Time and Again

grass would grow again, year after year, summer after summer. He had proof of that. He was proof of that. The stream would run fast, where now it forced its way over rock and thick islands of ice.
    A little dazed, he crouched down and took a handful of snow in his ungloved hand.
    He had been alone then, too, though there had been the steady drone of air traffic overhead and a huddle of mountain hotels only a few kilometers to the east. When he had uncovered the box his brother had buried he had sat on the grass and wondered.
    And now he stood and wondered. If he dug for it, he would come upon the same box. The box that he had left with his parents only days before. The box would exist here, beneath his feet, just as it existed in his own time. As he existed.
    If he dug it up now and carried it back to his ship, it would not be there for him to find on that high summer day in the twenty-third century. And if that was true, how could he be here, in this time, to dig it up at all?
    An interesting puzzle, Jacob mused. He left it to stew in his brain as he walked.
    He saw the cabin and was fascinated. No matter how many pictures, how many films or simulations he had seen, this was real. There were patches of snow melting slowly on the roof. The wood was still dark, aged by mere decades. On the glass of the windows, sunlight sparkled as it streamed through the high trees. Smoke-he could see it, as well as smell it-puffed from the stone chimney and into the hard blue sky.
    Amazing, he thought, and for the first time in many hours his lips curved. He felt like a child who had discovered a unique and wonderful present under the Christmas tree. It was his, for the moment, to explore, to analyze, to piece together and take apart until he understood it.
    Shifting his bag, he walked up the snow-covered path to the steps. They creaked under his weight and turned his smile into a grin.
    He didn't bother to knock. Manners were easily lost in the haze of discovery. Pushing the door open, he stepped into the cabin.
    "Incredible. Absolutely incredible." His quiet voice hung in the air.
    Wood, genuine and rich, gleamed around him. Stone, the kind that was chipped and dug out of the earth, merged with the wood in the form of a huge fireplace. There was a fire burning in it, crackling and hissing behind a mesh screen. The scent was wonderful. It was a small, cramped room, jammed with furniture, yet it was appealing in its cheeriness and its oddities.
    Jacob could have spent hours in that room alone, examining every inch of it. But he wanted to see the rest. Muttering into his minirecorder, he started up the stairs.
    Sunny yanked the wheel of the Land Rover and swore. How could she actually have believed she wanted to spend a couple of months in the cabin? Peace and quiet! Who needed it? She ground the gears as the Land Rover chugged up the hill. The idea that a few solitary weeks would give her the opportunity to sort out her life and finally decide what she wanted to do with it was ridiculous.
    She knew what she wanted to do with it. Something big, something spectacular. Disgusted, she blew out a long breath that sent her blond bangs dancing. Just because she hadn't decided exactly what that something was didn't matter. She'd know it when she saw it.
    Just as she always knew what it wasn't when she saw it.
    It wasn't flying cargo planes-or jumping out of them. It wasn't ballet, and it wasn't touring with a rock band. It wasn't driving a truck, and it wasn't writing haiku.
    Not everyone, at twenty-three, could be so specific about where his ambitions didn't lie, Sunny reminded herself as she spun the Land Rover to a halt in front of the cabin. Using the process of elimination, she should be well on her way to fame and success in another ten or twenty years.
    Fingers drumming against the steering wheel, she studied the cabin. It was squat, and just homely enough not to be ugly. An old rocker stood on the porch that skirted the front. It had sat there year after year, summer and winter, for as long as she could remember. There was, she discovered, something comforting in continuity.
    And yet with the comfort came a restlessness for the new, for the untouched and the unseen.
    With a sigh, she sat back, ignoring the cold. What was it that she wanted that wasn't here, in this place?
    Or in any place she'd been? Still, when it had come time to question, when it had come time to think, she had come back here, to the cabin.
    She had been born in