“Very useful,” said Ram.

Then Noxon heard nothing, saw nothing. The facemask responded, not to his words, but to his will. All he could sense now was Ram Odin’s path through the ship.

It had been only a few days since the time of splitting, so the paths weren’t all that extensive. That was good. Fewer alternate paths to distract him.

Noxon watched but did not attach. He concentrated on making the path into a person, and then into a person who was moving very, very slowly.

What he had never thought about before was whether his path-sense had something like peripheral vision. Could he be concentrating on one path, and yet still be able to sense other paths? Or were they all shut out?

Or was the facemask shutting them out?

Noxon didn’t have to put it into words. He only felt the need to be able to sense all the paths without losing track of the one that was slowing him. The facemask responded.

But not instantly, because of course it was slowing down along with him. Or . . . the question that had bothered him and Umbo from the start . . . were he and the facemask speeding up relative to the timeflow of the path? Speeding up, not by slicing time the way Param did, which meant skipping over microchunks of time, but really speeding up, five moments per moment, experiencing every bit of time and causality, but moving so rapidly compared to the normal timeflow that it seemed slower and slower to him.

It didn’t matter what was actually happening. He saw the path resolve into Ram Odin, and then Ram moved more and more slowly, until he was almost not moving at all.

Hold me at this speed, thought Noxon.

And the facemask responded, as quickly as a reflex. Noxon no longer had to concentrate on holding this relative speed and now he could look for something else.

He almost missed it. Because the little nubs of backward time were not human-sized or human-shaped. And they didn’t flicker. It was nothing like the paths. Except in color.

Only it wasn’t color. It was the attribute that Noxon thought of as color, because that’s how he described it to Father when he first started quizzing him about it. As a child he had even thought of them as blue and green, yellow and red. But it wasn’t color at all. It was something else, the attribute that made every person’s path just a little different from everybody else’s. And markedly different from the paths of animals, and the more-intelligent animals sharply divergent from those with lesser minds.

It’s the consciousness itself that I’m seeing. Not the molecules of the body passing through space and time, but the mind itself. Without physical substance, and yet inextricably tied to the body and brain. It had no dimension, but it had location—like the theoretical point in geometry. Only the color made it detectable at all. A thread of it. Wherever he paid attention to it, it became detectable for only the tiniest distance—the tiniest duration in time.