Athos, Porthos, or Aramis? she wondered. He might get that. The Three Musketeers was a book here, too. The breakpoint between this alternate and the home timeline lay more than a century after it was written.

But Liz didn't want to talk about Alexandre Dumas with Dan. She just wanted him to go away. “Congratulations,” she said, and then spoiled it on purpose by adding, “I guess.”

“I think I was the youngest soldier in my company to get a musket.” Yes, he wanted to brag about it, no matter how much that made him sound like an idiot. He thought he was hot stuff. All he needed was a plume in his hat, and he could make like d'Artagnan. Never mind that his weapon would've been obsolete in 1750. He didn't care. It was more up-to-date than a bowand arrows, which was all that counted for him.

“Well, good for you,” she said. If he knew how pathetic he was… But she was judging him by the home timeline's standards. He wasn't pathetic here. By the standards of this alternate, he was way cool, and he knew it. A girl who took those standards for granted would think he was way cool, too.

Tough beans, Liz thought. I ain't that girl, even if Mr. Musketeer thinks I am.

And, all too plainly, Dan did. “Can I come in?” he asked. He didn't even dream she would say no. What he really meant was, Can I show off some more?

Liz wanted to tell him to get lost, at least as much to see the look on his face as for any other reason. She wanted to, yes, but she didn't dare. You were supposed to try to get along with the locals when they weren't impossibly obnoxious. If you didn't, you got a black mark in your database, one that would stay there forever. And Dan wasn't… quite… impossible. He ran his mouth, yeah, and he wondered whether Liz was some kind of spy, but he'd always kept his hands to himself.

She almost wished he wouldn't. If he tried feeling her up, that would give her a real excuse for having nothing to do with him afterwards. His silly talk and strutting weren't nearly enough, not by themselves. And since they weren't…

“I guess you can,” Liz said with a sigh she didn't even try to hide. Dan never noticed it. She hadn't thought he would. She would have bet a hundred Benjamin ’s against a dollar that he wouldn't, in fact. But winning the almost worthless dollar wouldn't have mattered to her.

Once he walked into the house, she had to be more polite. This alternate had rules about hospitality. A guest was a guest. She brought Dan orange juice and bread and olive oil, and had some herself. They sat on a bench in the courtyard. She wasn't going to take him to her room-no way. That would have given him ideas he didn't need. Oh, he probably had them already, but he wouldn't do anything about them, not out here. She couldn't be so sure of that in a more private place. There was such a thing as asking for trouble.

But right this minute Dan was too full of himself-and of his super-duper matchlock musket-to turn into that kind of nuisance. He unslung the musket and asked, “Do you want to know how it works?”

“Oh, I'm dying to,” Liz said in a tone that couldn't mean anything but. You must be out of your mind, Charlie.

Dan didn't get it. She might have known-she had known- he wouldn't. He walked her through the whole complicated process of loading and firing the gun. The only reason she would have wanted to know that was so she could shoot him with it. If he couldn't buy a clue, could he at least rent one?

Not a chance. After he'd gone through his rigmarole, he said, “And then, after you've been shooting, you have to clean the inside of the barrel. Gunpowder builds up in there-we call it fouling.” By the way he said it, he might have coined the word himself.

Liz knew she had to give him some kind of answer. Big deal was the first thing that came to mind. Somehow, she didn't think he'd appreciate it. She tried something safer: “How about that?” You couldn't get into too much trouble with three little words that didn't mean anything.

“Did you know any of this stuff before?” Dan didn't ask it quite smoothly enough. He wasn't just interested in her. He still halfway thought she was some kind of spy. Maybe more than halfway.

She shook her head. “No, not really. I told you-I'm not into guns.”

“No. You're into history. And that's just freaky,” Dan said.

Who was it who'd said, “History is bunk”? Henry Ford, that was who- Liz remembered it from a question on an AP test, and from reading Brave New World. Lots of people-most people, even-in the home timeline had thought so, right up into the middle of the twenty-first century.

But when you could go from one alternate to another, when you could see how one change in history altered everything that sprang from it, and when you needed to figure out how the changes worked, history wasn't bunk any more. Along with chronophysics. history was one of the underpinnings of Crosstime Traffic. In the home timeline, that made it a very big deal indeed.

But not here. Here, it was still bunk. People were still trying to get out from under the disaster history had dropped on them 130 years before. Understanding exactly why the disaster happened was a luxury they had no lime for.

She couldn't explain that to Dan. So she pointed to his precious matchlock and said, “Do you think you'd be carrying that if somebody wasn't interested in history?”

He looked at her as if she'd started speaking Russian. “Huh?” he said.

“It's true.” she told him. ''We can't make guns like the ones they had just before the Fire fell, right?”

“Well, sure. Everybody knows that,” Dan admitted. “Butwhat's it got to do with history? Or matchlocks?”

''Matchlocks come from a time hundreds of years before the Fire fell. They aren't a new invention. They're a, a reinvention, I guess you'd call it,” Liz said. “After the Fire fell, somebody who knew the history of guns must have figured, Well, let's use these-they're the best we can make with what we've got left.”

She waited. Would he think she was crazy? Would he understand any of what she was talking about? Or would he think she was making things up to freak him out?

He looked at the matchlock, and at the powder horn on his belt. “I guess the same thing's true about machine guns, huh?” he said after a few seconds.

Liz nodded. “Only more so, because they're more complicated.”

“Okay. I guess you make sense. I hadn't thought about it like that before,” Dan said. But before Liz could get too happy about enlightening him, he went on, “You sure know a lot about guns for somebody who says she doesn't know anything about guns.”

Oops, she thought. She threw her hands in the air, playacting only a little. “I don't know squat about guns. I don't care about guns-”

“But-” Dan interrupted.

“I don't!” Liz interrupted right back. “I know something about history. It's not the same thing. Can't you see that?” It wasn't quite the same thing, anyway. She hoped he wouldn't think it was.

She watched him wrestling with it. “Well, maybe,” he said. “But you know about Russians, too.”

He'd never let her live that down, would he? “I don't know a whole lot about them-I really don't,” she said.

“You know more than any right-thinking American's got any business knowing,” Dan said.

Most of the time, he thought of himself as belonging to the Valley. It was his kingdom, and Zev was his king. The Westside was a different country to him and to his fellow soldiers-and to the Westsiders, too. But he remembered the murdered United States on the Fourth of July… and whenever he talked about the Russians.

“It's a democracy, isn't it?” Liz said. Democracy was still a potent word here, even if it didn't mean what it had before the Fire fell. Duties got split up so lots of people did them-that was democracy. The rulers on the Westside called themselves city councilmen and not dukes-that was democracy, too. Liz went on, “So I have the right to find out about whatever I want to, don't I?”