“Much worse, because you had such a mouth on you, and if you ever were getting the worst in an argument, you’d act extra blind. What a cheater.”
“How does a person act ‘extra blind’?” asked Deborah.
“Deliberately reaching out toward me but in a direction where you knew perfectly well I was not standing,” said Wheaton. “Deliberately tripping a little when you walked. Bumping into the furniture—but I noticed you always chose upholstered or lightweight items.”
“The real question,” said Noxon, “is whether ‘extra blind’ kept working for very long.”
“It worked every time,” said Wheaton. “Every single time.”
“That’s a lie,” said Deborah. “I never got my way.”
“But I felt horribly guilty about it,” said Wheaton.
“I didn’t want you to feel guilty, I wanted you to give in.”
“That wasn’t one of the options,” said Wheaton. “If I ever let you win you would have become a monster.”
“Instead, I thought I was being raised by one,” said Deborah.
Noxon could see that they meant what they were saying, to a point. But under it all was the clear message that they loved each other, that they had loved each other even then.
The conversation ended abruptly when they began to hear shouts from far out on the savannah.
“Shouldn’t we hide now?” asked Deborah.
“Shhh,” hissed Noxon. “Let me hear their shouting.” He noticed that Wheaton was holding up a camera—vid with sound, Noxon assumed. So he could study their utterances later.
Not language, or at least not a language Noxon could understand. The cries were so short.
But then, as he watched, he could see how the men responded to the shouts—the wing men beginning to close in from the sides, the chasers sprinting. And then some of the cries began to have meanings. The leader—one of the chasers, the one with a bit of grey in his hair—was saying a word that meant “gully” and others that meant “run” and “catch.” Nothing like sentences, no syntax. Just commands, all of them. Even “gully” was a command.
“They know this land,” said Noxon softly. “They all know that there’s a gully up here, and they know they’ll catch the !a! there.”
“Catch the what?” asked Ram.
“Click tones,” said Wheaton. “It’s a language, and it uses clicks.”
“It’s words,” corrected Noxon. “No syntax. All commands. Time for us to hide. They’re moving pretty fast.”
He had been thinking about what he was hearing and seeing and it was already too late to keep from being seen. The nearest wing man had spotted them and had veered toward them. Now he would see them disappear. Noxon wondered what he would think he saw—a shape like what he would think of as “people,” but mostly hairless, and wearing fabrics. And Deborah’s artificial eyes. Now you see us, now you don’t.
Except that the wing man kept heading right toward them, looking at them instead of looking back at the prey animal. Was he merely remembering where they had been?
No. Deborah was fumbling with her sound recorder. She was not holding Ram’s hand. She was not slicing with them. She was completely visible to the wing man.
And while Noxon was focused on Deborah, the wing man brought up an arm. Noxon finally saw it because the facemask saw it and forced his attention from Deborah to what the Erectid hunter was doing. He had a fist-sized stone in his hand and he was bringing back his arm and before Noxon could come out of sliced time to shout at Deborah the stone was already in the air, moving faster than any bird—though not so quickly that the facemask could not bring every moment of its flight to Noxon’s attention.
The trajectory was inevitable. It struck Deborah on the side of the head—she wasn’t looking at the wing man who threw at her—and dropped her instantly.
Noxon immediately stopped slicing time—he couldn’t stay invisible and bring her along with him. She would have to move to disappear that way. So now all three of the Sapient men were revealed to the wing man.
He didn’t even register surprise. He was already drawing another stone out of the bag tightly bound around his waist. Survival instinct—strange animals that looked like people, but not from his tribe. There was a constant state of war among Erectid tribes; if they ever had truces, Noxon had seen no evidence of it in their paths.
“Both of you hold on to me and Deborah,” said Noxon.
The wing man’s arm was going back for another throw.
Noxon jumped them all back to the future.
Wheaton was kneeling beside his daughter, checking her vital signs. He began to press on her chest, then breathe into her mouth.
“It’s no good,” said Noxon. “She’s dead.”
“People come back from heart stoppages,” said Wheaton as he pushed on her chest again.
“She’s dead,” said Noxon. “No path.”
After a half-minute this finally registered on Wheaton. He stopped trying to revive her. He just knelt there gasping.
“Calm down,” said Ram. “Remember what Noxon is. What he can do. She isn’t permanently dead. He can go back in time and prevent this.”
That was true, of course, and Noxon was already thinking about when he should intervene in the past in order to prevent it.
“Think of something,” said Wheaton. “Because I can’t bear to stay here much longer, looking down at her dead body.”
Noxon concentrated on Deborah’s corpse and pushed this lifeless object back about two hundred years.
Wheaton looked up in dismay. “What did you do!”
“What you asked me to do,” said Noxon.
“I know,” said Wheaton. “But now I know that there’s something worse than seeing her dead!”
“Quiet, quiet,” said Ram. “There are other people out here. In hovercars, yes, but they have mikes picking up sounds on the savannah.”
“How can you think about being quiet when . . .” But then Wheaton nodded. “I know. To you, she’s not really dead because she’s not going to stay dead. So let’s do it. Let’s go back and—”
“We can’t just go back,” said Noxon. “I mean, we can. But if the three of us appear to the four of us in the hotel, before we leave, it’ll change the paths of the past versions of ourselves, but as the agents of change we’ll still exist.”
“So there’ll be two copies of all of us,” said Ram.
“Except Deborah,” said Wheaton. “Worth it.”
“Seven of us to live on your already small income,” said Noxon.
“It’s Deborah’s life!” said Wheaton.
“I’m not proposing that we leave her dead,” said Noxon. “I’m just trying to think of a way to change the past without going there. So we don’t get copied.”
“Slice time and write a note,” said Ram. “You said you and your sister used to communicate that way.”
“If I’m there when the change happens, then whether it’s a note or a conversation, I’m still the agent of change, still present at the moment of change. I promise you, that’s how copying happens.”
“Then sneak in during the night and leave yourself a note that you’ll find in the morning,” said Wheaton.
“All right, yes,” said Noxon. “That’s good. But what should the note say? ‘Don’t go on the hunt’? ‘Make Deborah hold hands every second or she’ll be killed’?”
Ram asked Wheaton quite earnestly, “Would it work, just to warn her that not holding hands will result in her death? I mean, I’m sure she’d promise to comply, but in the moment, with that guy running at us with a stone in his hand—would she even think of her vulnerability?”
“I don’t know,” said Wheaton. “She thinks about whatever she’s thinking about, and not the things she’s not thinking about. She’s human.”
“So we forbid her to go?” asked Ram.
“Not sure she’d obey that,” said Noxon. “And if it isn’t her, it might be one of us.”