“Including the man who actually did it.”
“Maybe it tortures him,” said Ram Odin. “Maybe he doesn’t care. What difference does that make to the other people? That girl’s life changed them all, and her death changed them all. People see the world differently because she’s gone. I don’t know how that changed their behavior, their decisions, and neither do you. But maybe there are marriages that didn’t happen, jobs that were done differently, or not done at all, because of the shadow of Onishtu’s life and disappearance. You don’t know how their lives and choices would be different. But you arrogantly assume that because her death was awful, that gives you the right to take away all the lives that have been lived in this valley since she was buried under that window.”
Rigg sat very still, thinking, thinking. “It’s what the Odinfolders did—sent back messages that wiped out billions of lives.”
“Their lives! Their own lives. And they chose to send back the Future Book in order to save the world. A knowing sacrifice. Who is getting a choice if you save this one girl from her murderer?”
“She is.”
“And nobody else. Give one girl a few more years, and obliterate all the other lives that have been lived after her death—including the children of her murderer and his wife. Do they deserve to die for a crime their father committed before they were born?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. You can lie to yourself but don’t lie to me. Because remember, you think of me as a murderer even though I never killed you—but you did kill me. Noxon didn’t, because you came back and prevented him. So tell me, Rigg. Are you and Noxon both killers? I won’t say murderers, because according to your story you acted in self-defense—and I believe you, I know I was thinking about it, I had decided to do it, but this man talking to you right now, Rigg, this me never made the final decision to take your life. But you are the very one who deliberately, calculatedly went back in time and killed me first, before I could kill you. And then you regretted it.”
“I killed you because I believed that it was you, alone, who triggered the destruction of Garden. Not just because you tried to kill me. I could have dodged you forever, to keep myself alive. I killed you to save the world.”
“But it turns out you were wrong and I didn’t blow up Garden and obliterate the life that I had been tending for eleven thousand years! What a shock! How could you have guessed!”
“I undid the killing,” said Rigg, quieting himself. The last thing they needed to do was let their shouting in the cold night air bring curious people to the barn. “I was wrong, and I undid it, and I believe you are not dead, sir.”
“And this murderer—I wonder if, after a while, he came to wish he hadn’t done it. I wonder if he might not have chosen to go back in time and stop himself from killing her—even at the risk of causing two copies of himself to exist.”
“He can’t. Nobody can. Just me and Noxon and Umbo. And the mice, in their own way. Everybody else is stuck with whatever choices they made. I know.”
“So you think because you can undo a terrible mistake like killing an innocent man—me, because I never killed anybody and I did not destroy the world—because you can undo it, you’re not a murderer. You’re an ex-killer, a former killer, but you unkilled me so—”
“I get your point. Two points. One, that I don’t have the right to wipe out all the things this village has done in response to Onishtu’s death. Two, that I don’t have the right to kill him before he has killed. You think people have the right to be vile before they get punished for their vileness. By that reckoning, do we have to let the Destroyers wipe out all life on Garden before we take action to prevent them?”
“If you can’t see the difference . . .”
“I can see lots of differences. I can see differences between all your comparisons.”
“Think, Rigg. When Umbo and Param prevented those plague-infected mice from boarding the Visitors’ ship, they made the decision that saving human life on Garden was not worth wiping out human life on Earth. There’s actually a limit to what they would allow the mice to do in order to save our world.”
“Noxon’s going to take mice with him.”
“Not plague mice, Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m telling you that yes, you can prevent the destruction of Garden and yes, in the process there may be people you have to kill or cause not to exist in order to prevent the death of a world. But you try to make as little change as possible. You don’t just decide that to save this one girl, you can wipe out innocent children and make it so their lives never happen.”
Rigg just sat there, not really thinking, because he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent Onishtu’s death after all, but he hated himself for listening to Ram Odin, and he now felt as ashamed as if he had stood at the door and watched the murder and had done nothing to prevent it. Because that was pretty much how things stood. He had the power to stop the rape and murder, and he wasn’t going to stop it, and it hurt.
“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m only urging you to follow the course you and Umbo have followed all along. Minimal change. All the things you did affected mostly yourselves, and nobody else’s life was going to be all that changed by it. And you were contained within Ramfold, so nothing you did could possibly transform any of the other wallfolds. Noxon and Param went off by themselves to practice chronomancy, so they wouldn’t go back in time where it might change the course of the Larfolders’ lives. And in Yinfold, you didn’t prevent the adulterous pair and you didn’t even tell on them. In fact, you covered up their betrayal so that greater evil wouldn’t come from it.”
“Adultery is not the rape and murder of a child.”
“I know that,” said Ram Odin. “And so do you. I’m talking about the principle of minimal change.”
“To be able to stop it, and choose not to, that makes me complicit.”
“No!” said Ram Odin sharply. “You have this godlike power to force other people not to do evil, but to choose not to use it doesn’t make you evil. It says that you respect other people’s freedom enough to allow them to choose to do terrible things. To reveal who they are by the choices they actually make, the things they actually do. If you didn’t have this godlike power, if you had lived in this village and realized what the murderer was going to do, and you came and saw what he was doing and decided to let it happen, then you’d be complicit. But you have a godlike power to compel people to be better—or at least less awful—than they wish to be. How many people can you keep from being moral monsters? You children are going to try to stop the destruction of a world—but even then, there are limits to how you’ll go about doing it. There are limits! The only reason you can be trusted with this power is that there are limits.”
“So you stopping me from doing something, that’s all right, but I—”
“I’m not stopping you, foolish boy. I’m trying to persuade you. But I know perfectly well that at any second you could leap back in time, go prevent the murder, and come back here to rejoin this conversation right where we left off.”
“I actually can’t. I’d have to slice my way back.”
“You’d get back here. If you wanted. You could also leave me behind whenever you want. But you don’t do those things.”
“Maybe I should.”
“But you haven’t and I think you won’t. You sat here and listened to my arguments for one reason and one reason only.”
“I know.”
“Tell me the reason.”
“You’re not my father. You don’t have the right to quiz me.”
“You listened to me because you know I’m right. No, more than that. You already knew I was right, and you let me talk you out of it because you already mistrusted your decision to save the girl. You just needed me to help you do the right thing.”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “You nai
led it. And now I’m going to sleep.”
He lay down in the hay, his coat under his head to keep bits of straw out of his nostrils while he slept. But he did not sleep until he had exhausted himself with weeping. For the beautiful dead girl whose path was still present even when he shut his eyes, whose face was always before him because he could not stop himself from examining her path.
In the morning, Rigg went to work with the other men—sausage-making today, because it was beginning to snow, and it might turn into a real storm, and nobody should be caught out in the woods when the world went invisible and white.
“I had a dream last night,” said Rigg. “After imagining that poor girl’s path through the world. I dreamed that I saw her dead.”
One of the other men grunted. Nobody said anything.
“I know I’m a stranger here, and I have no right to anything to do with that girl. I don’t have a right to say her name, if you don’t consent to it.”
“Onishtu,” said one of the men. “You can say it.”
“Dreams are dreams,” said Rigg. “They mean nothing except that’s what was on my mind. Only I do believe that people leave paths in the world, and I do believe those paths enter into my mind sometimes. And I wouldn’t mention it even now, except that I also happened to see the very house I dreamed that she was buried in, and if that was real . . .”
All work stopped. “House?” asked a man.
“One of the empty houses,” said Rigg. “In my dream, it had been built for her.”
“She was too young,” said a man. “Nobody would build a house for her.”
“I know, her father said so last night—I’m sure that’s why it was on my mind. Forget that I said anything. It was just . . . such a vivid dream.”
Silence for a long time. They got back to work. Rigg kept grinding the meat and fat that would go into the sausages—the bloodiest and most menial task, but he didn’t mind.
As Rigg expected, the silence was finally broken by a man asking, “Which house?”
They didn’t leave their task until it was almost time for the noon meal. They would all eat together, so they didn’t have to change out of their bloody clothes. But they had to wash their hands, at least, before putting food into their mouths, and for that they went to one man’s dooryard. And when they were clean, the man said, “Food’s not quite ready. Suppose you point out the house in your dream.”
“No, no,” said Rigg, but they insisted.
On the way, they passed the Cave, and the old men who were spry enough came out and walked with them, and a few curious women joined them, so there were about twenty people when Rigg got to where he had a clear view of the house that was Onishtu’s grave and marker. They were still a good hundred meters from it, but he could point and there would be no ambiguity about the house he meant.
“Let’s go have a look,” said a woman, who had been filled in on what they were doing in quiet conversation along the way.
“Not me,” said Rigg.
“You said she was buried there, in your dream,” said one of the sausagemakers. “Where?”
“Behind the wall under a window,” said Rigg. “The west-facing window.”
“Behind the stone? Not in the floor?”
“That’s right,” said Rigg. “But is that even possible?”
“We’ll see,” said a man. And they went on ahead.
Ram Odin was among the men who had come out of the Cave. He didn’t go into the house, either. “So you decided to tell them your . . . dream.”
“Naming no names,” said Rigg. “They’ll know whose house or they won’t. They’ll accuse him or they won’t. He’ll break down and confess what he did, or not. But her parents will have her body and know she didn’t leave them and run off somewhere. No one carried her off. They’ll know.”
“Small comfort, if they knew how she died.”
“After all these years, I think the comfort will be more than small. But I’m not telling them how she died, or what was done to her first. I’m making the minimal change, and leaving them free to make of it what they will.”
They were a deliberate people—after all, despite years of suspicion, they had never taken any action against the villages they suspected of taking Onishtu. The girl’s parents were given a chance to wail over the body, and they buried the body in a real grave, among her ancestors, with a marker, before anyone started open inquiries about who had built the house.
It took only a few minutes to get past the “nobody knows who builds them” objection, and then it was only a few moments before they had named aloud the man who built it. The murderer kept his silence, except to say, “I’m angry that the killer hid her in the house I was building.”
And they took that at face value for a while.
But finally the question came. “Who did you build it for?”
He would not tell them. “A man doesn’t have to tell. Shouldn’t tell. She chose another.”
They started ticking off the women who had accepted houses during that year. They all agreed—for by now the whole town had assembled—that the man had not shown special attention to any of those women.
“Did you never offer it?” asked a man.
“She already took another,” said the murderer.
“Who, then? Because if it’s one of these, she never knew.”
“I’m a shy man,” he said. “I was afraid to speak, and then it was too late.”
“You never even looked at any of the women of Woox-taka-exu,” someone pointed out. “Was she an outsider?”
“When would I see an outsider girl?”
“Who was it?” they demanded.
He named one of the women who had accepted a house at the time.
“You never looked at me, you never talked to me,” the woman said.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t like me,” said the murderer.
“Then why did you build a house for me?” she asked. “Who builds a house for a woman he thinks won’t like him?”
“I hoped you would like the house.”
They all looked at the house. “It is a fine one,” said the woman, “but what kind of empty-headed fool would marry a man she didn’t love because the house he built was so sturdy?”
“I hoped you would,” said the murderer. “Now I’m going home with my family.”
He reached for his wife, who had been there when the conversation started. But she was gone. With the children.
“She must have gone ahead to prepare the table,” the murderer said.
Only then did the murderer seem to realize that his outward calm was no longer in place. He looked tense. He looked as if he was barely controlling himself. So now he let go with an emotion he thought might explain his nervousness. “Why are you asking me these questions? Are you accusing me?”
“She wasn’t wearing her clothes, they were wrapped around her,” said a woman. “I think someone tore them off and then wound them around her dead body.”
“Not me!” said the murderer.
No one looked at him.
“Not! Me!”
“Why isn’t your wife standing by you?” asked a woman. “I’d stand by my husband, if such things were being said or even thought. Because I know he doesn’t have it in him.”
“She knows I don’t have it in me, either,” said the murderer. “Do you think she’d have married me and stayed with me all these years if she did?”
That was when some men came back with the wife, who hadn’t gone far. “Found her crying just around the corner there,” one of them said.
“You know something,” said a woman. “Tell us all.”
“She knows I’m innocent!” said the murderer.
Reluctantly, the murderer’s wife spoke. “I had my eye on him for a long time. When he built his first house, I hoped it was for me. Bu
t it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t because he never looked at me. He never looked at any girl but one. And her too young for a house.”
“If you’re accusing me,” said the murderer, “how can I stay married to you?”
“He kept building on it after she disappeared,” said his wife. “But maybe that was just for show.”
“I’m the father of your children,” he said quietly.
“I think you need to winter in another house,” she said.
Those words hung in the silent air. Snow once again started drifting down, but there was no wind and it looked like just a flurry.
“I think you need to winter in another valley,” said a man.
There was a murmur of assent.
The murderer visibly sagged. “Do you even care that I didn’t do this?”
Rigg became conscious of the many eyes that were now glancing at him. Or openly watching him.
“You’re a kind of holy man,” said a sausagemaker. “Do you think we’d be doing a wrong if we held this man to account?”
Rigg did not know how to answer. So he just looked at the murderer. A long, steady gaze.
“You’ll believe a stranger over me?” he shouted. “He comes into the village and suddenly he knows where she’s buried! Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
“Hard to guess his age,” said a woman, “but he’s young. I think he would have been under ten years old when she died. So no, I don’t think that’s suspicious. I think it’s the Sight. He said he sees the paths people take in their lives, and he saw where her path ended.”
“Did he do it?” another man asked Rigg.
“The boy is not a judge,” said Ram Odin. “He had a dream. You found the body that he saw buried in that dream.”
“But did he see who buried her?” demanded a man. There were open declarations of agreement.
“I would never accuse a man on the basis of a dream,” said Rigg. “I don’t know which dreams are true and which are merely dreams. I’m sorry this one turned out to be true.”
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