“I haven’t tried to change it,” said the expendable.
“We’re facing the wrong way,” said Ram Odin. “If we could deploy our ram scoop it would still be behind us. So we’re not capable of gathering fuel. The engines seem to be running, but I don’t know how.”
“Our best calculation,” said the expendable, “is that as hydrogen dust is consumed in the engines of the outbound ship, it powers the movement of both ships, the outbound and the inbound.”
“So matter is crossing over.”
“No,” said the expendable. “It remains entirely in the normal timeflow.”
“Then energy is crossing.”
“No,” said the expendable. “Energy and matter are the same thing, in a fusion engine.”
“Something is crossing over,” said Ram Odin impatiently.
“As near as we can tell,” said the expendable, “and that’s not very near, because there is no way to measure this, the only thing crossing over is momentum.”
“Is momentum actually a thing, in physics?” asked Noxon.
“It is not,” said the expendable, “at least not the way we’re using the term. Our hypothesis is that there’s some unknown force binding the subatomic particles to each other, forward and backward.”
“You know what?” asked Ram Odin. “I don’t actually care how it works. I only know that when and if we do break free and jump back into ordinary time, we’ll be hurtling toward Earth in reverse. That’s another argument in favor of making the switch before we come too close to Earth.”
“Yet if we try it too far out, we can’t bring the ship with us,” said Noxon.
“That’s all we were doing,” said a mouse. “Trying to figure these things out in advance.”
“I believe you completely,” said Noxon to the mice.
“No you don’t,” said the mouse.
“Apparently you don’t believe me,” said Noxon.
“I will alert you by standing exactly here and raising my arm like this when we’re approaching Earth but are still well back from it. Maybe a week or two out. Would that be good?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “Make it three weeks. I want to see when I start getting a sense of paths that are tied to Earth rather than to spaceships. And that means I need to start looking well before the point of no return.”
“So shall we slice time?” asked Ram Odin. “I’m looking forward to my first actual time-shift.”
“You just had one.”
“Only an hour or so. And I didn’t feel anything.”
“You won’t feel anything. Nothing in the ship will change, unless he moves around. We’ll be moving, of course, but if I do this right, we won’t complete even a single step.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Ram Odin. “We have nothing to lose but seven years of mind-numbing boredom.”
“All right,” said Noxon, and he took a step as he sliced forward.
CHAPTER 15
Building a House
Singhfold wasn’t all up-and-down, mountains and valleys—there was a coastal plain, and some high plateaus. But the level ground was in the rain shadow of the mountains, and those who lived there scratched out a living by damming the occasional streams and laboriously irrigating the fields.
In most of the mountain valleys, however, rain fell often, and snow-fed streams never disappeared. The ground was rarely level, and farming required terracing. But nimble goats and sheep thrived on the grass that grew wherever the snow abated, and if winters were long, there were many labors that resulted in artifacts for trade. It was a good life for people who were willing to work hard, and each community learned to be self-sufficient.
Singhfold was also a linguist’s heaven, or would be, if anyone but Singhex traveled enough to realize how many languages were spoken, and how they revealed deep secrets of history by the groups and families of languages, and how they were interlaced among the valleys.