“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 doesn’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.”