“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.