Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

His eyes were open. He saw the entire room at once. He wondered how long he had been trapped in the struggle for control and without even trying to calculate, he knew: seventy hours and thirty-two minutes. In that time he had drunk water that Vadesh had brought, but it had been the facemask that made his body drink. Now he looked at Vadesh, who stood nearby, and said, “I’ll have more water now.”

“I’d suggest cleaning yourself as well,” said Vadesh.

“All in due time,” said Rigg.

“Welcome back.”

“Thank you.”

But already Rigg was testing something else: He was finding out what the facemask had done with the paths.

Immediately his mind was flooded with information. He almost lost himself in it, for the onslaught was as great as anything the facemask had thrown at him before.

He saw every nearby path, but not as a path. He saw each path as a person. He knew their faces, he knew where they had come from. Without conscious effort, he knew the whole path of each life, from beginning to end.

There is no way my mind can hold so much information about each of these people. Yet when he looked for it, there it was.

There was Ram Odin, again and again, path after path. Going into stasis, coming out. Into stasis, out again. Sitting in the control room making decisions, giving orders. As he was doing now.

And there was Ram Odin, eleven thousand, two hundred two years ago—how clear the time was now, without thought or calculation or uncertainty.

And Rigg knew another number: His age. With all his skipping around in time, he should have been confused, for he had repeated several stretches of time because of going back, to live them over again. This was the year in which Rigg had turned fourteen, but he had lived through nearly a year in Odinfold before going back again, so he was sixteen now, regardless of what the calendar year might be.

But there were other tests he needed to perform. For instance, while Rigg could connect to any path in the past and go to it, he could not rebound into the future without Umbo anchoring him there.

Did he still have that limitation?

It was simple enough to test it. He slid a half-meter to the right, and then jumped a minute back in time.

Then he shifted forward. It was a sensation he had felt many times, when Umbo pulled him back, but now he could make it happen as an act of will.

When he went back in time, he could see himself sitting beside him; when he jumped forward again, that self was gone, because he returned to the exact moment when he had jumped back in time. He could go back, then rebound himself.

Another test yet to perform. Could he move forward the way Param did, slicing time and skipping over bits of it? He had felt that sensation, too, when he held her hand and she sliced her way into the future at a speed much faster than the natural world.

Now, because he had the facemask’s enhancements to his brain, his body, he could slice his way forward. Slowly at first, the time differential very slight. But then more rapidly.

Vadesh came into the room, holding a carafe of water. He did not see Rigg.

Rigg waited until Vadesh went outside to see where he had gone, before he stopped slicing time. He did not want Vadesh to know that he could duplicate Param’s ability. Let him think that Rigg had shifted backward and then returned, and that’s why he was gone. Let Vadesh think that Rigg had only an enhanced version of abilities that he had possessed already.

Rigg went to the door and found Vadesh walking in the corridor. “There you are,” Rigg said. “I’m so thirsty.”

Vadesh hurried with the carafe. He said nothing about Rigg’s absence. And if Rigg had really been gone into the past, and then returned, he wouldn’t know that Vadesh had come into the room in his absence. So he simply drank the offered water.

There was one more ability to look for, and this was one that he had never directly experienced: The ability of the Odinfolder mice to move an object in both space and time. He had no idea how it would feel to do it. He had never even seen it done, though he had seen its effects—the metal cylinder in Param’s exploded throat; the knife that he took from the sheath at the waist of a passerby.

Rigg did not make the conscious decision to use Vadesh as the object he would attempt to transport. He simply felt the will to move something and Vadesh was near at hand, Vadesh was the thing that Rigg was looking at, and so Vadesh moved. Only a finger’s width, but he moved without passing through the intervening space. One moment he was a meter and fourteen centimeters away, and in the very same moment he shifted to a meter and fifteen centimeters away, plus a quarter of a centimeter to the right.

It had been so smooth that Vadesh didn’t even change his stride, and if he noticed the difference in his location he gave no sign of it.

He must have thought through what giving a facemask to me might mean, and so he’s looking for signs of what I can do now, and how I’ve changed.

“Well, Vadesh,” said Rigg, “don’t you think it’s time I met Ram Odin?”

Vadesh turned to him. “Of course,” he said. “I assume you already know the way?”

“I’ve seen him walk the route a hundred times,” said Rigg.