Ram Odin grinned at her.
“Why did she say that?” asked Noxon. “It seems presumptuous of her.”
“I think I picked the wrong time to travel,” said Ram Odin. “I’ve already been named as one of the possible pilots of the foldship, so people who are following the starship program know who I am.”
“A pilot is famous?” asked Noxon.
“A very low level of fame,” said Ram Odin. “It won’t get crazy until I’m selected as the pilot.”
“We could have sliced our way through this trip,” said Noxon. “They would never have known we were on the airplane, and the trip would have been over in a few minutes.”
“Next time,” said Ram Odin. “I have to admit that I’m enjoying being home on Earth. I like having money and something to spend it on.”
“Are you rich here?”
“I make a decent living,” said Ram. “But no, not rich.”
Noxon had had his misgivings when they boarded the plane. But he couldn’t say anything at the time, since officially he could speak only Quechua. “Isn’t the pre-voyage version of yourself going to find out you’re here?”
Ram Odin grinned. “He’s going to find out that somebody got a duplicate of his credit chip. My guess is that the police will be waiting to arrest me as an identity thief when we land in Atlanta.”
“How does that help us accomplish our purpose here?” asked Noxon.
“It doesn’t. So we will slice our way off the plane.”
In Atlanta, the police boarded the plane before any passengers were allowed to leave. But by then, Noxon’s and Ram Odin’s seats appeared to be empty. Because time slicing slowed down their movements so much, they were the last ones off the plane before the door closed, and by the time they got to the head of the ramp into the terminal, the police had abandoned their search.
Inside the terminal, Noxon sliced them forward by several days. Ram Odin quickly abandoned his credit chip. “Sorry,” he said to Noxon. “I won’t do that again.”
“You’re going to be recognized,” said Noxon.
“I really am about twelve years older now than I was at this point in the past. My face is thicker and as you can see, I’m letting my beard grow. Plus, I expect to spend a lot of time invisible, thanks to you.”
“I have a better idea,” said Noxon. He took Ram’s hand, attached to a path, and popped back to the year before. “Are you famous now?” asked Noxon.
“No,” said Ram Odin. “But it still doesn’t solve the money problem. We can’t afford to walk to where we’re going, and without money, we can’t get transportation.”
“Why can’t we walk?” asked Noxon. “If it takes too long, when we arrive I’ll take us back in time.”
“It’s not the time, or not just the time it takes to walk. It’s that nobody does it. There aren’t roads with places for pedestrians.”
“Can’t we work somewhere for a few days and earn passage?” asked Noxon. “Loaf and Umbo did that on a riverboat.”
“You have to have a certified identity to get hired anywhere, for any job,” said Ram. “And we don’t have any.”
“How do we get them?”
“Be born on Earth, and don’t have a duplicate of yourself running around getting resentful when you claim to be him.”
“How do we get identities?” asked Noxon.
“We don’t,” said Ram Odin. “We sneak aboard public transportation and ride in discomfort, for free.”
Fortunately, Noxon’s time-slicing was now so effective that they could get on a bus and walk slowly up the aisle and back to the door during the five-hour ride to Huntsville. To them it took only three minutes and a few steps.
“I warn you,” said Noxon, as they walked through town. “We can’t steal food while we’re slicing, because our hands just go right through anything we’re picking up.”
“Why don’t we sink into the ground?” asked Ram Odin.
“Because we don’t,” said Noxon. “For the same reason that paths stay in a fixed position relative to a spinning planet. I don’t understand the rules, but we stay on the surface.”
Noxon was used to walking hundreds of miles in a row, stopping only for sleep and meals. Ram Odin was not. So when they reached the door of the house Ram was looking for, miles from the bus station, he was sweaty and exhausted, while Noxon wasn’t even tired.
“Why do you think these people will help us?” asked Noxon.
“Because we have something to trade,” said Ram Odin.
“What do we have?” asked Noxon.
“Time travel,” said Ram Odin.
“This already sounds like a bad idea,” said Noxon.
“It’s a brilliant idea, and I think you’ll enjoy every minute of it. Well, maybe not the first few minutes, but all the rest of them.”
“What happens in the first few minutes?”
“We have to prove to them that we’re not insane.”
The door was answered by a young woman wearing large opaque glasses. “I don’t think I know you. Do you have an appointment?”
“A long-standing one, and you do know me, Deborah Wheaton. I’m betting you left your glasses in reading mode.”
“I did. But it can’t be you, Cousin Ram, because you’re in Houston training and competing to be pilot of the first starship.”
“Oh, I’m definitely there right now. I remember it well. But to me that was nine years ago, I think. And I’m quite sure your father wants to talk to me, with or without an appointment.”
“That’s always true,” said Deborah. “And with or without your right mind.”
“He’s never had a right mind,” said a man behind her, a thin, spectral figure with ordinary glasses and disheveled hair, as if he often ran his hands through it, but never a comb.
“Uncle Georgia,” said Ram.
“Who’s your friend?” asked Uncle Georgia.
“This is Rigg Noxon. He’s been pretending to be a Quechua from Peru, here to consult with a plastic surgeon.”
Georgia leaned in close to study Noxon’s face. “Odd placement of the eyes, and they seem protuberant. I don’t see brow ridges at all. Do those eyes actually work?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “Since you’re not my uncle, what do I call you?”
“I’m not his uncle, either. I’m Professor Wheaton, to my students. ‘Wheat’ to my colleagues. ‘Georgia’ was a nickname given to me within the family, when I first showed interest in primitive anthropes. After an action-movie archaeologist named Ohio Jackson or something. As if archaeologists had anything to do with anthropes.”
“So you’re from Georgia?” asked Noxon.
“I’m from Iowa,” said Wheaton. “I think my cousins enjoyed calling me Georgia. It was a slur on my masculinity. Naturally, to overcompensate, I went into erectology.”
Ram chuckled, and explained to Noxon. “Nothing to do with urology. Uncle Georgia studies Homo erectus.”
“The first true humans,” said Wheaton. “Or so I have tried to prove. They had complete mastery of fire. They evolved the articulate hand, the running foot. They had also mastered weaving and wore clothing, though not for the purposes we use it for now. And agriculture—not just cultivation—at least two hundred thousand years before anybody else believes it started, and maybe a million. Just because Western civilization used cereal grains doesn’t mean that’s how agriculture began. It was yams, young man! Yams and taro root, legumes and berries. Nothing that would show up in the fossil record, but the signs are in the teeth! Small ones. Can’t evolve small teeth unless you’re eating soft food!”
“We’re still standing on the porch,” said Ram Odin.
“Is that my fault? Is the door locked? Don’t your feet work? Come in, uninvited visitors. I was just thinking of peeing when the doorbell rang, and I’m of that age when it d
oesn’t pay to ignore nature’s call.” Wheaton disappeared inside the house. Deborah ushered Noxon and Ram into what might have been a library. It was lined with books, books and journals were stacked everywhere, and on top of most stacks were fossils inside acrylic boxes.
“It feels like home,” said Ram Odin.
“It looks like the basement of an ill-run museum,” said Deborah, “but I think that’s what you meant.”
Noxon picked up an acrylic box with a bone inside.
“Please leave things where they are, without fresh fingerprints,” said Deborah. “What’s with your face?”
The question seemed quite direct, but Noxon knew how to answer. “What’s with yours?”
“I asked you first,” said Deborah. “But mine is easy to explain. A car crash and a fire. I lost both eyes and my face is one big scar. Plastic surgeons were able to give me a nose and you might see that around my mouth, they’ve grown me new lips and the musculature needed to make them work properly. But they can’t regrow eyes. I opted for digital glasses. Your turn.”
“It’s a parasite,” said Noxon. “A specially bred variant of a creature called ‘facemask,’ designed for symbiosis with humans.”
“So your having it wasn’t an accident,” said Deborah.
“I asked for it,” said Noxon. “It augments the human brain and body. Speeds up reactions, maintains health, sharpens perceptions.”
“Your eyes are out of place. Too far apart.”
“The first thing the facemask takes is the eyes. Then it grows new ones, better than before. But it’s a little careless about placement. It takes a few years for them to migrate to the normal positions.”
“The skin seems repulsively unnatural,” said Deborah. “Or is that just an artifact of my glasses?”
“No, you’re seeing rightly enough,” said Noxon. “At least the facemask did a good job of matching my skin color.”
“What race are you?” asked Deborah. “Too light for African or Dravidian, too dark for Malay. And you’re not big enough for Fijian.”
“I’m the same color as everyone else in my homeland. I think we may be the original race. That is, we represent a complete mixing of the deliberately diverse sampling of nationalities of the colonists on the starship that Ram Odin is going to pilot.”
“That’s such a bizarre assertion that I’m wondering if it might be truthful, and if so, how.”
“I’m sure Ram is explaining everything to your . . . father?”
“He’s my father, yes. Now. He’s actually an uncle that took me in. My parents died in the crash that blinded me. I don’t remember them, I wasn’t yet two years old.”
“Do you even remember seeing through regular eyes?” asked Noxon.
“I have memories, but I don’t know if they’re really from that time, or manufactured in dreams and imagination. Where are you from?”
“Not Peru,” said Noxon.
“Ram admitted as much when he said you were pretending to be a Quechua speaker.”
“I’m not pretending that,” said Noxon. “I’m fluent in Quechua.”
“But not from Peru.”
“I’m from Ramfold, one of the nineteen wallfolds on the planet Garden.”
“Planet,” said Deborah.
“The colony world that Ram Odin founded. The younger Ram Odin, the one that’s going to pilot the starship in a few years.”
“So there are two Rams.”
“More than that,” said Noxon. “There are two of me, as well. The other one kept the original name, Rigg. I go by Noxon so our friends know which one they’re talking about.”
“I don’t mean to quibble,” said Deborah. “But if Ram hasn’t founded the colony yet, how can you be from there? And how has there been time for the races to mix so thoroughly that you think you’ve recovered the original skin color of the human species.”
“Homo sapiens. I have no idea about Homo erectus.”
“Nobody does,” said Deborah. “So what’s your claim? How can this be true? A time machine?”
“Not a machine. More like an inborn ability.”
“You just naturally hop around in time?”
So Noxon explained his original ability with paths, and how Umbo’s time-slowing talent showed him that the paths were people from the past. And now the facemask allowed him to latch on to paths without any help from Umbo.
She heard him out. And then said nothing.
“You don’t believe me,” said Noxon.
“I’m trying to decide whether you believe you. Between your dispassionate face and my fake eyes, I can’t tell if I’m missing your tells.”
“I have a simple remedy,” said Noxon. He started to get up from the chair he was sitting in, and as he moved, he sliced time. He didn’t slice very much—just enough to disappear—and he took only a couple of steps before he stopped slicing. While he was invisible, moving slower than the rest of the world, he saw Deborah reach out to where he had been—where, in fact, he still was—then stand up and walk through him. He felt the heat of her passage, speeding up his slicing a little as she intersected his space, so neither of them would be damaged. She walked to the window, looked outside, then turned around and surveyed the whole room. Perhaps she was wondering where he would be when he reappeared. If he reappeared.
And then he reappeared.
“Neat trick,” she said, showing no surprise.
“Not a trick,” said Noxon.
“I’ve seen people seem to disappear before.”
“I’ve seen people move through the space where I’m walking, too, but it never gets old,” said Noxon.
“You were really there the whole time.”
“I was,” said Noxon. “It’s one of the reasons why time-slicing isn’t useful as a getaway technique. If your enemy knows what you’re doing, all he needs to do is put a slab of metal into the space where you are. The heat of a billion atomic collisions cooks you to death.”
“You’ve seen this?”
“My sister died that way, once,” said Noxon.
Deborah looked stricken.
“No, it’s all right. As soon as we knew what had happened, we went back in time and rescued her before it happened.”
“So she didn’t die.”
“She was dead when we found her,” said Noxon. “That’s the nice thing about timeshaping. You can sometimes undo some really bad things.”
Those words hung in the air.
“You’re thinking of your parents,” said Noxon.
“I didn’t really know them,” said Deborah. “And I’m trying to think what would happen if you went back and saved them.”
“If I went back, alone, then I would change your whole life. Everything you’ve done since the accident will unhappen. You won’t remember any of this, because the toddler who was saved from that fiery wreck will have her normal face and eyes, and her parents, and no reason to be so close with Uncle Georgia.”
“How do I know if that other life would be better than the life I’ve led? Yes, my parents were cheated out of raising me. Or maybe they were spared an ugly divorce. Or maybe I’d hate my serial killer little brother.”
“Such a dark imagination.”
“But if I went back with you,” she said. “You seemed to imply there were two alternatives.”
“If I took you into the past and you were causally connected to the change in behavior that saved your parents and the toddler version of yourself, then you would continue to exist, with all your memories. The two-year-old would also be you. There’d be two copies. The way there are two copies of me, this one on Earth and the one still back on Garden.”
“But Father?”
“Professor Wheaton would have no idea who you are. He wouldn’t have raised the little burned and blind girl who survived the wreck. He’d be a dif
ferent man. And you’d be a stranger.”
“So I would survive, but I’d be lifted out of my own life.”
“Not really—you’d just be erased from theirs.”
Deborah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I must be a horrible human being, not to want to save my parents, but . . . this timeshaping thing you do, it can’t save everybody. Death still comes.”
“Eventually,” said Noxon. “But you’re right. My friend Umbo has always regretted that we couldn’t go back and save his little brother Kyokay, but it was his death that brought us together to discover what we could do.”
“Wouldn’t the two of you still exist?”
“Now I know that we would. There’d just be a copy of Umbo back in Fall Ford, getting beaten by his father until he either runs away or kills the man. And there’d be a version of me who didn’t meet up with Umbo and so had no idea of what it meant to see these paths.” Then Noxon shuddered. “And I would have gone back in time to save my dead father. That’s when I would have found out he wasn’t a man at all.”
“A woman?”
“Not human. An expendable.”
“But that’s illegal. For an expendable to pass for human.”
“It may be illegal, but that’s what they’re designed for. Complete with an anus that passes convincing feces. I lived with him in the forest for months at a time. If he hadn’t seemed perfectly normal in every way, I would have known.”
“Designed to pass for human. I didn’t know. They wear special uniforms and talk in these leaden voices so that you can always tell.”
“My father—all the expendables—they spoke perfectly normally. They seemed like people. You’d have no reason to doubt them until you noticed that they live forever and don’t get older.”
“That’s such a crime.”
“There are worse crimes,” said Noxon. “Like sending a fleet to blow up a planet and kill billions of people.”
“Who would do that?” asked Deborah.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Noxon. “Because that’s what the people of Earth do to the people of Garden.”
“But your colony is the hope of humanity! After the comet tore up the Moon and nearly ended life on Earth, we knew we had to establish ourselves on another world so that one cosmic accident wouldn’t wipe us out. And the fact that you exist proves that it worked.”