“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.”