It’s not that he really had all the time in the world—he had more. The world had only a finite number of years. Noxon could have more years than that, if he wanted. He could just keep going back to other times, and live on until he died of old age. People who couldn’t shift time were stuck with the life they had. If somebody came and burned all life from the surface of the world, well, that was too bad; they were cheated out of all their potential life after that.

But how was that different from the way the world worked all the time? You could get sick, you could take a fall, someone could kill you, there might be a flood, a drought, starvation. So many ways to die without living out your normal span. Everybody died of something, didn’t they? The only thing that made the end of Garden so tragic was that everybody met up with the same death at the same time.

No. That wasn’t the only thing. It wasn’t even the main thing. What made the end of the world so terrible, so vile, so urgent to prevent, were two things.

First, nobody would be there to remember. Everything would be lost. You couldn’t leave anyone or anything to continue work you had just begun. Any other death would at least leave a memory of what had once been. But not this one.

Second, and worse, was that somebody did it on purpose. It wasn’t an act of nature, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of chance. It was the murder of a world. Nineteen worlds, nineteen collections of human history and culture.

But during his walk, Noxon didn’t just think deep philosophical thoughts about why it was worth risking his life to try to prevent the end of the world. He also replayed old arguments with Father, pondered questions he had never had a chance to answer, thought about what Rigg might do, if Noxon succeeded in his mission—how he might finish out their shared life. If he might marry and have children, and if so, what wallfold he would choose to do it in, since by then he would know them all.

We are no longer the same person now, Rigg and I, thought Noxon. He is getting to know this world; I am leaving it. He has a future on Garden; I will never come back.