What he had never thought about before was whether his path-sense had something like peripheral vision. Could he be concentrating on one path, and yet still be able to sense other paths? Or were they all shut out?
Or was the facemask shutting them out?
Noxon didn’t have to put it into words. He only felt the need to be able to sense all the paths without losing track of the one that was slowing him. The facemask responded.
But not instantly, because of course it was slowing down along with him. Or . . . the question that had bothered him and Umbo from the start . . . were he and the facemask speeding up relative to the timeflow of the path? Speeding up, not by slicing time the way Param did, which meant skipping over microchunks of time, but really speeding up, five moments per moment, experiencing every bit of time and causality, but moving so rapidly compared to the normal timeflow that it seemed slower and slower to him.
It didn’t matter what was actually happening. He saw the path resolve into Ram Odin, and then Ram moved more and more slowly, until he was almost not moving at all.
Hold me at this speed, thought Noxon.
And the facemask responded, as quickly as a reflex. Noxon no longer had to concentrate on holding this relative speed and now he could look for something else.
He almost missed it. Because the little nubs of backward time were not human-sized or human-shaped. And they didn’t flicker. It was nothing like the paths. Except in color.
Only it wasn’t color. It was the attribute that Noxon thought of as color, because that’s how he described it to Father when he first started quizzing him about it. As a child he had even thought of them as blue and green, yellow and red. But it wasn’t color at all. It was something else, the attribute that made every person’s path just a little different from everybody else’s. And markedly different from the paths of animals, and the more-intelligent animals sharply divergent from those with lesser minds.
It’s the consciousness itself that I’m seeing. Not the molecules of the body passing through space and time, but the mind itself. Without physical substance, and yet inextricably tied to the body and brain. It had no dimension, but it had location—like the theoretical point in geometry. Only the color made it detectable at all. A thread of it. Wherever he paid attention to it, it became detectable for only the tiniest distance—the tiniest duration in time.
It was so hard not to reach out with his mind and attach to it. Because this seemed to him to be the purest path of all, the path within the path. He had to know if it was really a person or just something he was making up because he wanted so badly to see something.
Disaster if it was something, and he attached, and the molecules of his body were annihilated. Or if he simply appeared in the outbound ship, in the normal timeflow, and then had to explain himself to that Ram Odin, which would change all of the history of Garden, maybe cause it not to exist at all. And Ram and th
e mice, trapped in the backward flow—they would just see him disappear. All this effort wasted.
He held himself back. He did not attach. Instead, he let the facemask know that it was time to ease back to the regular speed of time.
He opened his eyes.
“Tell us when you’re going to start,” said Ram Odin.
“He’s already finished,” said the expendable. “Did it work?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “I can do this. Once we’re close enough to Earth. And if I can bring the ship along with me. I think I can do this.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Ram Odin. “Slice us forward in time.”
Noxon didn’t know why he hated the idea. “What’s the hurry?” asked Noxon.
“What’s the delay for?” asked Ram Odin.
“It’s life!” said Noxon, frustrated. “Things take time. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“For everybody else. But look what you can do!”
“Yes, I can speed and skip and go back and all kinds of things, and you know what? Most of the time I don’t gain anything by hurrying.”
“After years on this voyage,” said Ram Odin, “I can tell you that you don’t gain all that much by waiting, either.”
“Not waiting,” said Noxon. “You didn’t wait. You read. You talked with him.”
“I didn’t accomplish anything,” said Ram, “except to avoid being comatose for the jump.”
“You didn’t learn anything? None of your thoughts were worth having? None of your conversations had value?”
“It was boring,” said Ram Odin.
“You seemed interested enough at the time,” said the expendable. “Maybe it’s only boring to remember.”