Ruins

Then came the day when they left her.

Umbo had gone first, making an expedition to visit the buried starship of Odinfold in order to test and expand what he had learned in his absurdly focused study of a single thing.

Then Swims-in-the-Air had said something to Rigg that alarmed him, and he had taken Loaf and Olivenko to follow Umbo. Nobody even looked for her, or asked her what she thought. Swims-in-the-Air mentioned they were gone, and when Param asked why they hadn’t told her where they were going, Swims-in-the-Air had only laughed lightly and said, “I don’t think they needed you, my dear.”

Param had simply gone back to her studies.

Until she noticed that her room was filling up with mice.

They swarmed around the floor and up onto the table. Their constant motion was distracting. “Why do you all have to be here?” she asked, not expecting them to understand or respond.

But they did respond—by ceasing their movement, by all turning to her at once and gazing at her.

They’re only mice, she told herself.

But the intensity of their gaze was disconcerting, and when it continued, it became alarming.

She got up from her place, intending to leave the overcrowded room. But when she stepped, there was a mouse under her foot. It squealed in agony and when she moved her foot to release it, she saw that blood had spurted out of its throat. Worse, she had stepped on yet another mouse, and this one made no sound at all when it died; she only felt the sickening crunch under her foot.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There are too many of you in here, there’s no room to walk. Please go away.”

Please! Was she a beggar now, she who should have been Queen-in-the-Tent? Was she reduced to pleading with mice?

In answer to her words—or to the deaths of the mice she had stepped on—more mice came into the room, until the floor and table were as solidly covered as if they were carpeted. No, as if they had grown a pelt and now had muscles that throbbed and surged under the many-colored fur.

She didn’t want to kill any more of them, and besides, they were frightening her. It was a sign of how much she had changed that she had not gone invisible the moment she noticed there were too many mice in the room. But even if she no longer sliced time by reflex, she could certainly do it as a matter of good sense. There was no reason to stay in this place, trampling mice and snuffing out their annoying little lives.

She went invisible, and began to walk out of the room.

But something was very wrong.

In one sense, everything worked perfectly normally. She could now walk right through the mice without crushing them.

On the other hand, the mice did not speed up or scurry around madly the way people did when Param slowed herself down. Usually they sped up and scampered like mice; but these mice did nothing of the kind. In fact, for a moment Param wondered if she had somehow acquired the opposite talent, and had frozen them in time, for they did not move at all. They stayed in place, noses pointing toward her.

But they were moving. Tiny movements, yes, but it made the carpet of mouse fur undulate and shift constantly. And those shifts were as rapid as she would have expected—she was indeed slicing time and skipping forward in tiny increments, walking as she did.

As she made her slow progress along the floor toward the door, she realized that the mice were not staring at the place where she had been. They were staring at where she was now.

They could see her.

It was impossible! When she sliced time, she never remained in the same place long enough to be visible to humans, whose brains couldn’t register an object that was passing through each location for only a split second at a time.

But mice were not human. Their metabolisms were faster. Did this mean that they also perceived more rapidly? Did it mean that they could see and register her presence for the tiny moment she spent in any one place?

Then something else. The mice were moving a thick cylinder of steel through the room, bringing it closer to her.

How could they lift it?

They weren’t lifting it at all. It was jumping from place to place. Near the door; halfway across the room; at the base of the table; up onto the table. It stayed in each place for what might have been five or ten minutes, though to Param it seemed only seconds.

They were shifting it in time and space. Or no, the mice weren’t doing it—how could they? The Odinfolders must be using their time-sender to move the thick cylinder from place to place.

A thick cylinder of solid metal that could be placed anywhere in space and time.

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.