“I’ll miss you,” she said, gripping his arm.
“Rigg will soon be back from his wandering.”
“You have begun as the same person,” said Param. “But you’re the one who was so patient. You’re the one who realized my sounds and your paths might be the same thing.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” said Noxon. “And not just because you taught me how to slice time effectively.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“You know you’ll have to go through the same thing with Rigg when he gets back. He won’t be happy till he can slice time this quickly. Umbo too, probably.”
“It would never do to give one of you an advantage over the others,” said Param. “It’s so hard to persuade would-be alpha males to get along.”
CHAPTER 9
Getting It Right
So there was Umbo, floating down the river, in no hurry now, so he only used his oar to keep the boat straight in the water. And, to tell the truth, he dragged the oar in the water to slow himself down. Because what was he going to do when he got to Leaky’s Landing? At this moment, young Umbo was with Rigg, making their way overland beside the river. They wouldn’t reach Leaky’s Landing for several weeks.
Then there would be the time spent getting to O, their arrest, and Umbo’s journey back to Leaky’s Landing with Loaf after they got off the boat where they were prisoners. After that, the time Umbo spent struggling to learn to send messages without Rigg’s help.
Finally Umbo and Loaf had set out to liberate Rigg. That was the great divide. After that, Umbo had appeared to Leaky again, then brought Loaf to her with his facemask. That’s the time he had to return to—and it was a long time from now. Umbo could feel how much empty time lay ahead of him. Time that he would have to live through, doing . . . something. Doing nothing that mattered.
If Param had been with him, she could have sliced them forward to the right time. But she was off with Noxon, learning how to time-shift without leaving herself vulnerable to assassins with iron bars. That was more important than the fact that Umbo was now stuck having to live through almost half a year.
No, not “almost half a year.” He had a much clearer idea than that.
Umbo couldn’t have said the exact number of days, because time wasn’t actually divided like that. It wasn’t divided at all, except into the huge number of separate causes and effects that determined the direction, if not the speed, of the flow of time. But without being able to name it, he knew the amount of time that lay ahead of him. He knew the “place” of those events in the forward sweep of time.
He had visited that narrow period of time often enough—his and Loaf’s departure from Leaky’s Landing, then his messages to Leaky and his return with Loaf—that it was now a firm anchor in his sense of the flow of time.
He couldn’t have charted it on paper—this many days, on this particular date. He didn’t keep a calendar in his head, and besides, whatever this time-shifting talent was, it couldn’t depend on literacy or calendars because presumably it would simply work, like sight and hearing. Yet he knew, the way you know where your hands are when your eyes are closed, just when in the future that day would come.
Was that real? Could he use that, the way Rigg used his paths, to journey to that time?
He thought back to the weeks in the roadhouse when he was struggling to find a way to send messages to the past without having Rigg to help him. When he finally began to have success, that was just the beginning. Then the trick was to get a sense of how far to reach back in order to send a message to arrive at the right place and time. Gradually, through trial and error, he had learned to have pretty good precision in throwing his image into the past and keeping it there.
At the time, he had thought he was going into the past, but now he understood the difference, and could do both. When he needed to push himself back to a few weeks before he and Rigg had left Fall Ford, it was easy to shift back within a day or two of the time he wanted. He didn’t have to be more precise than that.
And even though he had fretted about whether he might be asleep or doing something else when the exact moment of Kyokay’s death approached, on the day he simply knew it was the day, and at the time, he looked up to see Kyokay running toward the stairs—but why? There by the waterfall he could hear nothing. Why had he looked at that exact moment?
Because he knew. When he was in the future, he knew how to come back to a time before that event, and then when he reached that moment again, coming from the other direction, he knew it before his eyes could confirm it.
I have a map of time in my mind, just the way a blind man might learn to keep a map of his house in memory.
And he relied on that map all the time to travel into the past. It wasn’t precise to the second, but after so much experience, when he needed it to be, it was precise to the hour, or the half hour, or the ten minutes. He didn’t think of it that way—he just concentrated and got more careful when the exact time mattered.
No, he didn’t just concentrate. He sped up his perceptions—or slowed down time, as he had always thought of his talent as a child. The more precise he needed to be, the more sharply he made himself perceive the world, and the slower time seemed to flow for him. The map of time got sharper and clearer, the faster his perceptions were working.
He closed his eyes for a few moments at a time, trusting the dragging oar to keep them in the middle of the river, pointed downstream, and slowed time in order to examine his map. It wasn’t visual. It really was like the way you can feel your limbs without looking, or your tongue inside your mouth.
He couldn’t see the past—he wasn’t Rigg—but he could remember it. Not every second of it, but the key moments. Mostly times when he had sent messages or time-shifted, but also a few other events. The death of Kyokay. Jumping off the rock with Param. The moment when he accepted Param’s proposal of marriage.
He couldn’t see the future—nobody could. How could he have markers in times he had never lived through? But the next few years, though they lay ahead of him at this moment, had once been part of his past. No, they had often been part of his past.
Those few years that he had already lived through more than once were part of his map. If he were ahead of them in the stream of time, he’d have no hesitation in time-shifting back to them. Couldn’t he use that same timesense to shift to other remembered points in time, even though at this particular moment they now lay in his future?
He had always thought of shifting into the future as a leap off a cliff. Not knowing what the future felt like, what was happening there, to jump into it would be insane. What if he jumped ten years into the future? By then the Destroyers would have come, and the future he entered would be an uninhabitable wasteland. And if by ill luck he should jump into the exact moment in the future when they were burning Garden to a cinder, he would probably die before he could realize that he’d better jump out of there.