Lloyd was quiet, digesting this. "You think so?" he said at last. "I'd imagine there would be a lot of resistance."

"No, everyone's curious. Don't you want to know who that woman was?" A pause. "Don't you want to know for sure who was the father of the child I was with? Besides, if you're wrong about the future being immutable, then maybe we'll all see a completely different tomorrow, one in which Theo doesn't die. Or maybe we'll get a glimpse at a different time: five years down the road, or fifty. But the point is that there's not a person on the planet who wouldn't want another vision."

"I don't know," said Lloyd.

"Well, then, look at it this way: you're torturing yourself with guilt. If you try to reproduce the Flashforward and fail to do so, then the LHC had nothing to do with it, after all. And that means you can relax."

"Maybe you're right," said Lloyd. "But how do we get permission to reproduce the experiment? Who could give that permission?"

Michiko shrugged. "The nearest city is Geneva," she said. "What's it most famous for?"

Lloyd frowned, running down the litany of possibly appropriate answers. And it came to him: the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN, had been founded there in 1920. "You're suggesting we take this to the United Nations?"

"Sure. You could go to New York and present your case."

"The UN can never agree on anything," said Lloyd.

"They'll agree on this," said Michiko. "It's too seductive to turn down."

Theo had talked to his parents and his family's neighbors, but none of them seemed to have meaningful insights into his future death. And so he caught an Olympic Airlines 7117 back to the Geneva International Airport at Cointrin. Franco della Robbia had dropped him off for his outgoing flight, but Theo now took a cab — pricey at thirty Swiss francs — back to the campus. Since they hadn't fed him on the plane, he decided to go straight to the cafeteria in the LHC control center for a bite to eat. When he entered, to his surprise he spotted Michiko Komura sitting alone at a table near the back. Theo got himself a small bottle of orange juice and a serving of longeole sausage, and headed toward her, passing several knots of physicists eating and arguing about possible theories to explain the Flashforward. Now he understood why Michiko was alone; the last thing she wanted to be thinking about was the event that had caused her daughter's death.

"Hi, Michiko," said Theo.

She looked up. "Oh, hi, Theo. Welcome back."

"Thanks. Mind if I join you?"

She indicated the vacant seat opposite her with a hand gesture. "How was your trip?" she asked.

"I didn't learn much." He thought about not saying anything further, but, well, she did ask. "My brother Dimitrios — he says the visions ruined his dream. He wants to be a great writer, but it doesn't look like he's ever going to make it."

"That's sad," said Michiko.

"How are you doing?" asked Theo. "How are you holding up?"

Michiko spread her arms a bit, as if there were no easy answer. "I'm surviving. I go literally whole minutes where I don't think about what happened to Tamiko."

"I'm so sorry," said Theo, for the hundredth time. A long pause. "How's it going otherwise?"

"Okay."

"Just okay?"

Michiko was eating a tart-sized cheese quiche au bleu de Gex. She also had a half-drunk cup of tea; she took a sip, gathering her thoughts. "I don't know. Lloyd — he's not sure he wants to go through with the wedding."

"Really? My God."

She looked around, gauging how alone they were; the nearest person was four tables away, apparently absorbed in reading something on a datapad. She sighed, then shrugged a little. "I love Lloyd — and I know he loves me. But he can't get over this possibility that our marriage won't last."

Theo lifted his eyebrows. "Well, he does come from a broken home. The break-up was quite nasty, apparently."

Michiko nodded. "I know; I'm trying to understand. Really, I am." A pause. "How was your parents' marriage?"

Theo was surprised by the question. He frowned as he considered it. "Fine, I guess; they still seem to be happy. Dad was never very demonstrative, but Mom never seemed to mind."

"My father is dead," said Michiko. "But I suppose he was a typical Japanese of his generation. Kept everything inside, and his work was his whole life." She paused. "Heart attack; forty-seven years old. When I was twenty-two."

Theo searched for the right words. "I'm sure he'd be very proud of you if he'd lived to see what you've become."

Michiko seemed to consider this sincerely, instead of just dismissing it as a platitude. "Maybe. In his traditional view, women did not pursue careers in engineering."

Theo frowned. He didn't really know much about Japanese culture. There were conferences in Japan he could have arranged to attend, but although he'd been all over Europe, to America once, and to Hong Kong when he was a teenager, he'd never had an urge to travel to Japan. But Michiko was so fascinating — her every gesture, her every expression, her way of speaking, her smile and the way it crinkled her little nose, her laugh with its perfect high notes. How could he be fascinated by her and not by her culture? Shouldn't he want to know what her people were like, what her country was like, every facet of the crucible that had formed her?

Or should he just be honest? Should he face the truth that his interest was purely sexual? Michiko was certainly beautiful… but there were three thousand people working at CERN, and half of them were women; Michiko was hardly the only beautiful one.

And yet there was something about her — something exotic. And, well, she obviously liked white guys…

No, that wasn't it. That wasn't what made her fascinating. Not when he got right down to it; not when he looked at it head on, without making excuses. What was most fascinating about Michiko was that she had selected Lloyd Simcoe, Theo's partner. They'd both been single, both available. Lloyd was a decade older than Michiko; Theo eight years younger than her.

It wasn't that Theo was some sort of a workaholic, and that Lloyd had stopped to smell the roses. Theo frequently took rented sail boats out into Lac Leman; Theo played croquet and badminton in the CERN leagues; Theo made time to listen to jazz at Geneva's Au Chat Noir and to take in alternative theater at L'Usine; he even occasionally visited the Grand Casino.

But this fascinating, beautiful, intelligent woman had chosen the staid, quiet Lloyd.

And now, it seemed, Lloyd wasn't prepared to commit to her.

Surely that was no good reason to want her himself. But the heart was separate from physics; its reactions could not be predicted. He did want her, and, well, if Lloyd was going to let her slip through his fingers…

"Still," said Theo, finally replying to Michiko's comment that her father wouldn't approve of her having gone into engineering, "surely he must have admired your intelligence."

Michiko shrugged. "Inasmuch as it reflected well on him, I suppose he did." She paused. "But he wouldn't have approved of me marrying a white man."

Theo's heart skipped a beat — but whether it was for Lloyd's sake or his own, he couldn't say. "Oh."

"He distrusted the West. I don't know if you know this, but it's popular in Japan for young people to wear clothes with English phrases on them. It doesn't really matter what they say — what matters is that they're being seen to embrace American culture. Actually, the slogans are quite amusing for those of us who are fluent in English. 'This End Up.' 'Best Before Date on Bottom.' 'In order to form a more perfect onion.' "She smiled that beautiful, nose-crinkling smile of hers. " 'Onion.' I couldn't stop laughing the first time I saw that one. But one day I came home with a shirt that had English words on it — just words, not even a phrase, words in different colors on a black background: 'puppy', 'ketchup', 'hockey rink', 'very', and 'purpose.' My dad punished me for wearing such a shirt."