Umbo saw the way Loaf looked at him, then glanced languidly at Param, then back at Umbo, and he knew what Loaf was really saying. You were showing off, Umbo. You were impressing the girl. You weren’t thinking with your head.
“So maybe we blew it and maybe we didn’t,” said Umbo. “Or maybe we saved the world. Let’s see how things turn out.”
“If the mice don’t kill us all as soon as they find out what you’ve done,” said Loaf.
“For all we know, the future mice are putting poison in our food right now,” said Olivenko.
“Then we’ll die,” said Umbo. “But you don’t know we were wrong any more than we know we were right. So back off!”
“What we don’t know hasn’t killed anybody,” said Loaf.
“Or saved anybody,” said Umbo. “Or accomplished anything at all.”
“There are so many mice,” said Param. “Who’ll even notice they’re gone?”
“There are so many humans,” said Loaf savagely. “So many peasants. So many of our enemy. So many of the poor. So many ugly people, so many stupid people, so many people who aren’t as good as me. Who’ll miss a few dozen or hundred or million, if my actions happen to kill them?”
Param reeled at the accusation. She looked about to cry.
She disappeared.
“Now look what you’ve done,” said Umbo.
“You foolish boy,” said Loaf. “You’re more upset over my hurting Param’s feelings than you are about the murders you just committed without any evidence that you were accomplishing anything.”
Umbo knew that Loaf was right. Excruciatingly, humiliatingly right. And it was Loaf, of all people, whose high opinion Umbo wanted. Needed to deserve.
In his anguish, Umbo cried out, “I’m just a kid!”
His words hung in the air. Nobody said anything.
Param returned to view. “I’m not running away from this,” she said.
“Well, it’s nice to see that somebody’s growing up,” said Loaf.
Param glanced at Umbo, saw the tears on his face. “We did what we thought was right,” she said. “And it was a smart plan. And Umbo thought of it, and I agreed with it, and we did it. And he loves you as much as I love my father. So why can’t you show him a little understanding. Isn’t that what fathers are supposed to do?”
“I didn’t ask to be his father,” said Loaf.
“Yes you did,” said Param. “When you came along with him and Rigg, that’s what you were doing.”
“If your father were here and knew what you did, he’d be telling you off, too,” said Loaf.
“No he wouldn’t,” said Olivenko.
“Why, because he’s so much better than me?” said Loaf angrily.
“No,” said Olivenko. “Because he’s a weak and selfish man, and he wouldn’t care.”
Param looked as if Olivenko had slapped her. “I thought you loved him!”
“I love him,” said Olivenko. “But I also know him better than you. Strengths and weaknesses. He left you to your mother. He cared about nothing but his own researches. He still lives that way. You can’t expect anything from him, because he won’t come through. If you don’t understand that about him, he’ll break your heart. But Loaf, here. He’ll stand by Umbo through everything. Even when Umbo’s wrong, and needs to hear just how wrong he is. That’s a father. If I ever have children, that’s the father I want to be.”
“Then I hope you never have children!” Param snapped.
But all Umbo could think was: Loaf loves me. He cares what I do. And he threw himself into Loaf’s arms and wept. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Tell it to the mice,” murmured Loaf. But his arms went around Umbo and held him close.
CHAPTER 23
Murder
To kill a man isn’t something you decide lightly, Rigg knew. But he also understood that there were times when you had no choice.
Rigg had discussed it with Loaf long ago, during the time they spent in O, waiting for a banker named Cooper to convert a jewel into money they could spend. Rigg and Umbo had only begun learning how to use their talents together. Alone, Umbo could only go back a little way and appear to someone, like a ghost, and give them a brief message. Alone, Rigg could only see the paths that people made as they went through the world.
Together, though, they could actually change things. Rigg could fix on a particular path; then Umbo could send him to that time, and bring him back. Rigg was in the past time, but Umbo, who was still in the present, could also see him; he was in both times at once.
That was how Rigg got the knife—he stole it from an utter stranger, someone whose path he fixed on. “I could have taken his knife and killed him with it,” Rigg had said to Loaf.
“Why would you even think of that? From stealing to assassination in one quick step.” Loaf looked contemptuous.
“You were a soldier,” said Rigg. “You killed people.”
“Yes,” said Loaf. “It was war. They were trying to kill me, I was trying to kill them. I didn’t always succeed in killing them, but so far they’ve always failed at killing me.”
“So I guess you don’t think it would be fair for me to go where I know an enemy soldier was, and then go back in time and kill him when he had no way of knowing I’d be there.”
“Fair?” asked Loaf. “There’s no ‘fair’ about killing in war. If you can kill the other man, without any danger to yourself, then you do it.”
“But you just said it was wrong for me to—”
“Enemy,” said Loaf. “War. He knows he’s at war, he knows he has enemies, and suddenly out of nowhere an enemy kills him. That’s war. If you know how to kill the enemy without putting your own troops in danger, then you do it. You save the lives of your own, and take the lives of the enemy.”
“I would never just kill a stranger on the street,” said Rigg.
“But that’s what you said. You robbed him, and then you talked about how easy it was to kill him.”
“I said it would be easy,” said Rigg, “not that I would have killed him.”
“You’re wrong, though,” said Loaf. “It might be safe, it might be impossible for him to stop you. But if it’s ever easy for you to kill a man, then something has already died inside you.”
“So you can kill a man in a war,” said Rigg. “Any other time? What if someone was attacking Leaky?”
“Leaky would kill him without any help from me,” said Loaf. “Don’t argue, I know the point you’re making. You and Umbo, you can do this thing with time. So you know a man is going to kill somebody because he did it. There’s the person, dead. So you go back in time, and just before he kills the other guy, suddenly you appear and slit his throat.”
“That’s all right, isn’t it?” asked Rigg.
“You’re so eager to kill? You want to find out what the rules are, so you can do it?”
“I’m just asking a simple question,” said Rigg. “But if you’re afraid to give me an honest answer . . .”
“I gave you one. You’re too eager to kill. Go back farther. Before he ever reaches out to kill. Trip him on the way in. See if that stops him.”
“Trip him? He’s a murderer!”
“Do you know why he kills the other guy?”
“I’m making this up, how would I know why?”
“Was it a plan? Was someone else making him? Does he think this man wronged him terribly? What if he finds out later that the guy didn’t do it. He’s so grateful then that he tripped on the way into the roadhouse or the bank or wherever it was. Now both men are alive, and you didn’t kill anybody.”
“So you think all the murders in the world are done because of mistakes?” asked Rigg.
“I’m saying that not everybody who kills is a murderer. Sometimes killers are idiots. Sometimes they’re just boys. Sometimes they’re idiot boys.”
“Stop bringing me into this,” Umbo had said from the other room, where he was reading something. Rigg
didn’t remember what. He just remembered that Loaf finally came around to saying, Yes, this power you have, it can be used to kill, and there might come a time when you have no other choice.
This was that time.
Rigg didn’t leap to that conclusion. It came on him gradually. It began with all the lies. The Odinfolders were sure they had all the information from the chat among the expendables and the ships’ computers, and yet some of the information they had was false, and things were missing. The clincher was the fact that the Odinfolders and the mice had said that there was nothing from Larex about the Larfolders—but instead, Larex met with them all the time and was aware of what they were doing every step of the way.
“We all lie to Vadesh.” What did that even mean? Why Vadesh in particular? Yes, he had lost all of his humans, but now it turned out that Vadesh had actually left his own wallfold to visit Larfold.
What would it mean if he were told the truth—why would they bother lying to him?
So who was really lying? Had the Odinfolders lied to Rigg? Or did they tell what they believed was the truth, and the mice lied to the Odinfolders about what they had learned from their interception of expendable communications?
Who ordered the killing of Param in the library in Odinfold? Was it the mice, acting for their own self-interest, and they blamed it on the Odinfolders? Or did the Odinfolders order it? And if so, why? Who was served by it? Was it to try to kill Param, or to try to get Rigg and Umbo and the others to do exactly what they did—go on to Larfold and take ten thousand mice with them?
Who was in control of all this? Whose plan was being served? What if all the living creatures—human or part-human—were being lied to by the expendables and the ships’ computers?
Which led to yet another round of questions. What if the expendables had gone rogue? The ships’ computers hinted at the possibility; certainly Rigg had gotten different results from giving orders to the ship from the orders he gave to Vadesh.
Yet Vadesh had claimed that he had to obey the owner of the jewels, right from the start. The ships assured him that he was absolutely in control of everything. And yet they were all doing things that had nothing to do with anything he ordered, and sometimes that completely contradicted what they had told him they had done or were going to do or even could do.
How can machines lie? Were they lying when they said they had to obey him? If so, how did they get programmed to be able to tell that lie? In other words, who had ordered them to be capable of disobeying orders?
Ram Odin had ordered the killing of all the other Ram Odins so that the computers and expendables would not be forced to deal with contradictory orders. Yet one of the Ram Odins had lived, and the computers and expendables all knew it, because there existed both Ramfold and Odinfold, named for the founder of the colony.
The kind of lying that was going on—what if it wasn’t lying at all? What if everything that every single expendable and computer ever said to Rigg was true. No, not true, but honest—that is, they were conveying exactly the information they had been ordered to give him.
When they told him he was in command of everything, it was true. But what if shortly afterward it stopped being true, and they were ordered not to tell him that?
Or they were ordered to tell him that he was in control when in fact he was not, so they were lying, but not by their own choice.
Who could possibly give such orders? Rigg was in possession of the jewels, the ships’ logs, and by all rights he should be in command.
But only if the previous commander was gone. Dead.
What if the previous commander was unavailable, so Rigg took command; but then the previous commander became available, and so Rigg was not in command anymore. Or he was in command, but in a subordinate way, the way Umbo was in command in Odinfold because he had the copies of the ships’ logs that were on the knife—but he still served under Rigg and could not countermand an order of Rigg’s.
What if Rigg was also subordinate to another human commander, and the expendables had been ordered not to tell him?
Then it all made sense. All the lying by machines stopped being lies and started being a systematic plan of deception by a commander who didn’t want his existence to be known.
This is the way Father had taught Rigg to think. If things don’t make sense, then question your assumptions. When your assumptions all seem to be wrong, then think of ways that they might be right after all. Find new possibilities.
Here was the possibility that nobody ever talked about, yet it seemed obvious once it occurred to Rigg.
Ram Odin was still alive.
Eleven thousand years later, still alive?
Every starship had that room where sleeping colonists were revived and awakened from stasis. That’s where Vadesh had brought Rigg and Loaf, pretending it was the control room, but really intending to slap a facemask on one of them. Rigg had always assumed he meant to do it to him, not Loaf at all. But now he wondered: Vadesh had put the facemask on one of the two men in their group who had no power over time.
That was when Rigg realized that if he had the enhancements to his senses that Loaf had received, he might be able to use his power far more effectively. Wouldn’t the facemask also enhance his ability to see paths, the way it had enhanced Loaf’s sight and hearing and smell, his quickness, his memory, his mental acuity?
There in Vadesh’s revival chamber, Rigg had all the answers in front of him if he had only known the right questions. This was a room that was still in use. Not for the facemask—Vadesh didn’t have to bring him there to put the facemask on someone, he could have done that in any room in the starship.
So why did Vadesh choose that room? Because then Rigg would know what it was. What it was for. That it existed.
Vadesh was trying to tell him the truth even though he had been forbidden to tell it. Someone is still being kept in stasis. Someone who gets revived from time to time, then goes back to sleep. Someone who has slept his way through eleven thousand years of human history on Garden, only waking up for a few days here and there to give orders, to make tweaks in human history.
Ram Odin. Only he was not in Ramfold, where he had founded a colony and left his seed behind. He was in Vadeshfold, where Vadesh had tried to create a symbiosis of humans and native organisms.
“We all lie to Vadesh”—that was their code, their desperate attempt to signal Rigg, against all of Ram Odin’s orders, that there was something in Vadesh’s starship that they all were trying to resist as best they could.
This was the conclusion Rigg had reached when he heard the story of the mantles of the Larfolders, the tale of how they went under the sea. The contradictions had become too great, the web of lies too complicated. So he thought and thought until he made the leap that brought him to this conclusion: Ram Odin is alive, and Ram Odin is manipulating everything.
Then he made one more leap: It is not the Visitors who trigger the destruction of Garden. It is Ram Odin.
In the Future Books, the dying Odinfolders spoke of Destroyers from Earth, but did they know this was true, or had they been told this by the ships’ computers, by the expendables? Here was the key point: the Destroyers worked through the orbiters—the satellites from the original nineteen starships that circled Garden in stationary orbits.
The satellites obeyed their programming by threatening to destroy any wallfold that developed dangerous weapons. But those dangerous weapons were actually thwarted by the expendables, who forestalled any experimentation along those lines. What weapons were considered too dangerous to allow?
Any weapons that could threaten the starships’ control of this planet.
There were terrible slaughters in the wallfolds. The humans of Vadeshfold had made themselves extinct. There was apparently some kind of terrible plague that affected all the wallfolds early on. Many horrible wars and massacres and famines and genocides had happened, but it never triggered any reaction from the orbiters.
But then the Visitors come
and a year later the Destroyers activate the orbiters to destroy every single wallfold.
Nine times the Odinfolders had tried various ways to placate these vengeful, terrible gods, remaking themselves, unbuilding their society, leaving everything, even their own bodies, in ruins; devolving all their powers and knowledge upon sentient mice; even contemplating the slaughter of the human race on Earth in order to prevent the destruction of Garden.
What if it wasn’t the humans from Earth who did this?
What if it was Ram Odin?
The Visitors came. They got complete access to all the ships’ logs. Then they went away.
What if they studied those logs and realized what had happened. The whole system was under the control of the man whose first act upon discovering the accidental nineteen-copy, eleven-thousand-year time-shift event was to order the murder of all other copies of himself, and then the destruction of almost all life on Garden to make room for his colonies. The man who used Garden as a means of creating people with his own strange time-shifting powers, only enhanced, clarified.
Now this same Ram Odin saw the people of Earth returning. Maybe they even got near enough to send an order to the ships’ computers, taking command away from Ram Odin.
Only Ram Odin had already programmed in an automatic response to this move. The result of any order that took command away from Ram Odin was the immediate destruction of all life on Garden.
If Ram could not rule, he would destroy.
The humans from Earth had tried to save Garden from its secret god, and the god had wrecked all rather than let his own power be curtailed.
Now it all made sense. No matter how many times the Odinfolders tried to make a better impression on the Visitors, nothing would ever work because the Visitors had always gotten a good impression and had never turned against the people of Garden.
All the lies were part of Ram Odin’s mad or evil plan to keep control over Garden while creating a race of time-shifters who were subservient to him without ever knowing it was him whom they served.
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