Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

  And then he was gone.

  What could Umbo do but dry himself off and think about what his future self had said? Yes, that was a disaster. Of course Kyokay would know that it was Umbo who saved him. He wouldn’t be in any shape to notice how much taller and stronger he was. But Umbo couldn’t blame himself for rushing Kyokay home. It’s what they always did when Kyokay injured himself. Rush him home, take him to Mother, then let Father yell and beat on somebody for not watching Kyokay, even though everybody else knew that you couldn’t watch Kyokay because he would do what he wanted no matter what.

  Future Umbo was wrong, though. In the rush of emotion after saving Kyokay, he had hurried home to Mother and that was the disastrous mistake. Not saving Kyokay, but taking him home.

  Now that Umbo knew he could save Kyokay, he wasn’t going to unsave him because future Umbo was a hysterical mess. He had just watched Father beat his younger self. It made Umbo sick with fury even now. He hated that man—not his real father at all. Just Tegay, master cobbler, wife beater, child beater, and evil fool.

  But I didn’t see it. I didn’t just save my brother from the water. I can think more clearly, and I’m going to save Kyokay and leave the future unchanged.

  It meant he would skip a bit of practice swimming to make a few more preparations. He would need more blankets. He would need a much heavier knife than his everyday knife, or the jeweled knife that he rarely used and feared to break. But that was a simple matter, to swim across the river in the night and steal the heavy leather-cutting knife from Father’s—Tegay’s—workbench. Sharp. Yes, Tegay was kind and caring to his tools. Anything it touched, it would cut.

  It might also rust, since it got plenty of underwater time as Umbo swam back across. When he stole blankets, though, he had to use the boat to ferry them, then use the pulley line to haul it back across to the far side. Couldn’t have wet blankets for this.

  He cached everything near the ferry, then went back to swimming and watching.

  He saw the tale unfold—Kyokay running to the stone stair, Umbo following after, but too far away. Kyokay laughing, knowing he was doing something stupid and wrong, but delighting in it.

  But there was now an added complication. Umbo knew that when he had done this the first time, everything had worked out well enough—broken bones, but alive, not drowned. Now, though, besides trying to concentrate on the things he had planned to do, he had this nagging doubt: Am I doing it exactly as I did it before? Or slower? Or wrong somehow? Will I fail now, though I succeeded before?

  Kyokay fell. Umbo slowed him so much he was afraid he might exhaust himself so he’d have nothing left to slow time for himself as he swam. But how could he do less than his strongest, fiercest effort? What good would it do to save strength for later, if he didn’t keep Kyokay alive now?

  Kyokay twisted himself in midair so his legs would enter the water first. Smart boy, thought Umbo. Don’t get your head anywhere near those rocks.

  Umbo plunged into the water and swam directly to where Kyokay was being churned by the water. His legs were broken, feebly waving around with extra bendings. And a dark patch spreading from one leg made it clear that a bone had broken the skin. Can’t worry about infection now.

  He got to Kyokay and the boy was able to grip his hand, then cling to his shoulders as Umbo swam strongly to shore. He dragged him up out of the water and realized at once that he couldn’t leave that bone sticking out. He used the jeweled knife to slice open Kyokay’s trouser and then he gripped the boy strongly and pulled the bottom of his leg away far enough to put the jutting bone back in place. Then he tied strips of Kyokay’s own trouser leg around the wound to keep the leg from moving and to keep the wound closed. It was a ragged job and if it wasn’t fixed soon, if the bones knit back together as Umbo had left them, Kyokay would never walk right again. But he was alive.

  Kyokay bore the pain well, but the reason was clear. He was trembling, then shaking with cold. The numbness helped him bear the crude bone-setting without screaming. But now Umbo had to get him warm and dry.

  As for himself, he was used to the cold water, after all that practice, and the exertions involved in setting and binding the leg had kept him warm. So he worked on getting Kyokay as warm as possible.

  Some of the shivering probably came from shock. But Umbo couldn’t do anything about that. If he was going to get help for Kyokay, he’d have to move fast.

  He carried the boy swiftly, knowing that every stop caused him pain. But he had to get away before anybody from Fall Ford started searching for the body of the boy who had fallen.

  He laid Kyokay on the gravel landing area at the ferry, then went for the cache of blankets and leather-cutting knife. With the blankets he made a kind of bed and then lifted Kyokay and put him back down in the bottom of the boat. With Kyokay’s weight, the boat was now firm on the gravel, though the current tugged at the other end. The rope connecting the boat to the iron ring was slack. So he could cut it without the boat getting away from him.

  When the rope was cut—and it took only two swipes with the leather-cutter—Umbo thought of throwing the knife into the middle of the river, so Tegay could never again use it to beat a child. But no, that was one of the tools with which Tegay provided for the family. And in this world, Tegay had not beaten Umbo’s brains out. If this worked, would never beat young Umbo again. So Umbo laid the knife in plain sight in the middle of the gravel, where anyone using the ferry would stumble across it. It would get back to Tegay’s bench.

  Then Umbo pushed the boat out into the water. The current took it so swiftly that Umbo had a few moments of fright as he struggled to climb up and over the side to get in it. Nothing deft about that operation. But he finally got into the boat and then laid the rower’s plank across the middle and sat with his legs straddling Kyokay, who wasn’t shivering as badly now, so maybe it had been only the cold and not the shock of the wound that had him shaking so much before.

  “How did you get down into the water so fast?” Kyokay asked.

  “You fell very slowly,” said Umbo.

  “Yes,” said Kyokay in wonderment. “I did. But I still hit very hard.”

  And then he closed his eyes. With all that pain, he couldn’t be asleep. Unconscious, then. Exhausted. Maybe in shock after all.

  But all Umbo could do was row like a demon. The current was fast—Umbo wanted to go faster. What would have been several days’ journey upstream might be only a couple of hours going down. He had to get to Bear’s Den Crossing before dark, or he’d float right past it and then Kyokay really would be in a dangerous position.

  It took till the last light of dusk, but Umbo saw the wharf and tied up at it. The boat he had come up on was gone—of course it was gone, the owner had to keep the boat moving. But when Umbo carried Kyokay into the tavern where he had bought his provisions for the journey to Upsheer, whom should he see at one of the tables but the pilot he had parted with so warmly.

  At once the pilot was on his feet, clearing away dishes to let Umbo lay Kyokay on his own table. A bonesetter was called for, and a stitcher too, once they saw the blood-soaked rags binding the wound. The pilot asked no more questions after Umbo said, “I saw him fall, and I knew nowhere to take him but here.”

  “What about Fall Ford?” asked the pilot.

  “We were already downstream of it,” said Umbo. “And you—your boat is gone.”

  “My brother took it back. I’m here waiting for my wife to deliver my firstborn. If she doesn’t hurry, I’ll take the boat you came in and catch up with my brother.”

  Umbo didn’t want to lie to this good man, but he knew he had to, for the future’s sake. “This poor boy thinks I’m his brother. Kept calling me by his name. Bobo or something like that.”

  “Whereas you’re ‘Ram Odin.’” The pilot’s tone made it clear that he didn’t believe that was Umbo’s name, and probably never had.

&n
bsp; “On the river, sir, a man is what he does, don’t you think?”

  The pilot only grinned at him and kept working on warming up the boy’s arms and legs.

  Next morning, Umbo left a good deal of money with the taverner with instructions to send someone upriver to tell the folk in Fall Ford that they should come fetch one of their children. Umbo knew it would insult the pilot to offer payment to him, and that the man would look in on Kyokay as if he were his own nephew, if not son.

  When Umbo got to his little boat, he saw that it had been provisioned for a downriver voyage. A long one. And someone had untied the rope that had once connected the boat to the ring. So it was no longer obvious that it was a stolen ferryboat.

  The man didn’t know whether my business was fair or foul, but he abetted me in trust that it wouldn’t bring him harm.

  I already repaid him by not undoing the course of events that brought me and Rigg together, and Param, and Loaf and Olivenko. Now it’s their job to go ahead and save the world. I saved my brother’s life, and that’s all I can do, and more than I should have attempted, but now it’s done.

  CHAPTER 7

  Paths and Slices

  Noxon wasn’t despairing yet, exactly. He and Param had accomplished quite a lot. The easiest part was for Noxon to master the stuttering forward jumps that Param did when she sliced time, so that he could race through hours and days in just a few minutes.

  But he was not a whit closer to being able to do it backward. Not simply going into the past—he could already make backward leaps just by attaching to some path and joining that person or animal in its time. What he couldn’t do was get time flowing the other direction and then slice through it in that direction. He wasn’t even sure it was possible.

  And Param, for her part, was now better at what she already did—she learned a bit from the way Noxon’s facemask helped him slice time in greater and greater swaths. Her gift really was the most remarkable, because alone of the timeshapers she had always been able to make jumps forward rather than back.

  The drawback was that her forward jumps were only a fraction of a second at a time; but she did a lot of them in rapid succession, and could keep it up for hours. When she did, though, she remained trapped in the place where she was when she began the process—not visible to others, but if they knew where she was when she disappeared, they could make a good guess where she was now. Her physical movements through space were greatly slowed while she was slicing time, and if someone brought something dense, like a metal bar, and passed it into her body and held it there, she would burn up slowly from the heat of it. And if she came out of her time-slicing with the metal in her, it would tear her apart.

  But as Noxon’s facemask helped him learn to make longer jumps between slices, and Param learned to do it along with him, it meant that even with a metal bar held in the midst of her body, she spent far less time with it, and surely the would-be murderer was bound to conclude that nothing was happening because she wasn’t where he thought she would be.

  If they accomplished nothing else, that was a good thing. It made her safer. It also meant that when they had need of her ability to race forward through time, she could do it more quickly and efficiently.

  But it wasn’t enough. Noxon had half-expected to fail at his task, learning to reverse the flow of time for himself. But he had not expected to fail at helping Param learn how to slice into the past. She wouldn’t be reversing the flow of time—in the moments she spent in realtime, she and her body and clothing and whatever else she held with her would still be progressing in the normal direction of timeflow.

  She followed him so easily when Noxon sliced forward with facemask efficiency. But when he jumped backward while holding her hand, she had no idea how he had done it. And when he jumped backward in time without holding her, he simply left her behind.

  “It’s all right,” she consoled him. Time after time she said it, and Noxon believed she meant it. She, too, had not expected to succeed.

  They began to spend more of their time just talking, either about their lives in such different upbringings, or about things they had learned in their studies. They had no one else to talk to, most of the time, because even though they had to depend on the Larfolders for their food, they never knew what time—what year, what month, what day—they would be in when their bodies told them it was time to eat.

  Fortunately, they could always slice forward until they saw somebody preparing a meal, and it was a part of Larfolder culture that they always welcomed the unexpected mealtime guest.

  One day, after such a meal, which had, in Larfolder fashion, turned into a storytelling session, with lots of singing and chanting of old songs and legends and stories, Noxon could see that Param was tired. “We’ve had a long day,” he said to the Larfolders.

  The Larfolders laughed, and one of them said, “How would you know?”

  That was a good question. And yet it was one that didn’t really matter. They ate when they were hungry and slept when they were tired—those were their times and days and nights, since no calendar or clock could contain them.

  Noxon walked away with his sister. She held his arm and leaned on him. “I’m going to sleep as we walk,” she said. “And when I wake up tomorrow, I’m going to make you take me back eight hours or ten so I can sleep that time again.”

  Noxon chuckled. “The Larfolders seem to make the most of their time on land. They have no voices underwater, and no ­spoken language. They come here to remember being human.”

  “Oh, I love being with them,” said Param. She shuddered. “Their singing drowns out the noise, as much as is possible.”

  “The noise?”

  She shook her head. “I’m so tired I was almost talking to myself.”

  “But I want to know. The Larfolders aren’t all that noisy. It’s not as if they have drums or horns.”

  “Oh, not their sounds. I love the sounds of life. And nature. And civilization. Wind in the trees, frogs croaking, crickets chirping. But also crowds of people, the bustle of the city. I love that! I wish I had lived in Odinfold when billions of people lived so close together in their great cities. But now they didn’t even exist. They never happened. That makes me sad.”

  Noxon was almost turned aside to try to console her sadness. But not this time. He was intrigued by her talk of noises. “So there’s no noise in a big city?”

  She laughed. “Of course there is. That’s why I never talk about this thing I call noise. It’s not really noise because I’m the only one aware of it. At Flacommo’s, though, I loved to spend my days in remote parts of the house where nobody had been in years. It was so much quieter there. Never silent, but . . . you know.”

  Noxon thought he did, though he tried to conceal his excitement, for fear of dashing her hopes if he turned out to be wrong. “So you needed to be away from people.”

  “Oh, people are fine, people drown out the noise! All the talking and clattering, it was such a relief. But in those rooms where people gathered all the time, the noise was almost unbearable when those rooms were empty. It’s as if the rooms stored up all the noises that had ever been in them, and when there was nothing to distract me, I had all these . . . tunes or rhythms or whatever they were.”

  “So slicing time was how you got away.”

  She shook her head against his shoulder and gave one laugh. “No,” she said. “That was the worst of all. Not a breath of real sound. Just those memories of all the stored-up sounds. I couldn’t even sing to myself, except silently in my own head and that didn’t actually help much.”

  “When you’re slicing time, there can’t possibly be any sound,” said Noxon.

  “I know that,” said Param. “I think my schooling was at least as good as yours, privick boy.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. I had Ramex teaching me.”

  “So did I, under another name. Though
not as much as he was with you, of course.”

  “Did you ever tell him about these noises?”

  “I only told you by accident. Like I said, they aren’t real noises. I think they’re a sign that I’m crazy.”

  “The way I see paths everywhere,” said Noxon. “Paths that nobody else sees. I’m definitely out of my mind.”

  “Yes, just like that,” said Param. “Except that it turns out your paths are real. People really did move through the world right where you see the paths.”

  “But I can’t shut out the paths by closing my eyes or turning my back,” said Noxon. “They’re still there. But I don’t really see them, it’s another sense entirely. So they never get in the way of my seeing things that are really there.”

  “I know,” she said. “Just like my noises. They’re always there, more in some places than in others, but they don’t stop me from hearing real noises and sounds and talking and music. And plugging my ears doesn’t change them in any way. Only going to rooms with less noise stored up makes the sheer clangor of it ease up and give me some peace.”

  Noxon stopped walking. “I’m so glad you were tired enough to tell me this,” he said.

  “Yes, just one more thing that’s wrong with poor Param.” She said it wryly, but Noxon knew she also meant it.

  “I don’t think it’s anything wrong,” said Noxon. “I’ve always told you that I don’t see the paths with my eyes. I just compare it to seeing. I use the words of seeing to describe the way I sense them, because there are no words for pathsight.”

  Param was not slow. “But how could I hear a path?”

  “How can I see a tune?” asked Noxon. “For all I know, we’re using different words, different comparisons, to talk about the exact same thing. As if somebody were trying to describe an orange to someone who had never eaten one. You might try to explain the look of it. Or you might try to talk about the taste or the smell or the feel of it in your hand. But it’s still an orange that you’re talking about.”