She’d stared at him for a full minute before deciding that:

  1. Yes, this was her father and

  2. No, she wasn’t dreaming anymore.

  “Hey, there, little chick,” he said to her confused face in the same voice he used when she was five.

  She had a doctorate in Linguistic Anthropology, and it did nothing by way of guiding her on what to say.

  “Dad? You look…”

  He smiled at her. He’d have to tread carefully through the mine field of her questions. But he could worry about that ter.

  She stretched stiff muscles as she worked her way out of the chair. Her father’s bear-like embrace as he lifted her slightly off her feet finished the job of bringing her to full consciousness. But catching up on two years’ news was not the matter of a five minute conversation while standing in his cluttered office. And he wanted her all to himself for as long as possible, so it took only a short amount of time before father and daughter traveled along Egerton Road in his six year old Volvo 145 trading gossip and fluffy news. The real conversation would begin once they were home, and Roz had a chance to shower and change. Ed beamed from ear to ear as his hands held the steering wheel loosely. Roz kept stealing gnces at her father, her brain not quite accepting what her eyes were transmitting to it: a version of her father that was easily twenty years younger than when she st saw him. It wasn’t just hair dye, or moisturizer. Everything about him—the tone of his skin, the firmness of his arms, his thicker hair. Everything screamed youth. She wanted to ask him, but she didn’t know how to start.

  “How long can you stay?” Ed asked.

  She hadn’t thought that far ahead, and any pnning on that part had been erased from memory with her first look at him.

  “I hadn’t thought about it to be honest.”

  “Nothing calling you back to…somewhere. Someone?”

  “No, no somewhere. No someone. I gave up my ft when I moved to Papua New Guinea. Everything I own is in the boot of your car. Except for some things in a trunk at mum’s”

  “So you can stay? With me? For a while?”

  Roz stole another gnce. “What’s a while?”

  Ed shrugged his shoulders. “As long as you like. You can have the spare room.”

  She could lie to herself and say she hadn’t thought of the possibility. But then why did she haul almost everything she owned to her father’s office? “I need to type up my notes. After I make something legible out of them. I’m writing a book.”

  Ed began to smile. “You can use my study. I only use it for storage. It’s yours for as long as you want.”

  She gnced again at the man who barely looked older than she did. She was still not entirely sure that she wasn’t dreaming, but if she was, then she didn’t want to spoil it by asking pointless questions.

  “If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind, I love that.”

  She didn’t think his smile could get any bigger.

  She was wrong.

  Roz watched the muscles in her father’s back, shoulders and arms put on a show as he carried boxes of books, journals, notes and other assorted paraphernalia out of his study. It was his third trip, and his st. She’d helped, but he’d done the heavy lifting. Literally. “Thanks for doing this for me, Dad.”

  The spare bedroom—your bedroom as her father started calling it as soon as they set foot inside—was also now as neat as a pin. Everything removed from both rooms sat in a disordered stack waiting to go down into the basement.

  It was while they were moving the second load from study to dining room floor that Roz got the chance to look at the photos lining the office wall. She knew he liked to mark the passage of time in that manner, but he never felt the need to bel the photos with date or pce. The only indication of time passing was how old—or young—her father was in each of the photos. So she knew that the upper leftmost image was the oldest, and she could follow him as he aged, left to right, top to bottom. That is, until the st photo.

  “When was this taken?” she asked, indicating the penultimate one in the collection.

  Ed Martell hefted another box before looking.

  “Last summer,” he said.

  He looked just like he did in the one before that, which would have been summer, 1982 by her reckoning. That photo had one less man in it. One less very attractive, very young man who appeared smiling, his arms around an equally young, equally smiling woman’s waist in the summer of ’83. It was the next photo, taken outside and not in the b, that threw off her sense of normality, and the photographic chronology.

  “And this one?”

  “That’s from st month, our weekend in Cornwall.”

  Last month. Not even a year since the previous photo. And he looks twenty years younger.

  She had no idea how to ask. No clue what words to use that didn’t sound insane. Her mind seemed to work on auto pilot, defaulting to something banal, free of risk.

  “Still developing your own film, and photos?” she called out after him—staring at the image of his young face as he set down another box.

  “Absolutely. You don’t think I’d leave it to some amateur, do you?”

  She ughed. “It’s all done by machine now, Dad. No amateurs involved.

  He smiled as they surveyed the now quite tidy study, perfect for an author to work from as she crafted what he was certain would be a masterpiece.

  “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.

  Or young ones, it seems, she thought.

  “He’s spending time with his daughter,” Edith said as she wrote in the research journal that contained their sum of knowledge of Aric’s powers.

  “Doesn’t he have end of term exams coming up?” Hank asked. In fact, Dr. Ed Martell had several things coming up. The end of term exam for his advanced undergraduate course in Electricity and Magnetism. Two PhD students and one MSc student for whom he was acting as thesis committee chair, plus two more PhD committees he sat on. And the minor detail of leading a research group that studied a being more powerful than anyone realized, with beauty to match. Which was to say—if he was being honest—seventy percent of those things, since he was not above foisting thirty percent of his duties—in aggregate, the percentages of each thing varied—off to Edith’s slender shoulders.

  She reached into the open safe behind her, retrieved a series of papers held together by a clip, and waved it in Hank’s direction.

  “He’s written the exam already. And I took it, and wrote the answer key.”

  Hank shook his head. “He shouldn’t be taking advantage of you like this. Every semester. You don’t even get paid for it.”

  “I’m happy to do it. I like it. Well, I like the thirty percent of it I do. I don’t know how I’d feel about the other seventy percent.”

  “There’s not enough whatever in wherever to get me to take that job. It would drive me crazy.”

  “It’d be a short trip,” Edith mumbled as she resumed writing.

  “Huh?”

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t look up. “Nothing.”

  In fact, there wasn’t much new information to write. Aric was home, supposedly studying, but also recovering. His test incident had left him badly shaken. Edith had never seen him like that. She and Delphine had slept in his ft the first night in case he needed help. He’d slept like the dead, needing nothing from them, but they felt better knowing he was safe instead of being in their own beds worrying about him.

  But even though there was nothing new, there was quite a bit of old data to analyze and record. Part of the funding that Aric’s stunt on the roof had secured went to a new VAX-11/780 running VMS 4.1 and three WYSE-50 terminals. All their analysis code—written in WATFIV—entered directly via those new terminals instead of punch cards. One entire shelf in Ed’s office groaned under the weight of those cards, stored in neat boxes, one program per box. It was the responsibility of Sanjay Deshmukh—Ed’s master’s student—to load or change the 9 track magnetic tapes or—much less frequently—the SCOPUS 300 MB hard drive in the VAX that stored that data.

  “Sanjay, you have to keep up, buddy,” Carol would admonish him on those occasions when the reel-to-reel tape drive was bare. “Do you have any idea how important this data is? We can’t take a chance of losing it.”

  “Of course I don’t know how important it is. You won’t tell me what you’re studying. If you did, maybe I could help.”

  “You can help by getting a new tape loaded, amigo. That would help a lot.”

  The young man’s brow furrowed. “What does amigo mean?”

  “It means get your ass into the server room and load a new tape,” Hank said with his usual Kiwi bluntness.

  So the b continued to operate, committees were chaired, or attended. Students were mentored, or tutored. Not—for a few days at least—by Ed Martell, but by someone almost as capable, ultimately to be just as capable once time hath sow’d a grizzle on her case. Jeff Weatherby couldn’t help but notice.

  “Hello, Edith. Ed not feeling well?”

  She smiled, and tried to be as ambiguous as possible. “He’ll be right as rain when he gets back.”

  He felt, in point of fact, better than he had in quite some time; and not just because he was twenty years younger than this time st year. The return of his daughter, having her close to him every day, seemed to take even more years off his ledger. He found himself humming in mid-song. The third or fourth time it happened he realized that Roz was humming along with him.

  Rosalind was also happy, and for the same reasons. She was making a start on her book, something that she had put off during her fieldwork. Ed had borrowed an old typewriter from the department (he’d had to remind Jeff that the only reason they had a new typewriter was because of his group’s funding) along with a few reams of paper. The sound of keys tapping away quickly filled the house, and his heart filled with it.

  But Roz’s heart was split. Not in two, nothing so evenly divided. She was mostly happy—joyous, even. But part of her still looked at two photos, taken less than a year apart, and a man who should not have changed so much in that time, who should certainly not have gotten younger, let alone twenty years younger. She’d found an old photo album of his and leafed backwards until she found the images of him that matched the one from Cornwall. 1960. The year he’d finished his PhD at King’s College.

  He was forty in that photo. How can he be forty again in 1984?

  It didn’t make sense. But she still didn’t know how to ask him.

  What was that saying about gift horses? she wondered. Did she even want to know? Was it so important to run the risk of spoiling what they had now?

  She didn’t think so. Anyway, if he was getting younger every day then the one thing they had was time.

  Her questions could wait.

  “You look better than the st time I saw you,” Ed said after answering his doorbell and seeing the familiar face.

  “I feel better,” Aric replied as he followed Ed in and closed the door behind him. “Sorry I haven’t been back into the b.”

  “Well I haven’t been back either, so we’re even.”

  The sound of typing—usually, if not always, present in the house—competed for Aric’s attention with the cricket match emanating from the radio in Ed’s kitchen.

  Ed picked up a cardboard box from a pile on the dining room floor. “If you’re up to it you can give me a hand carrying these boxes downstairs.”

  “I’m fine,” Aric said before grabbing a box and following Ed down the narrow stairs. A left turn led to his darkroom; to the right, another room lined on one long wall with shelves filled with books. One shelf held a model of the HMS Tireless, the destroyer Ed had served on during the war. On the other wall was a small folding work surface, the wall above it lined with tools. Ed found a bare patch of floor that he was quickly filling up with boxes.

  They heard the sounds of footsteps above their heads just before ascending the stairs.

  “Did I hear the doorbell?” A woman’s voice asked in the precise tones that older generations still referred to as BBC English.

  “We have a visitor,” Ed said as he reappeared above ground, followed closely by Aric. “This is Aric. Aric, this is my daughter Roz.”

  He looked even more attractive in person than in the photo. Much more attractive. She’d been spooning tea into the pot when she saw him and her heart skipped.

  “At least some of that is going to end up in the pot I hope,” Ed said as he looked at the table top.

  “Oh,” Roz replied as she observed the dry leaves of Earl Gray that had missed their mark while she’d been distracted. “Sorry.”

  “It’s a pleasure meeting you,” Aric said with a friendly smile—the one that was meant to disarm, not the one that was meant to attract.

  Roz’s face broke into its own smile at his accent. “An American. We don’t get many of those here. It’s quite refreshing.”

  “What is?” Aric asked.

  “Your accent,” Ed expined. “Roz is a Linguistic Anthropologist. She loves anything nguage reted.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Aric said.

  The sounds of the Test match that Engnd was hosting against The West Indies pyed in the background as Roz ughed.

  “If that’s your idea of excitement then cricket is just the sport for you.”

  “Point taken. I was referring to the anthropology part. Getting a glimpse into the past. Like looking at ancient ruins and painting a mental picture of what it must have looked like in its heyday.”

  She’d been sweeping tea leaves off the table and into her hand while she talked. “That part is exciting, at least I think so.”

  “Why don’t you let me do that?” Ed asked as he took over preparations. “Tea doesn’t grow on trees. Shouldn’t waste it.”

  “Tea doesn’t grow on trees?” Aric asked as his face scrunched in thought.

  Roz and Ed ughed in unison.

  “No.”

  Roz, who was normally not the talkative type—particurly around strangers—spent almost fifteen minutes talking about her work, recounting humorous (in the case of New Guinea) as well as disturbing (in the case of Laos and Northern Thaind) incidents she’d experienced over the st five years. Aric’s face had broken into ughter—or grown serious with concern—at the appropriate times, and Roz realized that it was his presence making her so talkative. It had been three days since her arrival in Engnd, and Surrey. She was rested, fed, bathed and brushed—certainly more presentable than on the day she’d walked into her father’s office. But, unlike her dad, she hadn’t discovered the fountain of youth, and she was still more than a decade older than the fwless youth sitting across from her. It was during one of those stories that the voice of the BBC radio announcer burst forth.

  “AND HE’S BOWLED HIM CLEAN THROUGH! Absolute peach from Holding—my word, what a delivery!”

  “Wow, That got loud,” Aric said. “I bet he woke up some listeners. At home and in the stands.”

  “Ed smiled. “It can get loud in the stands. Announcers have to be able to be heard in rge venues.”

  Roz also smiled as she thought of a Wanumati proverb she’d learned in Papua New Guinea.

  “Tanu koraka Wanumati han mo tai, muliko ita sohu,” she said, paying particur attention to her inflection, which could alter the meaning of the sentence. The New Guinea crow does not need to shout to be heard by the forest.

  It was one of the ancient nguages of New Guinea, part of the group referred to as the Papuan nguages. Highly regionalized. Sometimes to specific families. This nguage was spoken by fewer than a thousand people. Never in a million years did she expect to hear anyone in Engnd speak it, let alone know the usual response to that call.

  “Tanu weko nima, emo kaiyu tokari,” he replied without thinking. The crow sits in silence, but its mind moves with fire.

  Roz’s mouth fell open.

  And stayed open.

  A mouthful of tea slipped past her lips, dribbling down her chin and neck.

  Next to her, Ed blinked, startled by the sudden change in his daughter’s posture—and the liquid now running down into her t-shirt.

  “Jesus, Roz—did you just have a stroke?” he asked, already reaching for a napkin and blotting her chin like she was six months old.

  “Sorry,” she answered when she finally regained the power of speech.

  Ed was immediately aware that something had happened. Something important. But he didn’t know what. He was not the only one to notice.

  “What?” Aric asked.

  Roz was able to manage only a few of the words that wanted to come pouring out of her mouth. “What you just said—”

  “The crow sits in silence, but its mind moves with fire. That’s the proper response, isn’t it? It’s a contemption on silence. Isn’t it? The poet is saying that you don’t have to shout to be heard, and stillness shouldn’t imply idleness. Right?”

  He was one-hundred percent right. Just as his pronunciation—each small inflection that could have thrown the meaning off—had been perfect.

  But she had no idea how.

  “Right,” she said as she picked up her cup before realizing it was empty. She poured more from the pot and took a sip. It was bitter, but she didn’t notice. Her mind was working on what to do—what to say—next.

  Could it just be a coincidence? Could he have heard it somewhere, learned it phonetically, and someone expined the meaning behind it?

  Coincidence was possible. But improbable. There was one way to know for sure.

  She switched to another nguage from another region—near Madang on the north coast. Amele was almost as rare as Wanumati. Never in her two years in New Guinea had she found anyone other than herself that spoke—that even understood—both.

  Her heart was beating fast as she set her cup down. “Tili uqa galia sobiga eyo nega meli.” It is wiser to watch like the crow than to speak without knowing.

  He didn’t even hesitate. “Gume tili sobiga, ni fo mene lele cece. That one’s about knowledge.” From the treetop the crow watches; it sees what lies under the leaves.

  She was stunned.

  I can’t breathe.

  She felt light headed.

  This is not happening. It can’t be.

  Her instinctual brain acted on its own. She knew a dozen nguages beside her own, and she cycled through them in no particur order as she spoke.

  “You know your proverbs I see. Where did you pick those up?”

  Aric matched his nguage to her own. “I’m not sure. I must have read them somewhere.”

  “Do you do a lot of reading?”

  “When I have the time.”

  “You must be pretty busy. Courses, research, not a lot of time to rex.”

  “We find time. We just had a long weekend at the beach.”

  Back and forth. Shifting nguages faster than Ed could follow. Aric didn’t bat an eye. He seemed unaware of the change. Never had to stop to think about what he was going to say. Never stumbled while transting on the fly. It began to take on the rhythm of call and response. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Tamazight, Maghrebi, Hmong Njua and Mien. Even Latin, for God’s sake.

  But the real kicker—the nguage that she’d started developing in grad school, the one no one but her knew—that one she saved for st.

  “I see there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

  She almost fainted when he replied.

  “I’d say that’s true of everyone.”

  Ed sat motionless through the whole thing. Roz would occasionally look his way, and the look she received back spoke volumes.

  Silence speaks, she thought.

  Ed gave a non verbal cue to his guest by standing and collecting the dishes. Aric stood and thanked his hosts, said again that he was gd to have met her, and how much he’d enjoyed their conversation. His beautiful face didn’t show any indication of what had happened. Roz herself wasn’t sure she knew that either.

  But she intended to find out.