Visitors

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.

“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 the 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.”

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.”

“All right, of course, yes,” said Noxon. “I think that this time, you won’t need to hold on to me. Either the ship will come with me or it won’t. If it does, you’ll come along with it. If it doesn’t, then at least you won’t be stranded in space without a ship.”

“That’s dumb in sixty ways,” said Ram Odin. “If we’re not sure that the ship will come with you, why would we want to stay with the ship? I’m hanging on to you for dear life, my boy, though if you want to try your experiment with the mice, I don’t mind. That’s what mice are for.”

Noxon held on to the box of mice.

“Excuse us,” said a mouse, “and I know this will sound self-serving and you’ll interpret it as an attempt to finagle our way out of the box, which it is, but we would feel a lot safer about this change in time direction if we had direct contact with your skin the way Ram Odin does.”

Noxon understood at once and, despite his annoyance with and distrust of them, he opened the box and let the mice crawl up inside his sleeves and pantlegs and down the neck of his shirt. “Thank you,” several of them murmured. Noxon appreciated the politeness, though he also knew that once they got back into forward-time—if they did—he’d wish there were a way to make them get back in the box—which there wasn’t. Short of stripping naked and having the expendable pick them off his body one by one. And who knew how much damage they could cause before he was able to carry out such a plan?

They had served their time in prison, and now they were free again, and he would have to deal with them like the sentient beings they were.

“All right,” said Noxon. “I don’t know how long it will take me to find an appropriate path. Earth is a long way off, hundreds of thousands of kilometers even now. And the nubs of paths are very small even close up. This may take me a while. It may not even be possible.”

“We won’t interrupt you,” said Ram Odin.

The first challenge was to find paths at all—or, rather, the nubs that implied the presence of a path. Noxon began with near-contemporary paths in the construction station itself. He quickly found a few, then a lot of them. He began spotting paths that must be in nearby ships and shuttles, and then in farther ones.

It got harder and harder, the farther they were. And none of them were all that far.

He realized that there was no chance he could spot any individual paths on Earth, especially since they would all be mere nubs anyway.

“I need a second plan,” said Noxon. “I can see the nearby paths in the station and ships but Earth is just too far.”

For a few moments, there was silence.

“Well,” said Ram, “that’s useful information.”

“Can we start up our engines and move away from here, closer to the surface?” asked Noxon.

“Theoretically,” said the expendable. “But we’ve been in an atom-for-atom lock with the structural components of the outbound ship. The energy cost of breaking away might be too high. We don’t understand the nature of those bonds, since they’ve never been detected or measured in nature. Nor can we be sure in which direction Earth might lie. Or how far we’ve traveled in relation to it.”

“Clear enough answer,” said Noxon, who understood little of the physics but knew what “probably not” sounded like when he heard it.

“The new plan is obvious,” said a mouse.

“The mice think it’s obvious,” said Noxon.

“The mice can come live in my butt,” said Ram Odin.

“No need to be crude,” said a mouse.

“He’s being hospitable,” said another.

“What’s your obvious plan?” asked Noxon.

“Slice onward until the time when they haven’t yet started constructing the outbound ship.”

The expendable heard this, too, of course, and immediately began working it out. “Looking at the ship’s memory, which includes all the reports on the construction process, the ship was finished on—”

“No,” said Noxon. “We need a time when there was nothing in the space we occupy, but there were people up here so I can attach to their paths.”

“If it’s at all possible,” said Ram Odin, “can you seek out a time, about twenty-five years, when there were no paths at all, and choose a path before that break?”

“Why?” asked Noxon. “What’s the gap?”

“The comet that came so close it threw the Moon out of its orbit. Tidal forces then tore chunks out of the Moon, which formed a ring that destroyed everything that was orbiting Earth. I’d really like us not to reappear during that time. And before it would be better than after.”

“Why? Either way, we’ll be seen.”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed in the dingy little runt of a Moon we have left,” said Ram Odin. “You need to see the glorious Moon under whose influence the human species evolved.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll see both versions of the Moon, if this works at all,” said Noxon. “So here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take us forward to a time before this ship was built. Then I’ll attach to a forward-moving path out here in space. I’ll switch the whole ship to that timeflow. If it works, then I’ll immediately jump us further into the past without looking for a path at all.”

“I thought you couldn’t do it without a path.”

“I can’t go to a particular time without a path. But in this case, once I get us facing the right direction, I’ll simply slice my way backward as fast as possible, like closing my eyes and throwing us all into a time before space travel. Preferably before telescopes. Once we get there, we can figure out when we are.”

“Close your eyes and jump,” suggested Ram Odin. “Like Icarus learning to fly.”

“Icarus fell to earth, burning, as I remember from my reading in Odinfold,” said Noxon. “That is the legend you were referring to, right?”

“Just trying to think what people on Earth will think of this new, fast-moving star.”

“Once we get back to the right direction,” said Noxon, “I don’t actually care much about what people on Earth think of us. We’ll be visible here for a second or so, but no longer. Maybe nobody will be looking, but there are bound to be instruments that register our presence.”

“They’ll call it a computer glitch,” said the expendable. “It happens all the time. And since the ship won’t be there for them to discover, I’m betting that nobody will suggest that what they saw was a ship moving backward in time that flipped directions and then threw itself backward like a child diving into a swimming pool.”

“Because that would be insane,” agreed Noxon.

“Maybe this is a better plan than the original one,” said Ram Odin. “The distance from the surface of Earth to L5 is actually farther than from the surface of Earth to the near surface of the Moon. It’s safer to move an object the size of this ship when we’re not all that close to Earth and its corrosive atmosphere.”

“I never really understood how far things were in space,” said Noxon. “I knew I could sense paths that were much farther away than I could actually see. But distances on a planet’s surface are trivial compared to distances in space.”

“Words like ‘near’ and ‘far’ take on completely different meanings out here,” said Ram Odin. “Just the fact that I say ‘out here’ instead of ‘up here’ shows something. On a mountain, you’re up high. But in space, you’re far away, you’re outside.”

“So I was naive to think I could find a two-hundred-year-old path from space,” said Noxon. “But what if I hadn’t spent all those months working with Param to figure out how to back-slice? I’d be helpless now. Umbo might have done it, because he doesn’t need paths, but until Param and I trained each other, I couldn’t have done it.”

“Then it’s a good thing you took the time to learn,” said Ram Odin.

“Just do it,” said a mouse. “Slice us on into the past, please, so we can get moving in the right direction.”

Even the mice were impatient with him. Noxon wanted to yell at them all, mice and human and expendable: Don’t you see that I have no idea what I’m doing? I’m going to kill us all, or strand us in some impossible place and time, or even if I get us on the right timestream I’ll still fail at finding a way to save Garden. So what is your hurry?

Instead he closed his eyes. “Shut up, everybody, please.”

He had only sliced a moment or two when he realized that closing his eyes wasn’t going to help, considering that he had to see the expendable’s signal when he had reached a point before the ship was built.

The expendable’s arm was already up.

“You started time slicing with your eyes closed,” said the expendable, “and I was beginning to wonder if you left them that way.”

“Only for a moment,” said Noxon, “but that was too long. Sorry.”

“The ship’s computers have concluded that we are no longer bonded with the outbound ship,” said the expendable. “As far as we can tell, it doesn’t exist. The question is, did you bring us to a time before anyone was up here at L5 preparing to build it?”

“The only way to answer that,” said Noxon, “is to see if I can find the nub of somebody’s path.”

At first glance, Noxon thought he had gone too far—there was nobody up here in space. But maybe he had gotten them into that twenty-five-year gap in which Moon debris was wrecking everything everywhere. Maybe there was something big and rocky headed for them right now.

Then he found a few nubs. Not terribly close. But if he attached… if the ship came with him…

He gripped Ram Odin a little tighter. With the other hand he pressed against the instrument panel, as if this would help ensure that the ship came with him. “Hang on, mice,” he said. Then he attached to the nearest path.

He felt it, a great wrenching feeling. This was not the simple matter it had been when he first switched to this backward direction. It was as if he were walking through chest-high water. And why shouldn’t it feel that way? He had to drag the whole ship with him, change its moment, lever it back to its right place—all without a fulcrum, without any place to stand.

When he opened his eyes, the ship was still there. So were Ram and the expendable and he could feel the mice’s feet against his skin. They were not stranded in space. They had air.

Of course, they had had all those things before he tried to jump.

“Did anything happen?” he asked.

The expendable took just a moment before he replied—no doubt waiting for a full report from the ship’s computers. “We have joined the normal universe. I believe there was something in your plan about not lingering here for more than a second?”

“Yes! Yes, I just… I had to know…” And then, feeling foolish in spite of his having succeeded at the most important task, Noxon began to slice time backward, and this time—finally—“backward” was taking him into the past, the real past, the one full of humans and hope.