Visitors Page 9

  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?”

  Jobo set her lips and marched to the place. She saw the rock—it was the only one “about this big” at that spot. Instead of bending, she only nudged it over with her foot.

  Then she cried out and bent over, reaching for the button.

  And then, because sometimes the universe conspired to make things work out perfectly, the wooden button she had sewn into the place of the missing brass one popped right off the blouse. Because she had bent over so far. Popped right off.

  Jobo cried out and held up the button for all to see. Bak, though, moved behind his wife and carefully gathered the edges of the blouse together so no skin showed. Rigg had never seen a man so relieved and happy.

  “I must have—I thought it was a dream,” said Jobo. “Like you said, I thought I was only dreaming that I came to see if you were coming back, only you weren’t, and then I felt very faint and I bent over all the way, to hang my head and get blood back into it, and that’s when it must have popped off. Oh, how could I have thought it was only a dream, when here’s the button to prove that it was real!”

  Everyone was listening to her in her rapture, watching Bak in his joy. But Rigg had already seen how Ram Odin had moved over to stand beside the mayor and murmur something softly that no one else could hear.

  The mayor heard, and gave a short sharp nod, and then moved away to join the crowd. Ram Odin came back to Rigg.

  “You said to him . . .” Rigg prompted.

  “I said, ‘We saved you this time, but if you ever do it again, I promise you that two houses will burn.’”

  “Which would happen how?”

  “That’s for him to worry about. To watch his own wife and maybe be a little more attentive to her. Or maybe he fears the second house would be some other mistress he’s taken in this village. I have no idea. But it sounded very menacing and fine, didn’t it?”

  “So what have we learned here? Burning up adulterous women in their own house? This children’s news service? The way the best man in town is not the mayor, but everyone knows which one is best and the mayor can’t touch him?”

  “All of that,” said Ram Odin, “and we still have supper tonight, and a bed to sleep in. Though I imagine we’ll be downstairs now in the boy’s and girl’s bedrooms, because I think that Bak will be in Jobo’s bed again.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I saw that the boy’s bed had been slept in, and the girl’s not, and Jobo’s bed in the room with us was the only one big enough for two. It isn’t calculus. It’s barely arithmetic.”

  “So you see paths too.”

  “Of a kind. In my way.”

  And now the attention turned back to them, and suddenly people were crowding around them. But oddly enough, nobody had anything to find, except a child who had buried a favorite doll, and Rigg easily pointed to the place under a shade tree where the child had knelt for a time a year ago. The doll was there, half-rotted away, but now the children had far more reason to rejoice than over a brass button. Finder of Lost Toys! How his fame would spread.

  CHAPTER 6

  Undoings

  Umbo listened to Loaf and Leaky as they planned the journey to get Leaky a facemask of her very own. He had misgivings, but there was no point in arguing with them. They were going to go, and they needed Umbo because the way Rigg set up the rules, they could only go through the Wall if two of them were together. Two, that is, of the original party, which had included Umbo and Loaf, but not Leaky.

  “The good thing about a journey to the Wall right now,” said Loaf, “is that nobody’s looking for us yet.”

  “I’m still not used to this,” said Leaky. “You say half the kingdom is looking for you, because you escaped from this General Citizen and then helped the queen’s daughter and Rigg escape from the People’s Revolutionary Council, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

  It was only then that Umbo realized that their journey might not be such an easy thing. “I know another thing that hasn’t happened yet,” said Umbo.

  “Your beard?” said Loaf.

  “Rigg hasn’t taken command of the ships yet. That won’t happen for a year, almost. So if we go to the Wall now, the ships’ computers won’t know to let up on the Wall.”

  “What’s a computer?” asked Leaky.

  “If I understood it,” said Loaf, “I’d tell you. Whatever it is, it talks but the voice comes out of nowhere, and if it feels like it, it tells you things you need to know. But not enough things you need to know.”

  “Did you hear me?” asked Umbo.

  “I’m thinking about that,” said Loaf. “And I think what we’ll do is go to the Wall, and then you take us into the future, after the queen and General Citizen have left, and you’ll take us through then. That’s after Rigg’s order, isn’t it?”

  “But I can’t do that,” said Umbo. “Go into the future.”

  “You do it all the time,” said Loaf. “When we all went back to watch the battle between the bare humans and the facemasks, you took us all into the future.”

  “No,” said Umbo. “I stayed in the future and brought you all back to me. I was the anchor.”

  “But when you went to the Visitors’ ship, that was years in the future.”

  “And I didn’t do that,” said Umbo. “Param did. When she slices time, she can take us into the future very quickly. By thousands of tiny little skips. Then I brought us back to the past in one big leap. That’s just what each of us can do.”

  “Rigg skips into the future, doesn’t he?” asked Loaf.

  “Noxon is trying to learn how,” said Umbo. “And Rigg and Noxon have facemasks. So maybe they can do it, but I can’t. And I think they can’t, either, because Rigg has always gone into the past by connecting with somebody’s path, and the paths are only in the past.”

  “So we can’t go?” asked Leaky.

  “I think we can,” said Loaf. “I think Umbo just doesn’t know all that he can do yet. I think where his time-shifting is concerned, he’s like a baby who’s become really good at crawling, but he still hasn’t tried to get up on his hind legs and walk.”

  “I wish you were right,” said Umbo.

  “I think you should try it,” said Loaf. “Go into the past, and then come right back to now, while now is still fresh in your mind. I’m not talking about going a year into the past or even a day. Go a minute into the past, then take two steps away and try to pop right back.”

  “Then there’d be two of me,” said Umbo.

  “Only for a minute,” said Loaf.

  “But even if you couldn’t jump back to the present, you’d only have a minute to wait,” said Leaky. “It makes so much sense.”

  “I have a better idea,” said Umbo. “I have an errand to run that’s only a few weeks ago. I’ll go do that, and then either I’ll live through those weeks and come back, or I’ll jump back, but no matter how much time I spend, I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Loaf looked at him suspiciously. “What errand? You’re not going to go dig up the jewels again, are you?”

  “It’s not a prank. But I have some unfinished business back in Fall Ford.” The moment h
e mentioned his hometown, he knew it was a mistake.

  “If you’re planning to settle accounts with your father,” said Loaf. “He’s still bigger than you are. Well, maybe not. But leave well enough alone.”

  “Loaf,” said Leaky. “He isn’t going back to get even.”

  Umbo didn’t want to discuss this anymore. “See you within a few hours.”

  As he said this, he heard Leaky finish her thought. “He’s going back to save his brother’s life after all.”

  Then Umbo was gone, so he didn’t have to hear Loaf shout at him about how dangerous it was to try to do that. He knew it was dangerous. But he had to try.

  Ironic that it was Leaky who remembered Kyokay’s death, though she hardly knew Umbo, while Loaf, who had traveled with him for years, thought Umbo would go home for revenge. But maybe it wasn’t about who knew Umbo better. Maybe it was just that Loaf was thinking of the kind of thing he himself might do—punish someone who had done wrong—while Leaky was better at remembering personal things, like how Kyokay had died right before Umbo’s eyes.

  Umbo jumped back easily enough to a time before he had left Fall Ford with Rigg. The real problem was that he was still in Leaky’s Landing, and he had to get upriver. It had been a long hike to here, and that was with Rigg, a skilled trapper, providing food along the way.

  On the other hand, Umbo had a little money now. Compared to then, in fact, he had a lot of money.

  He was in the kitchen yard of Loaf’s and Leaky’s roadhouse and he took a moment to inspect his coins to make sure none of them were new—so new that they wouldn’t even be minted for a few more years. He didn’t need someone to accuse him of counter­feiting.

  Then he heard the kitchen door open and he realized that Leaky would have no idea who he was. And if she saw his face and took him for a thief, she’d remember him when he and Rigg showed up a few months from now, and would never let them in.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t far from the fence, and it was no problem to vault over it. He didn’t even drop his moneypurse or snag it on anything. All she could possibly have seen was his back. And since he was now at least a hand taller than he had been when Leaky first met him, she’d never connect the boy Umbo with the thief she surprised in the kitchen garden.

  If it was Leaky. For all he knew, it was a patron staggering to the privy to void himself. But it would have been stupid to turn and look to see who it was, showing his face.

  He walked between a couple of buildings to come out on the road, and as he did, he jumped another day back in time, so he could walk right past Loaf’s and Leaky’s roadhouse without fear of her seeing him and calling him a thief.

  There were two boats docked at Leaky’s Landing, but they were both heading downriver. That was all right. Umbo knew he had plenty of time to get upriver. He could wait.

  As he waited, he thought through the dangers Loaf would surely have warned him of. Saving Kyokay would not be easy. If Umbo saved him by bodily preventing him from going up to the top of the falls, then Rigg wouldn’t have needed to drop all his pelts to try to save the boy from falling, and therefore Umbo—younger Umbo—wouldn’t have “seen” him push Kyokay from the cliff, and so Rigg wouldn’t have been forced to leave town in a hurry, and Umbo certainly wouldn’t have felt any need to go with him to make amends for having nearly gotten him mobbed, and . . .

  A part of his mind insisted that none of that could possibly change, because—well, because it hadn’t. But they had made plenty of changes before, and as best they understood the rules of how this sort of thing worked, whoever made the change continued to exist, even if his own past was obliterated. But this change would be Umbo’s alone, so he was the only one who would be preserved.

  It wasn’t till the next day—only a few hours before Leaky, or someone else, would catch a glimpse of Umbo jumping over the fence—that a boat came upriver and tied up.

  “Not going all the way to Fall Ford,” said the pilot.

  “How far then?” asked Umbo.

  “Bear’s Den Crossing,” he said.

  “Never heard of it,” said Umbo.

  “I have,” said the pilot, looking irritated.

  “Left bank or right?” asked Umbo.

  “It’s Bear’s Den Crossing,” said the pilot. “If you don’t like which side of the river I tie up on, you can cross to the other side.”

  “Oh, you mean like you can ford the river at Fall Ford?” asked Umbo.

  The pilot did know the river top to bottom, so he got the snide joke. Fall Ford hadn’t had a usable ford in centuries, but nobody bothered to change the name. The pilot glowered. “Every smart remark just raises the price.”

  “Then I’ll try to make it up to you by being useful on the trip,” said Umbo.

  The pilot looked him up and down, sizing him up. “Slender arms.”

  “I sure couldn’t pole the boat alone,” said Umbo. “But I know how to poke and push and lift a stick, and I also know how to sit the prow and watch for debris coming down and call a warning in plenty of time.”

  “So you’ve made the voyage before.”

  “Only once. Not enough to be an expert like you, sir,” said Umbo, “but there were many days of work, and I worked hard all those days.”

  The pilot named a price, then, and promised some of it back if Umbo worked as he claimed. And that was that.

  Except that for some reason, Umbo was reluctant to give his right name. “Ram Odin,” he said, when the man asked. And there was a case to be made that whatever was done in this world, Ram Odin had a hand in it.

  Umbo worked hard. It was a pleasure, and it kept his mind off of brooding about the impossibility of what he meant to try. Somehow he had to let Kyokay do everything he had done that got him killed, up to and including his fall off the cliff. There was no way that time-shifting could allow Umbo to catch him partway down. But there were some things he might try.

  The key was to find a path to the foot of the falls without passing through Fall Ford itself, where, even though he was taller, he was bound to be recognized, to the confusion of all. But the road was on the right bank, along with Fall Ford. Umbo had never heard of any kind of road on the left bank, not paralleling the river. If he had Rigg’s ability to see paths, then he could easily find paths through the thick forest. But he couldn’t see paths. Couldn’t fly, either. He might have a knife with the ship-controlling jewels in the hilt, but the Ramfold starship was a long way beyond Upsheer Cliff, and he didn’t think that if he called for the flyer he’d get much of a response.

  By the time they got to Bear’s Den Crossing, he had earned the respect of the pilot and the other boatmen. He had eaten what they ate, and worked as hard as anyone, and made no mistakes. He even fended, by himself, one big water-soaked log that didn’t become visible through the morning mist until it was almost too late to avoid a collision. Nobody would have blamed him for not seeing it, the mist was that thick. Instead they thanked him well for quick action and a perfect placement of the ten-foot fending pole.

  So when it was time to settle up with the pilot, the man was better than his word. He gave him back his entire fare. “I was planning to hold back only the cost of what you ate,” said the pilot, “but the morning you saved my boat, you earned your board. The only reason I’m not paying you a wage is that the owner only authorized me for three boatmen besides myself, and you make the fourth.”

  “I meant to pay and didn’t expect anything back, sir,” said Umbo. “I might have saved the boat, but that was my duty that morning, I think, and along with you and your crew and cargo, I also saved myself. But I thank you for being an upright man, and I take back anything I might have said disparaging about Bear’s Den Crossing.”

  “You can disparage it all you like,” said the pilot, smiling. “Won’t make it any better or worse than it is. And as to your wish to get to Fall Ford, I can’t say we’re ex
actly close, but come morning, if you happen to be in the middle of the river, you’ll catch a glimpse of Upsheer Cliff afar off to the south. It’s still two days on the water, and a good deal more than that afoot, I dare say. But within sight of the cliff is not very far, I think.”

  “I think you’re right, sir,” said Umbo. “And now will you let me give you back this fenten, not as fare, but for you to buy a few rounds of ale for my crewmates, at a time you think it won’t interfere with their duty?”

  “I will let you do that indeed, and tonight is that night, and they’ll raise a mug in your honor. I take it you don’t mean to be there yourself, or you’d do the buying.”

  “My journey is long, and I’ll be setting out today, there still being many hours of light. And you see why you shouldn’t have paid me—I wasn’t there for the loading, and I won’t be here for the unloading either.”

  “Now I see that you are a slacker,” said the pilot. “Now be off before I call you a generous man and other such names.”

  Umbo left the small wharf with a light heart and a brisk foot, though it was strange to be walking on solid ground again. He had been so long in the company of Rigg or Loaf—or Param, who had spent the whole time before she proposed marriage disparaging him—that he hadn’t really known that he knew how to talk to a good man and be taken for a good man himself. His height explained them taking him for a man now, but as for the “good,” Umbo had earned that himself. He had been so long treated like nothing that he had started half-believing it himself.