For a couple of months after the Visitors’ ship was launched, Noxon and Ram skipped ahead only a few days at a time. Then Noxon stopped blind-jumping entirely. He only moved forward by very rapid time-slicing, so that they caught a glimpse of the intervening days.
Thus it was that they were time-slicing in the back bedroom of Wheaton’s apartment when there was a blinding flash of light and searing heat. The floor disappeared beneath them; the whole house disappeared. They plunged downward, but Noxon kept on time-slicing, so the fires were out for days before they landed.
The building was gone.
In the midst of time-slicing, they couldn’t converse about what just happened, but it was soon obvious that the event had flattened all the buildings in their vicinity. Forest fires had raged on the nearby hills, and here and there they were still smoldering, giving off a red glow at night.
Noxon increased the gaps in his time-slicing, so they raced forward, spending less time in any one minute or hour. The forest fires died out completely. Everything seemed calm. Noxon was about to bring them out of time-slicing mode when he saw several aircraft of strange, wingless design come hurtling by in the near distance, not very high above the ground. Only when they had passed by did he take Ram back to the regular flow of time.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Ram immediately. “I think that was a nuclear blast and we’re going to be eaten alive by radiation.”
“Let’s get to a place where there weren’t any buildings or parked cars, so we can jump back safely.” Noxon began scanning for paths so he could pick an appropriate moment to return unobserved. He tried to avoid noticing where all the paths ended abruptly with the blast.
“I didn’t know anybody was on the brink of war,” said Noxon as they walked.
“Nobody was,” said Ram. “Nobody on Earth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those aircraft that just went by. They clearly don’t operate by any technological system I’ve heard of. And I’ve heard of them all.”
“Not of human origin? Or some country had a secret program?”
“Not made by Homo sapiens. And I’m betting they weren’t Erectid ships.”
It still took a moment for Noxon to be sure what Ram meant. Not anthropes. Not from Earth. “What do we do?”
“Get back into the past right now.”
“This radiation exposure,” said Noxon. “You know we took a lot of it while we were time-slicing, too. Only a small fraction of what it could have been, but it looks like we weren’t all that far from the center of the blast.”
“So we’re probably dying already,” said Ram.
“Any cures?” asked Noxon. “Any effective treatments?”
“Well, if your facemask can’t cure it, I doubt anything my body can do will be of much help.”
“So we need to go back and warn ourselves in person,” said Noxon.
Ram understood at once. “Which will duplicate us.”
“If you and I are going to die,” said Noxon, “our copies need to go on. At the moment, I think we’re more indispensable to the survival of the human race than ever.”
“And if we don’t die?” asked Ram.
“The more the merrier.”
They could learn nothing. The next time they reached that point in time, at least they were out of town, well to the south. They had communications equipment, but there were no signals to pick up.
The third time, Ram and Noxon visited one of Ram’s friends from the space program. They made their explanations and demonstrations and were given a connection so they could look in on the communications of the international space exploration authority. This time there was a little warning. A ship of some kind spotted just outside the orbit of Jupiter. And then a complete loss of control over all computers and communications for only a few minutes, and a near-simultaneous launch of all missiles from all nations.
Armed with this data, Ram and Noxon visited the same friend, played the recordings and showed the data from the near future. With a lot of “never mind how I got it,” this data provoked some serious alerts and this time the spacecraft was tracked. It seemed to have come from a direction similar to the route taken by one of the exploratory drones sent out prior to Ram Odin’s colonizing mission, when the space authority was searching for planets likely to be habitable. And this time, given some warning, some of the communications systems were uncoupled from the worldwide networks, so they remained under human control.
What Noxon and Ram took back with them this last time was a much clearer picture. The best guess was that the drone sent out more than two decades before had discovered, not just a habitable world, but an inhabited one. A world with space travel and a keen sense of umbrage, or paranoia about what a follow-up visit from humans might bring.
“Given what Ram Odin’s expedition did to the planet Garden to get it ready for human habitation,” said Noxon, “I can’t say they were wrong to determine on a preemptive strike.”
“We would never have attacked a planet with sentient life,” said Ram Odin. “We would have moved on to the next prospective colony world.”
“You would never have attacked,” said Noxon. “But who knows what the expendables would have done while you were in stasis?”
Speculation was all they had to go on, when it came to causes and motives. Results were a different matter. The aliens had such advanced tech that, virtually unnoticed, they were able to infiltrate our computers and communications from a distance, read enough data to know our weapons capabilities and what targets to hit, and then activate the surviving nuclear arsenals of two dozen former nation-states. The killoff was nearly complete. Then the alien ship reached Earth orbit at incredible speed, and those aircraft sought out every source of radio signals and then every sign of body heat.
“There weren’t going to be any survivors,” said Ram Odin.
“So by the time the Visitors come back to Earth from their voyage to Garden,” said Noxon, “they’re going to find that they’re the last human beings left in the solar system.”
“Then why would they go back and destroy the surviving humans on Garden?” asked Deborah. Immediately she shook her head, answering her own question. “Right. It wasn’t humans.”
“They got inside our computer systems,” said Ram Odin. “They knew all about my voyage and then the Visitors’ trip, including all the data they collected. So it was the aliens who went to Garden and activated the built-in self-destruct system orbiting the planet. It was never humans from Earth at all. It didn’t matter what the Visitors saw. Their ship’s log would show the aliens that there was another clump of humans. They found us completely defenseless and wiped us out.”
“I’m so glad we didn’t let the mice come back and infect the human race,” said Noxon. “But—no, the mice were going to sneak back with the Visitors. So they would have reached an uninhabited Earth no matter what.”
“What now?” asked Anthropologist Wheaton. “You’re the timeshapers.”
“I think our mission just broadened,” said Noxon. “Our job now is to save the whole human race. On both worlds.”
“Even though this alien attack on us was not completely irrational?” asked Philologist Wheaton. “We have a history of wiping out other flora and fauna to make way for our own biota.”
“This isn’t about justice,” said Ram Odin. “It isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about us and them. And I choose us.”
“All in favor?” asked Deborah.
They all raised their hands.
“We can philosophize to our hearts’ content after we’ve saved humanity,” said Ram.
“Now all we need is a plan,” said Noxon.
“I think I have another voyage ahead of me,” said Ram Odin. “But with a different destination. How long do you think since these aliens first developed space flight?”
br /> Meanwhile, the original Noxon and Ram Odin had both developed radiation poisoning. Noxon’s facemask helped his body recover. Now there were two copies of him, though one was still in bed, sleeping almost constantly as his body’s cells were rebuilt and cancers were eliminated.
There was only one Ram Odin, though. Only one person in their group who could pilot the starship they had stashed in Antarctic ice in the remote past. This time the mice would be given the freedom of the ship. This time, they would be turned loose on an alien world.
CHAPTER 26
Tidiness
Param stood in the Tent of Light, bending over the table, studying the maps with Olivenko, Umbo, Loaf, Rigg, Ramex, and Square. Ram Odin sat in the doorway of the tent, looking out over the meadow, either keeping watch or dozing—it was hard to tell which.
Param spoke little at these councils. Her natural disposition coincided exactly with good policy on this—for she had quickly learned that if she even hinted at a preference, Olivenko would start to bend all his ideas and argument to favor the course of action that he guessed she was favoring.
She had had to be careful even of her questions, until she finally said, rather testily, that she could not make any rational decisions unless she was sure she understood the situation, which meant she must ask questions. But how could she ask questions if people reacted by trying to guess what she meant by her question? “I mean—I always mean—that I believe I need to know the answer to my question. Nothing else. I don’t hint. When I’ve come up with a tentative decision, I offer my conclusions for comment. It isn’t subtle, is it? You all understand when I do that?”
They all did—but after that, Param was quite sure that they still tried to guess what her questions meant, which way she was leaning. They simply became more subtle about their responses.
It was annoying that, as Queen-in-the-Tent, at least for this corner of the realm, she had to be so scrupulous about even the slightest utterance. How constraining it was to have authority!
Yet she also remembered Mother’s powerlessness in the pleasant prisons in which Param had grown up. Mother also had had to watch every word she said, but not because others would over-obey her, trying to anticipate her decisions. Mother’s constraints came from fear that the People’s Revolutionary Council would suppose her to be trying to assert royal authority. So Mother, too, had to learn to speak far less than she thought.
It turned Mother into a monster of deception. What is it doing to me?
In private, she could ask Umbo. But she knew his answer: You’re doing a perfect job of saying the very least that you can say. Yet when you do speak, it’s always sensible and when you make decisions, everyone can see the justice, the wisdom in your words.
And then Param would wonder if Umbo said this because it was true, or at least he believed it was true; or did he say these things only to reassure her and make her happy? And if she ever made a decision that flatly contradicted the clear will of the council, would she be obeyed? She tried to rule by persuasion, by creating consensus, but that only worked when the decision had no urgency. As they prepared for the full-fledged all-out war, the clash of great armies, decisions would need to be made quickly, and she was quite aware that it was not just the Queen-in-the-Tent—herself—who had no idea what she was doing. Olivenko was well-read and clever, but no one knew what their army would do in real bloody combat, so he might be wrong about everything. So might Loaf. So might any of them.
“We can always go back and try again,” said Umbo at such times. “Have I come to you in a vision and warned you not to decide in a certain way?”
“Well, not yet,” said Param.
“Then your decisions obviously work out perfectly well.”
“Or I haven’t made any decisions with consequences that matter.”
“That should ease your mind even more,” said Umbo.
“Or whatever went wrong killed you and me and Rigg, and so there was no one to come back and prevent it all from going wrong.”
“And if that happens,” said Umbo, “then the Destroyers will come and wipe out all our mistakes.”
“Unless Noxon succeeds in saving us,” said Param.
“He hasn’t yet,” said Umbo.
“That we know of,” said Param.
Then Umbo glowered and fell silent. It was obvious that even though Noxon was gone—millions of kilometers away on Earth, or else lost in the oblivion of some crack in spacetime—Umbo was still envious of the many weeks Noxon had spent in Param’s company while they were teaching each other to use their timeshaping talents with more range and expertise.
Umbo’s resentments were the worst thing about him. But in this case, Param had to admit that he was not so very wrong. It was irrational that even though Noxon was the very same person as Rigg, prior to the division between them, Param did not hold him responsible for all the annoyances Rigg had caused. Nor did she think of Noxon with the same sisterly affection she had for Rigg. There really were times that she wished Noxon were still here.
Though, to be fair, Umbo was a very kind and sweet husband, and he made no effort to interfere with her authority as Queen-in-the-Tent. If anyone spoke less at these war councils than Param, it was Umbo. He would not offer an opinion or even ask a question unless she commanded it, or so it seemed.
His diffidence was, of course, annoying, especially since it extended into the bedroom. Into all their time alone. He never even asked for intimacy. Never even waited around as if hoping. If she said—or implied—that she wanted him to share her bed, then there he was, always compliant, and in the moment quite enthusiastic yet also gentle. Always careful of every sound, every flinch, every cue she gave, whether it meant anything or not. This made him in some ways the perfect husband, the perfect lover—and in other ways, completely annoying. Wasn’t there any moment in which he would step up and be her equal? Assert himself?
How could he? She had spent so many months openly disdaining him, before they married, and she was sure he remembered every slight, every offense. Umbrage was his normal state, and she had given him so much cause to doubt that she had or could ever have any respect for him that she could hardly expect him to behave otherwise. Loaf, Leaky, Olivenko, and Ramex had all explained to her, quite kindly, that any strangeness between Umbo and her was entirely the result of the way they had been reared.
“Actually, you’re quite compatible,” said Olivenko. “Now that you’ve stopped picking at him, he seems to be nearly perfect for you.”
“Tiptoeing around me as if I were a sleeping lioness is not ‘perfect,’” Param had replied.
“You are a lioness,” said Olivenko, “and most definitely not asleep. I think he’s doing very well, and for you to be impatient with him is not just unreasonable but destructive. He knows he’s displeasing you but since the thing you’re displeased at is how perfectly he avoids displeasing you, it’s hard to imagine how he could act differently without, well, without displeasing you even more.”
Thus they stood around the table, around the map, contemplating various potential battlegrounds. South of General Haddamander’s main army was a place where the ground would favor Param’s army—but, as both Loaf and Olivenko pointed out, victory would leave them no better off than before, since Haddamander would still be between their army and the capital. But if they simply took possession of the capital, it would be an easy matter for Haddamander to besiege them, leaving her to feed hundreds of thousands of citizens as well as her army.
“We could do it,” said Rigg. “The way we feed our army now—by making purchases in the past.”
“We’re already buying up surpluses from five hundred years ago,” said Ramex. “Not that there aren’t plenty of other good years to buy from. But every purchase of grain improves the past economy, which changes history.”
They didn’t want to do that. Couldn’t afford to find themselves facing
a much more popular or powerful enemy than Haddamander as the general of Hagia’s army. What if they changed history so the Sessamoto Empire was much better governed? So there had never been a People’s Revolution? So that Haddamander was, not the scion of a persecuted noble family, but the pampered, celebrated son of a great house? Might he not have been married to Hagia in the first place, instead of Rigg’s and Param’s own father? Just how much could they meddle in the past without causing vast, confusing changes?
Yet they had to feed their army—and, if their army suddenly appeared in the streets of Aressa Sessamo, all the citizens of the city as well.
What they needed was a quick, decisive, irresistible victory. Param had expected Rigg to argue against something so violent, but he surprised her. “I know you think I’m a pacifist of some sort,” said Rigg, “but that isn’t so. What will save the most lives is to have a quick, brutal, thorough victory, so the war ends with the one battle.”
“True,” said Loaf. “No matter which side wins, a decisive battle would definitely shorten the war.”
“I’d like us to win,” said Olivenko.
“You know we’ll win, eventually,” said Square. “Because if we lose, Umbo will come back to this very meeting and give us the information that will let us make better decisions.”
“Only if he has the brains to stay here during the fight,” said Loaf, “so he doesn’t have to travel back here, possibly pursued by enemies, after a devastating defeat.”
Umbo merely shook his head.
“Umbo is right,” said Param. “He can’t stay here in the tent, far from any of the battle sites. How will he even know the outcome of the battle, or what went wrong, if he spends the whole battle here? If there’s anyone who can easily evade pursuit and return here to give warning, it’s Umbo.”
Umbo said nothing. Merely continued looking at the map.