“With an alien species. One that has a lot of the human genome, but we definitely can’t interbreed.”
Param pursed her mouth. “I don’t know which of the two images that came to my mind is the more disgusting.”
“Will you stay here and not follow me into the future?”
“Do I have to decide and take a solemn oath right now? If I don’t agree, will you decide not to go?”
“It would be a waste of your time anyway,” said Noxon. “You can’t hear their high little voices, and they talk very fast.”
“They must get so impatient, waiting for humans to finish talking.”
“They hold dozens of conversations of their own while we’re saying, ‘Well, um . . .’”
“Go,” she said abruptly. “I need some alone time anyway.”
Noxon wasn’t sure if she was angry or not. And even if she was, whom she was angry at. Him, maybe, for shutting her out of a negotiation. Or herself, for still being afraid of the mice, maybe, or for being inferior to people with facemasks, or some other unfathomable reason. Sometimes Noxon thought that if he had grown up with Param as a sister, he might have turned out even crazier than he was just getting to know her now.
It was a simple matter to return to the time of the mice in Larfold. Once they had brought the mice in, they had propagated so quickly that there wasn’t a habitable region of the wallfold that didn’t have nests and warrens. And these mice were like humans—they didn’t choose just one habitat, they adapted to every possible habitat. They lived in trees, in grass, in burrows that they dug themselves—or burrows that other animals had dug, which the mice expelled them from. They lived beside streams and in dry places, in crags and swamps. They made ordinary mice seem lazy and finicky.
They also bred themselves for particular traits. Within a few generations, the tree mice would be different from rock mice and swamp mice and field mice. But they were all part of the same species, and, like dogs, they could be quite different in size and other traits, yet still interbreed.
Noxon didn’t want to talk to them in their billions. He wanted to talk to them only a few generations after they first came to Larfold.
He rapidly sliced his way forward in time until he saw just a few of the distinctive paths of Mus sapiens, and then he abruptly stopped. At once the mice in the clearing stopped what they were doing and ran up to him. Several of them scampered up his clothing and perched on his shoulder. “Rigg or Noxon?” one voice asked.
Regular human ears would have heard only a brief squeak. Noxon imagined that a mouse could spout a lot of vilification while a cat was preparing to kill it.
“Noxon,” he replied.
“You’ve been hiding from us.” “Where’s the girl?” “Why won’t you take us with you?” “What are you doing that you don’t want us to see?”
The questions came on top of each other, from different mice that were now in various places on his body. He could sort them out because the facemask kept them clear in his memory. Noxon knew that all the questions came from all the mice. He also knew that he should answer only the questions he wanted to answer.
“I’m here to talk to you about taking you with me.”
“Into the past?” “What wallfold?” “Vadeshfold!” “Earth?”
“I’m going to try to get to Earth in a peculiar way,” said Noxon. “It may not work. It involves hooking onto a backward timeflow, and I may not be able to do it.”
“Worth the risk.” “We’ll be there.” “Let us see Earth.” “Where you fail, we may succeed later.”
“Not that simple,” said Noxon. “I said I might take you with me in the ship, but that doesn’t mean I’m taking you to Earth.”
“Where are you going if not Earth?”
“I’m going to take the ship to Earth, but I can’t land it on the planet. It’ll be in orbit. And when I go to the surface, I may or may not take mice along.”
“Then what’s the point?” “We’ve seen spaceships.” “We have all the schematics.” “A voyage just to stay in the ship?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s my point. I’m going to go down to the planet and try to learn why they destroy Garden, and then see how I can prevent it. Until I’ve seen what’s going on, I’m not bringing anyone with me. But I may need you. And if I do, I’d like to have some of you there.” He did not say: I may need you to destroy the human race, to wreck their ability to come to Garden and destroy us. He knew that they already understood what their task would be.
But that did not mean they were content to let him call the shots. “Why is it all your choice?” “You think you’re King-in-the-Tent.” “We won’t go.”
“Then don’t go,” said Noxon. “I was only inviting you, not commanding you.”
“Let us go!” “We want to go!” “Don’t leave us all behind!”
They nagged like children. Cute, too, like children. But Noxon knew just how dangerous they were.
“I know that even on the ship, you can cause trouble for me,” said Noxon.
“Not us.” “Why would we cause trouble?” “We want to help.” “Let us help.”
“You can send things in time and space. You could kill me in my sleep.”
“Why would we do that?” “We aren’t killers.”
“You most certainly are killers,” said Noxon. “I saw Param’s dead body.”
“We never actually did that.” “You got her away in time.” “We weren’t really going to do it.”
“You did it, and then we came back and undid it.” Noxon didn’t mention the attempt to infect the whole population of Earth with a plague of some kind, because they hadn’t done it yet, and it would be a bitter irony if it was Noxon who gave them the idea. “I’m sure you had very good reasons.”
“We knew you’d undo it!” “We were just trying to get you to take action!” “You were all being so complacent!” “Lazy!” “It was time to act.”
“I’m sure your motives were pure.”
“Irony!” “Lie!”
“Not a lie, and not irony,” said Noxon. “You were doing what you thought was right for Mus sapiens. It just happened to be inconvenient for Param.”
“Queen-in-the-Tent.” “We love her.” “We revere her.”
“You love no human, you revere no human.”
Silence.
“Of the biped class,” said Noxon. “I recognize you as a kind of human.”
“Then we are not Mus sapiens, we are Homo musculus.” A single voice. The distinction was important to them.
“You’re right,” said Noxon, drawing upon Father’s counsel about negotiations: Get your counterpart to agree with you about a common foundation, then build on it. “You are as entitled to the one name as the other. It’s really up to you whether you’re mice with human traits grafted in, or humans with the gifts that come from being small but many.”
“Good.” “Very good.” “True.” Father’s advice worked again, as it almost always did. More mice were talking than ever before. Tiny voices, but so many it was like a chord of music, held long on an organ. And instead of arguing with him, they were agreeing, amplifying.
“For all I know, you’ll be the key to solving the problem and saving Garden from the Destroyers,” said Noxon. “But you have to agree in advance that you’ll stay on the ship until I choose to bring you to Earth, and that you’ll do no mischief.”
Silence for a while, and then a lone voice: “Mischief to you might be survival to us.”
“I understand that. I’m asking you to put a lot of trust in me.”
“But you are not putting any trust in us.” “You try to control us.”
“Trust? I’m putting my life in your hands. Once you’re on the ship, I can’t possibly watch you all the time. You know how to interface with the ship’s computers, you could change our course, y
ou could corrupt the life support. You know how to kill a man in his sleep.”
“We can’t harm you.” “You are the one who can take us into the past.” “Backflowing time is a trap only you can pull us out of.”
“Yes. You know you need me, but I don’t know yet if I need you.”
“Whatever you say.” “Take us along.” “We promise.”
There was no way to get any firmer promise than that. What could they stake as collateral to assure their compliance? Noxon had to proceed on the assumption that they would try to cheat him eventually, even if they were perfectly sincere in their promises now.
Yet, being human, he couldn’t help but try to give the oath as much force as possible.
“I don’t know how your society functions,” said Noxon. “Do you speak for everyone? Every single homusculus?”
“Definitely.” “We all agree.”
“If you truly all agree, then I’m not sure you should be considered human,” said Noxon. “Total agreement is something humans never achieve.”
“Lots of discussion.” “Plenty of disagreement.” “Many hate the plan.”
“The issue is whether this promise will be binding on all the homusculi, even those who disagree.”
“Can any human speak for all other humans?” asked a lone voice.
“Thank you for your candor. I’m aware that not only is there disagreement among you now, but also there will be generations between now and when I leave, and generations on board the ship. The children may not like being bound by the promises of a previous generation.”
“As you said. We are human.”
“So you will understand and forgive me, I think, if I treat the mice who come with me as if there were no promise. I will check constantly. I will assume you are trying to cheat on our agreement.”
“We never cheat.” “We give our word.” “You’re a fool if you think we’re lying.”
“I think you’re telling the truth,” said Noxon. “I think I can trust you enough to take six mice. None of them pregnant.”
“Not enough,” they said at once. “At least twenty.”
And from that Noxon concluded that they needed at least twenty mice in order to . . . what, move objects through spacetime? Or simply to establish a viable gene pool? No point in asking; he wouldn’t trust the answer to be complete. They always intended many different things at once. It was like trying to blow smoke away. It swirled and eddied but you were never in control of it.
“Bring thirty,” Noxon said. “In case I accidentally step on a few of you.”
They might or might not have a sense of humor. Whether they took this as irony or as a threat didn’t really matter to Noxon at the moment.
“When do we go?” “How long till we go?”
Those were excellent questions. He should say good-bye to Param and let her know she was on her own. Or should he first take her to Olivenko? Or wait until he could unite the whole group?
It was enough if one of them knew that he had gone. Param could tell the others. Noxon was the extra Rigg, the expendable one. No reason to act as if he thought he would be missed. When he left, there would be exactly the right number of Riggs in the world.
“Stay here,” he said. “And by that I mean—everybody off me and out of my clothes. That includes the five clinging to the insides of my trouser legs, the three on my arms . . .”
They knew that they couldn’t fool the facemask. They scampered or leapt, and in a moment they all stood around him in a circle.
“It isn’t very promising when you already try to sneak one stowaway with me.”
They put on a good show of consternation, and it’s true that the one who was still clinging to the back of his shoe looked small. He might really be as young and foolish as they said. Or he might have been of a small breed.
You can’t trust the mice.
It was easy to jump back to Param—he had never lost track of her path. This despite the fact that it had already jumped backward in time twice since his path had left hers. Her path was unbroken—it just got fainter and fainter as she practiced her backward jumps. She was about to do it again, he could see, when he arrived and touched her shoulder. She whirled and then relaxed.
“I’m going,” he said. “To Earth, I hope.”
“What about me?” she said. “Are you going to leave me here?”
“Yes,” he said. He tried not to think what it meant that her only thought was that she would be alone for a while, rather than that he might be going to death or oblivion. “But you’ll find your way home.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said, gripping his arm.
“Rigg will soon be back from his wandering.”
“You have begun as the same person,” said Param. “But you’re the one who was so patient. You’re the one who realized my sounds and your paths might be the same thing.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” said Noxon. “And not just because you taught me how to slice time effectively.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“You know you’ll have to go through the same thing with Rigg when he gets back. He won’t be happy till he can slice time this quickly. Umbo too, probably.”
“It would never do to give one of you an advantage over the others,” said Param. “It’s so hard to persuade would-be alpha males to get along.”
CHAPTER 9
Getting It Right
So there was Umbo, floating down the river, in no hurry now, so he only used his oar to keep the boat straight in the water. And, to tell the truth, he dragged the oar in the water to slow himself down. Because what was he going to do when he got to Leaky’s Landing? At this moment, young Umbo was with Rigg, making their way overland beside the river. They wouldn’t reach Leaky’s Landing for several weeks.
Then there would be the time spent getting to O, their arrest, and Umbo’s journey back to Leaky’s Landing with Loaf after they got off the boat where they were prisoners. After that, the time Umbo spent struggling to learn to send messages without Rigg’s help.
Finally Umbo and Loaf had set out to liberate Rigg. That was the great divide. After that, Umbo had appeared to Leaky again, then brought Loaf to her with his facemask. That’s the time he had to return to—and it was a long time from now. Umbo could feel how much empty time lay ahead of him. Time that he would have to live through, doing . . . something. Doing nothing that mattered.
If Param had been with him, she could have sliced them forward to the right time. But she was off with Noxon, learning how to time-shift without leaving herself vulnerable to assassins with iron bars. That was more important than the fact that Umbo was now stuck having to live through almost half a year.
No, not “almost half a year.” He had a much clearer idea than that.
Umbo couldn’t have said the exact number of days, because time wasn’t actually divided like that. It wasn’t divided at all, except into the huge number of separate causes and effects that determined the direction, if not the speed, of the flow of time. But without being able to name it, he knew the amount of time that lay ahead of him. He knew the “place” of those events in the forward sweep of time.
He had visited that narrow period of time often enough—his and Loaf’s departure from Leaky’s Landing, then his messages to Leaky and his return with Loaf—that it was now a firm anchor in his sense of the flow of time.
He couldn’t have charted it on paper—this many days, on this particular date. He didn’t keep a calendar in his head, and besides, whatever this time-shifting talent was, it couldn’t depend on literacy or calendars because presumably it would simply work, like sight and hearing. Yet he knew, the way you know where your hands are when your eyes are closed, just when in the future that day would come.
Was that real? Could he use that, the way Rigg used his paths, to journey to that time?
He thought back to the weeks in the roadhouse when he was struggling to find a way to send messages to the past without having Rigg to help him. When he finally began to have success, that was just the beginning. Then the trick was to get a sense of how far to reach back in order to send a message to arrive at the right place and time. Gradually, through trial and error, he had learned to have pretty good precision in throwing his image into the past and keeping it there.
At the time, he had thought he was going into the past, but now he understood the difference, and could do both. When he needed to push himself back to a few weeks before he and Rigg had left Fall Ford, it was easy to shift back within a day or two of the time he wanted. He didn’t have to be more precise than that.
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.