They glanced at each other, embarrassed.
“This vehicle is equipped with a food synthesizer,” said Vadesh. “I had it well-stocked with nutrients, and everyone was able to get what they asked for.”
The meaning of “food synthesizer” was clear enough, but the concept struck Rigg as vaguely nauseating. He took out some of his meat and began gnawing at it. The others looked away, as if he were doing something disgusting. Well, they’d been glad enough to have such fare a few days ago.
“You know,” said Olivenko, “that everything we eat is disgusting.”
“Rotten vegetable matter, rotten animal corpses, and assorted feces and other bodily excretions combine in the soil,” said Rigg, as if he were back at Flacommo’s house being examined by scholars to earn the right to use the library. “From that collection of nutrients, plants draw what they need, combine it with water, air, and sunlight, and grow leaves and branches and fruit, which are consumed by us or by animals that we consume.”
“It sounds delicious,” said Param.
“The food synthesizer apparently skips the plant stage,” said Umbo.
“On the contrary, it skips the rot stage,” said Vadesh. “It takes the nutrients from any plant matter and grows whatever molecular structure is required—flesh or plant.”
“Takes all the fun out of it,” said Umbo. “All the farming.”
The conversation was only mildly amusing, but it served its purpose: It allowed them all to converse again, without having to deal with their conflicts in the immediate past.
Now that Rigg could look at them normally, he saw something that had changed in the time they’d spent apart. “Loaf has his eyes back,” he said.
“The facemask seemed to thin out over his eyes,” said Olivenko. “Only we’re not sure whether we’re seeing his actual eyes, or eyes that the facemask grew there in order to fool us.”
“He could see when his eyes were covered,” said Umbo. “He never tripped or stumbled and he always knew where we were.”
“Could have been by hearing and sense of smell, even touch—sensing the wind of our movements,” said Olivenko.
“I take it you’ve already had this discussion,” said Rigg.
“This quarrel, you mean,” said Param. “We don’t know anything but they argue about it.”
“He looks better with eyes,” said Rigg. “In both senses of the word ‘look.’”
That was worth a mild chuckle, and they dropped the subject. The whole time, Loaf’s gaze remained steadily with Rigg.
The flyer came to a landing at the crest of a large grassy hill. It was no mere meadow—the grass extended as far to the east as the eye could see, with only a few stands of trees providing a sense of distance and scale. Dust clouds rose from some distant herd of animals. Apparently they were very near the Wall, though not so near that any of them felt any effect from it.
What bothered Rigg was the crowd of people gathered on the far side of the Wall. “We have observers,” said Rigg.
They all got out of the flyer, including Vadesh, and stood beside it, looking at the crowd of at least a thousand people, probably more, who were arranged on a grassy slope beyond the Wall. Many of them jumped up and waved their hands wildly, so the motion could be seen across the width of the Wall.
“They knew we were coming,” said Umbo.
Because they all looked at Vadesh, the expendable put up his hands in a very human gesture of protest. To Rigg, it looked like his father telling him that he was about to refuse him a request. “It wasn’t me,” said Vadesh. “I didn’t tell any of the other expendables that I was coming.”
“I thought you told each other everything,” said Rigg.
“Eventually, yes.” Then Vadesh added, “Or at least I tell them. I think they are not all candid with me.”
“Nevertheless, these people seem to have known we were arriving, and they’re here to greet us,” said Olivenko.
“Or they’ve come to rush through if we bring down the Wall,” said Rigg.
“Bring it down,” said Vadesh. “This wallfold needs people.”
“People to wear your happy little facemasks?” said Param.
Vadesh made no answer.
Rigg was scanning the distant crowd, not with his eyes—the distance was too great to pick out individuals with any clarity—but with his path-sense. “They didn’t all come from the same place,” he said. “They’ve come from many places, and some of them very far away. They must have been traveling for days.”
“Well, I don’t want to cross here, then,” said Olivenko. “Who knows what they have in store for us?”
“Feels like a trap,” said Umbo.
“They seem to be waving to us,” said Param. “Cheerfully. Beckoning.”
“Laughing,” said Olivenko.
“You can’t possibly hear any laughter,” said Vadesh.
“But you can,” said Olivenko. “And I can see enough of their body movement and attitudes to see that they’re on a frolic. I don’t think they have any hostile intent.”
“Or that’s what they want us to think,” said Umbo.
“No danger,” said Loaf.
Everyone turned to him at once. Loaf had not spoken since he was possessed by the facemask weeks before.
“No weapons,” said Loaf, still looking across the grassy expanse of the Wall.
“Is this you talking?” asked Umbo. “Or the facemask?”
“Me,” said Loaf.
“The facemask would make him answer the same way,” said Param.
Loaf reached up a hand and rested it comfortably on the facemask, the way a pregnant woman might rest her hand on her swollen belly. “Husband of Leaky, soldier, innkeeper, it’s me,” said Loaf. “But yes, the mask is happy to have me say so. The mask is glad that I’m speaking now.”
“Why haven’t you spoken before?” asked Umbo, still suspicious.
“Nothing to say,” said Loaf.
Rigg laughed. “Yes, it’s Loaf,” he said. “Same sense of humor. Or at least it’s as much of Loaf as we’re likely to get. I don’t suppose you can take off that thing now?”
“Don’t want to,” said Loaf. “I see so clearly now. I see all the faces, all the hands, what they’re wearing. No weapons. All unarmed. And happy, interested, excited.”
“You can see that?” asked Olivenko.
“Seeing what you saw, you have a soldier’s eye,” said Loaf. It was the most generous thing he had ever said to Olivenko. “But the mask has clarified all my senses. Overwhelming for days. Too much. And it was trying to take control. Manipulate me. But I would not obey. And now it doesn’t try. But I see far and clear. I hear everything. I smell everything. The mask helps me sort it out. It’s a gift.”
“What did I tell you?” said Vadesh. “That’s how I designed it to work!”
“Even the original facemasks probably made their victims feel that way,” said Umbo sourly. He turned away from Loaf. For weeks, he had been holding the man’s hand, guiding him; now it was as if Umbo couldn’t bear to see him or be near him.
“We’ll have plenty of time to sort out who and what Loaf has become,” said Rigg. “Right now we have a few hundred people waiting to greet us on the other side of the Wall.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty, including the babies,” said Loaf.
“You counted them?”
“All the ones who can be seen,” said Loaf. “There are more behind the hill, since a few dozen people have left and a few others have come out since we’ve been watching.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty is a suspiciously round number,” said Umbo.
“It’s an estimate,” said Param.
“It’s the exact count,” said Loaf. “Someone just left, so it’s three thousand, two hundred and nineteen now.”
“Counting the babies,” said Olivenko drily.
“When people make up numbers and want them to sound exact,” said Rigg, “they usually make sure the num
ber doesn’t end with zero or five. But in the real world, there’s a twenty percent chance that a random number of items will end in either zero or five.”
“So you believe him,” said Param.
“There are several hundred people behind the hill,” said Rigg. “I see their paths. And while I can’t say if Loaf’s count is correct, I have no reason to doubt it. We all saw how the facemasks fought in the battle we watched. Their precision, their accuracy. Facemasks enhance the abilities of the people who wear them.”
“The people controlled by them, you mean,” said Umbo.
“Loaf says he isn’t controlled,” said Rigg, “and we have no evidence to contradict him.”
“So you’re just going to believe him while he waits for a chance to plant baby facemasks on all of us?” said Param.
“I won’t do that,” said Loaf.
“They don’t reproduce that way,” said Vadesh.
“You don’t know half of what they do,” said Loaf, turning on Vadesh. “In all your years of studying them, you didn’t know they can give off spores within fifteen minutes of deciding to?”
“How can you possibly know that?” said Vadesh. “Humans and facemasks don’t communicate.”
“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”
Vadesh stood in silence.
“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.
“Then don’t,” said Param.
“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.
“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”
“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.
Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.
“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.
Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”
“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”
The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”
Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”
Rigg immediately remembered the crushing despair, the utter terror, the agony of his minutes—his decades, it had seemed—inside the Wall.
“This time we wouldn’t have General Citizen trying to kill us,” Param said helpfully.
“And now you know how to go back in time and then return without my help,” said Umbo.
“Maybe someday we’ll need to do that—go back in time to put off our confrontation with the people of Earth,” said Rigg. “But right now, since nineteen days ago, any two of us can simply walk through the Wall.”
“So let’s go back nineteen days to dodge the crowd,” said Olivenko.
“I can’t calibrate it like that,” said Umbo.
“Neither can I,” said Rigg. “It’s not like the paths have calendars attached.” But even as he said it, Rigg realized that he could do it well enough. He remembered that when he first discovered that the paths were actually people in motion through time, he had been standing on a clifftop with Umbo, unbeknownst to him, slowing time so that he could see the people instead of the paths. Couldn’t they simply go back a day at a time? Or count back? By picking one animal’s path, and then another’s, Rigg could work his way back to the exact time, then attach to that animal and bring the others with him.
“You’ve thought of a way?” asked Olivenko.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Take my hands.”
“No,” said Vadesh. “Get inside the flyer, so I can go back, too, and still have the flyer with me.”
Rigg looked at him coldly. “We won’t need you,” said Rigg. “And I don’t want to send you back in time, knowing what you know now.”
“What do I know that’s so dangerous?”
“I don’t want you knowing, nineteen days ago, that our party broke up, that we came here and found people waiting on the other side. That Loaf started talking again.”
“What harm do you think would come from that?” asked Vadesh.
“The more you argue for being sent back in time,” said Rigg, “the more determined I am never to let you do so. Because you wouldn’t want it so much if you didn’t have some plan for exploiting your present knowledge in the past.”
To that, Vadesh had nothing to say.
Olivenko laughed. “Let’s go, then.”
“Nineteen days,” said Rigg.
“Eighteen,” said Loaf.
Again they looked at him.
“It’s been eighteen days since I got the mask,” said Loaf. “That’s when you got control over the Walls, isn’t it? That’s what I remember.”
They all looked at Vadesh.
“He’s confused,” said Vadesh.
“You lied to us,” said Rigg. “You said nineteen days. You counted on us to trust your accuracy. So we’d take you back to the day before I took control of the ship. So you could do something to prevent it.”
Vadesh said nothing.
“Expendables,” said Olivenko. “Can’t trust them, can’t kill them.”
“Get in the flyer and go back to the ship,” said Rigg.
Vadesh immediately started toward the ship. Then he stopped and said, “Rigg, if you only—”
“Go without stopping, without speaking. Go.”
Vadesh got back into the flyer. In moments it rose into the air and flew away.
“Maybe that was a mistake,” said Umbo.
Of course he’d say that, thought Rigg. Of course I was wrong. “Why?” asked Rigg, trying to keep impatience and resentment out of his voice.
“Because we could never get him to tell us how he knew we needed a ride,” said Umbo.
“That’s a problem,” said Olivenko. “We figured you’d ask him when we got back together.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know?”
“It didn’t come up,” said Param.
“It’s our mistake,” said Umbo, “not yours.”
“He had some kind of foreknowledge, then,” said Rigg.
“So does that mean that in some version of the past, you actually did take him with you into the past?” asked Olivenko.
“We know there were multiple versions,” said Umbo, “because I came back and warned myself not to go into the tunnel with you.”
“But you could only have done that while you were still there,” said Rigg, trying to think through what those other futures, the lost futures, might have contained.
“Right,” said Umbo. “I think what happened was, the mask got put on you. And then we couldn’t go anywhere, because . . .”
Because Rigg was the only one who knew how to keep them alive on a long journey. Because until Rigg was able to take control of the ship’s computers, they had no way to turn off the Wall. They had nowhere to go, and no way to get there if they did.
“So you didn’t go back from here,” said Param. “The future you avoided with your warning—”
“I think that in that future, we waited until Rigg got control of his facemask and could tell us what to do,” said Olivenko.
“No,” said Rigg. “I think I never got control of it, or at least you didn’t wait long enough to find out. I think Loaf told you to go back and change who went into the starship. I think he knew that if he and I were the only ones who went in, Vadesh would have to put the facemask on him first, because if he went for me, Loaf would have been in a position to st
op him.”
“Sounds like Loaf,” said Umbo.
“So Loaf chose to be like this?” asked Param doubtfully.
“Good plan,” said Loaf.
“Terrible plan,” said Umbo.
“Excellent plan,” said Loaf. “Because I see clearly now. I have this gift.”
“I wish we could leave the facemask behind the way we got rid of Vadesh,” said Rigg.
“If you knew how to detach it,” said Loaf, “then I’d stay away from you so you couldn’t. I never want to go back to how it was before. It would be like blinding me, deafening me.”
“Says the facemask,” murmured Umbo.
“Says the man who has been awakened to his full potential,” said Loaf.
“‘Man,’ he calls himself,” murmured Param.
“Let’s be careful about suggesting somebody isn’t quite human anymore,” said Rigg. “Someone might say the same thing about a woman who slices up time, Param. Or someone who sees paths, or someone who can go into the past.”
“Can we just go back eighteen days?” said Olivenko.
“Seventeen to be safe,” said Umbo.
It took a while to work his way backward through the paths of the animals, but then Rigg found the right one. They joined hands and in a moment saw the squirrel scampering away.
And on the hill beyond the Wall, there was not a soul to be seen.
Rigg walked toward the Wall and kept walking. He could feel the presence of the Wall, but it was as if from a distance, as if the feelings were happening to somebody else. It didn’t even slow him down. He turned back to face the others. “It’s there, but it’s manageable,” he said.
The first time he had come through a Wall, Umbo had been holding Param’s hand. This time he held Loaf’s. But Rigg knew Param would not feel abandoned. She had taken Olivenko’s hand already. Param had never needed to learn how to hide yearnings she had never felt before, so it was obvious that she was attracted to Olivenko, that she was offering herself to him in the way that came naturally to women who were filled with desire.
It was impossible that Olivenko did not see this. But as they walked toward Rigg into the Wall, he could see no sign in Olivenko of either fending off Param’s attention or encouraging it. Is he blind? Or is he as inexperienced as Param, and doesn’t realize the significance of the way she stays so very close to him, as if to surround herself with every breath that he exhales?