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“I thought you couldn’t do it without a path.”
“I can’t go to a particular time without a path. But in this case, once I get us facing the right direction, I’ll simply slice my way backward as fast as possible, like closing my eyes and throwing us all into a time before space travel. Preferably before telescopes. Once we get there, we can figure out when we are.”
“Close your eyes and jump,” suggested Ram Odin. “Like Icarus learning to fly.”
“Icarus fell to earth, burning, as I remember from my reading in Odinfold,” said Noxon. “That is the legend you were referring to, right?”
“Just trying to think what people on Earth will think of this new, fast-moving star.”
“Once we get back to the right direction,” said Noxon, “I don’t actually care much about what people on Earth think of us. We’ll be visible here for a second or so, but no longer. Maybe nobody will be looking, but there are bound to be instruments that register our presence.”
“They’ll call it a computer glitch,” said the expendable. “It happens all the time. And since the ship won’t be there for them to discover, I’m betting that nobody will suggest that what they saw was a ship moving backward in time that flipped directions and then threw itself backward like a child diving into a swimming pool.”
“Because that would be insane,” agreed Noxon.
“Maybe this is a better plan than the original one,” said Ram Odin. “The distance from the surface of Earth to L5 is actually farther than from the surface of Earth to the near surface of the Moon. It’s safer to move an object the size of this ship when we’re not all that close to Earth and its corrosive atmosphere.”
“I never really understood how far things were in space,” said Noxon. “I knew I could sense paths that were much farther away than I could actually see. But distances on a planet’s surface are trivial compared to distances in space.”
“Words like ‘near’ and ‘far’ take on completely different meanings out here,” said Ram Odin. “Just the fact that I say ‘out here’ instead of ‘up here’ shows something. On a mountain, you’re up high. But in space, you’re far away, you’re outside.”
“So I was naive to think I could find a two-hundred-year-old path from space,” said Noxon. “But what if I hadn’t spent all those months working with Param to figure out how to back-slice? I’d be helpless now. Umbo might have done it, because he doesn’t need paths, but until Param and I trained each other, I couldn’t have done it.”
“Then it’s a good thing you took the time to learn,” said Ram Odin.
“Just do it,” said a mouse. “Slice us on into the pa
st, please, so we can get moving in the right direction.”
Even the mice were impatient with him. Noxon wanted to yell at them all, mice and human and expendable: Don’t you see that I have no idea what I’m doing? I’m going to kill us all, or strand us in some impossible place and time, or even if I get us on the right timestream I’ll still fail at finding a way to save Garden. So what is your hurry?
Instead he closed his eyes. “Shut up, everybody, please.”
He had only sliced a moment or two when he realized that closing his eyes wasn’t going to help, considering that he had to see the expendable’s signal when he had reached a point before the ship was built.
The expendable’s arm was already up.
“You started time slicing with your eyes closed,” said the expendable, “and I was beginning to wonder if you left them that way.”
“Only for a moment,” said Noxon, “but that was too long. Sorry.”
“The ship’s computers have concluded that we are no longer bonded with the outbound ship,” said the expendable. “As far as we can tell, it doesn’t exist. The question is, did you bring us to a time before anyone was up here at L5 preparing to build it?”
“The only way to answer that,” said Noxon, “is to see if I can find the nub of somebody’s path.”
At first glance, Noxon thought he had gone too far—there was nobody up here in space. But maybe he had gotten them into that twenty-five-year gap in which Moon debris was wrecking everything everywhere. Maybe there was something big and rocky headed for them right now.
Then he found a few nubs. Not terribly close. But if he attached . . . if the ship came with him . . .
He gripped Ram Odin a little tighter. With the other hand he pressed against the instrument panel, as if this would help ensure that the ship came with him. “Hang on, mice,” he said. Then he attached to the nearest path.
He felt it, a great wrenching feeling. This was not the simple matter it had been when he first switched to this backward direction. It was as if he were walking through chest-high water. And why shouldn’t it feel that way? He had to drag the whole ship with him, change its moment, lever it back to its right place—all without a fulcrum, without any place to stand.
When he opened his eyes, the ship was still there. So were Ram and the expendable and he could feel the mice’s feet against his skin. They were not stranded in space. They had air.
Of course, they had had all those things before he tried to jump.
“Did anything happen?” he asked.
