The expendable took just a moment before he replied—no doubt waiting for a full report from the ship’s computers. “We have joined the normal universe. I believe there was something in your plan about not lingering here for more than a second?”

“Yes! Yes, I just . . . I had to know . . .” And then, feeling foolish in spite of his having succeeded at the most important task, Noxon began to slice time backward, and this time—finally—“backward” was taking him into the past, the real past, the one full of humans and hope.

Chapter 17: Saving the Baby

CHAPTER 17

Saving the Baby

When Loaf and Leaky returned to the roadhouse at Leaky’s Landing, they invited Umbo to stay, for a few days at least, before he began his journey back to join Rigg, Param, and Olivenko in Larfold.

Umbo was happy to stay with them. He told them that the food was good, and he was tired of traveling. But they all knew there was more to their friendship than that. Umbo was without a family, but not beyond the need of one. Loaf was not just friend but father to him, and while he knew Leaky far less well, Umbo had helped to restore them to each other.

The roadhouse was beginning to fill up with the evening’s customers. Umbo offered to help serve them, but Leaky bluntly told him no. “You don’t know any of the work of the kitchen or the table, except to eat. So eat, or don’t, but stay out of the way till the work is done.” But she softened her words with a pat on the shoulder. Well, what passed for a pat with Leaky—to someone else it might have looked like a shove, but since it didn’t actually knock Umbo into a wall or onto the floor, it counted as gentle.

Taking a heel of bread and a bit of cheese with him, Umbo stepped out onto the street and began to walk. He didn’t have any great plan in mind as he headed south, though he knew it was the road by which he and Rigg had first come to Leaky’s Landing. Perhaps nostalgia was all that drew him there.

His thoughts turned to the future. He wondered for a time about Rigg—both Riggs, but most especially Noxon, the Rigg that had modestly chosen to designate himself as the mere copy, though he was as much the original Rigg as the other one. Noxon, who had come to know and serve Param far better than Umbo. Noxon, who had left Garden, perhaps never to return, in pursuit of one faint possibility of saving the world.

Saving it for what? For whom? What was the world even for, that it was worth saving? Especially if, like Noxon, you were unlikely to be saving it for yourself?