Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“It makes you stronger! It repaired everything—even your scars are gone!”

“We don’t even know that your body is the reason we haven’t had a baby,” said Loaf. “Let’s go back and see what happens.”

“I do know!” she cried. “Because I had a baby once.”

Loaf did not move.

“Before we married,” she said. “When I was barely a woman. I was too young. The baby was breech and it died trying to be born. They cut it out of me. And I was so torn up inside the midwife said I’d never be able to bear.”

“You never told me,” murmured Loaf.

“You said you didn’t want children, that you couldn’t raise children, being liable to go on campaign at any moment. So it didn’t matter. But then you left the army and it did matter after all.”

“You could have told me.”

“I was ashamed!” She wept for a while.

Umbo wondered if he should leave. This was clearly a time for husband and wife. Yet by leaving he’d call attention to himself. Of course, he could simply skip forward in time and let them have their privacy. He had to admit to himself that he simply didn’t want to. He was fascinated, even though he felt sorry for her pain. Their pain.

He noticed that Loaf did not ask who the father had been, or whether Leaky had been married before.

“And now I’m ashamed again,” Leaky said more quietly. “Because I have so little self-control that I can’t master this thing that a child like Rigg was able to control.”

“Rigg’s not a child now,” said Loaf. “And even when he was a child, he was . . . unusual.”

This made Umbo realize that he should be feeling resentful of Rigg for being able to bear a facemask when it was certainly out of his own reach.

But no, Umbo might be envious of Rigg for many things, but not for the facemask. Not now. Yes, it made Loaf an astonishingly effective soldier. It gave Rigg and Noxon so much more control over their timeshaping. But the thing was so repulsive and deforming. Umbo had gotten used to seeing it on Loaf. Definitely not on Rigg and Noxon. And the thought of having that thing crawl over his own face, push into his ears and nose and mouth, breathing for him, probing every aperture, taking away his eyes: How did they bear it? The horror of such an invasion?

Loaf was a soldier. People had pushed foreign objects into his body from time to time. He had borne pain and horror, and yet kept fighting, kept control of himself. Umbo wasn’t exactly a big baby about such things, but he could not stop himself from leaping to conclusions—wrong ones—and acting on them in irrevocable ways. It had got Kyokay killed that day. It had kept Umbo saying things, doing things that showed his pathetic yearning for Param, his childish resentment of Rigg. He knew these things made him look foolish, and yet he had not been able to stop himself.

Rigg was able to plan and calculate. Umbo did everything he did in a rush, on impulse. Even learning to travel in time, to send himself messages—he had done it by brute force rather than by thinking it all through and understanding it. Oh, he tried to think, and maybe his thinking helped. Somehow. But mostly it was just taking his power to manipulate people’s timeflow and trying to use it in a new way. That’s why it had taken months to learn to use it on his own, without Rigg—he had no idea what he was doing, he just flung himself into it, trying different things until one worked.

I learn like a squirrel, thought Umbo. No analysis, no finesse—I just keep leaping until I finally land where I want to.

I will never have a facemask, and I’m perfectly happy. I’d rather be my second-rate self than go through what Loaf and Rigg went through—and then wear that trophy of a face the rest of my life.

But if he said to Leaky, You’re better off this way, Umbo had a feeling that her response would cost him a significant portion of his hearing, if not a limb. Because it was true. Leaky did not have self-control. That’s why it had taken him so many tries before he was able to prepare her properly to meet Loaf again, in his new condition. She could not stop herself from raging long enough to hear the whole message, not until he found exactly the right way to approach her.

Which, of course, he had learned by flinging himself into the past, finding out that one method of telling her about it failed, and then trying again. Rigg probably could have succeeded the first time.

Still, I did figure out how to jump into the future, in a limited way, and I did it without a facemask. Just because I’m not Rigg doesn’t mean I’m nothing.

“What you don’t know,” said Loaf gently, “is whether that midwife was right. It’s easy to say, You’ll never bear children, but what did she know? If she was a good midwife the baby might have been delivered alive.”

At the mention of the baby’s death, Leaky’s tears came afresh. “I can’t believe I told you,” she said. And then, “I can’t believe I went so long and never told you.”

“You’ve told me now,” said Loaf. “So hear me out. We might still have a baby, though it’s perilous, because it’ll look like me. But if you want to risk adding to the ugly in the world, then let’s see if the problem was me. But if the problem is an old injury of yours, then that’s the way it is.”

“But the facemask could have cured it.”

“It’s not a cure if it kills you,” said Loaf. “If you aren’t still my Leaky, then I don’t want you to have my babies. And as long as you are my Leaky, then I’m happy whether we have babies or not.”

She flung her arms around him and wept even more, and finally Umbo did the thing he should have done in the first place, and skipped into the future by a few hours.

They were lying on the ground. Leaky was nestled next to Loaf, his arm around her. She was asleep. Of course Loaf noticed Umbo’s return, but he raised a finger to signal silence. Umbo nodded, walked quietly away.

He took a long walk, and after a while the city came into view. The great empty city with its sad empty towers made of fieldsteel, which never weathered, never wore away. Would the fieldsteel outlast the great burning when all life on Garden was ended? Would they remain as the sol