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eaten meat.
    “Please,” I said, pushing the plate across to him. “I made them for you. So, religion’s not your thing, is it? What about politics?”
    “I don’t vote.”
    “No? Not very English of you, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
    “I can’t stand England,” he said wearily. “It’s gray and it’s cold and it’s … it’s just so sad. I couldn’t wait to leave, and I hate it when I have to go back. You should see the absentee fines I pay every year to the House of Lords! You don’t want to live there, I hope?”
    “Oh, no.”
    “Good. You want to go see Spain again, though? You must not have seen it since you were little.”
    What a strange idea. “I wonder if I’d recognize it at all?” I said at last.
    “It’s fun there. Everything’s really expensive, but you can get real fish in the restaurants and there’s a festival day, like, every other week. I was there one time at—what’s that big party the Jews throw, where they dress up and there’s, er, a street carnival? Noisemakers and stuff? It’s in the spring, anyway, and there’s this big whatchacallem, temple thing—”
    “A synagogue?”
    “Yeah! A synagogue in, er, Santiago—”
    “Santiago de Compostela?” I was stunned.
    “Yeah! That’s the place. Anyway it’s great. Families build these booths all along the street and watch the dances and parades, and you can just go from booth to booth, drinking and eating and talking to people. The ones who understand English, anyway. And there’s bullfights with topless girls! Amazing acrobats. They flip over the bulls like they were on springs or something. And then they have this thing at the end where they burn the parade floats.”
    “Not the people?” I just couldn’t get my mind around this, somehow. Poor old Spain, freed at last from ancient sorrow and cruelty?
    “Nah, they never have accidents. We should go sometime. You’d like it.” He looked at me a little anxiously. “Though we can go anywhere you want, babe. Anywhere that’ll make you happy.”
    “I’ll be happy,” I said, reaching across the table and clasping his hand. “You’re not religious, you don’t care about England, and there’s a synagogue in Santiago de Compostela! We can go places or we can live on your ship. I don’t care.”
    Assuming, of course, I can skip forward through time into the future—impossible, but apparently not for me. Could I really just sail away with Alec, on an eternal holiday in the twenty-fourth century?
    Though of course it wouldn’t be eternal, because he’s a mortal. But I think if we could just once live out a peaceful life together, I could accept anything that came after that. Why have I felt this way, from the first moment I laid eyes on this big homely man? God only knows.
    He lifted my hand and kissed it. “We’ll go as soon as I’ve finished up this stuff I’m doing,” he said.
    “Ah, yes. This stuff you’re doing,” I said, looking down into my coffee, focusing on cold practical matters to keep from launching myself over the table at him. “There are some things you should know before you attempt to pilot that shuttle back to the twenty-fourth century. Somewhere on board, there ought to be little containers of the drug you have to take before time traveling. It looks like iodine, and I’ve heard it’s sometimes packaged to look like Campari. Do they still make Campari?”
    “Yes. I saw those.”
    “It’s not Campari, but if you pour fifty milliliters into an equal amount of gin or vodka, you won’t know the difference. You must drink it down, or risk death a second time when you activate the time transcendence field. I must tell you, I can’t imagine how you were able to sit up and talk coherently only a couple of hours after your arrival, let alone get that magnificent erection.”
    He snickered in embarrassment.
    “And you need to enter the proper algorithm into the time drive. I can do that for you now, but you’ll have to know more