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  “You already looked?” asked Ram Odin.

  “Turned the place upside down and shook it,” said Bak. Several people laughed. The man had a way with words and people liked him. “But buttons can get themselves into places. I know how that is. Button flies off, goes into a place and won’t come out.”

  It dawned on Rigg that the mayor might be the bossy one, and maybe the richest one. But if people had their pick, they liked Bak more than they liked the mayor, and the mayor knew it. If Bak wanted these strangers to look for that button, the mayor knew better than to try to interfere.

  And sure enough, the mayor shook his head. “They won’t find it cause there’s no such thing as magical finding, but if you want to feed them you do it.”

  Since that was clearly what Bak already meant to do, all the mayor did was turn Bak’s intention into the mayor’s command. And everybody knew it. The mayor walked away and Bak reached out a hand to them.

  “Come to my house. Sit at my table for the noonday meal. That’s where I last saw the button on her blouse, if that’s a help to you. And you’ll see how she does in the kitchen, fixing up the food, if that helps you.”

  “Oh, so I have to do the work?” asked Jobo. “My button, my loss, but I have to fix up their noonses?”

  “I know where the bread is,” said Bak, “and I can boil eggs.”

  “I don’t want you cooking in my kitchen!” snapped Jobo. “I married the clumsiest oaf in the village, and I’m not having you breaking eggs all over everything.”

  “Fixing to boil them is all,” said Bak mildly.

  But Rigg saw how the people didn’t much like her, and liked him fine. Her snapping at him was a shame to herself, but not to Bak, because clearly none of the folk thought he deserved it. They kept their silence though. It was between woman and man, how they talked to each other.

  Rigg and Ram Odin followed to a good-sized house. Not a poor family. It was a house they had passed. Rigg could see Jobo’s path going in and out, as also Bak’s. And children, but they must be grown because the paths went away and didn’t come back.

  “Children still living here?” asked Ram Odin. “Big house like this.”

  “My parents had seven that lived,” said Bak. “We had two. The boy went off to seek his fortune, poor lad, and the girl married out. I fear they didn’t like it here.”

  Rigg wondered if it was marital squabbling that drove them away, or simply wanderlust. Or, in the girl’s case, maybe love.

  “Think the boy found it?” asked Ram Odin. “His fortune?”

  “If he has, he didn’t come back yet to share it,” said Bak.

  His wife made a glottal stop to show exasperation. “He’s only two years gone,” she said to him.

  “A year to get a fortune, a year to waste it, and then come home,” said Bak. “I expect him any day.”

  “I’m going to see our daughter one of these days,” said Jobo. “Her husband writes twice a year.”

  “She’s afar off?” asked Rigg.

  “As far as an honest girl could go,” said Jobo mournfully. “Three villages yonder.” She pointed toward the south. Apparently the fourth village that direction would only lure dishonest girls. Ram Odin had been right. Their world was small.

  During lunch, Ram Odin kept them entertained with lies about life on the road. Maybe some of the stories were from Ram Odin’s earlier life, or maybe they were well-known tales from Earth. They were all new to Rigg, but he also didn’t care, because he was tracing all Jobo’s movements.

  In the old days, he could only see paths, until Umbo slowed down time—or sped up his perceptions, they had never really decided about that. But “seeing paths” wasn’t the right term, because he could do it with his eyes closed, and could examine the paths behind him, or beyond walls.

  Now, with the facemask, he could speed up his own perceptions, with more precision than was possible with Umbo’s help. The paths were never truly paths now, if he looked at them aright, but a continuous blurred shape of the person moving about. And if he sped himself up more, the blurs became the person clearly doing whatever it was he did at that hour, of that day, in that place.

  So he knew that as soon as the hamlet was emptied out, Jobo slipped along behind the houses till she came to the ­mayor’s house, and went in through the back door. She found the mayor waiting for her in his own upstairs bedroom—she seemed to know the way—and that was where all her buttons popped off in his eagerness. Afterward, she stayed to sew them all back on again, but there were only four. The mayor was all over that room, trying to find where the fifth button had bounced.

  Rigg closed his eyes and slowed things down—or sped himself up—even more. Now they barely moved, but he could see the buttons pop off one by one. The ones they found easily. And that fifth one. It took a bounce under the wardrobe and must have lodged on some slat or in some corner because it didn’t hit the floor again. Looking under the wardrobe wouldn’t help. Even sliding it out, unless you tipped it or hit it to dislodge the button.

  Well, Bak’s worst suspicions were certainly confirmed, and if Rigg found the button in the mayor’s house—well, that would only be possible if the mayor let him in.

  But if I make for his house, he’ll bar me from it. That won’t help—Bak will only be all the more certain that his wife and the mayor were up to something.

  Ram Odin must have guessed as much as Rigg now knew, because he was telling the story of a woman caught in adultery who had to wear a red letter on her clothing, always, the first letter of “adultery” in the language of the place, only when she died, the letter was also a scar on her chest, as if the letter had burned its way into her heart.

  “Burning is right,” said Bak. “A woman who does that sin when she’s married and a mother, she’s burning down her own house.”

  “It’s a terrible thing and nobody does it anymore,” said Jobo hotly.

  “Only ten years since it was done.”

  “In Stinkville, not here,” said Jobo.

  “Well, that’s why they burned her up in her own house in Stinkville, and not here.”

  “Is Stinkville really the name of the place?” asked Rigg. Thinking, meanwhile, That’s your punishment for adultery? To burn down the house with the woman inside?

  “Well they don’t call it that,” said Jobo. “And they have a choice name for us, too, you may be sure.”

  “What do you call this hamlet?” asked Rigg.

  “Not everything has a name,” said Bak.

  “We call it home,” said Jobo. “And I hate talk about evil old customs like house burning.”

  “It always made a kind of sense to me,” said Bak. “His wife sleeps with another man, the husband’s house is already destroyed and his wife is already dead to him. Burning down the house just makes it real to everybody.”

  “They don’t burn down the house around adulterous men.”

  Bak merely looked puzzled. “Why would they? He’s not going to get pregnant with another bird’s egg!”

  “You hear how he quotes foolish old sayings!” said Jobo hotly. “Everybody thinks he’s so nice, but he’s got a cold temper, cold but deep and it never stops till he’s satisfied.”

  She was afraid of him. He bore her tongue well enough, but if he thought he had suffered real injury, he’d seek justice. That’s what she feared, and that was what she was trying to impress on Rigg. Just in case he actually was a finder.

  Rigg knew he couldn’t find the button or the consequences would be terrible. Or at least he couldn’t openly find it where it was.

  “After lunch, can I lie down and let the finding happen?” asked Rigg.

  “He needs to be all alone, except for me,” said Ram Odin.

  Including you, you old weasel, thought Rigg. But he didn’t dare to contradict him—if they ever disputed each other’s story, it would cast
doubt upon all.

  So a half hour later, they were shut up together in a room with a nice bed, by local standards, and Rigg explained in a soft voice where the button was.

  “Don’t want to see this house burn down,” said Ram Odin.

  “Not going to,” said Rigg. “I’ll get the button and find it somewhere else. Excuse me for a minute.”

  He took off his sandals—they were noisy on the wood floors—and jumped back in time to the middle of the night. Sure enough, there was Jobo asleep in the bed, but not Bak. He must be sleeping somewhere else in the house.

  Rigg crept softly from the room, out of the house—through an open window so he didn’t have to open the door—and along behind houses, following the same path that Jobo had used on haying day. He got up right behind the mayor’s house and then latched on to Jobo’s path as she left on that day. In an instant it was daytime, and Jobo was rushing away, the gap in her blouse showing skin between the bottom button and the three at the top. She had closed the door carefully, but Rigg knew the mayor would soon give up his continuing button search. Sure enough, the front door of the house soon opened and the mayor went out that way.

  Now Rigg could go in and find the button. The house was empty and there was no one to hear him open the door and go up the stairs.

  He felt around under the wardrobe. He could feel the slats underneath and knew that the button must be resting atop one of them. But he couldn’t twist his hand around to find it.

  Can’t go tipping the wardrobe. What if it fell over? It’s a heavy piece of furniture.

  So Rigg sighed and watched the scene from haying day four times, until he knew exactly where the button bounced. Then he positioned his hand to catch the button and jumped back about an hour to the exact moment—got it!—and shifted right back to when the house was empty. He was there so fleetingly, thanks to the quick reflexes that the facemask gave him, that even if the mayor’s mind hadn’t been on other things, he would only have seen him for an eyeblink. And Jobo’s back was to him.

  Holding the button in his hand, Rigg wondered, not for the first time, if the reason the button never made a sound and came to rest on the floor under the wardrobe was that Rigg had caught it. But he hadn’t caught it until it already turned up missing.

  That was where thinking about the changes they made always led—to the edge of paradoxical madness. They had long since agreed that nothing was circular. Things couldn’t cause themselves. So the button really had been lodged up there, ­setting in motion this entire dilemma, and now it wasn’t there, but only because Rigg, at the end of the chain of events, had gone back to fetch it.

  He went out the back door, closed it carefully, and then jumped back to the night he arrived at the mayor’s house. Now, in dark of night, he walked to the main street and followed the many paths out beyond the town toward the hayfields. He knew that because that’s where everyone’s paths had gone on haying day. He picked a stone beside the track and pushed the button under it so it wasn’t visible at all, but still might believably have bounced there.

  Then he walked back to Bak’s and Jobo’s house, climbed in the window, and went back up to Jobo’s room. On the way he saw that Bak was sleeping in one of the children’s bedrooms. His son’s bedroom. The door was closed; Rigg saw him only by his path. But he could see, with his path-sense, that Bak slept little. Could see him lying there staring at the ceiling. Maybe not right now, but for long hours of the night, tonight and the other nights since the button was missed and he left Jobo’s bed.

  And there was Jobo, faithless woman. Rigg, with his knowledge of all people’s paths, knew well enough how common, and how uncommon, such actions were. More common in the city, less common in small villages, where everyone was known and it was hard to do anything unseen. It really took some ingenuity for Jobo and the mayor to betray their spouses here. And it had only happened twice, two months apart—Rigg knew that. Perhaps after this, never again.

  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.