“Yes. You know you need me, but I don’t know yet if I need you.”

“Whatever you say.” “Take us along.” “We promise.”

There was no way to get any firmer promise than that. What could they stake as collateral to assure their compliance? Noxon had to proceed on the assumption that they would try to cheat him eventually, even if they were perfectly sincere in their promises now.

Yet, being human, he couldn’t help but try to give the oath as much force as possible.

“I don’t know how your society functions,” said Noxon. “Do you speak for everyone? Every single homusculus?”

“Definitely.” “We all agree.”

“If you truly all agree, then I’m not sure you should be considered human,” said Noxon. “Total agreement is something humans never achieve.”

“Lots of discussion.” “Plenty of disagreement.” “Many hate the plan.”

“The issue is whether this promise will be binding on all the homusculi, even those who disagree.”

“Can any human speak for all other humans?” asked a lone voice.

“Thank you for your candor. I’m aware that not only is there disagreement among you now, but also there will be generations between now and when I leave, and generations on board the ship. The children may not like being bound by the promises of a previous generation.”

“As you said. We are human.”

“So you will understand and forgive me, I think, if I treat the mice who come with me as if there were no promise. I will check constantly. I will assume you are trying to cheat on our agreement.”

“We never cheat.” “We give our word.” “You’re a fool if you think we’re lying.”

“I think you’re telling the truth,” said Noxon. “I think I can trust you enough to take six mice. None of them pregnant.”

“Not enough,” they said at once. “At least twenty.”

And from that Noxon concluded that they needed at least twenty mice in order to . . . what, move objects through spacetime? Or simply to establish a viable gene pool? No point in asking; he wouldn’t trust the answer to be complete. They always intended many different things at once. It was like trying to blow smoke away. It swirled and eddied but you were never in control of it.

“Bring thirty,” Noxon said. “In case I accidentally step on a few of you.”

They might or might not have a sense of humor. Whether they took this as irony or as a threat didn’t really matter to Noxon at the moment.

“When do we go?” “How long till we go?”

Those were excellent questions. He should say good-bye to Param and let her know she was on her own. Or should he first take her to Olivenko? Or wait until he could unite the whole group?

It was enough if one of them knew that he had gone. Param could tell the others. Noxon was the extra Rigg, the expendable one. No reason to act as if he thought he would be missed. When he left, there would be exactly the right number of Riggs in the world.

“Stay here,” he said. “And by that I mean—everybody off me and out of my clothes. That includes the five clinging to the insides of my trouser legs, the three on my arms . . .”

They knew that they couldn’t fool the facemask. They scampered or leapt, and in a moment they all stood around him in a circle.

“It isn’t very promising when you already try to sneak one stowaway with me.”

They put on a good show of consternation, and it’s true that the one who was still clinging to the back of his shoe looked small. He might really be as young and foolish as they said. Or he might have been of a small breed.

You can’t trust the mice.

It was easy to jump back to Param—he had never lost track of her path. This despite the fact that it had already jumped backward in time twice since his path had left hers. Her path was unbroken—it just got fainter and fainter as she practiced her backward jumps. She was about to do it again, he could see, when he arrived and touched her shoulder. She whirled and then relaxed.

“I’m going,” he said. “To Earth, I hope.”

“What about me?” she said. “Are you going to leave me here?”

“Yes,” he said. He tried not to think what it meant that her only thought was that she would be alone for a while, rather than that he might be going to death or oblivion. “But you’ll find your way home.”

“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.