No doubt about it, being married with her would be somewhat more than just thrashing around on the bed together. And by the light of day, riding behind a team of Belgians spreading cow manure, it seemed to me we needed to talk about that. So when I heard the eleven-forty train whistle, I left my pitchfork there and went up to her house and knocked. She let me in, then cranked up Ma on the phone. Asked if I could stay for lunch and help her eat leftovers before she had to throw them out.

Ma didn't answer right away; there was half a minute there I couldn't hear her voice. Maybe she wondered if I'd started doing more at Varia's than just work. But she said that'd be fine. Anyway I sat down at the table, and we began talking while Varia rustled up a meal. I told her what was bothering me, and she just smiled. "We won't stay here," she said.

"Where-Where would we go?" I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer to that. Because suddenly I wanted to be with Varia the rest of my life, and was scared her answer would be something I couldn't live with.

"Where would you like?"

I thought for a minute. "Since the Depression hit last fall," I reminded her, "lots of folks are out of work. It's hard to get a job nowadays."

"We'll get a farm," she said, reasonable as could be. "Somewhere well away from here; maybe some black land in Illinois."

I shook my head. "That'd cost a lot of money. Especially that Illinois black land."

"Land prices are way down. I talked to them at the bank before I sold out to your father. And my grandmother's got money that belongs to me."

Her grandmother. I supposed I'd meet her. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

"She looks a lot like me," Varia said without my asking.

"Just as young?" I was a little scared of what the answer might be.

Varia laughed. "A little older. Maybe twenty-one." Light danced in her eyes when she said it. She was so bright and lively, I couldn't help thinking she'd be a wife like no one ever had before, except Will. But still-

"How about when I'm fifty," I said, "and you still look twenty?"

She looked at me a long time before she answered. "You won't need to look fifty, if you don't want to. Not you. You can look just as young then as you do today."

The first thing that hit me was, I'd have to sell my soul to the devil. I've never actually believed in the devil, but that's the thought that came to me. I set it aside. "Will aged," I reminded her.

"Will never had the choice. I tried. He was a nice man, a gentle man, and he had some unusual genes we need. But not the talent; not enough. I planned to stay with him till the situation here got dangerous-from my not aging, I mean-have sixty or seventy children by him, then disappear. I'd leave a note that I was afraid to stay, because I wasn't aging. That I was going somewhere where people thought I was twenty."

I guess I must have looked troubled, because she put her hand on my cheek again, soft as goose down, and said: "I never actually loved Will, as fond of him as I came to be. It's you I've loved. For a dozen or more years now, since I realized what you might be. Or who."

For a dozen years! That was a stopper. But she wasn't done. "And in the Sisterhood," she said, "we learn self-control." Her mouth twisted a bit. "Self-abnegation, really. It's not always easy, even though we're from selected stock. There's a lot about a person that's not genetic."

It's funny how much I remember of what she said, considering I didn't understand half of it then. The biggest puzzles were who this we was she talked about. And Will's jeans? I never knew him to own a pair of jeans. He'd always worn overalls, like most farmers.

Anyway, the upshot of it was, we'd tell Ma and Pa that we planned to get married and go somewhere else to live. And when we got there, we'd tell folks I was twenty-five and she was twenty. Then, in twelve, fifteen years we'd move again. Might be interesting to live different places.

We got married ten days later. The family didn't announce it beforehand; Varia asked them not to. We just got the blood tests and license, and one evening after supper, my folks went with us to the parsonage. Took Reverend Fleming totally by surprise. I suppose he thought I'd got Varia pregnant. Anyway he took us next door to the church, turned on the lights, and married us in our coats, it being cold out and no fire in the furnace. When it was over, we all went home-Ma, Pa, Frank and Edith to their house, Max and Julie to theirs, and me and Varia to ours. Varia Macurdy. She didn't even get a new name out of it, nor much in the way of wedding gifts. The ring was the one Will gave her.

I said something about it when we went inside. She said none of it mattered, that she'd got me, and that was what counted. Then we went upstairs to bed. We hadn't been to bed together except that one night, but we made up for it before we went to sleep.

We'd already packed most everything she wanted to take with us-not a whole heck of a lot. The week before, I'd hammered together sort of a shed for the back of the Model A, with stakes for the stake pockets, that we could use to move. So by ten the next morning we were sitting in the cab together, headed south for the Ohio River, happy as two worms in an apple.

We didn't have a notion of what we were getting into.

2: Idri

Evansville actually was where her gramma lived, except her gramma wasn't her gramma. More like her cousin. And almost as good-looking as Varia. The big difference was their personalities; I could see that right away. Idri's eyes were mean and hard, not laughing like Varia's. As if she held grudges; I recall thinking that. She didn't seem to be married-didn't wear a ring, anyway-but I smelled and saw cigar butts in an ashtray. Maybe a brother, I thought. Not knowing Idri at the time.

After Varia introduced me as her new husband, Idri looked me up and down and scowled. The first thing she said was, "You'll have to take him through! He's needed there right now!" Not "It's nice to know you," or "Welcome to the family," or "I suppose you'd like to meet your stepchildren." Just giving orders: "You'll have to take him through." Whatever that meant.

Varia's eyebrows shot up. "I have no intention of taking him through," she said. "We're moving to Illinois. I just came here to let you know, and draw five hundred dollars from the contingency account."

Idri raised more than her eyebrows; she raised her voice. I don't know what she said, because they started talking in some foreign language. But she sounded as mad as anyone I'd ever heard, ripping Varia up one side and down the other. Varia looked shocked at first, but after a minute she snapped something sharp and hard at Idri that stopped her in mid-snarl. Called her something, I suppose. Then she took my sleeve and dragged me out the door, and right on out to the truck. When we'd got in the cab, she started shaking, and I asked her what was wrong.

"There's a lot I didn't tell you," she said. "It didn't seem important. Now it is."

I didn't say anything, just nodded and sat listening, my eyes on that beautiful face.

"Idri and I are not-Americans. And not from some place in Europe. We're from another world entirely, a world called Yuulith." She looked at me as if begging me to believe. "It's as if it's right beside this one, and now and then, in a few special places, openings develop between them for a few minutes. We call them gates. We can go through them from one world to the other. The nearest is across the river in Kentucky; that's the one we use."

I'd heard or read some strange things in my life, but this was the strangest. Yet somehow I believed. For one thing, the name Yuulith gave me chills. No, she was telling the truth, and she knew I knew. "I can't tell you everything about it all at once," she said, "why we're here, why I'm making babies here-except that it seemed very important. In our world, there's a land with very bad people-soldiers, and lords of magic-evil, and very powerful. But recently-recently they sent an army into our country and killed most of us."