“You didn’t answer,” said a woman. “Was he in your dream?”
“In my dream,” said Rigg, “the cavity behind the wall under the window had already been dug out to receive the body before she died.”
“You can’t know that!” shouted the man. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! And even if it’s true, somebody else could have done it!”
“We would have known,” said a woman, “if a man started digging in another man’s marriage house.”
The assent was resounding.
“Will you give him a night to pack his things?” asked his wife. “The man who did this murder deserves nothing, but my children will be uneasy if their father goes away empty-handed, with winter coming on.”
“You can’t believe I did this!” the murderer cried to his wife.
“I know she was the only girl you ever loved,” she answered him. “And never me. Even when you built a house for me, your heart belonged to her. I’ve seen you staring at this house over all these years and I knew who it was you had built it for, even though she was still too young. I knew who you were thinking of. But it never crossed my mind that you were looking at her grave. Her clothes were torn off. Did you have her the once before she died?” The wife was taking no pleasure in this. She was being more ruthless with herself than with the murderer. “When you stare at this house of a night or of a morning, are you grieving for her? Or remembering that you were the only man ever to possess that beautiful child?”
There was a growl of rage now among the men. Not at the wife, but at what the wife had seen and what her words meant.
Ram Odin strode to the murderer and put an arm across his shoulder. “Let me take you back home, sir. You have some work to do tonight, I think.”
He wasn’t out of earshot when other women offered to take in the children and the wife herself for the night. The murderer would have his own house to himself.
This much goes to his credit: He did not kill himself inside the house, or in any other place where it would be one of his children who found him. He went into the smokehouse during the night and hanged himself from a short rope tied to one of the hooks.
Rigg and Ram Odin left the next day, walking on toward the next village. “We thought you’d winter here,” said Onishtu’s father.
“We owe you much,” said Onishtu’s mother. “Winter with us.”
“We have a place farther on,” said Ram Odin, “but your offer is kind.”
Rigg silently agreed, for he could not bear the thought of staying in this place. Justice had been served, he believed. But he also knew the repercussions would be long and hard. He had spared the lives of the murderer’s children by not changing the past in such a way that they would never be conceived, but their lives would be forever altered by the knowledge of what their father did, and that it was their mother’s testimony that condemned him in the eyes of the village.
As they walked toward the mountain pass that led to the next village, Rigg said, “I can’t figure out if he finally felt remorse at the end, or if he had felt it all along.”
“I don’t think he ever felt anything like remorse,” said Ram Odin. “I think he treasured the memory of the rape and the murder, both, indistinguishably.”
“Then why did he kill himself?”
“Because he couldn’t conceive of life outside his own village.”
CHAPTER 16
Near Earth
Noxon had sliced this fast before, practicing with Param. And, a few times, had sliced through more years. He had even watched for a marker—a stone he placed on top of another stone. When he saw it stacked up, he knew he had arrived at the target time, and stopped. The expendable’s arm would be as good a signal.
It felt like no more than five minutes, at the rate Noxon was slicing. But five minutes of absolute silence can seem long indeed. Noxon could have taken them even faster, but he didn’t want to overshoot too far from the time he saw the signal to the time he stopped.
The expendable’s arm went up. Noxon stopped slicing. Just like that, they were back to one second per second.
“Whee,” said one of the mice.
“So you enjoyed yourself?” asked Noxon.
“Did we skip seven years of unchanging travel? Then yes,” said Ram.
“Sorry, I was talking to the mice. They were getting sarcastic about how much fun they had.”
“We’re in a box,” said a mouse.
“So are we,” said Noxon. And then he repeated to Ram what the mouse had said.
“What matters, I think,” said the expendable, “is whether you can sense any of the paths on Earth. Inside Pluto’s orbit makes Earth a nearly-invisible dot.”
“So we should have picked Neptune?” said Ram. “Jupiter? I’d suggest Uranus, but you don’t have one.”
“I actually have an anus,” said the expendable, “because the lack of it would make it too easy to tell that I’m not human, and it’s important that I be able to pass for human for sustained periods of time.”
“Does it work?” asked Ram.
Noxon knew perfectly well that it worked—Father had done his business in the woods every day, like clockwork. If you had a clock that pooped. All very authentic. “Could we please stay with the subject? Can you point out where Earth is?”
“Are you asking him or me or the mice?” asked Ram.
“The expendable.” Noxon almost said “Father,” but that was an old reflex, and not that hard to suppress.
“Good thing,” said a mouse. “Cause we’re in a box.”
“We can’t do astronomy from here,” said another.
“Only boxonomy.”
Noxon didn’t bother reminding them that their own malfeasance got them there.
“While we were moving forward,” said Noxon, “I was thinking about all the things that can go wrong. For instance, all the paths on Earth are moving the direction I need to latch on to in order to return to normal time. But the path of the outbound Ram Odin is in this starship, moving the right direction in time. If I can’t see it now, what makes me think I can see any other path moving that direction?”
“What an excellent question,” said Ram Odin.
“Now you think of it,” said a mouse.
“It’s not as if I had any wrong-direction paths to practice on, back on Garden,” said Noxon. He couldn’t keep his irritation out of his voice.
“Ignore the mice,” said the expendable. “They have nothing like your ability. It merely amuses them to snipe at you.”
“I know,” said Noxon. But Father’s reassurance made him feel better. That hadn’t changed, although he knew “Father” was a machine.
“Have you looked for the outbound path?” asked Ram Odin.
“I don’t have to look for paths,” said Noxon. “They’re just there.”
“But this one isn’t. So now you do have to look for it. And that may be why you haven’t seen it, because you aren’t used to having to look for paths.”
“I have to search out individuals among the mesh of intersecting paths,” said Noxon. “But they’re always visible. Or present, anyway.”
“I get it that you don’t see them with your eyes,” said Ram. “But since we don’t have words for the ability to sense people’s passages through time and space, just use the words for vision.”
“All right, yes, of course,” said Noxon. That’s what he and Umbo had always done.
“So what I’m thinking is, you won’t see a path, because causality is going the other direction,” said Ram.
“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” said Noxon. “But that would imply that we’re doomed.”
“It’s not all I was thinking, if you want to hear the rest,” said Ram Odin.
“Oh, we do, we do!” cried the mice in their chirpy sarcastic voices.
“People moving through time the same direction as you, they make a path the way movies do it—one instant hasn’t faded out before the next one begins.”
“Because instants don’t exist,” said Noxon.
“Well, they do,” said the expendable. “You just can’t distinguish them.”
“Continuity, that’s my point,” said Ram. “But when they’re running backward, you don’t get any continuity at all. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t see each—forgive me, each instant—but only for an instant.”
“I don’t see any,” said Noxon.
“You haven’t looked,” said Ram. “You’ve looked for continuous paths. But what happened when Umbo slowed you down in time? Your perception of paths changed. They started individuating. You could see that they were people. You could see faces. The slower you went, the more clearly you saw them.”
“Because the whole continuity was there,” said Noxon. “No matter how slow I go, they still connect, they still make a continuous movement.”
“Exactly my point,” said Ram. “Maybe the most you can sense of backward paths is momentary slices. No continuity.”
“How can I see those? They don’t exist long enough to be seen.”
“You don’t know that,” said Ram, “because you haven’t looked.”
Noxon shook his head. “How can I slow myself down enough to sense something whose existence in our timeflow has no duration?”
Ram shrugged. “Got any better ideas?”
“The ship has been calculating,” said the expendable, “and your physics is correct. Each instant of the backward path would have no duration. Except that this is also true of forward paths, and you see those.”
“Because of causal continuity,” said Noxon.
“That’s your guess,” said the expendable. “It’s a good guess, unless it’s wrong. But I think you’re probably right. That doesn’t change anything. The other timeflow also has causal continuity. So what’s to say there isn’t a lingering image? Not an after-image, as with ordinary timeflow, but a pre-image, a semi-physical memory of what is about to happen, because in that timeflow, it already happened. Each instant caused the next and the next. Maybe there’s enough of causality clinging to each instant of a human life that it becomes visible.”
“If that were true,” said Noxon, “I should see them already.”
“No,” said the expendable. “Because they’re unhappening. Causality is unraveling, in the direction we’re going. Each instant is unmade as you sense it. So instead of a path, a continuity of events, it’s a series of discontinuities. An unpath.”
“Clever naming,” said Noxon. “But you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“On the contrary,” said the expendable. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, because I’ve never sensed these paths. But when we’re talking about the logic of causality and time, my guess is no worse than yours. And even if I’m wrong, my wrong guess will be more precise than yours.”
Ram barked a laugh. “See what I put up with for all those years in space?”
“See what I put up with, day after day in the forest,” said Noxon.
“I don’t expect you to understand what I put up with,” said the expendable.
“We’re in a box,” said a mouse. “That’s something to put up with.”
“If he’s right about this,” said Ram, “and it’s not as if I know anything here, but if he’s right, then at least you’d know where to look for these not-quite-instantaneous instants of my outbound path. My life was pretty much limited to sitting in that chair. Or lying on that bed. Or exercising in there. I swivelled the chair a lot. Not like a little kid spinning around, but from station to station. To do different jobs. I don’t know what you need—motion or stillness. That chair is where I sat still most of the time. Or if you need me walking, I only followed certain paths, but I did them over and over.”
“Do you think I haven’t been looking for anything anomalous since I got on this ship?”
“No,” said the expendable. “I think you have not been looking for this because you didn’t know what to look for. Looking for ‘something anomalous’ is identical to just scanning around and hoping something slaps you in the face.”
And there was Father’s note of scorn.
“Yes, that’s right,” admitted Noxon.
“Have a plan,” said Father. The expendable.
“A plan to do something that nobody in the history of the universe has ever done.”
“You don’t know that,” said the expendable.
“If they did, I didn’t read the report,” said Noxon.
“What made paths turn into visible people to you? Slowing down,” said Ram. “And then attaching to them.”
“Attaching to them brought me into their timeflow,” said Noxon. “That’s the last thing I want to do, until we’re in a place where I can take the ship with us safely.”
“Right, no attaching,” said Ram. “But when you came here, when you first latched on to this timeflow, how did that feel?”
“I wasn’t in any timeflow. I wasn’t in time at all.”
“You were fully stopped,” said Ram.
“But I didn’t stop me,” said Noxon. “The fold was a place of no movement. I just hung there, unmoving, until I attached.”
“The ship’s computers got us to that place, somehow,” said the expendable. “But since we didn’t know that the fold would be a place without motion, time, or causality, we had no plan for emerging from the fold. We might have inadvertently created the twenty possible causal paths. But we think it was Ram Odin who did what you did—only instead of picking one, he attached to all of the causal potentialities and the whole ship took all of them at once.”
“I did no such thing,” said Ram.
“Nobody thinks you were conscious of it,” said the expendable. “What we do know is that the only successful time-shifting of living people and animals we’ve ever seen has been done by human timeshapers. You were the only conscious human, Ram Odin. We think you were choosing forward, and so the whole ship moved forward in all the available directions.”
Noxon was thinking aloud now. “I was in a place with no movement at all. Nineteen paths started along the regular line of time. One path went the other way. I took the strange one.”
“Strange in what way?” asked Ram Odin.
“It led into a potential future, but it tracked into the past.”
“So you do know what a backward path looks like,” said Ram.
“The others weren’t paths either. You’re right, what I saw then is what I’m looking for now. It’s like . . . the promise of a path. Like seeing underbrush get lighter and darker long before the person swinging the lantern comes along.”
“But the one going the wrong way was different. How?”
Noxon shook his head. He couldn’t remember.
But the facemask did. It couldn’t sense paths itself, but it could re-create Noxon’s brainstate at the time he was in that frozen moment. At the wish to remember it, the facemask re-created that brainstate and Noxon was there again.
The trouble was that along with the brainstate of what he was observing, he could only think the thoughts he was thinking then. And he was also aware of being completely unable to take any action, except to choose a path and attach to it. Only now he wasn’t seeing paths, he was remembering seeing paths. So there was no escape. He couldn’t even put together a coherent thought along the lines of: Help! Get me out of this loop!
There was no sense of duration in that brainstate. He didn’t know how long he stood there, utterly immobile and incapable of action. He only knew that eventually it ended and he could think and move again. “That was unpleasant,” said Noxon.
“What was?” asked Ram.
“Being unable to move. To do anything.”
/> “When did that happen?” asked Ram.
“So the facemask didn’t allow it to go on long enough for you to notice. That’s good.”
“You just got the memory back?”
“Not my memory. The facemask’s memory of what my brain was doing at that moment. I could only think what I thought then.”
“Except you were able to worry that it might go on too long,” said Ram.
“That wasn’t a conscious thought. That was the behind-thought. The watcher. The one without any words who’s always listening to what I think consciously in language and evaluating it.”
Ram nodded wisely. “It’s terrifying how well I know what you mean.”
“It was a good refresher, once it actually ended,” said Noxon. “I didn’t stay there forever, though it felt like it. And now I have a much clearer memory of what I experienced at the time. How paths look when they’re not moving. The nineteen with the potential to move away from me into the future. And the one with the potential to move into the past.”
“What about the one that got me to that point?” asked Ram.
“The others all attached to that one,” said Noxon. “They were all continuations of that.”
“So you saw some going back and some forward,” said Ram.
“That’s not the difference. They were all going into a future. But this one was heading into . . . an unproductive future. A place with no causal potential.”
“So look for that.”
“But at that point I wasn’t seeing paths at all. Nothing was moving. They were all alike—I can’t explain why the one was different from the others. It just was. The point is that I know what an unpath looks like, a slice of path, because they all looked like that. But in order to see it, I have to be completely stopped in time.”
“Still as death,” said a mouse.
“Yes,” said Noxon.
“And how do you come back from that?” asked a mouse.
Such a good question. Not sarcastic at all. Well, a little sarcastic, as if a human could hardly be expected to come up with such an important question on his own.