As he pulled the boat onto a firm landing place, it occurred to him that if he couldn’t take the boat, what about clothing? The jeweled knife?
No, no, these were foolish fears. Param jumped into the future all the time. A microsecond at a time, but she skipped forward with clothes and whatever she was carrying on her. I’ll have everything with me when I get there. If I get there. Won’t I?
He stood on the bank, then decided that he’d better do this sitting down. And not just sitting, but sitting inside the boat, holding on to the knife with one hand and the rim of the boat with the other. Just to make it clear to whatever force in the universe controlled time-shifting that this was his stuff and he wanted it with him.
Then he slowed down time—sped up his perceptions—and found the marker he was looking for. He sharpened his awareness even more, and then chose a time a little bit this side of the time when he left Loaf and Leaky to come on this errand.
And then he jumped.
He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened.
Well, that was disappointing.
He sighed and rose to get out of the boat.
The boat shifted and slid awkwardly under him. He nearly fell.
The solid ground at the riverbank was muddy now. It hadn’t been muddy when he landed. He looked at the sky. It was sunny, but he could see the clouds that must have just finished dumping rain here not an hour ago.
It had rained two days before they got to Leaky’s Landing.
Of course everything looked unchanged. He was sitting on the riverbank looking at the river. What, exactly, had he thought would be different?
But his timesense didn’t lie. When he checked to see when this moment was, he could sense the marker looming only a couple of days from now.
Since he didn’t know how far upriver he was from Leaky’s Landing, if he was going to arrive when he said, he would have to hurry.
Then he laughed at himself. If he arrived late, he could easily jump back to the right time.
I jumped into the future. Not slicing, jumping. To the time I chose. Nobody else can do that. With no external paths, only the map of time I unconsciously formed while doing all this jumping, I was able to jump into a future I had already lived through.
As he got the boat back out into the middle of the stream, he checked his markers again. The end of the world was the farthest in that direction. And in the past, the farthest he had gone—well, the farthest he had pushed anybody—was to almost the exact time when Ram Odin’s nineteen ships crashed into Garden, destroying native life almost as thoroughly as the Destroyers would. Rigg had chosen the moment by attaching to the path of the last animal to pass through the space where the Wall would be. Rigg had chosen the animal thinking that it would be the last moment before the Wall was created, but no. After the crash of the nineteen ships, there were no large animals to leave paths through the wall. So Rigg had inadvertently taken them almost to the exact moment of the previous destruction of life on Garden.
We were the Destroyers that time. Not us exactly, not Rigg and me and the others, but we humans. Ram Odin. The expendables. Garden has had bad luck with living through the arrival of ships from Earth.
Still, this meant that Umbo’s map of time extended from the last moment before humans came until nearly the last moments that humans survived. Almost all his time-shifting had been within the past dozen years, but they had gone back to a time only a few centuries after the establishment of the colonies, when they all went to witness, in Vadeshfold, the battle between the people with facemasks and the people without them. That is, they had all gone except Umbo, because he had had to stay behind as their anchor, so they could return to the time they had left.
Now, though, I don’t need an anchor. Now I could go with them on such an expedition, and bring us all back. Because the whole history of Garden, up to the end, is the past in my mind.
He reached Leaky’s Landing with a few hours to spare. He didn’t want to walk into the roadhouse before he left to go save Kyokay, lest he should cause a copy of himself to pop into existence or, worse, deflect his earlier self enough to make it so he did not figure out the plan that worked to save the reckless boy.
He was looking for an out-of-the-way place to wait, one where he wouldn’t be noticed by his earlier self while he was waiting for an upriver boat. Then he realized: I don’t have to wait. I can jump to the right time. Just because it’s only a few hours doesn’t make it any less possible.
Umbo chose an out-of-the-way place to make the jump in privacy. Not for the first time he wished for Rigg’s path-sense, because Rigg would have known just how heavily trafficked any spot might be. Then again, Rigg couldn’t help him in this case because the paths that would be most pertinent had not yet been laid down in this place. Rigg could not see into the future.
Umbo tried to keep from thinking, Rigg can’t do what I can do. But the effort not to think it was nothing more than another way to think it, while feeling even more guilty and frustrated.
He made the jump forward to the exact time he wanted. To Loaf and Leaky, he would have been gone only an hour.
He walked to the roadhouse door, opened, came inside. “Well, I’m back,” he announced.
Loaf and Leaky looked up from behind the bar, where Loaf was putting away glasses and mugs on the highest shelf.
“Took you long enough,” said Loaf.
“Sorry,” said Umbo.
“Well, did you save him?” asked Loaf.
“Mostly,” said Umbo. “Pulled him out of the water before he drowned. His arms were—no, his legs were broken.”
“You can’t remember the difference?” asked Loaf. “Remind me not to let you tend to my injuries.”
“That’s my job,” said Leaky.
“The first time, he broke his arms. The second time, it happened a little differently. He landed legs-first, so those are what broke.”
“So you didn’t interfere with events until after everybody thought he had died in the water.”
“The first time I was so stupid I carried him home before Rigg and I had even left town, and that wrecked everything. So I had to do it over.”
“Well, now that that’s done,” said Leaky, “Let’s set out for the Wall.”
“Give the boy a chance to rest,” said Loaf.
“He’s only been gone an hour,” said Leaky impatiently. Then she gave a sheepish grin. “I haven’t had as long as you two to get used to how things work now. He’s been gone for weeks, hasn’t he?”
She said it to Loaf, but spoke it while looking Umbo up and down. “Not a very cleanly expedition, it would seem,” she said.
“I haven’t done much clotheswashing.”
“You never do.”
“I keep thinking I’ll just jump back to a time when they were clean.”
Loaf glowered. “That really doesn’t make sense.”
“It was a time-shifting joke,” said Umbo. “I don’t have many people I can tell those to.”
“Lucky them,” murmured Loaf. “We’ll leave for the Wall in the morning.”
“One tiny problem,” said Umbo. “We can’t go through the Wall now.”
“Rigg set it up so any two of our group can go through,” said Loaf. “That’s how we got back here to Ramfold.”
Umbo shook his head. “Rigg hasn’t set it up that way yet. And Vadeshex hasn’t even met us. We don’t want to arrive with you wearing that facemask. Who knows how differently he’d act if he already knew he would succeed.”
“So we do have to wait,” said Loaf.