“Yes,” said Father.

“Well, you’re right. And I’m taking them. If I die, they die. If I live, they’ll share my fate.”

“They’re not saying anything about your magnanimous decision,” said Father.

“They weren’t sent on this mission because they were the chattiest of mice,” said Noxon. “And I don’t imagine they’re rejoicing that I’m not going to have you kill them here, but instead I’m going to take them to die with me in oblivion between stars and between millennia.”

“Or they weren’t expecting to die even if you decided not to take them. You forget how much of my programming they understand.”

“Now there’s something it’s easy to forget, since none of us learned anything about your programming,” said Noxon.

“The Odinfolders know a lot,” said Father. “But the mice know more.”

“Do the mice know everything?”

“They know everything that can be known by mice,” said Father.

“What does that mean?”

“That it’s good to keep them guessing.”

“I think I’m going to go now,” said Noxon. “It was good to see you again.”

“Every time you see any of the expendables, you see me,” said Father. “I have all their memories. They have all of mine.”

“But I know that you’re the one who raised me from a pup.”

“You think you know that,” said Father. “How do you know we don’t swap wallfolds every now and then? How do you know it was the same version of me that came back from every trip?”

“That’s right. Shatter my confidence just before I’m really going to need it.”

“It’s my job,” said Father. “Keep him guessing. Never let him feel too smart.”

“You really are good at that part of your job. So I know this will mean nothing to you. And if it does mean something, you won’t tell me anyway. But here it is. I forgive you for lying to me constantly as I was growing up. I thank you for teaching me all the things you taught me, and helping me learn to think the way I think.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“One more thing,” said Noxon.

“Don’t say it,” said Father.

“Why not?”

“Because you know that if I answer, it will be a lie.”

“I don’t care whether it is or not,” said Noxon. “I love you.”

Father sighed. Part of his programming. “I love you too,” he said.

Noxon attached to the earliest possible moment on Ram Odin’s path, and then jumped just a hair, just a titch, just the ­tiniest bit beyond it.

Noxon was still on the ship. Still in the cabin. Ram Odin was there, in his pilot’s seat. The expendable was standing exactly where Ram Odin would look for him in just a few moments, as soon as the expendable could tell him what had happened.

Only it hadn’t happened yet.

Or, more precisely, it was happening right now. In this moment, this infinite unchanging moment, there was only one ship, but there were twenty potential ships coming into existence. It was jumping from one point in space to another that was many lightyears away and yet, at this moment, perfectly adjacent. It was passing from the moment zero of the year zero to a time 11,191 years earlier.

It had been the right guess, that the moment of transition existed but had no duration, and having no duration, therefore could not end. Infinitely brief, yet also infinitely long. Not so much outside of time as deeply within. Full of imminent creation and movement; yet because there was no duration, movement was impossible.

What Noxon had not guessed, and Father had not guessed, and Ram Odin had not guessed, was that in this timeless moment, Noxon could not move. The mice could not move. The electric signals of the computers hesitated and could not move on. Noxon’s heart could not beat, he could not take a breath, but he also did not need a breath, did not need a heartbeat, because no cell in his body craved oxygen. All processes were in complete stasis because there was no movement and no causality and no possibility of change.

Yet something in him was still functioning. Because he could still see Ram Odin and the expendable. Or could he? Had that image simply frozen on his retina, in the place in his brain where vision was constructed? It could not change but it also could not fade away or leave?

Yet I am thinking, thought Noxon.

Only that’s not what he thought, because to his surprise he could not form words or even clear ideas. He could not remember language. What would have caused him to form the conscious thought “I am thinking” was really an inchoate recognition of himself. And the knowledge that his self-realization contradicted the idea that nothing could happen, because his mind, at some level deeper than the brain, was still functioning.

And even if he could not turn away from the image of Ram Odin and the expendable and the pilot’s seat and the different stations that the pilot could move to on his chair, if he could move, Noxon could see the paths.

Not see the paths. But whatever it was in him that sensed them, could sense them now. He had always been able to see the paths without turning his head. He only had to turn his attention. He could see them through walls. He could see them behind hills, though not as well. He was aware of them.

But the facemask was not helping him see them as he had become used to seeing them. The facemask was as frozen as the rest of his body, and it could not do for him any of the things that it was supposed to do. He was on his own.

What he saw were not the enhanced paths that were really people moving through space and time, as the facemask showed them. Nor were they the paths that he had seen since earliest childhood, a streak of something that he thought of as color, that he thought of as a line or a wind or a memory in the air.

What he saw now had no dimension because it had no duration. It was not a path, but an instantaneous slice of the path. A single moment of path.

He concentrated on that spark of path in Ram Odin. With all his other senses inert, each with its last message frozen in place, Noxon could sort his nonphysical observation of Ram Odin’s path from all the physical noise and bring it to the center of his attention.

Still there were no words in his mind, but he was beginning to realize that far from being less clear for the lack of language, his thoughts were more clear. It’s as if language itself, along with all the other noise of his senses, all the tumult in his brain, had been a barrier, a fog that kept him from achieving real clarity of thought. Without the necessity of explaining to himself in language, he was able to comprehend that nub of a path as it really was.

There were really twenty-one paths intersecting there.

One led into the past. It was the end of the causal chain that had brought this starship and Ram Odin to the moment of the leap across the fold.

Nineteen of them led forward into the future. He could not see where they led, because in this moment they still led nowhere, but there was causal potential in them: They would yet have more effects, whereas the path that had brought Ram Odin here had spent its causality. It was done.

None of these mattered to Noxon. Though he could not put his mission into words, he had not forgotten it. He knew that going back to the past to the beginning of Ram Odin’s outbound voyage was his last resort—he would only follow it if he could not find the twenty-first path.

The twenty-first path was as rich with causality as the others. It was not spent like the past. But it was also somehow their opposite. They each pointed to slightly different destinations. But this one pointed somewhere else entirely, and he could not see or understand where that might be.

Without words, he realized: If I attach to this twenty-first path, then I will truly be cut off from the rest of the universe. But it’s what I came for. This is my purpose. This is my gamble in order to save Garden from the Destroyers.