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Such were her thoughts during these glorious months of exploration and imagination. She lived a thousand different lives, conquered, ruled, lost, loved. The others understood nothing of what went on inside her heart.
&
nbsp; 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.
