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Only that’s not what he thought, because to his surprise he could not form words or even clear ideas. He could not remember language. What would have caused him to form the conscious thought “I am thinking” was really an inchoate recognition of himself. And the knowledge that his self-realization contradicted the idea that nothing could happen, because his mind, at some level deeper than the brain, was still functioning.
And even if he could not turn away from the image of Ram Odin and the expendable and the pilot’s seat and the different stations that the pilot could move to on his chair, if he could move, Noxon could see the paths.
Not see the paths. But whatever it was in him that sensed them, could sense them now. He had always been able to see the paths without turning his head. He only had to turn his attention. He could see them through walls. He could see them behind hills, though not as well. He was aware of them.
But the facemask was not helping him see them as he had become used to seeing them. The facemask was as frozen as the rest of his body, and it could not do for him any of the things that it was supposed to do. He was on his own.
What he saw were not the enhanced paths that were really people moving through space and time, as the facemask showed them. Nor were they the paths that he had seen since earliest childhood, a streak of something that he thought of as color, that he thought of as a line or a wind or a memory in the air.
What he saw now had no dimension because it had no duration. It was not a path, but an instantaneous slice of the path. A single moment of path.
He concentrated on that spark of path in Ram Odin. With all his other senses inert, each with its last message frozen in place, Noxon could sort his nonphysical observation of Ram Odin’s path from all the physical noise and bring it to the center of his attention.
Still there were no words in his mind, but he was beginning to realize that far from being less clear for the lack of language, his thoughts were more clear. It’s as if language itself, along with all the other noise of his senses, all the tumult in his brain, had been a barrier, a fog that kept him from achieving real clarity of thought. Without the necessity of explaining to himself in language, he was able to comprehend that nub of a path as it really was.
There were really twenty-one paths intersecting there.
One led into the past. It was the end of the causal chain that had brought this starship and Ram Odin to the moment of the leap across the fold.
Nineteen of them led forward into the future. He could not see where they led, because in this moment they still led nowhere, but there was causal potential in them: They would yet have more effects, whereas the path that had brought Ram Odin here had spent its causality. It was done.
None of these mattered to Noxon. Though he could not put his mission into words, he had not forgotten it. He knew that going back to the past to the beginning of Ram Odin’s outbound voyage was his last resort—he would only follow it if he could not find the twenty-first path.
The twenty-first path was as rich with causality as the others. It was not spent like the past. But it was also somehow their opposite. They each pointed to slightly different destinations. But this one pointed somewhere else entirely, and he could not see or understand where that might be.
Without words, he realized: If I attach to this twenty-first path, then I will truly be cut off from the rest of the universe. But it’s what I came for. This is my purpose. This is my gamble in order to save Garden from the Destroyers.
What he felt was not fear—fear was an emotion tied to the body. He felt nothing, not in the usual sense. But he knew that attaching to that nub of backward-streaming path could mean utter failure or complete success.
He remembered that there were two of him, and he wondered what the other version of himself might do if he were here instead of Noxon. Rigg was the one who had seen the need to kill Ram Odin, and he had done it. Then Rigg was the one who saw the need not to have killed him, and so he undid it. But from this choice there would be no undoing.
Noxon could hesitate as long as he wanted. His body would not decay here. He could not die.
But neither could he live. Neither could he act and make changes in the world.
Of course, heading backward he couldn’t make changes outside the limits of this starship. It would be a very small world indeed. And who knew if, once caught in that timeflow, the regular stream of causality would not become as invisible as backward-flowing time had been to him till now.
Filled with uncertainty, filled with determination, Noxon mentally attached himself to that nub of a path, that path of a kind and color he had never seen before. He attached to it, and left that moment of nothingness.
The moment he could sense motion again—and it felt completely normal, he felt like himself, nothing had changed, and that infinite moment between e
verything was now infinitesimal in his memory—in that moment he began to slice time so that he would be invisible and undetectable to the computers.
He did not know if he had acted quickly enough. He did not know how long it would take the computers to be aware of the presence of the jewels he carried with him. Or how long it would take the computers to upload all the contents of the jewels, containing as they did the entire history of the human race in every wallfold of Garden. And the history of Ram Odin on all nineteen starships.
But even if it had absorbed every speck of those memories, it didn’t matter the way it would have if he had joined with any of the nineteen forward-moving copies of the ship. Because this ship was going back to Earth, but undetectably. As it now was, this ship could not have any effect on the rest of the universe.
Noxon’s job was to find an appropriate opportunity, after the ship returned to Earth, and take the whole ship with him back into regular time, so that he could learn what motivated the people of Earth to wipe out life on Garden, and prevent it if he could.
For now, though, his only job was to stay alive through the seven-year voyage.
If the expendable knew that there were jewels aboard, he showed nothing. Noxon could not hear the words they were saying, because he was slicing time so sound could not reach him in any intelligible form. But there was only the frustration of realizing that they were the loser in the lottery of ships, that they were the one that would never found a colony, the one that would never reach any destination at all.
Ram Odin was a man so young, so childlike compared to the old man Noxon had known. He and the expendable conversed. Ram got up and talked. The expendable talked. They walked here and there. They did inexplicable things that didn’t matter to Noxon at all.
All that Noxon cared about was the place where he could use the jewels to take control of the ship. Of course, it was possible that the ship would not let him take control, since Ram Odin was the commander.
But it was also possible that once Noxon had allowed the ship to upload the contents of the jewels, the ship’s computers would realize that Noxon was the commander of the only mission that mattered now, and that Noxon was the only person who could possibly bring the ship back into forward-time.
