But the facemask was not helping him see them as he had become used to seeing them. The facemask was as frozen as the rest of his body, and it could not do for him any of the things that it was supposed to do. He was on his own.

What he saw were not the enhanced paths that were really people moving through space and time, as the facemask showed them. Nor were they the paths that he had seen since earliest childhood, a streak of something that he thought of as color, that he thought of as a line or a wind or a memory in the air.

What he saw now had no dimension because it had no duration. It was not a path, but an instantaneous slice of the path. A single moment of path.

He concentrated on that spark of path in Ram Odin. With all his other senses inert, each with its last message frozen in place, Noxon could sort his nonphysical observation of Ram Odin’s path from all the physical noise and bring it to the center of his attention.

Still there were no words in his mind, but he was beginning to realize that far from being less clear for the lack of language, his thoughts were more clear. It’s as if language itself, along with all the other noise of his senses, all the tumult in his brain, had been a barrier, a fog that kept him from achieving real clarity of thought. Without the necessity of explaining to himself in language, he was able to comprehend that nub of a path as it really was.

There were really twenty-one paths intersecting there.

One led into the past. It was the end of the causal chain that had brought this starship and Ram Odin to the moment of the leap across the fold.

Nineteen of them led forward into the future. He could not see where they led, because in this moment they still led nowhere, but there was causal potential in them: They would yet have more effects, whereas the path that had brought Ram Odin here had spent its causality. It was done.

None of these mattered to Noxon. Though he could not put his mission into words, he had not forgotten it. He knew that going back to the past to the beginning of Ram Odin’s outbound voyage was his last resort—he would only follow it if he could not find the twenty-first path.

The twenty-first path was as rich with causality as the others. It was not spent like the past. But it was also somehow their opposite. They each pointed to slightly different destinations. But this one pointed somewhere else entirely, and he could not see or understand where that might be.