supposed to project into the next millennium?"

"Shouldn't be difficult, Rohmer," Karen said. "Go backwards."

Trust a medieval scholar to state the obvious, Karen thought.

Everyone should have at least one friend with the same first name. Karen had known Karen since college; they had always called each other by their last names. Karen Jenner, PhD, ex-nun, medievalist, was the kind of friend you could look up at two-year intervals and resume the conversation where you'd left off. Between classes on Marie de France and the Courts of Love, she scheduled guest speakers at her small Catholic college. Karen Rohmer Guerreri, science fiction writer and alumna, was this week's coup. Barring traffic on the Southern State Parkway, within the hour she'd be surrounded by eager undergrads, telling them How She Broke into the Writing Business.

"Go backwards," Rohmer repeated what Jenner had just said.

"Sure," Jenner said, muttering something very Chaucerian and un-nunlike at a minivan trying to nose into her lane. Even more nearsighted and red-haired than Rohmer, she pushed her glasses up on her nose, ruffled her short Clairol Intense Red hair up out of her eyes and honked the minivan driver, the frown-lines between her eyebrows evidencing concentration rather than nerves; she could have qualified as a NASCAR driver. "The point has been made that if something works, the essential design won't change in a hundred years or even a thousand. Look at ship-building. Sails and rudders have changed, but the basic shape of a clinker-built seagoing vessel stayed relatively the same from the Phoenicians to the steam era.

"Or, something closer to home. A teakettle. Tell me the thing we boil water in has changed in thousands of years. Materials, yes. Aluminum or glass instead of bronze or iron. And we set it on a stove instead of hanging it over the fire, but it still has a round body, a handle and a spout."

They both thought of, and immediately suppressed the thought of, the nursery-song about the Little Teapot. Commonality, parol, shared synapses. Karen immediately saw what Karen meant. That was all good writing was about - tapping that germ of a familiar idea in somebody else's brain and setting it dancing. Sort of like psychiatry, only it paid a lot less. Or like putting water in a teakettle and letting it boil. Rohmer rolled the thought around in her mind.

"Or farm tools, or jewelry -" she suggested.

"Exactly." Jenner tapped the brakes and leaned on the horn as a motorcycle slalomed around them. "A pitchfork, an ax, a hammer, haven't changed since Celtic times. Earrings, cloak pins. The Celts invented the safety pin, by the way, no matter what the Egyptologists tell you. The clasp on a cloak pin from 3500 B.C. is no different from this -"