The periods of homesickness didn’t even always happen when she was having a miserable time. The worst had been in Renaissance Italy during the most fantastic birthday party she had ever attended. There had been jugglers and fire-eaters and enough food to sink a boat. Cuerva Lachance’s incarnation, Luzio Ferrante, had begun to play an unexpectedly beautiful piece on the fiddle, and Freddy had just been … lost. She’d thought about where she was and what she was doing, and it hadn’t made sense. She hadn’t fit. And then she’d wondered if she really fit any worse here than she did in her ordinary life, and everything had seemed to turn upside down. I never admitted I was out of place, she’d thought. I made myself fade into the background, and I thought I was unhappy because it was so hard, not because I didn’t really want to do it in the first place …
And she was homesick for that. There was definitely something wrong with her.
Most of the time, she managed to keep the homesickness at bay by being Mel and playing at private investigator. She had a lot more puzzle pieces now, though the picture still wasn’t complete.
She and Josiah had visited hundreds of different places and times. She had tried to keep track of them early on but had lost count around about the March of the Infants, which had happened when they’d ended up jumping into the life of a Three who was only a few days old. She wouldn’t have thought that would be a problem, but babies only thought about a limited number of things, and so any sympathetic resonance was almost inevitably with—
“Other babies,” said Josiah glumly when they hit the third in a row in the space of about ten minutes. This one was, she thought, somewhere in Africa; Freddy wasn’t sure exactly where or when, since they were there only about long enough for Three’s mother to give them a startled glance. It was in what may have been a Haida longhouse that Josiah added, “We should have expected something like this. We could jump almost anywhere. They’ll all be resonating.” They were in a futuristic airport by the end of the sentence.
Perhaps fifty babies later, they came upon a baby who happened to be breastfeeding. The next jump took them to a Three who was a teenage boy. Freddy had her theories about that one, but she kept them to herself.
About seventy percent of the time—if you didn’t count the babies—they would run into the past Josiah and some version of Cuerva Lachance. Freddy preferred it when this happened. Josiah was less jumpy and paranoid when he knew how their visit was going to turn out, even if he wouldn’t tell her. It also gave her a chance to refine her theory about the two of them. Well, calling it a “theory” was premature. But she knew Josiah hadn’t told her the whole story, and she was working towards understanding why.
What she had seen so far did seem to confirm what he’d told her. She had been quite far back in time—she didn’t know exactly how far back, though she vividly remembered one instance when Josiah had told a gentleman dressed in furs to “move his Upper Paleolithic ass”—and had met Josiah over and over, and he was always, well, Josiah. He didn’t change. He didn’t forget things. Her Josiah could still speak fluently to the man with the Upper Paleolithic ass. More puzzlingly, he didn’t look like any of the people they had met. Freddy had thought him mixed-race when she first saw him, but after they had started travelling, she had wondered if they might eventually end up somewhere he blended in. So far, they hadn’t. On the other hand, he always seemed to find a place where he fit, socially if not visually. Some societies treated him as a god or a demon or some other kind of otherworldly creature. Some accepted him as an ordinary person. He always had a role.
Choosing Josiah, Freddy thought, meant choosing order. He represented stability and predictability. He didn’t change, but he didn’t grow, either. He was forever fourteen years old.
Cuerva Lachance had never been the same twice. Josiah changed his name, but he did it to be inconspicuous, and she’d noticed that he liked the name “Josiah,” which he’d used several times over the past few millennia. Cuerva Lachance changed her name, her gender, her appearance, her age, and occasionally her personality. Some things about her were relatively consistent, though it wasn’t safe to assume anything about her. Freddy had banked on her never having an attention span until it had become apparent, during an unfortunate trial in Rome, that she could develop one whenever she needed it. Her character ranged from friendly and helpful to blatantly psychotic. She treated time like a goofy version of space and did everything in the wrong order. She was seen as a god or a demon much more frequently than Josiah was, for good reason. Freddy couldn’t swear she wasn’t a god or a demon. No rules applied to her, from basic rules of common sense such as “Don’t stick your hand in the fire” to fundamental laws of nature such as “If you stick your hand in the fire, you will end up with serious burns.” Freddy was pretty sure she had seen various incarnations of Cuerva Lachance chatting happily with people who didn’t exist. It wasn’t always easy to tell, but the way some of them were see-through was, Freddy thought, a clue.
If Josiah represented order, Cuerva Lachance had to represent chaos. That was the choice, then: order or chaos. Stability or change, predictability or mystery, the possible or the impossible. Pick one, and the world got a tiny bit more predictable; pick the other, and the world got a tiny bit less.
That was, at least, what they wanted her to think. She was thinking it at the moment because she had to, but she didn’t trust the thought. As she had sensed when she had been watching Claire make her choice, there was something wrong.
She hadn’t yet discovered what. She needed more information. She did know she didn’t believe in the categories Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had set out for themselves as firmly as Josiah and Cuerva Lachance seemed to. If Josiah was all about order, why were there things about him that didn’t make logical sense? How could he be an embodiment of reason and still not age or sleep? Why did his hair grow but not the rest of him? Why did Cuerva Lachance consistently forget names she had heard two minutes before but remember epithets over periods spanning multiple thousands of years? Wasn’t someone who never followed rules actually following a rule? Why did Cuerva Lachance and Josiah hang around together if they had nothing in common and even actively opposed each other? And why was Three even necessary? Why didn’t Josiah and Cuerva Lachance just go around ordering and chaosing without guidance?