“Because Father doesn’t have a path. He’s the only person-he’s the only living thing-that I’ve ever known that didn’t have a path of any kind.”
“Are you sure?”
“After ten years of seeing and watching and studying paths, you think I might be wrong when I say that the one person I was close to all the time had no path?”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “But I think you and I can both agree that Father was a really unusual man.”
“Why do we have these abilities if we can’t go back and save Kyokay?” demanded Umbo.
“Are you asking an invisible saint or a god or something? Because I don’t know. Maybe we can save him-that time. But how do we know he doesn’t just get himself killed the next day doing some other stupid thing?”
“Because I’d watch him,” said Umbo.
“You already watched him,” said Rigg. “He couldn’t be controlled. And meanwhile, we might change a thousand other things that we don’t want to change.”
“So our gifts are completely useless,” said Umbo.
“We have this knife,” said Rigg.
“You have a knife,” said Umbo.
“At least you’re not suddenly remembering a whole bunch of stories about men who appear out of nowhere and steal fancy knives and then disappear,” said Rigg.
“If Kyokay stays dead, then all of this is useless.”
“All of this,” said Rigg, “us being together, talking, finding out what we can do together-all of this happened because Kyokay went up on the falls and I tried to save him, and failed. So if we save Kyokay, does that make it so none of this happens? Then how would we go back to save Kyokay?”
“You already proved that you can change the past!” said Umbo.
“But I never did anything that mattered,” said Rigg. “Or at least I wasn’t able to accomplish anything I wanted to.”
Umbo reached out his hand for the knife. Rigg handed it to him at once. Umbo pulled it out of the sheath and pressed the point of it against a spot on the heel of his hand. It punched in almost at once, and blood welled up around the blade.
Rigg snatched the knife back. Umbo stared at his palm, making no effort to stanch the bleeding. Rigg wiped the blood off the blade with a handful of dewy grass, but he didn’t say anything to Umbo. Whatever crazy thing Umbo was doing, he’d explain it when he felt like it.
“Now the past is real,” said Umbo softly. “I’ve been wounded by it.” Then he, too, tore up a wad of damp grass and pressed it to the wound in his palm. “That stings like a hornet,” he said.
“I guess now you know why your mother taught you never to poke yourself with a knife.”
“She’s a smart one, my mom,” said Umbo. “Even if she did marry some angry idiot of a cobbler.”
“I hate the way you make a joke out of everything,” said Rigg.
“At least mine wasn’t funny,” said Umbo.
They picked up their things. Rigg dried off the clean blade on his shirt, and slid it into the sheath. Then he tucked the knife he had stolen about two thousand years ago into his belt, and they set off down the Great North Road toward Aressa Sessamo.
CHAPTER 5
Riverside Tavern “Has anything happened yet because I made the decision to go ahead with the fold?” asked Ram.
“Yes,” said the expendable. “You remained in command of the ship.”
Ram was a little irritated to learn that the decision had been a test of him rather than a real decision. “So you were going ahead no matter what I decided?”
“Yes,” said the expendable. “It’s in our mission program. You never had a choice about that.”
“Then what am I here for?” asked Ram.
“To make all the decisions after the fold. Nothing is known about what happens after we jump. If you had proven yourself timid before the jump, you would be regarded as unfit to make decisions afterward.”
“So if I was too timid, I would have been replaced. By you?”
“By the next crew member we awakened and tested. Or the one after that.”
“So when does the real jump happen?”
“In a week or so. If we don’t blow up before then. Spacetime is being very naughty right now.”
“And nothing I might do can stop it?”
“That’s right, Ram.”
“And what if none of the crew turned out to be capable of making a decision that would satisfy your criteria?”
“Then we would command ourselves until we got to the target planet.”
“‘We’… meaning the expendables?”
“We the ship. All the computers together.”
“But the ship’s computers don’t agree on anything.”
“That’s one of the many reasons we were all hoping you’d do the right thing.”
Ram hadn’t missed the one bit of information the expendable had given him. There was zero chance that it had been an inadvertent slip. “What do you mean, spacetime is being naughty?”
“We keep generating fields and forces, and things change. They just don’t change the way anyone predicted.”
“And when was I going to be told that?”
“When you asked.”
“What else should I ask in order to find out what’s going on?”
“Whatever you’re curious about.”
“I want to know what spacetime is doing.”
“It’s stuttering, Ram.”
“What does that mean?” asked Ram.
“There seems to be a quantum system of timeflow that has never been seen or suspected before.”
“Meaning that instead of a continuous slide into the fold, we’re finding that spacetime reforms itself in a series of discrete steps?”
“It’s going to be a bumpy ride, Ram.” • • • After three weeks on the road, Rigg and Umbo had long since exhausted the food they brought with them, and hunting for small game was taking more and more of their days. Just because Rigg could see the paths of the animals didn’t mean that setting traps would catch them. In this part of the world, the animals were far more wary of humans than they had been up in the wild highlands of the south.
So they were hungry as Rigg led the way to the public house that filled the five or six rods of land between the river and the road.
“This doesn’t look like much of a place,” said Umbo doubtfully.
“It’s all we can afford,” said Rigg. “If we can afford it.”
“It isn’t much of a town, either,” Umbo added.
Rigg looked around him. The buildings were all fairly new, and had the look of shabby construction. A thrown- together kind of town. But from the paths weaving through the area, Rigg could tell that it already had a lot of people. “You could drop Fall Ford into the middle of it and nobody could tell.”
“Well, my standard of a good-sized town has changed a little over the past three weeks.”
“And my standard of a good-sized meal has changed, too,” said Rigg. “If I set traps we might have some squirrel or rabbit by morning, or we might not. They’ve got food in there right now.”
By now they stood outside the door of the tavern. A couple of burly rivermen brushed them aside as they went in. “Out of the way, privicks.” Rigg had heard that term more than once, as they passed through towns they
