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“Not a machine. More like an inborn ability.”
“You just naturally hop around in time?”
So Noxon explained his original ability with paths, and how Umbo’s time-slowing talent showed him that the paths were people from the past. And now the facemask allowed him to latch on to paths without any help from Umbo.
She heard him out. And then said nothing.
“You don’t believe me,” said Noxon.
“I’m trying to decide whether you believe you. Between your dispassionate face and my fake eyes, I can’t tell if I’m missing your tells.”
“I have a simple remedy,” said Noxon. He started to get up from the chair he was sitting in, and as he moved, he sliced time. He didn’t slice very much—just enough to disappear—and he took only a couple of steps before he stopped slicing. While he was invisible, moving slower than the rest of the world, he saw Deborah reach out to where he had been—where, in fact, he still was—then stand up and walk through him. He felt the heat of her passage, speeding up his slicing a little as she intersected his space, so neither of them would be damaged. She walked to the window, looked outside, then turned around and surveyed the whole room. Perhaps she was wondering where he would be when he reappeared. If he reappeared.
And then he reappeared.
“Neat trick,” she said, showing no surprise.
“Not a trick,” said Noxon.
“I’ve seen people seem to disappear before.”
“I’ve seen people move through the space where I’m walking, too, but it never gets old,” said Noxon.
“You were really there the whole time.”
“I was,” said Noxon. “It’s one of the reasons why time-slicing isn’t useful as a getaway technique. If your enemy knows what you’re doing, all he needs to do is put a slab of metal into the space where you are. The heat of a billion atomic collisions cooks you to death.”
“You’ve seen this?”
“My sister died that way, once,” said Noxon.
Deborah looked stricken.
“No, it’s all right. As soon as we knew what had happened, we went back in time and rescued her before it happened.”
“So she didn’t die.”
“She was dead when we found her,” said Noxon. “That’s the nice thing about timeshaping. You can sometimes undo some really bad things.”
Those words hung in the air.
“You’re thinking of your parents,” said Noxon.
“I didn’t really know them,” said Deborah. “And I’m trying to think what would happen if you went back and saved them.”
“If I went back, alone, then I would change your whole life. Everything you’ve done since the accident will unhappen. You won’t remember any of this, because the toddler who was saved from that fiery wreck will have her normal face and eyes, and her parents, and no reason to be so close with Uncle Georgia.”
“How do I know if that other life would be better than the life I’ve led? Yes, my parents were cheated out of raising me. Or maybe they were spared an ugly divorce. Or maybe I’d hate my serial killer little brother.”
“Such a dark imagination.”
“But if I went back with you,” she said. “You seemed to imply there were two alternatives.”
“If I took you into the past and you were causally connected to the change in behavior that saved your parents and the toddler version of yourself, then you would continue to exist, with all your memories. The two-year-old would also be you. There’d be two copies. The way there are two copies of me, this one on Earth and the one still back on Garden.”
“But Father?”
“Professor Wheaton would have no idea who you are. He wouldn’t have raised the little burned and blind girl who survived the wreck. He’d be a dif
