Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“Honest of you,” said the riverman. “Though it was obvious to the rest of us days ago.”

Umbo gave him a quick grin—it did feel good to have their acceptance, though it was Loaf, not Umbo, who had earned it. But when he met Loaf’s eyes across the coals of the cookfire still red in the metal firepan, he gave him a wink, and Loaf nodded. Progress.

That afternoon, Umbo worked to isolate what caused him to go into the trance himself. It was not sleepiness—that had ended, not triggered, the phenomenon. Nor was it concentration, really—he had not been thinking about the rhythm of “pole, stick, pole, stick” as the two teams alternated their surges. Rather it was a different thing, different from the way it felt when he did it to others, but still, in a strange way, the same. Just like learning to use a new muscle, and the more he practiced, the more easily he found himself in that inward place where time slowed down, or he speeded up.

It was as if, instead of doing something to himself, he simply found the place inside himself where time was already moving along at a different clip. And as he got more practiced at it, he realized that he had much more versatility and control over his own trance than over the timeflow of other people, when he worked the trick on them. He could go much faster than he could make them go; he could vary the tempo across quite a broad range of speeds. And it didn’t weary him to do it to himself; he was rather invigorated by it, instead of its wearing him out.

“All well and good,” murmured Loaf. “But can you do it with your eyes open?”

Umbo woke up

. Or not really—he hadn’t been asleep this time—but coming out of the trance of time always felt like awakening, though it also felt like leaving home and coming out into a harsher world.

“How did you know I was doing it?” Umbo whispered.

“Because when I sit by you,” murmured Loaf, “or walk near you, I can feel it happening to me. A quickening of my step. And it’s stronger than when you were practicing on us all, back at the beginning. It grows as I come nearer to you, and fades as I walk away.”

“Do you think the others feel it?” asked Umbo.

“If they do, they don’t know why. It feels, to a man my age, as if I were younger, fresher, less tired. As if I thought more sharply, saw more clearly, heard things from farther away and could tell them apart more easily. In other words, it just feels good. Who would try to blame feeling good on a boy who seems to be asleep on the deck?”

“I really do need to open my eyes,” said Umbo. “I don’t know why I haven’t already. I don’t think I have to keep my eyes closed to make it happen to myself, not anymore. I just don’t know if there’ll be anything to see. It was Rigg that saw people moving through time, without any help from me.”

“But it’s you that knows how to move a man backward in time, whether he can see anything there or not.”

“I need Rigg. I really do. Maybe I don’t send the message until he gets out of his captivity.”

“If that’s how it worked, then it would have been Rigg delivering the messages instead of you, wouldn’t it?” Loaf got to his feet again. “My rest time is over. I’m on the stick team today. Stick, pole, stick, pole—no wonder these rivermen need so many pints of strong ale when they stop at Leaky’s Landing!”

In the remaining two days of the upriver voyage, Umbo grew so practiced at slipping into quicktime that he began having to work at not moving about in that mode. He felt sluggish when he did not have that alertness about him, and he wondered if this ability to speed himself up in relation to the world might not be rather like ale to these rivermen—a way of making the world brighter and pleasanter. Because it felt good to be so aware of everything, and to have time to think of what he wanted to say before he said it. It made him seem cleverer—to others and to himself—to have the time to think of an answer before speaking, or not to speak at all when his first impulse was to say or ask something stupid.

But in all the time he spent in quicktime, he never saw so much as a glimpse of the “paths” Rigg talked about seeing all the time, still less any person from another era. It seemed hopeless to him, for Rigg, when Umbo put him into quicktime, had to pick out a particular path and then look at it closely in order for the individual person to emerge clearly enough for Rigg to pick his pocket. But Umbo, seeing no paths, could not pick out a target for his attention, and therefore could not possibly make them become solid and real.

I can’t do it. And yet I did it.

Not until they arrived at Leaky’s Landing was there another opportunity to talk, for this part of the river Loaf knew well, having plied it up and down to buy groceries and linens, tools and hardware, furniture and liquid refreshments for the inn. So as they passed each landmark, Loaf would offer his opinion of the place—“You never buy your sheets from the weavers in that town, they make them all too small to tuck in tight on a goodsized bed. It must be a town of dwarfs, eh?”—and then the rivermen would offer their opinions of the place—“There’s a girl there so ugly they don’t castrate their hogs anymore, they just bring them to look at her and their equipment freezes up and drops off.”

Umbo was quite aware that what Loaf said was always literally true, and what the rivermen said was almost never true at all—and yet no one was lying and all were entertained by each other. Umbo could well see why rivermen might prefer to live in an exaggerated or downright imaginary world, what with all the poling, and the sameness of the river going up or coming down. While Loaf, the soldier, the hardheaded man of trade, the toiler in all trades, he needed to keep a clear-eyed view of the world.

When they got home they bade good-bye to the rivermen, who did not stop the night, “Because why should we give you back, for food and ale, the very passage money you just gave to us?” said the captain of the boat.

Leaky barely seemed interested in them—neither Umbo nor her own husband. She was busy, she said, and didn’t have time for greetings, what with doing everything single-handed while they were off playing the tourist in far countries. Loaf’s answer was not to rail at her, as Umbo’s father would have done, but rather to pitch in beside her and help her make short work of her tasks. And as they labored side by side, she began to smile now and then—not looking at him yet, but just smiling—and then she hummed, and then sang, and finally began to tell him stories of things that had happened while he was gone.

Umbo, meanwhile, tried to make himself useful, too, though he did not know how to do many of the tasks they did, and had to learn by watching. That, however, he did very well, for he could quicken himself so he had plenty of time to watch and understand exactly what they were doing, and then observe his own actions and correct them. He didn’t move any faster than he normally did—that is, exactly in proportion to the time of the people or creatures or things he was interacting with. But while acting, he had time to think again and stop himself or change his action. It was a wonderful luxury, that ability to rethink and still have time to change his course.

So now he understood, at last, how his quickening gift was useful to the people he had used it on, though he hadn’t really understood how. They really are better able to carry out their plan of action, when I put a quickening on them. Wandering Man called it “slowing” because it made things around a person seem to proceed at a leisurely pace. He had gotten it all wrong, as if Wandering Man thought it was time itself that Umbo affected, rather than the person’s perceptions and thought processes within time.

It was actually a bit of a relief to realize that Wandering Man didn’t know everything about everything; he wondered if the man himself had ever realized it before he died. Or maybe he died because he was so sure he knew everything that it didn’t occur to him that he might be wrong about the direction in which a hewn tree would fall.

Supper was the best food Umbo had eaten on the river, and he said so. “That’s because you’re eating like family now, not the swill we slop the pigs with,” said Loaf, at which Leaky smacked him across the top of his head, saying, “We eat from the same pot as the guests and that’s a fact, which you well know, Loaf, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.”

“No, my love, you won’t have me saying otherwise in your presence,” which earned him another smack, and a harder one.

The room they put Umbo in was not one of the guest rooms. It was a smallish bedroom right next to their own, and Umbo realized that this was the room where, if they ever had a child, that child would sleep. How old is Leaky, Umbo wondered as he readied himself for bed. Might she have children? Or is one of them unable? When they built this place it was clear they meant to have children. Sad if they couldn’t have what they wanted, when a lout like Umbo’s father popped babies into women every time he had a go at them, and heaven knows why any woman ever let him.

Umbo had just fallen asleep when he was wakened by Loaf shaking him gently.

“What?” murmured Umbo.