Noxon turned to the expendable. “We’ll be moving very quickly. What should I look at to know when we’re nearing the gravity well of Earth, but are still outside it?”
“Gravity goes on forever,” said the expendable. “The Earth is already exerting a faint but noticeable tug on this ship. What threshold am I looking for?”
“I don’t know,” said Noxon.
“When we come within the average orbital distance of Pluto,” said Ram Odin.
“I didn’t even think about the outer planets,” said Noxon. “What if one of them captures our timeflow?”
“We don’t come in through the plane of the ecliptic. Our course brings us toward Earth from the North Pole. Or rather toward L5, a point balanced between the gravity wells of Earth and the Moon.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I don’t think this will work if we’re at such a point of balance.”
“As we approach,” said Ram Odin reassuringly, “Earth will have a much stronger pull on us than the Moon, until right before we arrive at the point where this ship was built.”
Noxon thought of something else. “Do you have any control over this ship?” he asked.
The expendable cocked his head. “The other computers and I are the ship.”
“No. I mean . . . can you make the ship go where you want?”
“I haven’t tried to change it,” said the expendable.
“We’re facing the wrong way,” said Ram Odin. “If we could deploy our ram scoop it would still be behind us. So we’re not capable of gathering fuel. The engines seem to be running, but I don’t know how.”
“Our best calculation,” said the expendable, “is that as hydrogen dust is consumed in the engines of the outbound ship, it powers the movement of both ships, the outbound and the inbound.”
“So matter is crossing over.”
“No,” said the expendable. “It remains entirely in the normal timeflow.”
“Then energy is crossing.”
“No,” said the expendable. “Energy and matter are the same thing, in a fusion engine.”
“Something is crossing over,” said Ram Odin impatiently.
“As near as we can tell,” said the expendable, “and that’s not very near, because there is no way to measure this, the only thing crossing over is momentum.”
“Is momentum actually a thing, in physics?” asked Noxon.
“It is not,” said the expendable, “at least not the way we’re using the term. Our hypothesis is that there’s some unknown force binding the subatomic particles to each other, forward and backward.”
“You know what?” asked Ram Odin. “I don’t actually care how it works. I only know that when and if we do break free and jump back into ordinary time, we’ll be hurtling toward Earth in reverse. That’s another argument in favor of making the switch before we come too close to Earth.”
“Yet if we try it too far out, we can’t bring the ship with us,” said Noxon.
“That’s all we were doing,” said a mouse. “Trying to figure these things out in advance.”
“I believe you completely,” said Noxon to the mice.
“No you don’t,” said the mouse.
“Apparently you don’t believe me,” said Noxon.
“I will alert you by standing exactly here and raising my arm like this when we’re approaching Earth but are still well back from it. Maybe a week or two out. Would that be good?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “Make it three weeks. I want to see when I start getting a sense of paths that are tied to Earth rather than to spaceships. And that means I need to start looking well before the point of no return.”
“So shall we slice time?” asked Ram Odin. “I’m looking forward to my first actual time-shift.”
“You just had one.”
“Only an hour or so. And I didn’t feel anything.”
“You won’t feel anything. Nothing in the ship will change, unless he moves around. We’ll be moving, of course, but if I do this right, we won’t complete even a single step.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Ram Odin. “We have nothing to lose but seven years of mind-numbing boredom.”
“All right,” said Noxon, and he took a step as he sliced forward.
CHAPTER 15
Building a House
Singhfold wasn’t all up-and-down, mountains and valleys—there was a coastal plain, and some high plateaus. But the level ground was in the rain shadow of the mountains, and those who lived there scratched out a living by damming the occasional streams and laboriously irrigating the fields.
In most of the mountain valleys, however, rain fell often, and snow-fed streams never disappeared. The ground was rarely level, and farming required terracing. But nimble goats and sheep thrived on the grass that grew wherever the snow abated, and if winters were long, there were many labors that resulted in artifacts for trade. It was a good life for people who were willing to work hard, and each community learned to be self-sufficient.
Singhfold was also a linguist’s heaven, or would be, if anyone but Singhex traveled enough to realize how many languages were spoken, and how they revealed deep secrets of history by the groups and families of languages, and how they were interlaced among the valleys.
Along with the languages came a variety of folkways—from which valley the young people of a village might seek a spouse, and into which it was forbidden to marry. Some villages practiced strict exogamy; some regarded “foreign” spouses with suspicion and treated their children and grandchildren as strangers.
“I love Singhfold,” said Ram Odin. “My regret is that because I’ve tried to prolong my life by sleeping through the years in stasis, I never have time to visit here for more than a few days. It’s the life I think humans were meant to lead—intensely involved with a community that knows you too well, that’s always in your face and in your business.”
“I think those sound like reasons not to like the life here,” said Rigg.
“People don’t understand how evolution has shaped us to hunger for human company,” said Ram Odin. “Even the shyest of introverts suffer from being alone.”
“Meaning yourself,” said Rigg. “Because what human on Garden has been as much alone as you?”
“I feel it more than most, it’s true,” said Ram Odin. “But that doesn’t mean my observation isn’t true. Shy people might take their doses of companionship like an ill-tasting medicine, but they need it, and they suffer a thousand maladies, physical and mental, if they don’t have it.”
“Well, then, this must be the healthiest place in the world,” said Rigg.
“It is,” said Ram Odin. “Partly because there’s no anonymity. Everybody is always with people who know who they are.”
“No traveling merchants or peddlers? No show people, no bards? No wars to force one village to bow to another?”
“At different times and places such people have arisen, and such events have happened. It’s in human nature to come to blows sometimes. Every few generations, one of the cities of the plain, weary of the struggle to live with little water, gets the grand idea of conquering the mountain valleys.”
“But they fail?”
“Oh, they succeed easily. The valleys don’t have enough people to defend them against a relentless enemy. But the valleys farther in take the refugees, and the people of the plain don’t know how to work the land, or what crops grow. And when do you stop? Which valley is the last one you’ll conquer? Whatever place you choose, the people in all the nearby valleys will shun your trade, and if you’ve been particularly brutal, the neighboring valleys conduct a relentless guerrilla campaign. If the conquerors leave a small force, it will be killed one by one. If they leave a large one, it will starve or freeze.”
“So their history is the same thing over and over,” said Rigg.
“All
history is the same thing over and over,” said Ram Odin. “The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don’t. In the valleys of Singhfold, most of the villages and hamlets have found and held on to customs that allow the most happiness for the most people.”
“First you tell me that there’s infinite variety here, and then—”
“The superficial customs vary extravagantly,” said Ram Odin. “But the underlying principles of village civilization are still served by all of them. Which is why Singhfold could reward a lifetime’s study—and can be discovered almost completely in a few days.”
“But if they don’t have peddlers or bards, what are we?”
“Priests,” said Ram Odin. “It’s one of the ways they amuse themselves—there are more religions than languages. Organized and disorganized, proselytizing and localized, every possible religion.”
“Each valley has its own?”
“Some valleys are mostly one thing or another, and others are so eclectic there are hardly enough believers in any sect to make it worth building a meetinghouse.”
“And what religion, exactly, are we preaching?” asked Rigg. “Are they mostly monotheists? Partisans of favorites in a pantheon?”
“It almost doesn’t matter. Because traveling priests are all treated respectfully, but none is expected to do anything in particular. Some are silent and very holy. Others pitch in and join the village in all their labors, talking about their gods as they do. We can belong to the Church of Finding Out How People Think, and simply ask questions.”
“That might make us the most annoying of all,” said Rigg.
“Your face will make us annoying and disturbing,” said Ram Odin.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned, people get used to me if they look long enough. And this lovely facemask of mine might make me seem all the holier.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Ram Odin. “These valleys are secure enough that they don’t have any habit of killing strangers. The worst that can happen is that they’ll escort us to a pass and encourage us to move on to another valley.”
“Well, then, human nature is not the same here as everywhere else.”
“You’ll see,” said Ram Odin. “They don’t have to kill us, because expulsion, to them, is worse than death. To be alive, but have no home, no village, no people you belong to—booting out strangers is, to them, worse than killing them, but also kinder.”
“There have to be exceptions,” said Rigg.
“There are,” said Ram Odin. “But we’re not going to those places.”
“Those,” said Rigg, “are precisely the places where I want to go.”
“Because you like being depressed and angry,” said Ram Odin.
“Because if the Wall comes down, the danger to other wallfolds is likely to come from the people who aren’t happy and nice and kind to all living things.”
“Well, then,” said Ram Odin. “Let’s by all means find a bitter, suspicious village and invite them to prove me wrong about how they only exile the people who annoy them.”
In their own language, their name for the valley and the village was the same: “Good People’s Home.” Of course this rolled off the wallwalkers’ tongues as if it were in their native speech: Woox-taka-exu. This meant that simply speaking the name was praise and nostalgia and affection, even for people who had never lived there.
At Rigg’s insistence, they joined in with the work that was going on, which at present was beginning to move indoors, as the winds rose, the sky was slate, and snow flurries came often and unpredictably. Not hard winter yet, because the snow could pile up to rooftop level in those storms. But the promise of winter, the warning of it. Get your flocks in from the hills, make sure your hay is stored up high in the barn, slaughter the excess geese and sheep and goats, smoke or dry or salt or sausage away the meat, grind bones into fertilizer.
Gather fallen wood for fires—it took less than Rigg might have thought, because the fires were never very hot or bright. With houses insulated by snow and no one going outside most of the winter, body heat and small, steady fires kept people as warm as they needed or wanted to be. But woe to the family that ran out, because no one else would have very much to spare. Usually, instead of sharing their firewood, the neighbors would take in this or that family member for the rest of the winter, and then mock the householders mercilessly when spring came.
Rigg liked to work alongside people. Much better than being a judge—he didn’t like arriving with an office that kept him distant. He realized that Ram Odin might be right—Rigg didn’t need to talk to people, but he needed to be near them as they talked to each other. They saw that Rigg was trying to learn and that he worked hard—he certainly wasn’t accepted enough to marry one of their daughters, but they trusted him enough to talk in front of him.
Ram Odin, on the other hand, gravitated toward the old men who gathered in the Cave, which was not a cave, but rather a house-sized building with few interior walls. It served as town hall, church, court, and ballroom by turns. And it was the gathering place of the old men who got cold too easily and left all the last-minute winter preparation to younger folk. “I plan to die this winter,” said one of the men. “So what do I care if there’s firewood? I won’t be using it.”
“You say that every year,” another retorted.
“Not bending over to pick up sticks is why I didn’t die.”
Ram Odin soon joined in with a dry witticism or two, and after a while began discussing various philosophies with them, in a folksy way.
Rigg and Ram soon learned the same thing: why this village was a sad and suspicious place. A girl had been lost fifteen years ago, and not in winter—it was spring when she disappeared. No one saw her leave. She was simply gone at suppertime one day, and no one knew what happened to her.
All their children were known to all, and loved more or less according to their character. But this girl, Onishtu, was spoken of with reverence. Not only was she an extraordinarily beautiful girl—“Like the sun when she first comes warm in spring to melt the snow”—but she was also kind and generous, loved by all, and if any of the other children envied her, they kept it to themselves because no one wanted to hear ill of Onishtu.
“They took her,” said someone, and with each person there seemed a different idea of who “they” were. Mostly, though, the candidates were the people of this or that nearby village. “Took her, they did, and stuffed up her mouth so she couldn’t cry out, and carried her off.”
To be somebody’s wife. To be everybody’s wife. To be disfigured. To be kept in a cellar and fed as little as possible until she became scrawny and sour. “They’ll give her back to us then, when she’s an ugly hag, bitter and mean. Then they’ll say, ‘You were so proud of her, do you like her now?’”
And people would nod as if they agreed. Only they’d nod again at the next theory.
Rigg got the idea that they didn’t talk about Onishtu all that often—but it was a story so central to their lives these days that even after fifteen years, it was an open wound, and the arrival of a stranger meant that the tale had to be told, in all its details, from every angle.
When Rigg and Ram Odin were alone in the haybarn where they would spend the night, Ram Odin preempted any discussion by saying, “You’re not the finder of lost things here.”
“I’m the only person who can solve this mystery.”
“It’s not a mystery, it’s a tragedy.”
“It’s a tragedy that they can’t find the answer to the mystery.”
“It’s a tragedy that a beloved child was lost. It’s become a part of how they define themselves—we’re the people that someone envied so much that they did this to us. They’r
e actually quite proud of it. It sets them apart.”
“I think they’d rather have the girl back.”
“Would they?” asked Ram Odin. “Are you sure?”
“Do you think that if I asked them, any of them would say no?”
“Do you think that just because that’s what they say they want, what they believe they want, it must be what they really want?”
“Why do you have to fight me on something so obvious?” asked Rigg. “Aren’t you glad I went back and prevented your killing?”
“It’s precisely because you have that experience that I’m afraid your do-good soul will triumph over your see-ahead brain, which teaches you caution.”
“I’ll be cautious.”
“Meaning what? The way you were cautious in Ramfold? Constantly fiddling with the past, having no idea what the consequences might be?”
“Everything turned out fine.”
“As far as we know. So far.”
“That goes without saying. The Umbo that warned us of future danger always disappeared when we took his advice and did a different thing.”
“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “I’ll keep that in mind. Just promise me something—and not an idle promise, not an ‘agree so he’ll stop talking’ promise.”
“What’s the promise?”
“That you won’t go back into the past and change things without talking to me first. No, talking to me and listening to what I say.”
“I’ve never had to consult you on these things and I’ve done well enough.”
“Yes, you have,” said Ram Odin. “And I admire your self-restraint—that you’ve never used your ability to rule over other people, or for vengeance. Mostly it’s been to help you accomplish a good and honorable task. But promise me all the same.”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “I promise. It won’t hurt—I always have time to talk things through before I act.”
“Then play this out and see what you find,” said Ram Odin. “I’m curious, too.”