The trajectory was inevitable. It struck Deborah on the side of the head—she wasn’t looking at the wing man who threw at her—and dropped her instantly.
Noxon immediately stopped slicing time—he couldn’t stay invisible and bring her along with him. She would have to move to disappear that way. So now all three of the Sapient men were revealed to the wing man.
He didn’t even register surprise. He was already drawing another stone out of the bag tightly bound around his waist. Survival instinct—strange animals that looked like people, but not from his tribe. There was a constant state of war among Erectid tribes; if they ever had truces, Noxon had seen no evidence of it in their paths.
“Both of you hold on to me and Deborah,” said Noxon.
The wing man’s arm was going back for another throw.
Noxon jumped them all back to the future.
Wheaton was kneeling beside his daughter, checking her vital signs. He began to press on her chest, then breathe into her mouth.
“It’s no good,” said Noxon. “She’s dead.”
“People come back from heart stoppages,” said Wheaton as he pushed on her chest again.
“She’s dead,” said Noxon. “No path.”
After a half-minute this finally registered on Wheaton. He stopped trying to revive her. He just knelt there gasping.
“Calm down,” said Ram. “Remember what Noxon is. What he can do. She isn’t permanently dead. He can go back in time and prevent this.”
That was true, of course, and Noxon was already thinking about when he should intervene in the past in order to prevent it.
“Think of something,” said Wheaton. “Because I can’t bear to stay here much longer, looking down at her dead body.”
Noxon concentrated on Deborah’s corpse and pushed this lifeless object back about two hundred years.
Wheaton looked up in dismay. “What did you do!”
“What you asked me to do,” said Noxon.
“I know,” said Wheaton. “But now I know that there’s something worse than seeing her dead!”
“Quiet, quiet,” said Ram. “There are other people out here. In hovercars, yes, but they have mikes picking up sounds on the savannah.”
“How can you think about being quiet when . . .” But then Wheaton nodded. “I know. To you, she’s not really dead because she’s not going to stay dead. So let’s do it. Let’s go back and—”
“We can’t just go back,” said Noxon. “I mean, we can. But if the three of us appear to the four of us in the hotel, before we leave, it’ll change the paths of the past versions of ourselves, but as the agents of change we’ll still exist.”
“So there’ll be two copies of all of us,” said Ram.
“Except Deborah,” said Wheaton. “Worth it.”
“Seven of us to live on your already small income,” said Noxon.
“It’s Deborah’s life!” said Wheaton.
“I’m not proposing that we leave her dead,” said Noxon. “I’m just trying to think of a way to change the past without going there. So we don’t get copied.”
“Slice time and write a note,” said Ram. “You said you and your sister used to communicate that way.”
“If I’m there when the change happens, then whether it’s a note or a conversation, I’m still the agent of change, still present at the moment of change. I promise you, that’s how copying happens.”
“Then sneak in during the night and leave yourself a note that you’ll find in the morning,” said Wheaton.
“All right, yes,” said Noxon. “That’s good. But what should the note say? ‘Don’t go on the hunt’? ‘Make Deborah hold hands every second or she’ll be killed’?”
Ram asked Wheaton quite earnestly, “Would it work, just to warn her that not holding hands will result in her death? I mean, I’m sure she’d promise to comply, but in the moment, with that guy running at us with a stone in his hand—would she even think of her vulnerability?”
“I don’t know,” said Wheaton. “She thinks about whatever she’s thinking about, and not the things she’s not thinking about. She’s human.”
“So we forbid her to go?” asked Ram.
“Not sure she’d obey that,” said Noxon. “And if it isn’t her, it might be one of us.”
“We all held hands,” said Ram.
“But we were all distracted. Thinking and talking about language. He should never have seen us at all. I should have disappeared us much sooner. If I had done that, nothing would have gone wrong.”
“If if if,” said Wheaton.
“I’m a timeshaper,” said Noxon. “My life is all about ifs. When we make changes, it’s always in the belief that we understand what caused the problem and what the consequences of the changes we make will be. But nothing ever has just one cause, and nothing ever has just the predicted results.”
“So you fail all the time?” asked Wheaton.
“We mostly succeed,” said Noxon. “But the edges of everything we do are fuzzy. Nothing is really sharp and clear. So we spend a little time trying to think it through so we think of more choices and then choose the one we think is best.”
Ram and Wheaton fell silent then, for a few moments.
“If I were Umbo, I could just appear to myself in a vision,” said Noxon.
“You keep talking about the amazing powers of this mythical Umbo,” said Ram. “But he’s not here.”
“What I have to do is the equivalent of that. Like a vision. So yes, I think leaving a note is the best plan. But a long note. I’m going to lay out exactly what happened here and suggest several changes. I’ll tell us that their calls are language-like, and I’ll include the chip that has the recording. But then I’ll say, slice time from the moment you arrive there, and stay together.”
“Will that do it?” asked Ram.
“I don’t know,” said Noxon. “Because we don’t know what Erectids can see. It seemed to me that while he saw Deborah most clearly, because she wasn’t slicing time at all, he also saw us, or never lost track of where we were. I think I need to tell myself to slice time much more deeply, and trust the cameras to record everything. Which means we need to arrive much earlier and place cameras. I’ll tell us to do that.”
“We should have done that in the first place,” said Wheaton bitterly.
“What happens to us then, after you leave that note. Do we just . . . disappear?”
“I don’t know,” said Noxon.
“You said Umbo did this all the time,” said Ram.
“Yes, but you see, I’ve always been the guy who gets the warning,” said Noxon. “When we change our behavior, does that eliminate the timestream of the selves that sent the warning? Or merely diverge from it, leaving them to live with the bitter consequences of the mistakes they warned us not to make?”
“You mean I might still be here, with my daughter dead?” asked Wheaton.
“I just don’t know,” said Noxon.
“Well, what if we find out that it’s so. Can we go back and give a different warning? Or appear to ourselves even before we got the note, and this time accept that yes, we’ll copy ourselves?”
“You don’t want to copy yourself,” said Noxon. “I know that.”
“You say that with absolute certainty,” said Wheaton, “but you’re the copy. You exist because of copying.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I’m the original. I’m the one who never murdered Ram Odin—a future version of him. I’m the one who got warned. Rigg was the one who had to live with the consequences of having done such a killing. He was the one who wasn’t saved.”
“None of us killed Deborah,” said Wheaton. “Unless you want to use some oblique causal chain that starts with ‘if I hadn’t insisted on seeing Homo erectus.’ But I tell you this: I don’t want to save my former self from seeing h
er dead, while I have to go on living in this world that doesn’t include her.”
“So you want to copy yourself?” asked Noxon.
“I don’t know what I want, except I want every version of myself to live in a world that includes a living Deborah!”
“There’s another choice,” said Ram. “We could leave Africa, go back to the States, and then go back in time and prevent the traffic accident that killed Deborah’s parents and blinded her.”
Wheaton thought about that for a long moment. “In that world, I wouldn’t raise her. I would hardly know her. I wasn’t really all that close to my brother, and Deborah’s mother never cared for me. Deborah would just be an annoying little kid that I avoided because I’d have no responsibility for her.” He grabbed his ears and squeezed hard against them, as if trying to crush his own head. “What kind of man am I? I don’t want to save Deborah, I want to save myself from losing her. And losing her by having her parents live, saving her eyesight—I hate that thought almost as much as losing her to an Erectid stone. I’m a monster.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “it’s not a bad thing, to find out a few of the monsters living inside us. Because you know you won’t act on that preference.”
“Well, one thing’s certain,” said Wheaton. “If we save Deborah’s parents and preserve her sight, she would certainly not be with us on this expedition. She’d be at home with her family. Or away at school. And probably not even interested in anthropology, because that would just be something her eccentric uncle did.”
“We can’t do that,” said Ram. “Because it changes too much. We don’t know all the influence raising Deborah had on Uncle Georgia. Without her grounding him, giving him a meaningful personal life, a purpose, who knows whether he would have been all that successful in his career? Or even alive? Men living alone don’t always take care of themselves.”
Wheaton shrugged. “So I allow Deborah’s family to die and her to suffer in order to avoid damaging my career?”
“I don’t care about your career all that much,” said Ram, “except that it’s your career that gives you the money and the privacy for us to hide out with you while we wait for the Visitors to come back from Garden and somehow persuade the people of Earth to commit planetwide genocide.”
“Thank you for reminding me of what I’m here to do,” said Noxon. “I can’t afford to lose track of that. But something Umbo and I learned early on, though we didn’t realize we had learned it for a long time: No matter what grand purposes and causes we enlist in, we still have to be decent and good to the people we meet along the way. People like Professor Wheaton here. And Deborah.”
“So what’s best for Deborah, that still allows Uncle Georgia to be helpful to our cause?” asked Ram.
They were silent for another long while.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said Noxon.
“You just decide?” said Wheaton. “Without any kind of discussion or vote?”
“It’s always my decision,” said Noxon. “Because I’m the one who actually does it. So I’m the one who bears the responsibility.”
“But without advice?”
“Hear me out and then give all the advice you want,” said Noxon.
Noxon woke up in the morning and joined the others, who were having room service breakfast. Ram fluttered a two-page note toward Noxon. “Read it,” he said. “It’s from future you. Apparently our expedition today didn’t turn out too well the first time around.”
“Because apparently I’m an idiot,” said Deborah. “Apparently my dead body appeared out there in the grass about two hundred years ago, and hyenas already had their way with me.”
“Let the man read,” said Ram Odin.
Noxon read.
“So the thing to decide,” said Noxon, “is whether to go out there at all, and trust that we’ll do better, or just go back to watching the camp.”
“I say we go,” said Deborah, “and I just won’t be an idiot.”
“He lays it out—you lay it out pretty clearly, Noxon,” said Ram. “Slice time from the start, place cameras to record everything, then watch from invisibility the way we always do.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Noxon. “But what about his other suggestion?”
“His?”
“Future me wrote this note,” said Noxon. “I didn’t. So it’s his suggestion, not mine.”
“I don’t remember my parents,” said Deborah to Professor Wheaton. “Not enough to want to trade them for you.”
“It’s not a trade,” said Noxon. “What he’s suggesting will copy us. You—the you of right now, eyeless and brilliant and semi-annoying—”
“Thanks for that ‘semi,’” said Deborah.
“You will still exist,” said Noxon. “But that other you, the baby with parents and eyes, that version of you will continue. And live a completely different life. She’ll never know you existed.”
“She’ll probably get hit by a bus at age twelve,” said Ram. “There are no guarantees.”
“Or her parents might get divorced. Or all kinds of bad things. But she’ll have that life, and whatever happens, she’ll see it happening with her own eyes,” said Noxon. “And meanwhile, the four of us will still exist because we’re the agents of change. And we’ll jump forward in time and go calling on the other version of Professor Wheaton, and he’ll take us in because he’s a generous guy.”
“I’ll be living in a garret somewhere,” said Wheaton. “Or a homeless shelter. Or I’ll be dead.”
“And if you are, then the four of us will find some other way to survive,” said Noxon. “It isn’t hard for me to make a killing on the stock market. We don’t need some version of Professor Wheaton’s pension. That’s just the simpler way.”
“Why are we even thinking of going back to save my parents?” asked Deborah. “That was never part of the plan.”
“It’s what future Noxon said,” Wheaton answered her. “We saw you dead. And we couldn’t help but think, as long as we’re saving her life, why not save her original life?”
“We don’t have to do that,” said Deborah. “We can prevent my death out on the savannah today—or a million and a half years ago, or whatever. And then we just go home and wait for the human race to monstrify ourselves.”
“That’s one choice,” said Ram Odin.
“But it’s the one I’m going to make,” said Noxon. “Because my friend Umbo—”
“The legendary Umbo,” said Ram quietly.
“Never forgot about his brother who died when we first started messing with time. And if I know Umbo, he’s probably already found some stupid elaborate way to save Kyokay’s life. Because he couldn’t go on unless he did.”
“But that hardly applies to you, Noxon,” said Wheaton.
“And it certainly doesn’t apply to me,” said Deborah, “because I think I turned out just fine.”
“Oh, you did,” said Ram. “You are superb. If Noxon proposes anything that might get rid of you, I’ll strangle him first.”
“We’ve already proven you aren’t quick enough to kill me,” said Noxon. “And any change I make, I’ll be sure to keep you around, eyeless and mean as ever.”
“I’m not mean,” said Deborah, sounding a little hurt.
“I meant it in the nicest possible way,” said Noxon.
“None of the possible ways to mean that are nice at all,” said Deborah.
“He means that he’s halfway to being in love with you,” said Ram. “And I agree, that isn’t a very nice thing to contemplate, what with that incredibly ugly face of his.”
“Enough,” said Noxon. “Let’s go watch a gnu get slaughtered and butchered by Erectids. And then go back and save a little girl from being a blind orphan for the rest of her life. And then we can figure out how to save a faraway planet from destruction. I’m no
t putting it to a vote, and any of you who wants to can opt out of any step along the way, and choose your own consequences. But those are the changes I’m going to make.”
“You do realize that the simplest choice would have been to leave me dead,” said Deborah. “Why did they even leave this note to warn us? You can still accomplish your mission whether I’m there or not.”
“Because Professor Wheaton couldn’t bear to live in a world in which you were dead,” said Noxon. “Future me explained it very clearly.”
“So it isn’t me, it’s Father who caused all this annoyance,” said Deborah.
“My fault,” said Wheaton. “I take full responsibility.”
“Are you coming with me, or not?” asked Noxon.
They followed him out the door of the hotel room. They arrived at the parking lot much later than before, and now two rangers tried to persuade them not to go. But they went, and saw the prey stunned by two expertly thrown cobblestones, and then killed with the jab of a wooden spear into the spine. They watched the Erectids flake small blades from their seedstones, and flay and section the body while the blood was still warm, then bind the haunches and slabs of meat with twine and start jogging back toward the camp, where the fires would be waiting, and the women and children and old men were hungry for the meat, which would mean the survival of the tribe for another few days.
CHAPTER 24
Motherless Boy
“Something doesn’t feel right to me,” said Square to Umbo.
Umbo looked at the young man but said nothing. It wasn’t Umbo’s job to draw him out. Square would say what he had to say, when he was ready to say it. If Umbo spoke now, it would become Umbo’s conversation, and since he had no idea what the conversation would be about, it didn’t seem likely to be productive.
“I’m trying to think through everything that everybody has taught me about what’s right and wrong,” said Square. “I know it doesn’t mean legal or illegal—it’s usually right to obey the law, because that’s how civilization works best, but not always. I mean, over in Ramfold, either you’re King-in-the-Tent because you’re married to Param Sessamin and her mother is Sessaminiak, the rightfully deposed queen, or you’re a traitor and a rebel because you and Param make that claim but Hagia is still Sessamin, and Haddamander is King-in-the-Tent and all his actions are right.”
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