“No, no, that’s not why I gasped. I’m so sorry I did that, I couldn’t help it.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because I realized that she was the tune. The tune was streaming back from behind her. She was making the tune.”

“Making the path, you mean.”

“How could I live all these years without noticing that the tunes were streaming along behind people?” Param sank to the ground. “But I did know. I did realize it. As a little girl, I told Mother, ‘I don’t like his noise, he has a bad noise,’ and she told me to hush and never talk like that again, so I didn’t. ‘He’s not making a noise, don’t be rude,’ that’s what she taught me. So I stopped noticing. Or stopped admitting that I noticed. But there were noises that I definitely associated with people. The noise of Flacommo was all over the house. And I knew Mother’s tune by heart, I knew where she had been. But I never thought it was this specific. That she passed by this place or that place at a certain time.”

“But she did. You’re not stupid for not realizing all this. Do you think I knew what I was seeing? Father helped me understand it. He didn’t know that I could jump to those times—Umbo and I discovered that—but he helped me understand that I was seeing—no, that I perceived—different people and different animals, and that some were more recent than others. I think of the recent ones as being brighter, but for you they’re—”

“Louder,” said Param.

“You’re such a pathfinder,” said Noxon, with mock contempt.

“I need me an Umbo!” she cried out in joking frustration.

“When we jumped, though. Could you feel what we were doing?”

“Not really. I knew when we jumped, I know that we jumped. But I don’t know what you’re doing when you do it.”

“Just like I didn’t know what you were doing as you sliced time. So let’s start picking paths and jumping to them, and you see if you can start to get what I’m doing. Because there’s no reason to think you don’t have the same ability to hold on to a particular point in the path. A particular moment in the tune.”

“I see one problem,” said Param. “We’re going to practice by going back and back, to ever older tunes. Paths. But we don’t have Umbo as an anchor, to bring us back.”

“We need us an Umbo,” he said, echoing her joke. Then he caught himself. “It’s not funny. We always needed Umbo. How did we ever make him feel that we didn’t?”

“Because I told him we didn’t,” said Param. “And he believed every nasty thing I ever said. How could he still want to marry me, the way I treated him?”