Orson Card - Pathfinder

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“And yet you’re here and now, with me, in this version of time in which they weren’t arrested.”

“So I can’t go back. But what if I can’t stay here, either?” said Param. “What if I let go and I just disappear.”

“Because, second , this is the future right now. I’m the same person who put your hand in his. I have continued to exist, without you, until we rejoined. Take my hand.”

She did.

“Let go of his.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re not going to disappear,” muttered Loaf.

“Neither is she,” said Rigg, “because I’m from that same time and I haven’t disappeared. Right? Everybody agrees that I exist?”

“Annoyingly, yes,” said Loaf.

Param let go of Umbo’s hand. She didn’t disappear. Umbo massaged his own hand with a grimace.

“I’m sorry I held so tightly,” said Param. “But I was terrified.”

“If you want something terrifying, show them how you do disappear,” said Rigg.

Param glared at him for a moment, and then apparently thought better of it and did what he suggested—she vanished.

Loaf was furious. “I told you not to let go of her hand!” he said to Umbo. “Now look what you’ve—”

Param reappeared only a little way from where she had vanished. “I don’t really disappear when I do that,” she said.

“Well, you could have fooled me,” said Loaf.

“I’m always visible to myself,” she said.

“Now everybody take her hand,” said Rigg.

“She only has two,” said Umbo patiently.

“Everybody meaning Umbo and Loaf,” said Rigg. “Take her hands.”

They did. Rigg said, “Umbo, hold out your other hand. Just hold it out. Right there. Now, when she does . . . the thing she does . . . don’t move. Just hold your hand there.”

“Why?” asked Umbo.

“You’ll see.”

Param made a skeptical face. “I don’t like this,” she said.

“They have to know what you can do, and this is the easiest way.”

Param looked away from him with a huffy expression, but even as she was doing so, she vanished. And so did the other two.

Rigg realized—again—that it was hard to remember exactly where in space an invisible object was even a moment ago. Fortunately, he could see Umbo’s path and make a decent guess at where that extended arm must be.

He reached out and passed his hand through the space where Umbo’s arm had to be. Then he did it again, in the other direction.

Almost at once, they all reappeared. Umbo was staring at his own hand, and Loaf was in the process of sitting down very suddenly.

“Don’t do that again,” said Param.

“I don’t need to do it again,” said Rigg. “Judging from their reactions, I think they’re convinced.”

“It’s dangerous to put two objects through each other like that,” said Param. “What if I had slipped? You’d both have lost your arms.”

“Ouch,” murmured Umbo.

“So what happens when a fly passes through you?” asked Loaf.

“Or a gnat, or dust?” said Rigg. “It must have happened, over and over. Apparently her body is able to repel them, or absorb their small amount of mass. Who knows? She’s spent hours at a time that way, and I’ve seen flies and bees and moths pass right through her. She has to have come out of it with one of them inside her before this.”

“It makes me sick,” said Param.

“We have to talk about it,” said Rigg. “We’re all trying to understand it.”

“I mean,” said Param, “that coming out of it with a fly inside me literally makes me sick. Feverish. It takes time to heal the spot where the fly was. Painful and hot for hours. But dust isn’t a problem. Not even a little sand. The only problems are living things, thick walls, metal, and stone.”

“And I’m the only one,” said Loaf, “who can’t do a single interesting thing.”

“You just vanished,” said Rigg. “Even if you weren’t in control of it, you were still invisible, and that’s interesting, that something your size could disappear.”

Loaf glowered and then chuckled. “All right, that’s good enough.”

“You might also be able to do something else that’s very, very important.”

“What’s that?” asked Loaf.

“Get us out of the city,” said Rigg. “There are troops everywhere, and the mobs are dispersing except where they’re fighting fires. Plus, there’s still lots of traffic on all the roads and on the river.”

Loaf put his mind to the problem, as did they all. He thought of going downstream and then changing to a boat coming upstream, but then objected to his own idea. “They don’t know where we’re headed, so they’ll catch us downstream or upstream, if they’re serious about looking for us.”

Param slept again while they talked. Umbo suggested taking her back to their lodgings so she could sleep on a bed, but Loaf reminded him that that was the one place they couldn’t possibly go. “If this General Citizen was spying on us all along, he’ll certainly have somebody watching our rooms.”

Finally they settled into glum silence which turned into mere dozing in the shade, until, after more than an hour, Rigg spoke up. “Soldiers are coming this way. We need to move.”

“They aren’t on to us, are they?” asked Umbo.

“No,” said Rigg. “But they’re patrolling and this is a small enough group that I don’t think they’re doing riot control. They’re going to look for a group of people like us.”

“Can’t we just disappear?” asked Loaf.

“If we have to,” said Rigg. “But as Param already found out, if you have a different way of not being seen, it’s better not to do the invisibility thing. Right now, we can be unseen by walking around that corner there.”

“People are going to start coming out of their houses and shops soon,” said Loaf.

“That’s right,” said Rigg.

“If only you’d come back and warned us sooner,” said Umbo. “We could have left town yesterday.”

“The three of you could,” said Rigg. “But I’d still be stuck here.”

They walked at a leisurely pace up to the corner and rounded it, while Param yawned repeatedly. “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” she said.

“Rigg has that effect on people,” said Loaf. “Wears ’em right out.”

“Why not leave the city yesterday?” asked Rigg.

They looked at him like he was crazy. “Didn’t you just tell us it was impossible?” asked Loaf.

“But what if it isn’t?” asked Rigg. “I attached Param to the past by having her hold your hand. However these abilities of ours work, when human beings join hands they become like a single unit—they move through time together. Who’s to say that I couldn’t have joined you in the past at the same time Param did, by simply continuing to hold her hand, too?”

“But that never happened before—you never actually went into the past,” said Umbo. “Or not completely—part of you stayed here.”

“I never linked to anybody,” said Rigg. “I took a knife, but I didn’t hold on to the man. Did you ever link with somebody in the past?”

Umbo thought back. “I never touched anybody at all, except Loaf, and I brought him with me.”

Rigg was still thinking it through. “I think it’ll be best if we don’t try to find an earlier version of ourselves. I know that causal flows are preserved, but I don’t like tying the whole stream of time into knots if we can help it. We don’t understand the rules so I’d like to keep it simple.”

“So . . . we just pick somebody randomly out of the past and say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I and my three friends hold on to your body parts for a few minutes?’”