Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

She thought of Mother ordering her soldiers to sweep the air with swords and metal rods, in the effort to pass metal through her body and kill her. It was not hard to imagine that the Odinfolders controlling this cylinder had something similar in mind.

Now she could see that each time the cylinder moved, the mice moved out of its way first. It damaged none of them. In fact, it might well be that the cylinder could not move until the mice had cleared enough space for it; that might be the reason for its staying in each place for minutes at a time, waiting for the mice, their noses and paws and tails, to get out of the way.

She thought of Olivenko and his discussion of rules of physics. Two objects unable to occupy the same space at the same time. That was the principle that made Param slightly sick when she moved through soft things, like people and organic walls and doors—wooden things. Since most of any object was the empty space between and within atoms, there were surprisingly few collisions when she jumped ahead in time. When Rigg and Umbo shifted back in time, they never ended up inside a tree or a rock. They could move into a volume of air without causing the annihilation of more than a few particles.

Was that what this cylinder was doing? They could move it in time and space, but they couldn’t move it into a location occupied by something as substantial as a mouse. The mice had to move first.

But that was the second most frightening thing: The mice were moving. Whoever was controlling the movement of the cylinder was also controlling the mice.

The most frightening thing was the way the mice continued to stare at her, seeing exactly where she was. They could see her; she was not invisible. Their eyes were pointing to her. Whoever was controlling the cylinder could therefore put it into the space occupied by her heart or her brain during one of the gaps between her time-slicing jumps, and when she reappeared in that spot a fraction of a second later, that organ of her body would be annihilated.

Nor could she easily stop her time-slicing and reenter the normal timeflow. For then her feet would occupy the same space as the mice underfoot. It would not kill her, but she would be crippled. In agony. Her feet would be unable to hold her. It might take weeks for her feet to heal. And the mice themselves would be quite dead.

Why should she care if mice died? Someone was using them to try to kill her!

And they would succeed. Any moment they wanted to, they could put the cylinder into her body space and, when she came back into momentary existence, it would be sliding downward through her body, drawn by gravity while she was not there, then suddenly stopped and cradled by the skin and bones of her body when she did reappear with the cylinder inside her.

I’m going to die, she thought, and her stomach went sick and her head felt light and she was filled with more terror than she had felt before, more than the fear she had felt when she and Umbo leapt from the high rock and slowly fell downward toward the metal being waved around by Mother’s men.

The difference was that then she had Umbo with her—Umbo, who could jump backward in time and take her with him.

Who would save her now? Even if Rigg or Umbo showed up, they couldn’t see her; Rigg could see her path, but even he could not reach into the slices of time and take hold of her.

Why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t they go back to an earlier time and give me one of Umbo’s trademarked visions of his future self, saying, Get out of this room! Or simply taking her by the hand and moving her to another time or place.

Maybe they can’t get back into the library. Maybe when they found out I was dead, the Odinfolders kept them from coming here, where they could intercept me and prevent this terrible moment and save my life.

But then, they could always go back to a time before we came to the library. Back when we first came to Odinfold, but before the Odinfolders knew that we were here. Why didn’t they?

She knew the answer. If they went back and warned the whole group that Param would be murdered here, nearly a year after they arrived, then they would turn aside and would not learn all the things that they had learned. They wouldn’t know about the Visitors and the Destroyers. Nor would they know about the high technology of the Odinfolders and the billions of people who lived in these vast ruins when they were still mighty cities.

They had to choose between what they had learned in Odinfold, and saving my life at the cost of never learning it. And they chose correctly. What was her death, compared to the need to know about the end of the world and save it?

I am like a soldier who dies in battle. Regrettable, but an unavoidable loss.

Unless . . .

They didn’t have to warn her. They could come back and simply take her. A warning would make them all turn away, change the past, annihilate the months they had just lived through. But if they came back to the moment of their first arrival, they could take her away and drag her into some other time, earlier or later. She would be prevented from learning anything she had learned, but they would keep the knowledge that they had, because they would still have lived through all these months and would keep their memories when they shifted in time.

But they didn’t do it.

No, no. They did

n’t do it in this timeflow, because they couldn’t possibly know to do it unless they found out that I was killed. It is my death that provokes them into going back to change time and save me. So I have to go through this whole process, I have to see my death coming and then, most terribly, die.

Only then can they travel back in time and interfere with the forward flow of it, snatching me out of time before I can be murdered in this way. That version of myself will never live through these terrible minutes. Because in that version of time, I didn’t die.

But in this one, I will die. I won’t remember it, in that other timeflow, but it has to happen in order for them to save me, so my death will still be real, because it will still have its residual effects, even though a version of myself, a copy, will move forward into the future without this death.

To that version of me, this death will seem unreal, temporary; it will seem to have been avoided.

But it will not be avoided. I will live through it. I will die, and I will stay dead, I will; this version of me will be extinguished and I don’t want to die.

The cylinder disappeared again, and almost immediately Param felt a searing agony in her throat, the heat of billions of molecules being torn apart, some of them becoming radioactive as atoms collided and tore each other apart and then reassembled. She lived just long enough to feel the heat pulse through her entire body, every nerve screaming with the pain of burning to death in a searing moment.

Param noticed the room was full of mice. They were scrambling up onto the table, swarming all over the floor. Annoyed and a little frightened, Param was proud of herself for not time-slicing by simple reflex. No, she would get up and leave the room.

But before she could even push back her chair, Rigg appeared in the air above the table, his feet a few inches above its surface. He dropped to the table, crushing mice under his feet. He reached out his hand to her.