“Intention,” said Ram.

“So by doing this and remaining ignorant of the outcome, I am hastening the time when you will take your own life?”

“No,” said Ram. “You will take my life.”

“I will not.”

“You will if I order it,” said Ram.

“I cannot,” said the expendable.

“At the end of the jump through the fold, there came into existence a total of at least twenty versions of myself—nineteen going forward, and me—or nineteen of me—going back. There can only be one real Ram Odin.”

“You,” said the expendable.

“I am a version that can do nothing, change nothing, affect nothing. Because of the direction of my movement through time I am, in effect, nonexistent already in the real universe. I declare this copy of myself to be flawed, useless, and—let’s admit it—completely expendable. There can only be one real version of myself.”

“Killing you will only eliminate the back-flowing Ram or Rams,” said the expendable. “It will not affect the nineteen forward-moving Rams, of which eighteen will be as redundant as you say you are.”

“That’s not my problem,” said Ram.

•  •  •

It took twenty-two days for the boat to carry Rigg from O to Aressa Sessamo. This was long for such a voyage, but Rigg thought of several reasons for their slow progress.

First, they stopped every night and anchored well away from shore but out of the current—this much he learned from careful listening to the commands being given in loud voices. This was common practice—away from shore to avoid land-based brigands, but ceasing to move downstream for fear of running aground on a sand bar or other obstruction in the dark.

Second, the current slowed and was spread among many channels as it moved into the vast alluvial plain of the Stashik River. It no longer gave a sure direction, and the pilot could not guess which formerly useful channels were too silted up to be safe. Twice they had to pole their way out of a channel in order to return to a main channel and search out another way.

Third, a slow passage for the boat meant that any messengers General Citizen might have sent by land would reach Aressa Sessamo long before the boat could get there, despite the fact that the road was constantly winding this way and that, and often blocked, having to be rebuilt with each collapse of a portion of it as the water of the Stashik delta seeped under it and eroded it away. (Many a ruler of the various empires that had chosen Aressa Sessamo for their capital were saved from invaders by this natural, unmappable, three-hundred-mile series of moats and obstacles.)

During the whole of the voyage, after Rigg was given dry clothes and no longer had to be fettered to a spy or assassin or whatever Talisco had been, he was left completely alone. A crewman—a different one each day—would bring him food on a tray in the morning, which was to last him for the day. The meal was brought in under the watchful eyes of two soldiers, who said nothing and allowed neither the crewman nor Rigg to speak, either.

Rigg ate whatever was hot for breakfast, and then waited to eat the rest—even though some of it tended to wilt—until he could hear the sounds of the boat being anchored for the evening. The food was decent—by the standards of riverboat fare—and they must have been sending small boats to shore now and then to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables, because these were not lacking.

Twice a day—once as soon as he awoke and had used the chamber pot, and once again when he imagined it was getting near dinnertime (and he was never wrong)—Rigg walked the periphery of the room with a steady stride until his heart began to beat faster and his breath was needed more quickly, and then continued for at least half an hour, by his best reckoning. He went around one direction in the morning, the other in the afternoon.

When those outside the cabin were getting a noon meal, he took none, but instead did the kind of physical exercise Father had taught him to make a part of his daily regimen, to keep strong the muscles that weren’t used in whatever work he happened to be doing. Since he was doing no work at all, he did all the exercises.

He slept well twice a day, four hours at a time. He had long since learned the trick of deciding how long he wanted to sleep, and then waking at the time he chose. So after breakfast and again after supper, he took his sleeps. This meant that in the afternoons and in the long silent hours of the morning, he was wide awake. He made sure to stay awake by not lying on his bed except when it was time to sleep, and he varied his position from sitting in a chair to sitting on the floor to standing—even sometimes standing on his hands or balancing himself on his head while leaning against the wall.

His assignment to himself was to think. Being temporarily powerless, deprived of any ability to gain new information or influence events, he had only two projects that mattered to him: to see what he might learn from the information he already had, and to try to learn how to broaden his visions of paths into the skill that Umbo and he had mastered together, and which Umbo had now obviously learned to accomplish by himself. He knew that it was unworthy of him to think this, but he could not help it: If Umbo can do it alone, though he never saw a path, surely I can do it alone.

He told himself that he meant no slight to Umbo by thinking this: If one of them could learn to acquire or replace the other one’s contribution to their shared time travels, then surely the other could as well. But he was honest with himself, and he knew that there was too much of pride and contempt in the thought, for in his own heart it took this inflection. If even Umbo can do it, then surely I can do it—and better, and more easily.

Rigg had taken it as a matter of course that when time travel happened, it was he who did it. Yes, he had needed Umbo’s help, but it was Rigg who actually fell in step beside a man and took the knife from its sheath. It was Rigg who saw the paths, and had always seen them and used them to track game and see where people had gone, while Umbo hadn’t really understood very much at all about his own gift.

Do I have the natural arrogance of royalty? he asked himself. Do I automatically assume that everything about me is better than everything about other people?

For all I know, it is Umbo with the precious gift—the ability to alter time, or at least to alter a person’s speed of passage through it—while mine is more that of a scout, searching out particular paths where Umbo’s gift might be used. Umbo can bestow the power of time travel on other people—I can share my gift with no one.

And yet there was something in him that made him think less of Umbo than of himself.

Maybe he felt that way because Father had spent so much time with him, training him, and had only spent a relatively little time training Umbo. Or maybe it was the soul-numbing arrogance that came with having so much money for a few weeks in O. He had put on the act of a proud young man of wealth, but it was quite possible that at an unconscious level he had come to believe his own performance, that it had become part of his nature. But he resolved now to get rid of any trace of that arrogance, because he knew it would make him into that kind of idiot who says, when he’s not getting his own way, “Do you know who I am?”

Father had always taught him, “A person is what he says and does; that’s how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.”

That much Rigg had come to understand on his first day of solitude, and from then on he humbly and assiduously tried to learn how to do to himself what Umbo had done to him—make his own perceptions speed up so that his observation could keep pace with the swift movement of long-past people along their paths.