Varvara
an excerpt

"Look at what you've done," Varvara cried out. "History is leaking all over the carpet."

Arbatov had just stepped out of the atemporal interstice into a fairly ordinary early twenty-first century living room. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Just look at the floor," Varvara said.

Arbatov noticed a strange man in the room who gaped at him with an open mouth and wide blood shot eyeballs. Arbatov peered at the rug in front of him, and then at Varvara, whose eyes shone bright violet, betraying her non-terrestial origin. "Look carefully," Varvara remonstrated. "Look down, right before your feet."

Small tricklings, indistinct and dark, floated slowly across the carpet away from Arbatov's feet. He bent down and looked more closely. Tiny rivulets changing color, growing brighter and broader, spread half way across the room, past a dirty green sofa and close to piles of electrical wires connected to a small laptop computer on a brown fold-up table. Arbatov squinted and looked into the watery streams, which were now almost irridescent. He glimpsed the images of battlefields and presidential palaces, headlines and newsprint from remote eras, the faces of diseased children, mothers with broken backs, husband soldiers dying in agony. As he became more absorbed, and the images penetrated his mind, he saw epochs and eras, embodied in the figures of "great men": the stoutly rigid posterboard of mustachioed face of Stalin, the bent torso of Mahatma Gandhi, struggling down a road with his cane, followed by thousands, as sweat dripped from his bald pate; and he saw a momentary flash of Franco's visage, as a panorama of anarchists, syndicalists, trade unionists, trotksyists, and leninists fought against the bourgeois, the professional soldiers, and the gun touting priests during the Spanish civil war.

There would have been more images: the horrors of World War I, the beauties of the art of Monet, Van Gogh and, Cezanne, images of the unpredented upheaval in revolutionary Russia, where workers took the Winter Palace as gunshots flew high above them, fired from the Kronstadt sailors from their vessel in the Gulf of Finland.

A dry towel hit Arbatov in the face. "Mop it up!" Varvara barked out.

She leaned over, and the two of them dried streams up off the floor before they could become rivers, or an ocean to threaten them all. "I can't say I understand any of this," Arbatov said, as he soaked up what looked like-- but could not have been-- water. "Just keep wiping it up from the floor, and squeeze it into these jars." The stranger just continued to stand still paralyzed by the unprecedented spectacle of a male time traveler from his own future, and a female alien from another world, swabbing bits of history from a rug which had needed a good vacuum even before this untidy crisis.

"What if I get it on my hands," Arbatov asked with terror in his voice. "This has never happened to me, in all my travels from the twenty sixth to the nineteenth century."

"Just don't look at it too closely," Varvara advised. "Do not let it get into your mind. Put it all in the jars, and keep your head clear." In a short while, the jars were all full. The once clear containers turned to an opaque shade of ashen grey, then became black as soot, as they darkened to the color of empty space, and finally vanished.

"Where . . . . where did they go," the stranger asked.

"Yes, where?" Arbatov echoed, "and might I also asked what those drippings were, how they got in here, and anything else you might tell me?"

"I suggest you cease to concern yourself with the whole ordeal, at least for the moment," Varvara said with her accustomed calm, as if nothing had happened. She seated herself in a dignified manner on the tarnished couch. This was the Varvara that Arbatov remembered: serene and statuesque, fully self-possessed and without fear, untroubled and almost entirely remote, but for her few --- what were they-- attempts to appear human? But she was not human, as Arbatov well knew.

Arbatov carefully perused the carpet and the floor all about him, and found no remaining evidence of the spill. Castles under attack, expoding shells, mobs rebelling: they had all disappeared. He could see bits of fluff and dog hair on the carpet, and a few stains on the parts of the floor which had not been covered by any rug. Coffee perhaps? There was a red stain. Was that a tiny speck of blood? Pomegranite juice? No, it must have been borscht. A long thin throw down Turkish carpet led into the kitchen, but that appeared relatively clean (even though seconds before he had seen several armed batallions rushing over the tightly knit ply).

Arbatov looked up and saw the stranger sink down into plush chair, shocked and exhausted. Springs in the cushions groaned gently while the metalic frame faintly whined. Arbatov remained standing, and addressed Varvara while pointing his dry finger at the man in the chair.

"Tell me, who is this man? Why is he here, or more importantly, why are you with him? I can see that he is a denizen of this time, unfamiliar with any of our advanced scientific methods." (The last phrase he had made deliberately vague).

Varvara relaxed her spine only slightly as she leaned back and gestured amiably with the back of her palm toward the stranger. Arbatov noticed, as he had on previous meetings, the peculiar hue of her hand, an almost coppery shining tone. That metalic shade dimly reflected the light in the room; and it was odd to the extreme, very non-human in appearance, yet -- and this was always most curious to him -- not at all unattractive, however so alien.