And even though he had fretted about whether he might be asleep or doing something else when the exact moment of Kyokay’s death approached, on the day he simply knew it was the day, and at the time, he looked up to see Kyokay running toward the stairs—but why? There by the waterfall he could hear nothing. Why had he looked at that exact moment?

Because he knew. When he was in the future, he knew how to come back to a time before that event, and then when he reached that moment again, coming from the other direction, he knew it before his eyes could confirm it.

I have a map of time in my mind, just the way a blind man might learn to keep a map of his house in memory.

And he relied on that map all the time to travel into the past. It wasn’t precise to the second, but after so much experience, when he needed it to be, it was precise to the hour, or the half hour, or the ten minutes. He didn’t think of it that way—he just concentrated and got more careful when the exact time mattered.

No, he didn’t just concentrate. He sped up his perceptions—or slowed down time, as he had always thought of his talent as a child. The more precise he needed to be, the more sharply he made himself perceive the world, and the slower time seemed to flow for him. The map of time got sharper and clearer, the faster his perceptions were working.

He closed his eyes for a few moments at a time, trusting the dragging oar to keep them in the middle of the river, pointed downstream, and slowed time in order to examine his map. It wasn’t visual. It really was like the way you can feel your limbs without looking, or your tongue inside your mouth.

He couldn’t see the past—he wasn’t Rigg—but he could remember it. Not every second of it, but the key moments. Mostly times when he had sent messages or time-shifted, but also a few other events. The death of Kyokay. Jumping off the rock with Param. The moment when he accepted Param’s proposal of marriage.

He couldn’t see the future—nobody could. How could he have markers in times he had never lived through? But the next few years, though they lay ahead of him at this moment, had once been part of his past. No, they had often been part of his past.

Those few years that he had already lived through more than once were part of his map. If he were ahead of them in the stream of time, he’d have no hesitation in time-shifting back to them. Couldn’t he use that same timesense to shift to other remembered points in time, even though at this particular moment they now lay in his future?