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Chapter 9 Getting It Right

So there was Umbo, floating down the river, in no hurry now, so he only used his oar to keep the boat straight in the water. And, to tell the truth, he dragged the oar in the water to slow himself down. Because what was he going to do when he got to Leaky’s Landing? At this moment, young Umbo was with Rigg, making their way overland beside the river. They wouldn’t reach Leaky’s Landing for several weeks.

Then there would be the time spent getting to O, their arrest, and Umbo’s journey back to Leaky’s Landing with Loaf after they got off the boat where they were prisoners. After that, the time Umbo spent struggling to learn to send messages without Rigg’s help.

Finally Umbo and Loaf had set out to liberate Rigg. That was the great divide. After that, Umbo had appeared to Leaky again, then brought Loaf to her with his facemask. That’s the time he had to return to—and it was a long time from now. Umbo could feel how much empty time lay ahead of him. Time that he would have to live through, doing… something. Doing nothing that mattered.

If Param had been with him, she could have sliced them forward to the right time. But she was off with Noxon, learning how to time-shift without leaving herself vulnerable to assassins with iron bars. That was more important than the fact that Umbo was now stuck having to live through almost half a year.

No, not “almost half a year.” He had a much clearer idea than that.

Umbo couldn’t have said the exact number of days, because time wasn’t actually divided like that. It wasn’t divided at all, except into the huge number of separate causes and effects that determined the direction, if not the speed, of the flow of time. But without being able to name it, he knew the amount of time that lay ahead of him. He knew the “place” of those events in the forward sweep of time.

He had visited that narrow period of time often enough—his and Loaf’s departure from Leaky’s Landing, then his messages to Leaky and his return with Loaf—that it was now a firm anchor in his sense of the flow of time.

He couldn’t have charted it on paper—this many days, on this particular date. He didn’t keep a calendar in his head, and besides, whatever this time-shifting talent was, it couldn’t depend on literacy or calendars because presumably it would simply work, like sight and hearing. Yet he knew, the way you know where your hands are when your eyes are closed, just when in the future that day would come.

Was that real? Could he use that, the way Rigg used his paths, to journey to that time?

He thought back to the weeks in the roadhouse when he was struggling to find a way to send messages to the past without having Rigg to help him. When he finally began to have success, that was just the beginning. Then the trick was to get a sense of how far to reach back in order to send a message to arrive at the right place and time. Gradually, through trial and error, he had learned to have pretty good precision in throwing his image into the past and keeping it there.

At the time, he had thought he was going into the past, but now he understood the difference, and could do both. When he needed to push himself back to a few weeks before he and Rigg had left Fall Ford, it was easy to shift back within a day or two of the time he wanted. He didn’t have to be more precise than that.

And even though he had fretted about whether he might be asleep or doing something else when the exact moment of Kyokay’s death approached, on the day he simply knew it was the day, and at the time, he looked up to see Kyokay running toward the stairs—but why? There by the waterfall he could hear nothing. Why had he looked at that exact moment?

Because he knew. When he was in the future, he knew how to come back to a time before that event, and then when he reached that moment again, coming from the other direction, he knew it before his eyes could confirm it.

I have a map of time in my mind, just the way a blind man might learn to keep a map of his house in memory.

And he relied on that map all the time to travel into the past. It wasn’t precise to the second, but after so much experience, when he needed it to be, it was precise to the hour, or the half hour, or the ten minutes. He didn’t think of it that way—he just concentrated and got more careful when the exact time mattered.

No, he didn’t just concentrate. He sped up his perceptions—or slowed down time, as he had always thought of his talent as a child. The more precise he needed to be, the more sharply he made himself perceive the world, and the slower time seemed to flow for him. The map of time got sharper and clearer, the faster his perceptions were working.

He closed his eyes for a few moments at a time, trusting the dragging oar to keep them in the middle of the river, pointed downstream, and slowed time in order to examine his map. It wasn’t visual. It really was like the way you can feel your limbs without looking, or your tongue inside your mouth.

He couldn’t see the past—he wasn’t Rigg—but he could remember it. Not every second of it, but the key moments. Mostly times when he had sent messages or time-shifted, but also a few other events. The death of Kyokay. Jumping off the rock with Param. The moment when he accepted Param’s proposal of marriage.

He couldn’t see the future—nobody could. How could he have markers in times he had never lived through? But the next few years, though they lay ahead of him at this moment, had once been part of his past. No, they had often been part of his past.

Those few years that he had already lived through more than once were part of his map. If he were ahead of them in the stream of time, he’d have no hesitation in time-shifting back to them. Couldn’t he use that same timesense to shift to other remembered points in time, even though at this particular moment they now lay in his future?

He had always thought of shifting into the future as a leap off a cliff. Not knowing what the future felt like, what was happening there, to jump into it would be insane. What if he jumped ten years into the future? By then the Destroyers would have come, and the future he entered would be an uninhabitable wasteland. And if by ill luck he should jump into the exact moment in the future when they were burning Garden to a cinder, he would probably die before he could realize that he’d better jump out of there.

But no, not now. Because he had already lived through that time. He had stood on the beach in Larfold and watched the fires begin, before they all jumped back to a safer time.

That moment—the end of the world—was one of those markers in the future that he remembered with all the certainty of the most important times he had lived through or visited in the past.

And because his time map had nothing to do with place—it was a map of whens, not wheres—he could jump to any particular moment in the past, no matter where he was. He’d still be however many hundreds of leagues away that he had been before the time-shift, but he would be when he wanted, even if he wasn’t yet where he wanted. Just as he had done in jumping back to the time before Kyokay’s death.

Now Kyokay was alive again, but the day Umbo saved him was the same marker as the day he had failed to save him the first time around.

Maybe I can jump into the future. Not slice into it, a fraction of a second at a time, invisible to everyone, yet vulnerable to enemies. Jump to it.

Not while I’m out in the middle of the river. I don’t want to arrive at exactly the moment a boat is passing through this exact spot.

And what if for some reason the boat didn’t come with him? Even if he could shift into the future, there was no guarantee he could take anything with him in that direction. Umbo could swim, but he didn’t relish a soaking.

As he pulled the boat onto a firm landing place, it occurred to him that if he couldn’t take the boat, what about clothing? The jeweled knife?

No, no, these were foolish fears. Param jumped into the future all the time. A microsecond at a time, but she skipped forward with clothes and whatever she was carrying on her. I’ll have everything with me when I get there. If I get there. Won’t I?

He stood on the bank, then decided that he’d better do this sitting down. And not just sitting, but sitting inside the boat, holding on to the knife with one hand and the rim of the boat with the other. Just to make it clear to whatever force in the universe controlled time-shifting that this was his stuff and he wanted it with him.

Then he slowed down time—sped up his perceptions—and found the marker he was looking for. He sharpened his awareness even more, and then chose a time a little bit this side of the time when he left Loaf and Leaky to come on this errand.

And then he jumped.

He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened.

Well, that was disappointing.

He sighed and rose to get out of the boat.

The boat shifted and slid awkwardly under him. He nearly fell.

The solid ground at the riverbank was muddy now. It hadn’t been muddy when he landed. He looked at the sky. It was sunny, but he could see the clouds that must have just finished dumping rain here not an hour ago.

It had rained two days before they got to Leaky’s Landing.

Of course everything looked unchanged. He was sitting on the riverbank looking at the river. What, exactly, had he thought would be different?

But his timesense didn’t lie. When he checked to see when this moment was, he could sense the marker looming only a ­couple of days from now.

Since he didn’t know how far upriver he was from Leaky’s Landing, if he was going to arrive when he said, he would have to hurry.

Then he laughed at himself. If he arrived late, he could easily jump back to the right time.

I jumped into the future. Not slicing, jumping. To the time I chose. Nobody else can do that. With no external paths, only the map of time I unconsciously formed while doing all this jumping, I was able to jump into a future I had already lived through.

As he got the boat back out into the middle of the stream, he checked his markers again. The end of the world was the farthest in that direction. And in the past, the farthest he had gone—well, the farthest he had pushed anybody—was to almost the exact time when Ram Odin’s nineteen ships crashed into Garden, destroying native life almost as thoroughly as the Destroyers would. Rigg had chosen the moment by attaching to the path of the last animal to pass through the space where the Wall would be. Rigg had chosen the animal thinking that it would be the last moment before the Wall was created, but no. After the crash of the nineteen ships, there were no large animals to leave paths through the wall. So Rigg had inadvertently taken them almost to the exact moment of the previous destruction of life on Garden.

We were the Destroyers that time. Not us exactly, not Rigg and me and the others, but we humans. Ram Odin. The expendables. Garden has had bad luck with living through the arrival of ships from Earth.

Still, this meant that Umbo’s map of time extended from the last moment before humans came until nearly the last moments that humans survived. Almost all his time-shifting had been within the past dozen years, but they had gone back to a time only a few centuries after the establishment of the colonies, when they all went to witness, in Vadeshfold, the battle between the people with facemasks and the people without them. That is, they had all gone except Umbo, because he had had to stay behind as their anchor, so they could return to the time they had left.

Now, though, I don’t need an anchor. Now I could go with them on such an expedition, and bring us all back. Because the whole history of Garden, up to the end, is the past in my mind.

He reached Leaky’s Landing with a few hours to spare. He didn’t want to walk into the roadhouse before he left to go save Kyokay, lest he should cause a copy of himself to pop into existence or, worse, deflect his earlier self enough to make it so he did not figure out the plan that worked to save the reckless boy.

He was looking for an out-of-the-way place to wait, one where he wouldn’t be noticed by his earlier self while he was waiting for an upriver boat. Then he realized: I don’t have to wait. I can jump to the right time. Just because it’s only a few hours doesn’t make it any less possible.

Umbo chose an out-of-the-way place to make the jump in privacy. Not for the first time he wished for Rigg’s path-sense, because Rigg would have known just how heavily trafficked any spot might be. Then again, Rigg couldn’t help him in this case because the paths that would be most pertinent had not yet been laid down in this place. Rigg could not see into the future.

Umbo tried to keep from thinking, Rigg can’t do what I can do. But the effort not to think it was nothing more than another way to think it, while feeling even more guilty and frustrated.

He made the jump forward to the exact time he wanted. To Loaf and Leaky, he would have been gone only an hour.

He walked to the roadhouse door, opened, came inside. “Well, I’m back,” he announced.

Loaf and Leaky looked up from behind the bar, where Loaf was putting away glasses and mugs on the highest shelf.

“Took you long enough,” said Loaf.

“Sorry,” said Umbo.

“Well, did you save him?” asked Loaf.

“Mostly,” said Umbo. “Pulled him out of the water before he drowned. His arms were—no, his legs were broken.”

“You can’t remember the difference?” asked Loaf. “Remind me not to let you tend to my injuries.”

“That’s my job,” said Leaky.

“The first time, he broke his arms. The second time, it happened a little differently. He landed legs-first, so those are what broke.”

“So you didn’t interfere with events until after everybody thought he had died in the water.”

“The first time I was so stupid I carried him home before Rigg and I had even left town, and that wrecked everything. So I had to do it over.”

“Well, now that that’s done,” said Leaky, “Let’s set out for the Wall.”

“Give the boy a chance to rest,” said Loaf.

“He’s only been gone an hour,” said Leaky impatiently. Then she gave a sheepish grin. “I haven’t had as long as you two to get used to how things work now. He’s been gone for weeks, hasn’t he?”

She said it to Loaf, but spoke it while looking Umbo up and down. “Not a very cleanly expedition, it would seem,” she said.

“I haven’t done much clotheswashing.”

“You never do.”

“I keep thinking I’ll just jump back to a time when they were clean.”

Loaf glowered. “That really doesn’t make sense.”

“It was a time-shifting joke,” said Umbo. “I don’t have many people I can tell those to.”

“Lucky them,” murmured Loaf. “We’ll leave for the Wall in the morning.”

“One tiny problem,” said Umbo. “We can’t go through the Wall now.”

“Rigg set it up so any two of our group can go through,” said Loaf. “That’s how we got back here to Ramfold.”

Umbo shook his head. “Rigg hasn’t set it up that way yet. And Vadeshex hasn’t even met us. We don’t want to arrive with you wearing that facemask. Who knows how differently he’d act if he already knew he would succeed.”

“So we do have to wait,” said Loaf.

“Not necessarily,” said Umbo. “We have two choices. One. We can go back in time to before the Wall was made. Two. We can skip forward to right after we passed through on the way here.”

Loaf looked at Umbo for a split second and then began a low chuckle. “You sly barbfeather,” he said. “You’ve learned how to make forward jumps.”

“I’ve been to the end of the world,” said Umbo. “All of the future that we can possibly use has already been the past to me. So I can jump there now.”

“This,” said Loaf to Leaky, “is a very useful boy. I’m not sure any child of ours wouldn’t make us feel disappointed at the clever things he couldn’t do.”

“But he’ll be bigger, stronger, and not half so smug as this one,” said Leaky, “so I’ll take ours over him any day.”