It was very strange; the whole environment was nonphysical, it was just the way that her mind interpreted the sense of the timestream, but when she imagined herself reaching out and tugging, pulling herself along, it actually seemed to work. She had no real physical sensation, she was just consciousness, but she nonetheless perceived as if she was breathing, blinking, that her skin was warming... it was a product of her mind, she knew that at some level, but it felt real... as long as she imagined her body. If she got distracted looking at her surroundings, she could forget for a moment, and then she wouldn't have sensation until she realized what she was missing. It was disconcerting, but educational.
The travel process was instantaneous for a passenger, Joe had told her that, so, physically, she must have been traveling instantaneously, too, but she still perceived the passing of time. Or... did she? She'd had an odd, back-of-the-brain internal sense of time when she'd been "trapped" in the past, and she hadn't really noticed it very much until it was utterly gone, like it was when she was here. No time, no weight, no gravity, and yet no falling, no air, but the impression of breathing, no body but the impression of travel, of action, no eyes, but the impression of blinking. All in all, it was a very confusing space. And her mind was creating it, and creating her reactions to it. That was as astounding as what she actually seemed to be doing. If Joe was right, and the travel was in an instant, then it was only her mind that was spending all this time doing the navigating. That was something to discuss later, when they were back in the real world.
The threads were fascinating, too. She seemed to be able to "pull" along them, like... like a water-skiier uses a tow rope, but the threads didn't actually move. To look at them, they were markers, traceries of her future paths through time, illustrations of what her time-sense perceived, as interpreted by her visual cortex in her brain. Yet she was also able to make use of them to navigate, to help propel herself. They served double-duty, and possibly triple. It was all in her perceptions, anyway -- there weren't actual lines or cables or even a time-surface, if the hints Joe had given her were accurate. It was all how she was able to visualize it. So if she could visualize the threads doing what they were already doing, maybe she could visualize them doing anything she wanted, as long as... as long as the metaphor fit, as long as the visualization could come up with a way to conform to what she was trying to do. She had done it already, "reaching out" without actual hands to tug on the strings, even perceiving herself as touching things with her fingers, and it had worked, it had felt real. She'd even forgotten for a moment that she was somehow towing Joe and their prisoner through this, but they weren't perceptible unless she thought about it, and then she knew they were along, but she wouldn't have been able to explain how she knew. Very confusing. But thrilling, at the same time.
She was moving "upstream," which in the metaphor meant farther back into the past. There were very few dips of threads into the "surface" up ahead; most seemed to stretch uninterrupted off into the distance. But a few seemed to dunk in. One was coming up, actually, along the line she'd pulled, the one she thought she might have been guided to; if she understood the metaphor, of the several things she could get from these threads, it meant that she was coming up on a place where she had visited the past... or rather, where she would, at some point in her personal future. She'd visited, lived a while in the regular timestream, and then popped out again, heading forward through time. If it was a quick visit, it might be good practice to drop into the timestream just after her future self left. Surely Joe wouldn't object to a bit of practice like that; she was going to have to learn how to do that, anyway, one of these days. Besides, if she had really been guided, somehow, to pull on this thread, then perhaps she was meant to experiment here? That was assuming it wasn't just random, that the reaction she'd perceived when she "touched" the thread wasn't just what happened when one touched any old thread. Regardless, the decision point was coming up.
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