Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“On the contrary,” said the expendable. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, because I’ve never sensed these paths. But when we’re talking about the logic of causality and time, my guess is no worse than yours. And even if I’m wrong, my wrong guess will be more precise than yours.”

Ram barked a laugh. “See what I put up with for all those years in space?”

“See what I put up with, day after day in the forest,” said Noxon.

“I don’t expect you to understand what I put up with,” said the expendable.

“We’re in a box,” said a mouse. “That’s something to put up with.”

“If he’s right about this,” said Ram, “and it’s not as if I know anything here, but if he’s right, then at least you’d know where to look for these not-quite-instantaneous instants of my outbound path. My life was pretty much limited to sitting in that chair. Or lying on that bed. Or exercising in there. I swivelled the chair a lot. Not like a little kid spinning around, but from station to station. To do different jobs. I don’t know what you need—motion or stillness. That chair is where I sat still most of the time. Or if you need me walking, I only followed certain paths, but I did them over and over.”

“Do you think I haven’t been looking for anything anomalous since I got on this ship?”

“No,” said the expendable. “I think you have not been looking for this because you didn’t know what to look for. Looking for ‘something anomalous’ is identical to just scanning around and hoping something slaps you in the face.”

And there was Father’s note of scorn.

“Yes, that’s right,” admitted Noxon.

“Have a plan,” said Father. The expendable.

“A plan to do something that nobody in the history of the universe has ever done.”

“You don’t know that,” said the expendable.

“If they did, I didn’t read the report,” said Noxon.

“What made paths turn into visible people to you? Slowing down,” said Ram. “And then attaching to them.”

“Attaching to them brought me into their timeflow,” said Noxon. “That’s the last thing I want to do, until we’re in a place where I can take the ship with us safely.”

“Right, no attaching,” said Ram. “But when you came here, when you first latched on to this timeflow, how did that feel?”

“I wasn’t in any timeflow. I wasn’t in time at all.”

“You were fully stopped,” said Ram.

“But I didn’t stop me,” said Noxon. “The fold was a place of no movement. I just hung there, unmoving, until I attached.”

“The ship’s computers got us to that place, somehow,” said the expendable. “But since we didn’t know that the fold would be a place without motion, time, or causality, we had no plan for emerging from the fold. We might have inadvertently created the twenty possible causal paths. But we think it was Ram Odin who did what you did—only instead of picking one, he attached to all of the causal potentialities and the whole ship took all of them at once.”

“I did no such thing,” said Ram.

“Nobody thinks you were conscious of it,” said the expendable. “What we do know is that the only successful time-shifting of living people and animals we’ve ever seen has been done by human timeshapers. You were the only conscious human, Ram Odin. We think you were choosing forward, and so the whole ship moved forward in all the available directions.”

Noxon was thinking aloud now. “I was in a place with no movement at all. Nineteen paths started along the regular line of time. One path went the other way. I took the strange one.”

“Strange in what way?” asked Ram Odin.

“It led into a potential future, but it tracked into the past.”

“So you do know what a backward path looks like,” said Ram.

“The others weren’t paths either. You’re right, what I saw then is what I’m looking for now. It’s like . . . the promise of a path. Like seeing underbrush get lighter and darker long before the person swinging the lantern comes along.”

“But the one going the wrong way was different. How?”

Noxon shook his head. He couldn’t remember.