Pathfinder

CHAPTER 11 Backward

This time it took eleven days for the computers to come up with their answer.

“Converting the energy requirement into mass,” said the expendable, “all the computers agree that without violating previously observed laws of physics, the most likely cost of returning from the fold to our previous position in spacetime, but with the direction reversed, would be about nineteen times the mass of this ship and everything on it.”

“Nineteen computers,” said Ram, “and nineteen times the mass.”

“Do you find this coincidence significant?” asked the expendable.

“Each computer was an observer and a meddler in spacetime at the time the fold was created,” said Ram. “You and I weren’t observers, because we could not sense or even understand the convolutions of the fields being generated. So for each observer, there had to be a distinct jump. And for each jump, there had to be an expenditure of mass equal to the total mass of the ship and its contents.”

“So if there had been only nine or ten computers,” said the expendable, “we would have come only halfway back to the present?”

“No,” said Ram. “I think if there had been only one computer, we would have crossed the fold only one-nineteenth as far into the past of the target star system before being shoved back, in reverse.”

“You seem to be very happy about this hypothesis,” said the expendable, “but I don’t see why. It still explains nothing.”

“Don’t you see?” said Ram. “Crossing the fold pushed us into the past a certain amount, based on the mass of the ship and its velocity or whatever. But the only way to pay for that passage across the fold was to send an equal mass backward. And because there were nineteen observers creating the fields that created the fold, it happened nineteen times.”

“But it happened only once,” said the expendable.

“No,” said Ram. “It happened nineteen times. For each jump, a copy of the ship was thrust backward in time. Eighteen other versions of ourselves occupy the identical space as the original ship, only moving the opposite direction through time as we journey toward Earth, all of us invisible to each other.”

“So our reliance on the computers caused the failure of the mission?” asked the expendable.

“The mission didn’t fail,” said Ram. “It succeeded nineteen times. We’re just the exhaust trail.”

Loaf was full of plans to sneak back into O and live there in hiding long enough for Umbo to deliver his messages. Only when Umbo finally convinced him that he had no idea how to do it did Loaf finally realize that learning how to go back in time might better be done somewhere else.

“I might not learn how to go back in time for weeks,” said Umbo as they walked through the woods, back toward O. “Or months.” If I ever do. “It was only Rigg who could go back in time. I helped, by slowing him down. Or speeding him up.”

“Which?”

“I always thought I was slowing other people down, but Rigg said I was really speeding them up so that everything around them seemed slower.”

Loaf grunted at that and moved a branch out of the way, holding it so it didn’t swing back and hit Umbo in the face.

“Thanks,” said Umbo. “You see, Rigg could always see the paths of people moving around in the past. Long before I ever helped him. He knew what he was looking for. I don’t.”

Another grunt.

“We need a safe place to go where I can practice trying to do to myself whatever it is I do to other people. And even then, who knows whether I’ll be able to see anything?”

“Look,” said Loaf, “we know you did it. We know it happens. We just have to be patient. And you have to work hard at it so we don’t waste too much time.”

“It’s not a waste of time,” said Umbo. “It’s however long the job takes.”

“Here’s how I see things,” said Loaf. “We must have gone through all this before, only the first time, Rigg got arrested without your moving the knife and without my hiding the jewels and money. Then you learned how to go back in time, came back to O, delivered the warnings, and now everything is happening differently. So why do you need to deliver the messages this time at all?”

“Because none of that has happened yet, so now it won’t,” said Umbo. “I have to learn how to travel in time so I can go back this time and deliver the same message again.”

“But you didn’t get the message twice, did you? So why deliver it twice?”

“I don’t know,” said Umbo. “I don’t think it is twice. I think there’s only one message, and I still have to deliver it.”

“But you only know you have to deliver it because you already did. And that’s the point. You already did. But I’m not going to argue with you. Even if you don’t have to deliver the same message again, it’ll be useful for you to learn how to do it. And then if it makes you feel better, go ahead and deliver the messages—if you remember what you actually said.”

“I have to do it because I know I already did, only when I did it, it was the future, so I have to get to the future in order to come back and do what I already did . . . This is so crazy that it has to be impossible.”

“Except it happened, so it is possible. We won’t do your figuring-it-out time in O, because we might get caught. But I’m still going back to get the jewels and the money. The coins will be convenient for us, right now—we can buy passage upriver to Leaky’s Landing and stay there in safety for a while. But the jewels and the knife—it’s not like we can cash those in. I think you came back to warn Rigg and yourself because first time we went through this experience, those items got taken by the soldiers, and that made everything worse for Rigg. That first stone—did it just happen to be the only one that was legendary and fabulously valuable? Or are there others that would make things even worse if Rigg was caught with them? And that knife—who knows what that would cause. It’s very old, but it looks very new, right? And Rigg never did know anything about the man he lifted it from.”

“So we should take the money and bury the knife and the jewels somewhere nobody can ever find them,” said Umbo.

“No,” said Loaf. “Because we don’t know but what we’ll need them later to buy Rigg’s freedom. Or some other thing. They’re Rigg’s inheritance from his father, so what we have to do is keep them out of the hands of the Revolutionary Council or anybody else who means us ill. But we still need to get it all to Aressa Sessamo so Rigg will have the use of them if he ever needs them.”

“Because having them has worked out so splendidly up to now,” said Umbo.

Loaf gave him a little shove. “Look what you’re wearing. Look what we’ve experienced, the people we’ve talked to, the things we’ve learned. A few weeks of being rich has taught me a lot.”

“Like what? That it gets you arrested?”

“It was Rigg’s name that got him arrested, not his money.”

“So what has being rich—or hanging around with a rich kid—taught you?”

Loaf grinned. “That I like it a lot better than being poor.”

“I was fine with poor. I didn’t even know I was all that poor. I didn’t even know the stuff we were buying even existed, so I didn’t miss it. Life was good.”

“Spoken like a true privick,” said Loaf.

“So what’s the plan? We go into O, get the jewels and money—”

“You are so very, very wrong. I go into O, I get the money.”

“You’re not leaving me!”

“Yes I am,” said Loaf. “And we’re going to have a signal so that when I come back, I can call you. If I whistle like this . . .”—he whistled—“then I’m all alone and it’s safe. But if I whistle like this . . .”—a different sound—“then I have somebody dangerous with me and you should stay away.”

“There’s not a bird alive that makes sounds like those.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not calling any birds, isn’t it?” said Loaf. “Those are military signals from my old regiment.”

“You need one more signal.”

“What’s that?”

“One that means ‘I’ve got somebody dangerous with me, but I need you to come to me anyway.’”

“I would never give you a signal like that.”

“But you might. So whistle that one for me.”

“I’ll never need it.”

“Then you’ll never use it, but let’s have it anyway!”

Loaf glowered and whistled again, a very different sound. “I’m the experienced one, but you think you can give the orders.”

“You’re the big man, and I’m the little kid. I never have the option of fighting my way out of a situation. So I think of all the options I might need. That’s just how it is when you’re small.”

“I was a kid once, too,” said Loaf.

“And I bet you were bigger than kids two years older than you.”

Loaf said nothing.

“When you don’t answer, that means I’m right.”

“Shut up,” said Loaf. “I think I caught a glimpse of the tower.”

“What tower?” asked Umbo.

“The Tower of O,” growled Loaf. “Are you that stupid?”

“I was thinking of other things,” said Umbo. “I was thinking of how to go back in time.”

“You were thinking of how smart you are, telling me ‘I’m right,’ and then you proved you aren’t very smart after all, and don’t bother arguing because we both know I’m stuck with the dumb kid while the smart kid is a prisoner on that boat.”

That stung Umbo—worse than his father beating him. And even though Loaf cuffed him playfully and told him, “Come on, you know I was teasing you,” it didn’t change the fact that they both knew it was true. But it wasn’t about being smart. It was about the things Wandering Man had taught them. Umbo had gotten a little training and that was all. Just enough to help Rigg. But Rigg had been trained for anything. He had been trained to be a son of the royal house—because that was what he really was.

If Wandering Man had trained me the same way, I’d be smart, too.

Wouldn’t I?

Despite all the signals, Loaf ended up not using any of them. That’s because Umbo disobeyed him, didn’t stay where he was told, but instead followed him and, not far from the tower, climbed a tree. He could see now where Loaf dug to get the bag of jewels, and could see that nobody was following Loaf as he threaded his way back into the woods. So Umbo ran back toward their meeting place, climbed another tree, and dropped from a lower branch right in front of Loaf. He submitted cheerfully to the do-what-I-tell-you-or-you’ll-get-us-both-killed lecture.

When Loaf was finally through grumping at him, Umbo asked, “Did you get it? All of it?”

“Unless somebody found the bag, took out just one jewel, and put the rest back, yes, I found it all.”

“Well, let’s see it. Let’s count,” said Umbo. “Because now I think there really is one missing.”

They counted. And counted again.

“I can’t believe it,” said Loaf. “How could one be gone?”

“The biggest one, too,” said Umbo.

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t know,” said Umbo. “I just thought maybe.”

“It makes no sense at all,” said Loaf savagely. “Nobody would steal just one.”

“I would,” said Umbo. “And I saw the hiding place when you dug it up just now. So I’m betting that I did take it.”

Loaf rounded on him. “Hand it over, then, you little thief.”

“I didn’t hear you calling Rigg a thief for stealing that knife.”

“I called him a thief, all right!”

“That’s right, you did, but you didn’t grab him like you’re grabbing me and it hurts, so stop it! I don’t have the jewel because I didn’t take it!”

“You said you did.”

“I said I’m betting that I did, and I really should have said that I’m betting that I will.”

Loaf sighed and let go of him. “Why? What’s the point?”

“No point except that when you made your sarcastic remark about how somebody might have taken one, I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if my future self comes back, finds the bag of jewels, and takes out the biggest one. And the moment I thought that, I decided to do it if I got the chance. Now I know I’ll get the chance.”

“So you’re saying that when you learn how to travel in time, you’re going to use it to play stupid bratty tricks on your friends?”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“I ought to break your arm.”

“But I know you won’t.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“Because my arm looked fine when my future self came to visit me. I also know I won’t drown, break my neck falling from a tree, or get my throat slit by a highwayman. I won’t die of some disease and I won’t get struck by lightning, and nobody will beat me to death with a stick.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure.”

“How can I be anything but sure? I came back and visited me and Rigg! I took the jewel out of the bag!”

“I wish I could go back and hide the bag in a different place,” said Loaf.

“Now you’re getting into the fun of it!” said Umbo. “Come on, people always make games out of everything. You did war as your real grownup work—but didn’t you play at war when you were little? I did. All of us did. So when I learn to go back in time, I’ll play with it! Giving warnings is one thing—that’s just showing up and talking. I know I’ll have to prove I can do whatever Rigg did or I’ll feel like I lost the game. He took the knife—from a stranger. I took—I will take—the jewel, but I’m only stealing from us so nobody else will miss it. See? A game.”

“I’m not having fun yet,” said Loaf.

“Because you’re old and tired and you know you’re going to die.” And this time, when Loaf made as if to hit him, Umbo dodged away. “See? We’re friends, and I’m teasing you like a friend. See? That’s what normal people do.”

“It’s not how normal children treat normal grownups,” said Loaf, and he did seem a little angry.

“But you’re not a normal grownup,” said Umbo. “When you hit me, you don’t really mean to hurt me.”

“Come a little closer here, Umbo, and we’ll see about that.”

“My father would have knocked me down and then kicked me a few times,” said Umbo.

“Too much work,” said Loaf. “You’re not worth it.”

“Friends!” said Umbo triumphantly.

“Well, friend,” said Loaf, “I have only one question for you. Where is that jewel now?”

That kept Umbo silent for quite a while. Was it possible that the jewel had simply left the world? Had it ceased to exist, and then would exist again, out of nowhere, out of nothing? It got Umbo to wondering what it meant to exist at all. When Rigg went back and took the knife, he stayed completely in the real present world—the only difference was that he could see the people from the past, and they could see him, but he was still here. The jewel, though. It was gone.

What about the knife? It was in the stranger’s possession, Rigg reached out and took it, and Umbo remembered seeing it come into existence in Rigg’s hand. The knife had a continuous existence. The problem was that it skipped centuries, maybe thousands of years. Jumped right over them. Because Rigg had reached back in time and moved it. That’s what happened to the jewel. It never ceased to exist, it just changed places. And eras. The knife had been carried by Rigg’s hand; the jewel would be carried by Umbo’s.

They had come downriver carried by a boat. At every second between Leaky’s Landing and O, they still existed, somewhere in the world—on the boat. For the knife and the jewel, though, there was no boat. No river. The movement was instantaneous. And Umbo didn’t want to think about it anymore. Mostly because Loaf looked so smug, for having made him think of a problem that kept him silent.

That, too, was a kind of game, wasn’t it? And Loaf had won it.

They didn’t try to board an upbound boat in O, in case someone there recognized them, realized they must have escaped, and took them back into custody, jewels and all. Instead they went back downriver to a small ferry, crossed to the other side, and then caught an upriver boat.

They didn’t take the first one that passed, or even the first one that came close to shore and somebody called out if they wanted passage. Umbo didn’t understand why none of these boats was good enough, until Loaf called out to one boat—it wasn’t even coming to shore—by shouting the name of the pilot. “Rubal!” he cried, and then again, louder. Then Loaf waded out from the shore and waved and shouted “Rubal” again until finally the pilot heard him, or saw him.

“Loaf, you old poacher!”

“I didn’t poach, she just liked me better!” Loaf called back. But under his breath, to Umbo, he said, “I really did poach his girlfriend, but we were soldiers then, almost children. I’d never do it now.”

“Good thing,” said Umbo, “or Leaky’d kill you.”

“True. She might kill me for bringing Rubal back to our inn—I’ll have to put him up for the night, it’s only fair.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He can’t stop gambling at stones, and he cheats all the time. He’s pretty good at it but not good enough that a sharp player won’t spot him doing it.”

“You a sharp player?”

“No,” said Loaf. “But I had to kill a sharp player once to save Rubal’s neck.”

“So he owes you this passage.”

“We’ve saved each other’s necks about twenty times. He’ll do it as a favor, not as a debt.”

“How did you know he was coming?”

“I didn’t know it would be Rubal. I knew that soon enough there’d be somebody I knew well enough to trust he wouldn’t rob us and float our bodies downstream. I live and work on the river, Umbo. There’s only so many boats and only so many pilots, and after a while you get to know a lot of them.”

The passage upriver was uneventful. They stopped here and there. Loaf introduced himself to other innkeepers. They always got along cheerfully, because there was no competition between them. Rivermen stopped at the nearest inn when darkness approached; it was not as if they would continue upriver in the dark to stop at a favorite place. So unless your beds were so bugridden or your food so rancid that rivermen went out of their way to avoid it, the money was there to be made for all of them, but with steadily diminishing trade the farther upriver you went.

Loaf joined in with the poling and rowing from time to time—his muscles weren’t shaped to the work, but he was strong and learned quickly enough. Umbo, though, was so little that when he offered to help they only laughed at him. “Besides,” murmured Loaf to him, “you have other work to do. Inside your head.”

Thus Umbo spent hour after hour lying in the shade of a sail, when the wind helped them upriver, or a tarpaulin, when it didn’t. It was an easy thing to speed up the perceptions of the crewmen, so that they were more alert and had plenty of time to deal with obstructions or possible collisions on the river. None of them suspected they had had any help from Umbo, except Loaf himself, who squinted and glared at Umbo the few times he did it. Now that he was trying to study what he was doing—something he hadn’t done since Wandering Man stopped his lessons—he realized some useful facts.

First, the speeding up lasted for several minutes after Umbo stopped imposing it on the other person.

Second, it worked rather like the quick rush of energy that came when you were in danger—only it didn’t cause the racing heartbeat, the panting for breath, and the sheer terror that usually caused such intense concentration and speeded-up perceptions. Umbo’s gift to them was really a kind of panic without the fear.

So to cause himself to have the effect, he tried for a while to make himself afraid, in order to speed himself up. It didn’t work. For one thing, he didn’t really believe it. For another, it simply wasn’t the same thing at all, so fear had no effect.

If he had had a mirror he might have tried looking in it in order to cast the spell on himself, but the more he thought of that, the more ridiculous it seemed. He knew that mirrors worked by reflecting light—but there was no reason to think it would reflect whatever power it was that he wielded.

He tried looking at his hands or feet, the way he looked at the person he was targeting, but again, there was no effect that he could discern—no quickening, no perceived slowing down of the world around him.

Finally, he gave up in despair and just lay there in the shade, letting the boat surge upstream with each call of “Pole!” or “Stick!” then slacken as half the poles were reset at a time. It was almost smooth, but not quite, and lying there on the deck he could feel each surge, each slackening. He concentrated intensely on it, and it seemed to him that they were slowing down, the calls coming more slowly, each surge lasting longer, each slackening more sharp.

Then he fell asleep.

And when he woke up—nudged awake by a boatman’s toe, with a muttered, “Supper, lad”—he had almost forgotten that feeling just before he slept, of everything moving slowly, and even when he remembered it he did so only to think, I wonder if that’s how it feels to be under the time-slowing spell.

“Fool,” he whispered.

“What?” asked the riverman nearest him. They were pulled up along shore for the noon meal and a bit of a rest, so no one was at the poles right now.

“Myself,” said Umbo. “I called myself a fool.”

“Honest of you,” said the riverman. “Though it was obvious to the rest of us days ago.”

Umbo gave him a quick grin—it did feel good to have their acceptance, though it was Loaf, not Umbo, who had earned it. But when he met Loaf’s eyes across the coals of the cookfire still red in the metal firepan, he gave him a wink, and Loaf nodded. Progress.

That afternoon, Umbo worked to isolate what caused him to go into the trance himself. It was not sleepiness—that had ended, not triggered, the phenomenon. Nor was it concentration, really—he had not been thinking about the rhythm of “pole, stick, pole, stick” as the two teams alternated their surges. Rather it was a different thing, different from the way it felt when he did it to others, but still, in a strange way, the same. Just like learning to use a new muscle, and the more he practiced, the more easily he found himself in that inward place where time slowed down, or he speeded up.

It was as if, instead of doing something to himself, he simply found the place inside himself where time was already moving along at a different clip. And as he got more practiced at it, he realized that he had much more versatility and control over his own trance than over the timeflow of other people, when he worked the trick on them. He could go much faster than he could make them go; he could vary the tempo across quite a broad range of speeds. And it didn’t weary him to do it to himself; he was rather invigorated by it, instead of its wearing him out.

“All well and good,” murmured Loaf. “But can you do it with your eyes open?”

Umbo woke up. Or not really—he hadn’t been asleep this time—but coming out of the trance of time always felt like awakening, though it also felt like leaving home and coming out into a harsher world.

“How did you know I was doing it?” Umbo whispered.

“Because when I sit by you,” murmured Loaf, “or walk near you, I can feel it happening to me. A quickening of my step. And it’s stronger than when you were practicing on us all, back at the beginning. It grows as I come nearer to you, and fades as I walk away.”

“Do you think the others feel it?” asked Umbo.

“If they do, they don’t know why. It feels, to a man my age, as if I were younger, fresher, less tired. As if I thought more sharply, saw more clearly, heard things from farther away and could tell them apart more easily. In other words, it just feels good. Who would try to blame feeling good on a boy who seems to be asleep on the deck?”

“I really do need to open my eyes,” said Umbo. “I don’t know why I haven’t already. I don’t think I have to keep my eyes closed to make it happen to myself, not anymore. I just don’t know if there’ll be anything to see. It was Rigg that saw people moving through time, without any help from me.”

“But it’s you that knows how to move a man backward in time, whether he can see anything there or not.”

“I need Rigg. I really do. Maybe I don’t send the message until he gets out of his captivity.”

“If that’s how it worked, then it would have been Rigg delivering the messages instead of you, wouldn’t it?” Loaf got to his feet again. “My rest time is over. I’m on the stick team today. Stick, pole, stick, pole—no wonder these rivermen need so many pints of strong ale when they stop at Leaky’s Landing!”

In the remaining two days of the upriver voyage, Umbo grew so practiced at slipping into quicktime that he began having to work at not moving about in that mode. He felt sluggish when he did not have that alertness about him, and he wondered if this ability to speed himself up in relation to the world might not be rather like ale to these rivermen—a way of making the world brighter and pleasanter. Because it felt good to be so aware of everything, and to have time to think of what he wanted to say before he said it. It made him seem cleverer—to others and to himself—to have the time to think of an answer before speaking, or not to speak at all when his first impulse was to say or ask something stupid.

But in all the time he spent in quicktime, he never saw so much as a glimpse of the “paths” Rigg talked about seeing all the time, still less any person from another era. It seemed hopeless to him, for Rigg, when Umbo put him into quicktime, had to pick out a particular path and then look at it closely in order for the individual person to emerge clearly enough for Rigg to pick his pocket. But Umbo, seeing no paths, could not pick out a target for his attention, and therefore could not possibly make them become solid and real.

I can’t do it. And yet I did it.

Not until they arrived at Leaky’s Landing was there another opportunity to talk, for this part of the river Loaf knew well, having plied it up and down to buy groceries and linens, tools and hardware, furniture and liquid refreshments for the inn. So as they passed each landmark, Loaf would offer his opinion of the place—“You never buy your sheets from the weavers in that town, they make them all too small to tuck in tight on a goodsized bed. It must be a town of dwarfs, eh?”—and then the rivermen would offer their opinions of the place—“There’s a girl there so ugly they don’t castrate their hogs anymore, they just bring them to look at her and their equipment freezes up and drops off.”

Umbo was quite aware that what Loaf said was always literally true, and what the rivermen said was almost never true at all—and yet no one was lying and all were entertained by each other. Umbo could well see why rivermen might prefer to live in an exaggerated or downright imaginary world, what with all the poling, and the sameness of the river going up or coming down. While Loaf, the soldier, the hardheaded man of trade, the toiler in all trades, he needed to keep a clear-eyed view of the world.

When they got home they bade good-bye to the rivermen, who did not stop the night, “Because why should we give you back, for food and ale, the very passage money you just gave to us?” said the captain of the boat.

Leaky barely seemed interested in them—neither Umbo nor her own husband. She was busy, she said, and didn’t have time for greetings, what with doing everything single-handed while they were off playing the tourist in far countries. Loaf’s answer was not to rail at her, as Umbo’s father would have done, but rather to pitch in beside her and help her make short work of her tasks. And as they labored side by side, she began to smile now and then—not looking at him yet, but just smiling—and then she hummed, and then sang, and finally began to tell him stories of things that had happened while he was gone.

Umbo, meanwhile, tried to make himself useful, too, though he did not know how to do many of the tasks they did, and had to learn by watching. That, however, he did very well, for he could quicken himself so he had plenty of time to watch and understand exactly what they were doing, and then observe his own actions and correct them. He didn’t move any faster than he normally did—that is, exactly in proportion to the time of the people or creatures or things he was interacting with. But while acting, he had time to think again and stop himself or change his action. It was a wonderful luxury, that ability to rethink and still have time to change his course.

So now he understood, at last, how his quickening gift was useful to the people he had used it on, though he hadn’t really understood how. They really are better able to carry out their plan of action, when I put a quickening on them. Wandering Man called it “slowing” because it made things around a person seem to proceed at a leisurely pace. He had gotten it all wrong, as if Wandering Man thought it was time itself that Umbo affected, rather than the person’s perceptions and thought processes within time.

It was actually a bit of a relief to realize that Wandering Man didn’t know everything about everything; he wondered if the man himself had ever realized it before he died. Or maybe he died because he was so sure he knew everything that it didn’t occur to him that he might be wrong about the direction in which a hewn tree would fall.

Supper was the best food Umbo had eaten on the river, and he said so. “That’s because you’re eating like family now, not the swill we slop the pigs with,” said Loaf, at which Leaky smacked him across the top of his head, saying, “We eat from the same pot as the guests and that’s a fact, which you well know, Loaf, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.”

“No, my love, you won’t have me saying otherwise in your presence,” which earned him another smack, and a harder one.

The room they put Umbo in was not one of the guest rooms. It was a smallish bedroom right next to their own, and Umbo realized that this was the room where, if they ever had a child, that child would sleep. How old is Leaky, Umbo wondered as he readied himself for bed. Might she have children? Or is one of them unable? When they built this place it was clear they meant to have children. Sad if they couldn’t have what they wanted, when a lout like Umbo’s father popped babies into women every time he had a go at them, and heaven knows why any woman ever let him.

Umbo had just fallen asleep when he was wakened by Loaf shaking him gently.

“What?” murmured Umbo.

“I know you can’t see them,” said Loaf. “But does that matter, if you know right where they are?”

Umbo was too tired to get what Loaf was trying to say, and fell asleep again in moments. But when he awoke in the middle of the night to pee, the words came back to him, and actually took on some meaning. In fact he realized he had been dreaming about them. In his dreams, Umbo pictured Rigg standing a very long time by the carriage, so that Umbo did not have to be able to see him in order to tell him his message. And the same with Umbo’s message to himself—he had received it while lying in his bed in their lodging in O, so that he, too, was firmly in the same place and Umbo did not actually have to be able to see himself to give the message.

Awake now, Umbo tried to remember what his future self had looked like, and now he realized that his head had been bowed, as if he was staring at a spot on the floor rather than himself lying in bed. He had seemed rather shy or humble to Umbo, but what if he were simply not looking at anything at all, only talking into the air and hoping someone would receive his message?

But no, he had heard what Umbo asked him. Or had he? Perhaps, already knowing what past-Umbo would say, having said it himself, future-Umbo was able to answer it.

Closing the lid of the pissoir, he thought back to last night’s supper and almost went downstairs to try quickening himself and then speaking to the invisible past versions of himself and Loaf and Leaky. But he stopped himself in time. He couldn’t do that, because he hadn’t done it. There had been no visitation and no message last night. He’d have to do it tonight, instead.

Unless Loaf was right, and it was perfectly possible for him to go back and give a message where no message had been received, and then it would be received, and thus change the future, and after that there would be no need to actually do the message giving again. But Umbo could not see how such a thing was possible. It was maddening enough that trying to make sense of it put him back to sleep almost as soon as he was back under the covers.

The next day he said nothing to Loaf about his dreams and quandaries, and still less about his plans. During the afternoon he managed to filch some bread and cheese from the kitchen and secrete it in his room, because he intended to eat no supper at the table that night. In order to avoid confusing himself with the issue of whether he could take a message into the past that he had not already seen when it was delivered, prior to delivering it, he decided to be absent from the place where the message would be received.

So he pretended to have a little headache which needed nothing but sleep to be cured, and went to his room. He ate his bread and cheese and wished he had thought to bring water or weak ale into the room. But he resolutely did not leave the room, and waited until he could hear the quieting of the house. Only when all was dark and quiet did he get up and make his way down the stairs by the scant light of the stars and the silver night-ring coming through skylights and windows, then down a dark hall by feel alone.

He came into the little room off the kitchen where Loaf and Leaky must have eaten their private meal—late, as always, after the guests were served—and found no one there and the room dark, except for the flickering light from the kitchen fire.

Only then, imagining where Leaky and Loaf would have sat, did he realize just how many holes there were in his plan. Because even though he himself was not present for dinner, it is absolutely certain that if they had received his message—the one he was preparing to slip into the recent past and give them now—they would have come up to his bedroom and wakened him and told him of the success of it.

Unless I told them to let me sleep uninterrupted till morning. That’s what my message should be—to go to sleep as normal and not waken me till morning!

Satisfied now that he had resolved the contradictions, Umbo closed the doors to the room and, keeping his voice low, put himself into the trance of quickening. “Don’t waken me till morning, please,” he whispered entreatingly to the empty chair where Leaky usually sat. Then he spoke again, but with the trance shallower, or so he hoped. And again and again. At no point did he see any trace or flicker of Loaf and Leaky, or hear a speck of answer, but he resolutely tried to do it at every level of trance, thinking that perhaps the depth of the trance determined how far back he would go in time.

Exhausted and stupid from lack of sleep and long concentration, he was whispering now from hoarseness rather than a desire to be quiet. He hit on the idea of varying the message a little so that he’d remember which level of trance had been seen by them, but then gave up on it because how could he remember how “deep” the trance was at the time of a given message?

Even when he thought he was done and resolved to go back upstairs, he did not. Instead he sat down in his own place at the table and rubbed his eyes and knew, without knowing why or how, that he had failed. He had only been talking to himself.

Sitting there, drifting near sleep, yet still trying to quicken himself, he fell into an even deeper quickening—or dreamed he did—and this time when he spoke his message, talking across the table to his two friends, he reached out his hands and dreamed—or was it a dream?—that he felt their hands in his, and their voices assuring him that they would comply with his wishes.

“Then come back here after dark,” he said, “and bring me back up to bed, because I’m so very tired.” Whereupon he closed his eyes and fell, not into a deeper trance, but into such a deep sleep that he slumped forward and slept with his head on his arms.

Then he awoke to Leaky shaking him gently and saying, “Wake up, Umbo, go upstairs to your bed, why would you sleep sitting at table?”

For a moment Umbo thought this meant his dream was true. “You came as I asked!” said Umbo—his voice still a hoarse whisper.

“Listen to the croaking of a frog!” said Leaky with delight. “You poor thing, you really are sick, at least a cold, all full of mucus and snot, which is what happens when you come downstairs and fall asleep in a cooling house with no blanket and hardly a stitch on.”

There had been no message received, none at all.

I’ll just have to try again, he thought.

But the next night he tried nothing at all. He had spent the day working, not on reaching back in time, but rather on helping Loaf repair things around the inn, and fetch things from the weekly market that were needed to feed the guests, and whatever other errands were needed, anything to keep himself awake, since he had slept so little the night before.

Almost as soon as he had eaten, he went upstairs and dropped off to sleep immediately.

Again he was woken by Leaky’s hands shaking him.

No. Leaky’s and Loaf’s hands. They were in his room and it was still the same night, because there was the noise of guests in the common room, singing songs with bad harmonies and voices lubricated by ale.

“You did it!” said Loaf. “You appeared at our table, sitting there, reaching out your hands! We took your hands boy.”

Umbo felt a glow of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I tell you not to waken me?”

“No, you said we must waken you and send you upstairs to bed.”

“No he didn’t,” said Leaky.

“But since you were already here—well, we thought you were, so we came upstairs to check, and couldn’t help waking you and telling you that it worked!”

But it hadn’t worked. “I left that message last night. That’s why I was sitting at the kitchen table. So I didn’t go into the past at all, I went into the future. Tonight. Last night I left the message that you got tonight.” In despair Umbo rolled over in bed and faced the wall.

“You stupid little fool,” said Loaf, not without affection. “You think that’s failure? What do we care, right now at least, whether you go into the future or the past. So you went a few hours into the future? You shifted yourself into another time at all!”

Come to think of it, once Loaf had put it that way, it was an encouraging sign. “All right,” said Umbo, rolling onto his back but keeping his eyes closed. “Because you saw me sitting at the table, and you touched my hands, I know exactly which of my tries actually worked. It was different from the others. I was numb from lack of sleep, I was so deep in my trance I felt lost, felt like I might never find my way back. I couldn’t tell when I crossed the boundary from that into sleep. But all the other times accomplished nothing.”

“Unless we’re going to keep running into ghosts of you giving us foolish messages for the rest of our lives,” said Leaky.

“I must learn how to push the messages into the past—and just the right amount of time, too.”

Loaf chuckled. “You’re not even awake. But tomorrow, let’s keep you sending messages until you start going in the right direction. Or maybe you can pick a spot to write messages in the dirt.”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” said Umbo. “You couldn’t even hear my voice, am I right? All you did was see me.”

“And hold your hands,” said Leaky. “Didn’t you feel us hold your hands?”

“Yes, I did,” admitted Umbo. “And I could smell the kitchen.”

“Of course you could,” said Loaf. “You were in the kitchen.”

“I mean I could smell the dinner as if it was fresh. I remember that now, from what I thought was a dream.”

“We know you can scratch a message in the dirt, Umbo,” said Loaf, “because you were able to dig up a certain bag that was buried in dirt, and then cover the place again so it betrayed no disturbance.”

“What bag are you talking about?” asked Leaky.

“The bag of jewels,” said Loaf. “When Rigg was arrested, we went back and got it. Only Umbo, here, had apparently come back from the future to raid my little hiding place and take the biggest jewel out of the bag.”

“Anyone could have taken it,” said Leaky.

“Anyone in their right mind would have taken the whole bag,” said Loaf.

“I can’t have done it,” said Umbo miserably. “I’m only traveling in time to reach into the future. Which is useless, since we’re all going to end up in the future anyway.”

“All those stories of ghosts,” said Leaky. “They’re probably just somebody like you. They’re walking around in a house when they’re so tired they accidentally fall into this quickening you’re talking about, and they inadvertently leave behind an image of themselves—or even the reality of themselves, since there can be touching and smelling—which pushes them into the future so that people many decades from now will see this ghost going about its business. Maybe they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

“If they do it like me,” said Umbo, “they know what they’re doing.”

“Oh, so now you know what you’re doing?” asked Loaf. “Weren’t you the one who thought he was pushing messages back into the past, but they were really getting misdelivered into the future?”

“Let me go back to sleep,” said Umbo. “I’m so tired I could die.”

“But remember this when you’re going back to sleep, Umbo,” said Loaf. “You really did it. You really shifted yourself through time.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” said Umbo. And then he was gone and dreaming again, but this time of his brother standing at the edge of the falls.

He felt this urgent question building inside the part of him that knew it was a dream: Why can’t I also go back and save my brother’s life? If I can save Rigg’s money, doesn’t it mean I can go and speak to Kyokay and save him before he goes out to the falls?

Maybe I did, he thought as he drifted back to sleep yet again. Maybe I did, only years from now, when I’m grown. Maybe I’m the man that Rigg thought he was pushing or at least letting fall from the cliff.

Impossible.

If only.

He slept again.