“The way I got out of that moment was to attach to one of the paths. The one going the wrong way.”
“Answering the mice?” asked Ram.
The expendable explained, ending with, “So there’s a good chance that if Noxon can slow down enough to see the paths, it’ll be impossible for him to come out of it without attaching.”
“But I don’t know if I even can get to that point myself,” said Noxon. “Remember that I got there by following Ram Odin’s path backward—the path of the Ram from Ramfold. I could never have slowed myself down that much.”
“So if you have to be completely stopped,” said the expendable, “then there can be no experimentation. You have to do it holding on to the mice, to Ram Odin, and to the ship and all its contents, and you have to do it at the time when it’s most convenient to make the jump, and you have to attach to exactly the right path so we jump into the past, long before spaceships.”
“Except that I have no idea if I can slow down enough to get to that condition.”
“So the alternative,” said the expendable, “is that you will start to detect the backward path of outbound Ram—the individual nubs of each instant—before you get to a complete stop in time. If you can slow down to such a degree, but not lose the ability to snap yourself back to this timeflow, then we’ll know that this venture is possible.”
“Might be possible.”
“But if you can’t slow down enough to see his path,” said the expendable, “then we’ll know that’s an approach that doesn’t work.”
“And then I’d have to figure out how to get myself to a complete stop.”
“Death,” suggested one of the helpful mice. “Works every time.”
“From your expression,” said Ram, “a mouse said something you didn’t like.”
“It was very funny,” said Noxon. “To anybody who didn’t actually have to do this.”
“So are you going to do the experiment?” asked Ram.
“I’m going to try,” said Noxon. “The trouble is that speeding up is easy, now that I learned how from Param. Slowing down—I always do that by sort of watching the paths and doing whatever I do that makes them visible. It was really hard to learn. It’s the thing Umbo does naturally.”
“So follow my path. Here in the ship. Or your own.”
Noxon grimaced. “I hate using my own path to slow down. I have to see myself. And I’m always worried that I’ll attach and then there’ll be two of me.”
“Umbo slows himself down and sends himself messages,” said the expendable.
“Because he can’t see the paths,” said Noxon. “He can’t actually see in advance if the person he’s talking to is there. He finds the exact time another way, some inner time sense, and then he speaks the message to the place where he knows the person will be. At least that’s how it was for him, starting out. It’s why it was always easiest for him to send messages to himself, because he knew where he had been.”
“So he has no risk of attaching to himself,” said Ram.
“But if I use my own path, I always risk attaching to myself and making two of me,” said Noxon.
“So use my path,” said Ram. “Would it help if I sat in the pilot’s chair? Or near it?”
“It doesn’t matter what you do right now. It’s your past self that I’m working with.”
“So I can sing? Dance?”
“I thought all the sarcastic ones were in the box,” said Noxon.
Ram began, “I’ll be as quiet as—”
“A mouse,” said the expendable. “Your sense of when to drag out some old saying is deplorable—and the saying is contradicted, I might add, by the mice we have with us, who are not quiet.”
“We are right now,” said a mouse. “We don’t want Noxon to get distracted and screw this up.”
Noxon held up a hand. “I’m not going to attach to the path. But that’s my reflex, so I have to concentrate on not attaching. Which means staying completely calm.”
“Unlikely,” said the expendable. “Your vital signs are showing all kinds of stress.”
“As calm as possible,” said Noxon, “but thanks for instilling me with confidence.”
“You needed to know,” said the expendable.
“The warning would have been necessary if I didn’t have the facemask to calm all my vital signs whenever I need it to,” said Noxon. “And to shut out all sensory information from you folks, if I need it to.”
“Very useful,” said Ram.
Then Noxon heard nothing, saw nothing. The facemask responded, not to his words, but to his will. All he could sense now was Ram Odin’s path through the ship.
It had been only a few days since the time of splitting, so the paths weren’t all that extensive. That was good. Fewer alternate paths to distract him.
Noxon watched but did not attach. He concentrated on making the path into a person, and then into a person who was moving very, very slowly.
What he had never thought about before was whether his path-sense had something like peripheral vision. Could he be concentrating on one path, and yet still be able to sense other paths? Or were they all shut out?
Or was the facemask shutting them out?
Noxon didn’t have to put it into words. He only felt the need to be able to sense all the paths without losing track of the one that was slowing him. The facemask responded.
But not instantly, because of course it was slowing down along with him. Or . . . the question that had bothered him and Umbo from the start . . . were he and the facemask speeding up relative to the timeflow of the path? Speeding up, not by slicing time the way Param did, which meant skipping over microchunks of time, but really speeding up, five moments per moment, experiencing every bit of time and causality, but moving so rapidly compared to the normal timeflow that it seemed slower and slower to him.
It didn’t matter what was actually happening. He saw the path resolve into Ram Odin, and then Ram moved more and more slowly, until he was almost not moving at all.
Hold me at this speed, thought Noxon.
And the facemask responded, as quickly as a reflex. Noxon no longer had to concentrate on holding this relative speed and now he could look for something else.
He almost missed it. Because the little nubs of backward time were not human-sized or human-shaped. And they didn’t flicker. It was nothing like the paths. Except in color.
Only it wasn’t color. It was the attribute that Noxon thought of as color, because that’s how he described it to Father when he first started quizzing him about it. As a child he had even thought of them as blue and green, yellow and red. But it wasn’t color at all. It was something else, the attribute that made every person’s path just a little different from everybody else’s. And markedly different from the paths of animals, and the more-intelligent animals sharply divergent from those with lesser minds.
It’s the consciousness itself that I’m seeing. Not the molecules of the body passing through space and time, but the mind itself. Without physical substance, and yet inextricably tied to the body and brain. It had no dimension, but it had location—like the theoretical point in geometry. Only the color made it detectable at all. A thread of it. Wherever he paid attention to it, it became detectable for only the tiniest distance—the tiniest duration in time.
It was so hard not to reach out with his mind and attach to it. Because this seemed to him to be the purest path of all, the path within the path. He had to know if it was really a person or just something he was making up because he wanted so badly to see something.
Disaster if it was something, and he attached, and the molecules of his body were annihilated. Or if he simply appeared in the outbound ship, in the normal timeflow, and then had to explain himself to that Ram Odin, which would change all of the history of Garden, maybe cause it not to exist at all. And Ram and th
e mice, trapped in the backward flow—they would just see him disappear. All this effort wasted.
He held himself back. He did not attach. Instead, he let the facemask know that it was time to ease back to the regular speed of time.
He opened his eyes.
“Tell us when you’re going to start,” said Ram Odin.
“He’s already finished,” said the expendable. “Did it work?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “I can do this. Once we’re close enough to Earth. And if I can bring the ship along with me. I think I can do this.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Ram Odin. “Slice us forward in time.”
Noxon didn’t know why he hated the idea. “What’s the hurry?” asked Noxon.
“What’s the delay for?” asked Ram Odin.
“It’s life!” said Noxon, frustrated. “Things take time. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“For everybody else. But look what you can do!”
“Yes, I can speed and skip and go back and all kinds of things, and you know what? Most of the time I don’t gain anything by hurrying.”
“After years on this voyage,” said Ram Odin, “I can tell you that you don’t gain all that much by waiting, either.”
“Not waiting,” said Noxon. “You didn’t wait. You read. You talked with him.”
“I didn’t accomplish anything,” said Ram, “except to avoid being comatose for the jump.”
“You didn’t learn anything? None of your thoughts were worth having? None of your conversations had value?”
“It was boring,” said Ram Odin.
“You seemed interested enough at the time,” said the expendable. “Maybe it’s only boring to remember.”
“I’ve had enough adventures,” said Noxon, “to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there’s nothing wrong. You’re not hungry, you’re not in pain. Nobody’s making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you’re impatient for something else to happen.”
“Which I am,” said Ram Odin.
“And I’m not,” said Noxon. “Because when we get there, I’ll find the nub of some path that’s two or twelve or a hundred years old, and I’ll attach to it, and then either the ship will come with me when I take us back to the forward timestream, or it won’t.”
“It will.”
“You don’t know that. If it doesn’t, then we’ll be up there in space, dead in seconds.”
“I do know,” said Ram Odin. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Supposedly, I caused the twenty-way leap in time—nineteen forward, one back.”
“You took the ship and the colonists through and out of the fold,” said Noxon. “The computers caused the duplications.”
“Didn’t the ships come along on every one of those jumps? And I wasn’t sitting there chanting, ‘Bring the ship, bring the ship,’ because I didn’t know there was going to be a shift in time.”
“The ship just came.”
“And I wasn’t even near a planet,” said Ram Odin. “My path was tied to the ship, you’ve proven that, so the ship was massive enough to hold on to my path the way planets usually do. Yet it still made the jump with me. So it’s going to make the time jump with you, too.”
“Maybe, yes, probably,” said Noxon. “Though there are a lot of variables that may or may not be significant.”
“So what? So we die. Poof, the ship disappears around us, and we become tiny momentary sparks of fire in the night sky as our corpses enter the atmosphere. We won’t be the only humans to die that day, because dozens of people die each second. It won’t even extinguish our identities, because you’ve got a copy of you under the name of Rigg back on Garden, and I’ve got a copy of me, only about forty years older.”
“But I’ll be gone.”
“You’ll be gone someday anyway. Get over it.”
“You’re not afraid to die?” asked Noxon.
“Of course I am,” said Ram Odin. “But I volunteered to be the pilot of the first human starship, the founder of the first colony in another solar system. I don’t let my fear of death keep me from doing the things that make my life interesting and, maybe, worth living.”
“You’re so brave,” said Noxon, sounding a little sarcastic, but also meaning it.
“Me? Nothing I’ve done compares with that business you did right after your mechanical father pretended to die. Leaping on rocks over a waterfall current that could have swept you to your death if anything went wrong. All to save a stupid kid whose idiocy was going to get him killed someday anyway. That was brave.”
“I was like a machine, acting by reflex. The job needed doing, I moved, I didn’t think. But this time I’ve done nothing but think.”
“And you want more time in order to do more thinking? That’s going to be helpful in some way?”
“And there’s more at stake,” said Noxon. “I was trying to save one kid back then. Now it’s a whole world.”
“You were trying to save somebody who wasn’t you, and you risked everything you had and ever would have—to wit: your life. Your life is the same thing you’re risking now, and all the people you’re maybe going to save are equally not you. It’s the same thing, except now you’re getting cold feet.”
“The point I’m making,” said Noxon, “is that I’ve been really tense and maybe it would be good for me to have a few more days as we approach Earth to maybe wind down a little. Read a book. Maybe watch that Wizard of Oz movie.”
“I don’t know if we even have it on board,” said Ram Odin.
“We do,” said the expendable.
“If you want the time, take the time,” said Ram Odin.
“Thank you,” said Noxon with exaggerated politeness.
Then they sat there for about five seconds, as Noxon realized how impossible it would be for him to concentrate on anything, knowing what he had to do as soon as they got to Earth.
“Silbom’s left elbow,” said Noxon. He picked up the box of mice. “I was forgetting the mice. I couldn’t very well ask them to wait inside that box for days on end. But I’m also not letting them out. So it’s only fair to speed things up.”
“For the sake of the mice,” said Ram Odin.
“Right.”
“And not because you realized that neither of us could possibly stand to read books or watch vids or even converse about anything until we succeed in getting back to the right timeflow.”
“Not because of that at all,” said Noxon. “That never crossed my mind. I don’t even care about that. I’m truly only thinking of the mice. You’d feel the same way, if you had known them as long as I have.”
“As brief as my acquaintance with the mice has been,” said Ram Odin, “I already feel that I know their deep inner essence, which consists of a ruthless survival instinct hidden behind clouds of deviousness and hypocrisy.”
“That’s pretty much it,” said Noxon.
“We’re trying to learn civilized behavior from you,” said a mouse. “But it’s hard to know when we’re seeing anything particularly civilized.”
“Everything we do is civilized,” said Noxon.
“Talking to the mice again?” asked Ram Odin. “I’ll step outside so you can converse in private. Oh, wait. I can’t.”
“All right, hold on to me,” said Noxon. “Father . . . Ramex . . . expendable. Would you be so kind as to raise your hand again when this ship is firmly docked, as it was just after Ram Odin boarded it with all supplies and colonists ready for the voyage?”
“I won’t know when that is,” said the expendable. “They’ll all be invisible to the ship’s sensors.”
“You’ll know that the ship is in the dock because it won’t be moving,” said Noxon. “Raise your arm then.”
&n
bsp; Ram Odin put his arm around Noxon’s shoulder, while Noxon held tightly to the box of mice, and then Noxon sliced them all forward at such a clip that within only a minute or two, the expendable’s arm rose.
“We’re here,” said the expendable. “Are you?”
“Yes, I’m here,” said Noxon. “Give me a minute to unwind from the slicing. It uses a completely different approach and I’m kind of exhausted. Mentally. Physically I didn’t even break a sweat.”
“Take all the time you need,” said Ram Odin.
“Thank you for your completely insincere expression of patience,” said Noxon. “I’ve never been to Earth before, expendable. Is there some way of getting a view from here?”
There was a pause. “Noxon,” said the expendable, “you do understand that we’re the only objects in the universe moving backward in time.”
Noxon felt like an idiot. “I just thought that—planets would be visible.”
“Not even stars,” said the expendable. “We can’t even detect gravity. Nothing.”
“Then how did you know when we were inside the orbit of—”
“We have a perfect record of the exact moment when the outbound ship reached each distance,” said the expendable. “Since we’re locked to that ship, we’re assuming that our clock will tell us when we’ve reached any particular point along the way.”
“So our only navigational instrument is a clock,” said Noxon.
“The clock was the only means that sailors in the old days were able to tell their longitude,” said Ram Odin. “There are precedents.”
“But if the clocks are off—”
“Why would they be?” asked the expendable. “We have the same clock now that we had then. Only our direction in time has changed, not our velocity.”
“As far as you can tell,” said Noxon.
“We might be inside a sparrow’s eyeball for all we know,” said Ram Odin. “But we assume we’re not. By the only means we have of estimating our location, the ship says we’re in place for you to start looking for forward-moving paths so you can get us going in the right direction . . . a few centuries ago. If you don’t find the paths, then we’ll know something’s wrong.”