Rigg jumped forward to the time right after he left Ram Odin.
“Got it?” Ram Odin asked.
“Moved it to where I’m going to find it,” said Rigg. “Took a bit of maneuvering.”
“So you’re going to help the conspirators get away with it,” said Ram Odin.
“This time.”
“I’m glad you confined yourself to retrieving the button,” said Ram Odin.
“What else could I have done?”
“You could have spooked her so she ran away before she got to his house,” said Ram Odin. “You could have gone back to the first time they caught each other’s eye and plotted this sort of thing.”
“Should I have?”
“If you did, we’d have a devil of a time explaining what we’re doing in this room, where no one invited us because nobody lost a button.”
“If I had Umbo’s talent,” said Rigg, “I could have appeared to us on the road and warned us away from this village.”
“I thought the facemask let you do everything Umbo does,” said Ram Odin.
“No,” said Rigg. “Not even close. He can speed up his own perceptions, so time seems to go slower, and he can speed up other people’s. He did that to me—that’s how I first learned that all these paths were really people. The facemask does it for me now—but it can’t speed up anybody else’s perceptions. And that business with just appearing to people? That’s Umbo. I latch on to a person’s path and there I am. He sends a message somehow. He’s the really powerful one, if he only learned to master it, but who can help him? What he does, nobody else does.”
“But once he gives a warning, doesn’t he have to be sure to give that same warning when he gets to that point in the future?” asked Ram.
“Hasn’t an expendable explained that to you?” asked Rigg. “Because of Umbo’s warning, we never get to that point in the future. It doesn’t exist. Everything that happened down that road—the network of cause and effect—it’s gone. It never happens.”
“So he never sends the message,” said Ram Odin, shaking his head.
“I remember thinking the same way,” said Rigg. “But what we’ve learned by experience is that an effect can’t undo its own cause. So the old future just disappears. Never happens. And I can never time-shift to a lost time because it leaves no paths in our past.”
“So why didn’t you just disappear when you warned yourself—or I should say, warned Noxon?”
“Because I didn’t warn Noxon. I’m not Umbo. I couldn’t just appear, I came. The moment I changed the course of events, Noxon would no longer become the me who had killed you. But that wouldn’t erase me—because I had caused the change in Noxon’s path, so I had to remain.”
“I hope I’m not the only one to whom this makes no sense.”
“It’s causality. Conservation of causality. Umbo’s messages can cause things in the past to change in such a way that it destroys the future in which he sends those messages. Like the messages from the Odinfold time-senders—because they’re sending an object, not going themselves. But a shifter like me and Noxon and Umbo, too, when he actually travels—I can’t go to the past and change it and destroy myself, because I am the causer, still in that past, persisting into the change I made. It makes sense, really.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Ram Odin. “But if you think you understand it, that’s good enough for me.”
They rested a little while on the lumpy bed—the master bed of the house, the best bed, thought Rigg—long enough to make it convincing. Then they came back out of the room. “I know where the button is,” said Rigg. “Let’s go get it.”
Jobo looked like she was barely containing her terror, but at this point she dared say nothing. Still, Rigg wasn’t cruel. “You must have forgotten when you went out toward the hayers. I don’t know if you were feeling better and thought to join them, and then changed your mind, or maybe you were just going to see if they were coming back.”
“I never went out of the house,” said Jobo, too fervently.
“You were ill,” said Ram Odin. “You might not remember. It might seem to you to be part of a dream. But if Rigg says he knows where it is, then he knows.”
The fear drained from her face, but what replaced it was not relief, but the same contempt she showed when she was sniping at Bak. She thinks I’m a fraud, thought Rigg. Well, let her think that. “Let’s go get it,” said Rigg. “It has to be you that finds it.”
“Why me?” asked Jobo. “I don’t think I went out there, so why should I go looking where I never was?”
“We learned a good time ago,” said Ram Odin, “that if Rigg’s the one as picks up whatever was lost, then folks will whisper that he had it all along, that he stole it in the first place. So he won’t come near it. You’ll find it.”
“I won’t.”
“But not for lack of trying,” said Bak softly. “You will try, because it’s very important to find that button. I paid good money for it in town. Because my wife should have brass buttons instead of common wooden ones.”
“I should never have nagged you for those foolish buttons.”
“They were the desire of your heart. And you were proud of them,” said Bak. “I try to get you your heart’s desire, when it’s within my reach.”
And in those words Rigg heard a lifetime’s tragedy. He didn’t know what it was, not without looking. But there was something Jobo had longed for that Bak could not obtain for her. More children than two, perhaps? Or something else unguessed. Rigg could follow the paths back and see the whole story, but he’d found out enough of their secrets for now.
The moment they came out of the house together, the four of them, other people came out of their houses. They were quiet in this hamlet—Rigg didn’t hear anyone shouting, though he did see children scampering a bit in the back way behind the houses. But it was pretty much the whole town following them, he could see by the paths. Only a few stay-at-homes—mothers with babies, old people sleeping in the middle of the day. The fieldwork of this place was over for the year, but it was not yet winter. They had been working at the preparatory tasks—cheesing, smoking meat, sausaging, repairing harnesses, making rope, remaking loose chairs, rehanging doors with a catch in them. Whatever work there was, that they could do for themselves, they had been doing. But they set it aside for this. For Jobo’s missing button. And Rigg wondered how many of them were coming along just for curiosity, to see if Rigg and Ram Odin were fakes, and how many because they knew perfectly well, or guessed rightly enough, where that button had been lost, and wanted to see if there’d be a housefire today.
Rigg made a show of groping through the air with his eyes closed, though of course he could see his own path from the night before and knew exactly where the button was. He also knew that no other path led near the place since he had put it there, so no one had found it or moved it since then.
Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he whirled and pointed to the exact point where he could see his own path bending over the stone. “There,” he said. “It bounced and lodged itself under a stone about this big.”
“Oh, really,” said Jobo.
“Will you look, or should I?” asked Bak softly. “I think the boy is telling the truth, or he thinks he is. Don’t you hope he’s right? Wouldn’t it be good to find that button here in the road?”