“Can you see the moment where Umbo took them into the future?” asked Param. “Maybe if you hold on to the path right at that point . . .”
“I can’t hold a path,” said Rigg. “I don’t even see them, not really, not with my eyes, I just know where they are, I—I can’t touch them.”
“But you can, when Umbo . . . you have to try.”
Rigg reached out his hand. “Here’s where Olivenko was when his path jumps away. But I don’t know how he was standing. Was his arm here? Here?”
Vadesh was hearing everything they said. No wonder, when they showed up in the far future, he knew all about their ability to move through time. “Vadesh is almost here,” Param said.
“I know, but this isn’t working.” He kept moving his hand, trying to make some kind of contact. “I’d rather not have a conversation with the traitor who got all the uninfected humans killed.”
“They aren’t dead,” said Vadesh, still calling from some distance away. Could he hear even the slightest whisper? “They fled the city as the natives entered it.”
“Don’t argue with him,” said Param.
“He calls them natives,” whispered Rigg angrily. “Because they have that native parasite.”
“At least he doesn’t think they’re human,” said Param.
“But they are, and better than human,” said Vadesh, who was now close enough to speak loudly instead of shouting. “Didn’t you see how quick and clever they were on the battlefield?”
“Native and human,” said Rigg. “Come on, Umbo, see us, take us.”
To Param it sounded as if Rigg was praying. “This isn’t working, he can’t see us, so try something else.”
“There is nothing else.”
“No,” said Param. Her mind was racing. “When the woman tried to stab you, it wasn’t me that made us jump forward in time to the middle of the night, and it wasn’t Umbo because he would have brought us back to the time we came from.”
Rigg was looking at her, listening. But clearly he didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand.
“It was you,” said Param. “The knife was coming at you, and you jumped away. But in time, not in space.”
“I can’t do that. It’s Umbo who does that.”
“No, you do it—you’re the one who finds the other time, who pulls us to it. Or at least you join him in doing it. Your body’s been learning how to do it even if your mind doesn’t understand it or control it yet. But you can do it.”
“I’ve tried. My whole voyage downriver I tried, and—”
She didn’t have time for his chat about despair. She remembered how the Gardener—the expendable named Ram—had helped her find her own timesense. “Stop talking and listen,” she said, using the voice Mother had always used to command instant attention. “You feel it in your nose, like the beginning of a sneeze or the start of wanting to weep. But then it draws down, through your throat, down your breastbone, then down through your stomach to your groin. You draw it tight with your diaphragm, as if you were straining to lift something. Draw it tight. Only pull your nose down and your groin up with it.”
He looked baffled and confused as she talked. Clearly Ram hadn’t taught him this, maybe because with Rigg’s gift it wouldn’t work. But he had to do it—her gift wouldn’t get them away from Vadesh because he was a machine and he had heard everything they said, he’d know that if he just waited long enough he’d see them again. Rigg had to get them away, and so all she could do was try to help him get control of the power he had used to jump away from the knife.
She started to repeat the instructions and this time he tried to obey her. She could see tears starting in his eyes, just as they had in hers when she was first learning. A quivering in the muscles beside his nose, a twitching of the lower eyelids. And a clenching of his belly, a slight bend to his body.
His hand was still in midair, trembling, where he expected to find Olivenko.
Vadesh was nearly upon them, smiling, smiling, smiling.
“I can see him,” whispered Rigg. His hand moved.
And then Param could see that there was a sleeve in Rigg’s hand. No arm, just a sleeve. But then the arm was there, and in that instant it became Olivenko, turning now to face them, and there was Loaf, also turning, and the sounds of battle came back again, the stench of war, and Vadesh was gone.
Rigg didn’t hesitate, he turned his head back toward where Umbo had been. Rigg gave a vigorous nod, then cast his chin high, then nodded forward again. Param realized: He’s not going to give the hand signal because that would require him to let go either of her or of Olivenko.
But what if their jaunt to the week after the battle had made them invisible to Umbo? What if they were lost to him no matter what they did?
“Give Umbo the signal!” Param shouted to Loaf, to Olivenko.
But before they could obey her, the stockade was gone, and the stink, and the noise. It was a quiet morning again. Umbo was right where he should be. The city had all its tallest towers again. And Param and Rigg were both there with the others.
“Ram’s left elbow,” exclaimed Rigg in his relief.
“No, it’s my left elbow you’ve got,” said Olivenko. “Where did you come from? I thought you were over talking to those women.”
“You disappeared,” said Loaf. “I thought Param had done whatever it is she does.”
“No,” said Param. “I almost did, but I stopped myself.”
“But I felt you slip out of my control,” said Umbo. “Like having a loose tooth pull away. I’d been holding you so tightly, it hurt when you vanished. I lost you.”
“I know,” said Rigg, and then he grinned foolishly. “Umbo, it was me. Param figured it out. I’ve been learning how to jump without even realizing it. I felt what you were doing, I think I was even helping, but I didn’t know how to make it happen only I did by reflex, when she tried to stab me.”
“Param?” asked Loaf, alarmed.
“No, the woman we were talking to, we scared her, she was in the middle of a war, she was armed, so of course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do, we do—”
“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”
“I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became real and—”
“And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”
“Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.
Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her weeks and he got it with the first lesson.
Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught him nothing.