“But I know that you’re the one who raised me from a pup.”
“You think you know that,” said Father. “How do you know we don’t swap wallfolds every now and then? How do you know it was the same version of me that came back from every trip?”
“That’s right. Shatter my confidence just before I’m really going to need it.”
“It’s my job,” said Father. “Keep him guessing. Never let him feel too smart.”
“You really are good at that part of your job. So I know this will mean nothing to you. And if it does mean something, you won’t tell me anyway. But here it is. I forgive you for lying to me constantly as I was growing up. I thank you for teaching me all the things you taught me, and helping me learn to think the way I think.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
“One more thing,” said Noxon.
“Don’t say it,” said Father.
“Why not?”
“Because you know that if I answer, it will be a lie.”
“I don’t care whether it is or not,” said Noxon. “I love you.”
Father sighed. Part of his programming. “I love you too,” he said.
Noxon attached to the earliest possible moment on Ram Odin’s path, and then jumped just a hair, just a titch, just the tiniest bit beyond it.
Noxon was still on the ship. Still in the cabin. Ram Odin was there, in his pilot’s seat. The expendable was standing exactly where Ram Odin would look for him in just a few moments, as soon as the expendable could tell him what had happened.
Only it hadn’t happened yet.
Or, more precisely, it was happening right now. In this moment, this infinite unchanging moment, there was only one ship, but there were twenty potential ships coming into existence. It was jumping from one point in space to another that was many lightyears away and yet, at this moment, perfectly adjacent. It was passing from the moment zero of the year zero to a time 11,191 years earlier.
It had been the right guess, that the moment of transition existed but had no duration, and having no duration, therefore could not end. Infinitely brief, yet also infinitely long. Not so much outside of time as deeply within. Full of imminent creation and movement; yet because there was no duration, movement was impossible.
What Noxon had not guessed, and Father had not guessed, and Ram Odin had not guessed, was that in this timeless moment, Noxon could not move. The mice could not move. The electric signals of the computers hesitated and could not move on. Noxon’s heart could not beat, he could not take a breath, but he also did not need a breath, did not need a heartbeat, because no cell in his body craved oxygen. All processes were in complete stasis because there was no movement and no causality and no possibility of change.
Yet something in him was still functioning. Because he could still see Ram Odin and the expendable. Or could he? Had that image simply frozen on his retina, in the place in his brain where vision was constructed? It could not change but it also could not fade away or leave?
Yet I am thinking, thought Noxon.
Only that’s not what he thought, because to his surprise he could not form words or even clear ideas. He could not remember language. What would have caused him to form the conscious thought “I am thinking” was really an inchoate recognition of himself. And the knowledge that his self-realization contradicted the idea that nothing could happen, because his mind, at some level deeper than the brain, was still functioning.
And even if he could not turn away from the image of Ram Odin and the expendable and the pilot’s seat and the different stations that the pilot could move to on his chair, if he could move, Noxon could see the paths.
Not see the paths. But whatever it was in him that sensed them, could sense them now. He had always been able to see the paths without turning his head. He only had to turn his attention. He could see them through walls. He could see them behind hills, though not as well. He was aware of them.
But the facemask was not helping him see them as he had become used to seeing them. The facemask was as frozen as the rest of his body, and it could not do for him any of the things that it was supposed to do. He was on his own.
What he saw were not the enhanced paths that were really people moving through space and time, as the facemask showed them. Nor were they the paths that he had seen since earliest childhood, a streak of something that he thought of as color, that he thought of as a line or a wind or a memory in the air.
What he saw now had no dimension because it had no duration. It was not a path, but an instantaneous slice of the path. A single moment of path.
He concentrated on that spark of path in Ram Odin. With all his other senses inert, each with its last message frozen in place, Noxon could sort his nonphysical observation of Ram Odin’s path from all the physical noise and bring it to the center of his attention.
Still there were no words in his mind, but he was beginning to realize that far from being less clear for the lack of language, his thoughts were more clear. It’s as if language itself, along with all the other noise of his senses, all the tumult in his brain, had been a barrier, a fog that kept him from achieving real clarity of thought. Without the necessity of explaining to himself in language, he was able to comprehend that nub of a path as it really was.
There were really twenty-one paths intersecting there.
One led into the past. It was the end of the causal chain that had brought this starship and Ram Odin to the moment of the leap across the fold.
Nineteen of them led forward into the future. He could not see where they led, because in this moment they still led nowhere, but there was causal potential in them: They would yet have more effects, whereas the path that had brought Ram Odin here had spent its causality. It was done.
None of these mattered to Noxon. Though he could not put his mission into words, he had not forgotten it. He knew that going back to the past to the beginning of Ram Odin’s outbound voyage was his last resort—he would only follow it if he could not find the twenty-first path.
The twenty-first path was as rich with causality as the others. It was not spent like the past. But it was also somehow their opposite. They each pointed to slightly different destinations. But this one pointed somewhere else entirely, and he could not see or understand where that might be.
Without words, he realized: If I attach to this twenty-first path, then I will truly be cut off from the rest of the universe. But it’s what I came for. This is my purpose. This is my gamble in order to save Garden from the Destroyers.
What he felt was not fear—fear was an emotion tied to the body. He felt nothing, not in the usual sense. But he knew that attaching to that nub of backward-streaming path could mean utter failure or complete success.
He remembered that there were two of him, and he wondered what the other version of himself might do if he were here instead of Noxon. Rigg was the one who had seen the need to kill Ram Odin, and he had done it. Then Rigg was the one who saw the need not to have killed him, and so he undid it. But from this choice there would be no undoing.
Noxon could hesitate as long as he wanted. His body would not decay here. He could not die.
But neither could he live. Neither could he act and make changes in the world.
Of course, heading backward he couldn’t make changes outside the limits of this starship. It would be a very small world indeed. And who knew if, once caught in that timeflow, the regular stream of causality would not become as invisible as backward-flowing time had been to him till now.
Filled with uncertainty, filled with determination, Noxon mentally attached himself to that nub of a path, that path of a kind and color he had never seen before. He attached to it, and left that moment of nothingness.
The moment he could sense motion again—and it felt completely normal, he felt like himself, nothing had changed, and that infinite moment between e
verything was now infinitesimal in his memory—in that moment he began to slice time so that he would be invisible and undetectable to the computers.
He did not know if he had acted quickly enough. He did not know how long it would take the computers to be aware of the presence of the jewels he carried with him. Or how long it would take the computers to upload all the contents of the jewels, containing as they did the entire history of the human race in every wallfold of Garden. And the history of Ram Odin on all nineteen starships.
But even if it had absorbed every speck of those memories, it didn’t matter the way it would have if he had joined with any of the nineteen forward-moving copies of the ship. Because this ship was going back to Earth, but undetectably. As it now was, this ship could not have any effect on the rest of the universe.
Noxon’s job was to find an appropriate opportunity, after the ship returned to Earth, and take the whole ship with him back into regular time, so that he could learn what motivated the people of Earth to wipe out life on Garden, and prevent it if he could.
For now, though, his only job was to stay alive through the seven-year voyage.
If the expendable knew that there were jewels aboard, he showed nothing. Noxon could not hear the words they were saying, because he was slicing time so sound could not reach him in any intelligible form. But there was only the frustration of realizing that they were the loser in the lottery of ships, that they were the one that would never found a colony, the one that would never reach any destination at all.
Ram Odin was a man so young, so childlike compared to the old man Noxon had known. He and the expendable conversed. Ram got up and talked. The expendable talked. They walked here and there. They did inexplicable things that didn’t matter to Noxon at all.
All that Noxon cared about was the place where he could use the jewels to take control of the ship. Of course, it was possible that the ship would not let him take control, since Ram Odin was the commander.
But it was also possible that once Noxon had allowed the ship to upload the contents of the jewels, the ship’s computers would realize that Noxon was the commander of the only mission that mattered now, and that Noxon was the only person who could possibly bring the ship back into forward-time.
After the huge gamble he had already taken, wouldn’t it be ironic if the ship refused to pay off on this small bet.
It took Noxon more than a day of ship’s time to cross the small room to the jewel station. Then he kept sidling left and right, waiting for Ram to leave the room again.
At last he did.
Instantly Noxon stopped slicing time. His hand was already poised over the reader. He dropped all the jewels at once out of the bag.
They did not bounce off the surface because they were immediately locked in place, held in an invisible field that kept them all moving relative to each other. Noxon remembered the dialogue he had used before, the words he was supposed to say. But the ship’s computer did not speak to him.
Instead, it spoke to the mice.
Noxon could hear the high-pitched, rapid words, because the facemask allowed him to. It meant that the ship’s computer knew that with the facemask Noxon could understand this language, and therefore the computer used it so Ram Odin could not hear what it was saying. Or it meant that the ship’s computer, having reached its own conclusions from whatever was on the jewels, wished only to deal with the mice.
No. The words were to him. “Rigg Noxon,” said the ship’s computer. “We understand why you are here and we regard you as the commander of this vessel, superceding this Ram Odin because the older, better informed, and therefore more authoritative Ram Odin has certified you as his true successor in every one of these jewels. Do not speak because I must use the expendable to explain you to him before he sees you.”
“No,” said Noxon aloud. “I will explain myself.”
“The shock might harm him.”
“I have had far too much experience with ships’ computers and with expendables to believe that you have actually surrendered control to me, or that you will actually say what I would wish you to say.”
“It is unfortunate that you have such an untrusting attitude.”
“The mice that are now escaping from this room are to be contained on this ship and not allowed to leave it under any circumstances, until I specifically authorize each instance of their departure.”
“Understood.”
From down the corridor, he could hear Ram Odin’s voice. “I’m hearing a voice and it isn’t yours and it isn’t mine.”
“And you will preserve both my life and Ram Odin’s life, from each other and from ourselves as well as from you, the expendable, or any other peril.”
“Understood.”
Ram Odin came into the room. Noxon turned to face him. Ram Odin looked at him and kept a remarkable degree of composure. Which is to say, he leaned against his chair and then sank into it. But he did not point or shout or ask questions like “Who are you?” and “How did you get here?”
“First,” said Noxon, “I am fully human. My face looks like this because I have a symbiotic relationship with a parasite that enhances my perceptions and my reaction time. My name is Noxon.”
Ram Odin said nothing.
“Second, I am in control of this ship now.”
Ram looked at the expendable. The expendable nodded.
“Third, there are now mice aboard this ship. They are sentient, they are untrustworthy, but they might be quite useful to us at some later time, so do not harm them.”
Ram nodded slowly.
“Fourth, you know that we’re cut off from the normal flow of time. I was able to join you on this timestream only because I entered this path from the moment of intersection, where all the copies of the ship came to be. I don’t know if I can get us back onto the normal timestream, but if I can’t, nobody can, nothing can. I am your only hope to get back to the world of causality.”
Ram Odin kept looking at him.
“That’s all I’ve got,” said Noxon. “You can talk now.”
Ram Odin shook his head. Then, his voice choked and croaking, he said, “No I can’t.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “I’ve met your very old self. One copy of yourself, anyway. I know that you’re a sneaky conniving arrogant murderous son-of-a-bitch. I also know that you are willing to sacrifice whatever needs sacrificing in order to save your people. Even though you’re not the copy of Ram Odin who actually founded nineteen colonies on the planet Garden, you could have become him. You meant to found a colony. I’m asking you to preserve the results of your own work. The lives of your own children. I’m one of those children. I’m here to keep your life’s work from being obliterated.”
Ram Odin nodded. “I’m listening,” he said.
So Noxon told him about the world of Garden, and all the things Ram Odin had done, and all the things Noxon and his companions had done. He didn’t hurry the telling. The story was spread across several days. When his memory was incomplete or inaccurate, the expendable prompted him, for all these stories were now a part of the ship’s memory.
When he was done, Ram Odin said, “I’m in.”
“You’re in what?” asked Noxon.
“I’m in the game. I’m with you. Let’s save the world. Your world. My children’s world.”
“Garden,” said Noxon.
“Right,” said Ram Odin. “Let’s save Garden.”
CHAPTER 12
Choosing Masks
Umbo could have avoided Rigg’s rule and taken Loaf and Leaky through the Wall by jumping back before it was created, then leaping forward again in time. But that would be showing off, and besides, who knew what dangers there might be in the world of Garden before the colonizers shattered the biosphere and replaced most of the native life with plants and animals from Earth? Rigg could always see the path
s of creatures and avoid anything large and dangerous. Umbo could not.
And since Umbo and Loaf were together, they could pass through the Wall—but not until after Rigg’s rule of two-at-a-time went into effect.
Umbo chose the time right after Rigg went back to Vadeshfold, got his facemask, then killed and then unkilled Ram Odin.
Loaf and Leaky and Umbo traveled to the Wall, however, in the time before Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf had been arrested in O—a time when no one was looking for them. Though it probably wasn’t necessary. They would be looking for a boy the age Umbo had been, and a soldierly man just Loaf’s size—but with a normal human face. They would not be looking for Leaky at all.
But even if they weren’t looking for them as they were now, it was better to travel at a time when nobody was looking for anybody.
They hired a carriage for the part of the journey that went from town to town, but the last part could only be done on foot because no roads led to the Wall. It was then, at the verge of the Wall, that Umbo pulled the others forward into the future moment when Rigg, Noxon, and Ram Odin had just left to rejoin the rest of them near the shore in Larfold. The flyer would be gone, but Vadeshex would be at home.
Passing through the Wall with permission did not involve the agony of anxiety and despair that normally made it impassable. But neither was it completely absent. Several times Umbo saw Loaf take Leaky by the hand and reassure her, because even these pale shadows of the feelings the Wall evoked were clearly upsetting her. Umbo remembered watching Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf walk this half-league—though that time there had been soldiers coming to kill Umbo and Param as Umbo held the others in the past. Umbo also remembered making the walk himself, holding Param’s hand. They had just saved each other’s lives, and Umbo was in the first throes of falling in love.
All in all, it was a place that filled him with nostalgia, as well as dread.
Umbo half-expected Vadeshex to be there to greet them, as he had been the first time. What he did not expect was to meet himself.