Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“Whereas you’re ‘Ram Odin.’” The pilot’s tone made it clear that he didn’t believe that was Umbo’s name, and probably never had.

&n

bsp; “On the river, sir, a man is what he does, don’t you think?”

The pilot only grinned at him and kept working on warming up the boy’s arms and legs.

Next morning, Umbo left a good deal of money with the taverner with instructions to send someone upriver to tell the folk in Fall Ford that they should come fetch one of their children. Umbo knew it would insult the pilot to offer payment to him, and that the man would look in on Kyokay as if he were his own nephew, if not son.

When Umbo got to his little boat, he saw that it had been provisioned for a downriver voyage. A long one. And someone had untied the rope that had once connected the boat to the ring. So it was no longer obvious that it was a stolen ferryboat.

The man didn’t know whether my business was fair or foul, but he abetted me in trust that it wouldn’t bring him harm.

I already repaid him by not undoing the course of events that brought me and Rigg together, and Param, and Loaf and Olivenko. Now it’s their job to go ahead and save the world. I saved my brother’s life, and that’s all I can do, and more than I should have attempted, but now it’s done.

CHAPTER 7

Paths and Slices

Noxon wasn’t despairing yet, exactly. He and Param had accomplished quite a lot. The easiest part was for Noxon to master the stuttering forward jumps that Param did when she sliced time, so that he could race through hours and days in just a few minutes.

But he was not a whit closer to being able to do it backward. Not simply going into the past—he could already make backward leaps just by attaching to some path and joining that person or animal in its time. What he couldn’t do was get time flowing the other direction and then slice through it in that direction. He wasn’t even sure it was possible.

And Param, for her part, was now better at what she already did—she learned a bit from the way Noxon’s facemask helped him slice time in greater and greater swaths. Her gift really was the most remarkable, because alone of the timeshapers she had always been able to make jumps forward rather than back.

The drawback was that her forward jumps were only a fraction of a second at a time; but she did a lot of them in rapid succession, and could keep it up for hours. When she did, though, she remained trapped in the place where she was when she began the process—not visible to others, but if they knew where she was when she disappeared, they could make a good guess where she was now. Her physical movements through space were greatly slowed while she was slicing time, and if someone brought something dense, like a metal bar, and passed it into her body and held it there, she would burn up slowly from the heat of it. And if she came out of her time-slicing with the metal in her, it would tear her apart.

But as Noxon’s facemask helped him learn to make longer jumps between slices, and Param learned to do it along with him, it meant that even with a metal bar held in the midst of her body, she spent far less time with it, and surely the would-be murderer was bound to conclude that nothing was happening because she wasn’t where he thought she would be.

If they accomplished nothing else, that was a good thing. It made her safer. It also meant that when they had need of her ability to race forward through time, she could do it more quickly and efficiently.

But it wasn’t enough. Noxon had half-expected to fail at his task, learning to reverse the flow of time for himself. But he had not expected to fail at helping Param learn how to slice into the past. She wouldn’t be reversing the flow of time—in the moments she spent in realtime, she and her body and clothing and whatever else she held with her would still be progressing in the normal direction of timeflow.

She followed him so easily when Noxon sliced forward with facemask efficiency. But when he jumped backward while holding her hand, she had no idea how he had done it. And when he jumped backward in time without holding her, he simply left her behind.

“It’s all right,” she consoled him. Time after time she said it, and Noxon believed she meant it. She, too, had not expected to succeed.

They began to spend more of their time just talking, either about their lives in such different upbringings, or about things they had learned in their studies. They had no one else to talk to, most of the time, because even though they had to depend on the Larfolders for their food, they never knew what time—what year, what month, what day—they would be in when their bodies told them it was time to eat.

Fortunately, they could always slice forward until they saw somebody preparing a meal, and it was a part of Larfolder culture that they always welcomed the unexpected mealtime guest.

One day, after such a meal, which had, in Larfolder fashion, turned into a storytelling session, with lots of singing and chanting of old songs and legends and stories, Noxon could see that Param was tired. “We’ve had a long day,” he said to the Larfolders.

The Larfolders laughed, and one of them said, “How would you know?”

That was a good question. And yet it was one that didn’t really matter. They ate when they were hungry and slept when they were tired—those were their times and days and nights, since no calendar or clock could contain them.

Noxon walked away with his sister. She held his arm and leaned on him. “I’m going to sleep as we walk,” she said. “And when I wake up tomorrow, I’m going to make you take me back eight hours or ten so I can sleep that time again.”

Noxon chuckled. “The Larfolders seem to make the most of their time on land. They have no voices underwater, and no ­spoken language. They come here to remember being human.”

“Oh, I love being with them,” said Param. She shuddered. “Their singing drowns out the noise, as much as is possible.”

“The noise?”

She shook her head. “I’m so tired I was almost talking to myself.”

“But I want to know. The Larfolders aren’t all that noisy. It’s not as if they have drums or horns.”