Ruins

CHAPTER 12 Ruined Cities

Param’s idea of a city was a fantasy born of literature, with little experience to change things. She had never strayed from whatever house they imprisoned her mother in, so the only cities she saw were illustrations in books or art on the walls. When she fled Flacommo’s house with Rigg, she saw only a few streets of Aressa Sessamo, and then she was in fear every moment.

Besides, Aressa Sessamo was so flat and low that unless you climbed one of the few high towers, it was impossible to get any idea of the size of it. From Umbo and Rigg she had learned something of O, which, according to them, was a real city.

And then there was the empty city in Vadeshfold. But, once again, they had ventured only into the outskirts, had never climbed a tower, had plunged underground almost at once.

So she was not prepared for what she saw when they crested the second rise beyond the Wall. Since the Odinfolders lived in trees, there had been nothing that looked like a house or a shack or a shed or even a tent. But now they stood on the brow of a hill looking down into the valley of a swift-flowing river.

On the hither side of the river, there were only a few hundred hummocks with occasional walls, posts, and roofs rising out of them. Dust blowing primarily out of the east had drifted and turned everything into mounds of earth, covered in grass. Yet enough of the artifacts of human habitation still stood that it would have been an impressive, if bleak, sight.

But on the other side of the river, rising up to a flat mesa, the lower walls gave way to high towers. Most of them were skeletons now, with beams that marked the structure like bones, but many of them rose quite high, and because they had lost their façades, Param could see through each to the building behind, and the one behind that, and on and on up the slope.

On the flat of the butte, the great towers made way for somewhat lower, narrower buildings; but these, perhaps because they had sheltered each other from wind, still had much of their facing. They were ornately decorated and many still showed faded traces of once-bright colors. And the windows: a thousand eyes peered from every building.

Param was above two hundred when she gave up counting the towers.

“Ten thousand people must have lived here,” she said.

“Oh, no,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “This was a town of a million or so. And just down the river, you can see a city almost as big.”

It was true—though distance and bends in the valley made it so that nearby trees somewhat blocked the view, it was plain that about as many skeleton towers rose just as high, though starting on lower ground. The only thing missing was the patch of buildings with walls still in place.

“A million,” breathed Param. She knew the number as a theory, but had no idea what it would mean in practice. Aressa Sessamo was famous for having two hundred thousand inhabitants. Here, that would have been nothing. “How did they eat?”

“Food was easy,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We know how to make soil yield hundreds of times more than the primitive farms in Ramfold. It was energy and sewage that were a constant problem.”

“A million people would make it a pretty fecal city,” said Rigg. Umbo laughed.

Boys could be so crude. Param wondered how long it would be before they finally stopped finding ways to use “fecal” in every sentence. Olivenko didn’t think references to poo and pee were an inexhaustible source of mirth, the way Rigg and Umbo did.

“Where did they all go?” asked Param.

“Well, they died, of course,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“Plague? War?” asked Param. “If food was easy, it wasn’t famine.” She had read enough history to know these were the ways that cities turned to ruins.

“No, not at all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We weren’t so long-lived then. Only a hundred years, on average—once you’d seen your century, you expected your body’s functions to decay enough that living wasn’t a pleasure anymore. You lost interest. Or so I’m told.”

“We just hadn’t solved the problems of aging yet,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“A hundred years is very, very old in Ramfold,” said Rigg.

“Yes, we’re so sorry, dear,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“But that doesn’t explain anything,” said Param, a little impatient. “Just because people lived ‘only’ a hundred years doesn’t explain why the city emptied out like this.”

“The first time through our history,” said Mouse-Breeder, “our population reached six billion by the time the humans came.”

“You say that as if we weren’t human ourselves,” said Olivenko.

Swims-in-the-Air only smiled. “We do, don’t we,” she said.

“Again,” said Param, “I don’t see why the cities—”

“This one likes quick answers,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“Or easy ones,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “So here’s the quick and easy answer. We got a letter from the future, telling us how the world ends. So we set about trying to make it end differently. Each attempt meant cutting our population more sharply, until you see us as we are today, about ten thousand people in the entire wallfold, and most of us clustered within walking distance of the Wall.”

“Cutting your population?” asked Param. “How?”

“Having fewer babies, of course. Most of us having none at all. That’s why my two children became part of my name.”

“She’s such an optimist,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“Incurable,” said Swims-in-the-Air. But she sounded wistful and sad when she said it.

“People just stopped wanting children?” asked Loaf.

Param thought it was odd for him to sound so incredulous, considering that he and his wife Leaky had no children, or none that she had heard of.

“It’s not about wanting,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The body still has its primate roots. The body wants to breed. But we owed a duty to the whole world of Garden.”

“You see, the first time the humans came, they visited only Odinfold, because only our civilization was visible from space.”

“From space,” said Umbo, “why would the high towers make a difference?”

“Not the towers,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “The light. Every street had lamps on it. Every building had lights in the windows. There were lights everywhere at night, lights that could be seen from a million kilometers away. Our wallfold was the only patch of light on the whole planet, so they came to us. They thought we kept the rest of Garden as a nature preserve; they thought the name of the world confirmed that idea.”

“But then they learned what this world really was,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“And what is it?” asked Rigg, a little defiant-sounding. “Really?”

“Give just the tiniest thought to the question,” said Mouse-Breeder. “I know you know the answer.”

“A place where the human race could develop in nineteen completely different ways,” said Param.

“And in Ramfold, we turned out to be time shapers,” said Umbo.

“The three of you are,” said Olivenko.

“But most people in Ramfold can’t do anything with time,” Umbo added.

“You know that’s not true,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And it isn’t really time per se that you manipulate. You create fields with your minds, fields in which time can be altered because of the way you connect yourselves to the planet’s past.”

“What do you do?” asked Umbo.

“They move objects in time and space,” said Param. “They already told us.”

“No, Param, we didn’t tell you that that’s what we do,” said Mouse-Breeder. “It’s merely one manifestation of what we do. You see, we were the only wallfold where the learning of the Earth we came from wasn’t sealed to us. We could study it all. We also knew that the hope of Ram Odin, when he commanded the expendables and the ships to divide the world into folds, was that the human species would find nineteen different ways to evolve and change, either physically or culturally.”

“All of human history on Earth was scarcely twelve thousand years,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “and that’s with a most generous interpretation of the word ‘history.’ That’s how long it had been since the last ice age, as they called them—times when the Earth’s climate grew colder and much of the ocean’s water was locked up in ice caps.”

“Real history—written records and all that—was about five thousand years,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And the biggest leaps in science and technology had taken place in only the last thousand years or so, with the most dramatic transformations in the last two centuries.”

“The expendables were not even regarded as particularly remarkable when Ram Odin’s colony ship set out,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Indestructible materials, highly advanced language modules, things like that were only fifty years old. But the humans of Earth thought of fifty years as a long time, because they were used to such a fast rate of progress.”

“It hadn’t been two hundred years since humans first went into space, you see,” said Mouse-Breeder. “So the colonists in Odinfold expected to be able to continue making progress at the same pace, though they recognized that with a much smaller population and the need to deal with subsistence issues, there would be a slowdown for a few generations.”

“Oh, we had babies then!” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Babies and babies and babies, because we needed our population to reach a point where we could specialize, where the smartest of us could live the life of the mind.”

“But let’s go down to the river and cross into the city,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The vista from here is only interesting for a while, and then you want to go inside to get a sense of scale, don’t you think?”

They thought so, too, so they walked together down the slope toward the river, while the Odinfolders continued their story.

It wasn’t enough to have lots of babies, they explained. Wasn’t one of the goals of Garden to promote the isolated evolution of new human species? And since Odinfold retained its memory of the science of genetics, they could keep conscious control of the human species.

“Not just selective breeding,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The way I do with mice, where I select for traits I want and allow only those mice that have such traits to reproduce. No, we went into the genes themselves, the seeds within the human body that decide what each new generation will look like.”

They found long-lost traits that they wanted to restore, rare ones they wanted to make common, and then nearly everybody gave birth only to babies that had been enhanced in some way. Improving the species directly.

“What traits?” asked Rigg.

“Short legs,” said Umbo.

“Oh, no,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The short legs came later, when we were tailoring ourselves to look like yahoos.”

“We made ourselves tall and slender at first,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We metabolized food very efficiently, so we required less of it per person.”

“And we rebuilt ourselves to concentrate on the brain,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Each increase in brain size required more blood for the brain, less for the rest of the body. So the leaner we were, the better. Any organs we could eliminate or shrink saved blood.”

“Larger brains?” asked Param. Their heads were disproportionately large for their small bodies, but not larger than normal adults’ heads.

“The human brain folds quite elaborately, increasing the surface area,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Ours fold more. Also, our skulls are much thinner. Less bone here, more brain inside. It makes us fragile, but we don’t face the same sorts of enemies that our ancestors had to deal with. And when we’re doing something risky, we wear helmets.”

“Throwing dung at Loaf is risky,” said Umbo.

“But thrown dung is not going to break skulls,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “As weapons go, it’s more annoying than damaging.”

The Odinfolders also tried, in the early days, to bring out what they called “savant” abilities—perfect visual and auditory memory, the ability to count and solve equations with astonishing rapidity, vast expansion of available vocabulary. “We never quite succeeded. It seems that for true savant capability, you have to pay the savant price—a loss of social function, the inability to do the fuzzy thinking that leads to creativity. Once we realized that the price was too high, we worked to strike a balance. Creativity and better memory, better ability to notice things, better abstract and spatial reasoning.”

They did so well at shaping their own brains that any one of them might be trained as thoroughly in three or five or ten disciplines as ordinary humans were in one or two.

By five hundred years into life on Garden, they had built machines that could intercept and decode all the messages between expendables and starships, so that no secrets could be kept from them. By a thousand years, they were able to alter the programs that operated the Walls, so that the fields not only triggered powerful emotions in the human mind, but also wakened the latent language abilities present in all humans.

“It’s the grammar of grammars, the key to all vocabulary,” explained Mouse-Breeder. “It’s as if we sing you to sleep in all languages, when you pass through the Wall.”

“But nobody passes through it,” said Param. “Except us.”

“ ‘Through the Wall’ means in at one place and out at another,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You were the first to transverse the Wall, but many thousands have gone in and out; some have ventured well inside it, and for longer than you might have thought possible.”

“But what’s the point?” asked Param. “If you can never leave your wallfold, then what does it matter whether you learn languages you’ll never speak.”

“You’re not listening well enough, Param,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “These concepts are well within your reach.”

Param thought a moment more and then blushed. “You don’t give us languages. You changed the Wall so that it gives us Language.”

“Yes!” cried Swims-in-the-Air happily.

“I have no idea what that means,” said Loaf.

“The deep language of the human mind,” said Rigg. “The instinctive grammar of meaning that’s born into every human mind, on which we build our particular languages. Father told me that there was such a thing, but no one in the world had ever found the key to it.”

“In our world, we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Barely a thousand years into our history, we found it, and then embedded the key to it in the Walls, so that it was potentially available to any people who could bear the torment of the Wall long enough for it to take root.”

“And now let’s cross the river,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We can’t have bridges, you know, since we’re supposed to be yahoos, so we arranged stones to allow passage. Your feet get a bit wet, but it’s not that unpleasant, and you’ll dry off quickly enough in the grass on the other side.”

She and Mouse-Breeder led the way, taking off their shoes and walking easily across on stones just under or just breaking the surface. Rigg followed next, being used to such traverses from his life in the wild, and Umbo and Loaf went next, almost as easily. Only Olivenko bothered to stay behind to help Param across, for Param had never had to learn the art of delicate balance, and she was more afraid of falling and injuring herself than the others were. With Olivenko’s hand gripping hers, however, she was at no risk of falling, and she could cross in no more than twice the time it took the others.

Once across the ford, the walls began to rise on either side, and it was plain that the grass they walked on overlay smooth and level roads.

Also, other Odinfolders began to emerge from the large trees near the river. They waved, they smiled, but none of them made a move to join them; none tried to speak. Apparently Mouse and Swim had been delegated to be the only Odinfolders that their party would be allowed to meet. Param wondered why.

Meanwhile, as they ascended into the ruined city, the Odinfolders continued their story.

The Odinfold colonists had maximized their population over the years, growing food efficiently, living in splendid high towers so they used up the least possible surface area with mere habitation. As a result, they had enormous numbers of extremely brilliant people working on every scientific and technological problem they could think of—along with art, literature, history, and philosophy.

But in the midst of this vast civilizational florescence, something astonishing happened: A message reached them from their own future.

It consisted of a stack of thin sheets of noncorroding metal, inscribed with fine writing, laying out the key events of the history of the next five thousand years.

This Book of the Future appeared out of nowhere, in the midst of a meeting of scientists who were working on the problem of movement through time. One speaker was leaving the lectern, another rising from his seat at the table to take his place. And there, where the first one had been sitting before, the Future Book appeared, shiny, new.

By demand of the audience, the book was immediately read aloud. It was written in a slightly awkward version of their present language, and it was specifically written to the scientists at that gathering.

First, it confirmed to them that five of their number had already completed the theoretical work that laid the foundation of the ability to move objects through time. The Messengers who wrote the book chose this date for the book to arrive precisely because the science was already in place, and the book would be confirmation of what they already knew.

Second, it told them a rough outline of the history of Odinfold up to the year zero, and the nearly fourteen years beyond.

Third, it told of the coming of the first humans from Earth. To these Visitors, it had been only fourteen years since Ram Odin’s colony ship made the first Jump. So they were stunned to find six billion people living in such a limited area as Odinfold.

They were even more surprised to learn that the colony ship had replicated itself to make nineteen complete copies, all of which had become the source of colonies separated by Walls.

Almost their first act was to turn off all the Walls, something that no one on Garden had yet been able to do. Then they did what Odinfolders had never been able to do. They visited every wallfold and saw what had become of the human race within it.

Then they went home.

Eleven months later, in the year fifteen, nineteen starships arrived at once. These were not Visitors, but Destroyers. Without warning or discussion, they activated the destruct systems on the orbiters that had been circling Garden ever since the starships plunged into the planet’s surface more than eleven thousand years before. These burned the surface of the planet, destroying almost all plant and animal life.

Then the Destroyers sent flyers to the surface, where they systematically rendered all water undrinkable and the atmosphere unbreathable, with machines that would make the effects continue for at least two centuries.

The Messengers who wrote the Future Book were hidden away in a deep mining operation, where they had air enough to continue to live for the week in which, as a group, they composed and then used a machine to etch the book. They also had a displacer with them, and used it to project the finished book through time and space to precisely the moment when the earliest scientists equipped to understand the situation were gathered.

By the time Mouse-Breeder’s and Swims-in-the-Air’s story was finished, they were in the center of the city, where there were still walls and windows, instead of bare skeletons. Soil and dust had built up, mostly against east-facing walls, and so grass had softened the bottom edges of the buildings, and trees had taken root here and there. But it was still a city, however empty of inhabitants it might be, and Param could not help but be awed, not so much by the size of it, but by the way these people had lived.

“All stores and businesses on ground level, of course,” Mouse-Breeder explained. “And everybody walked—transportation was underground. Parks everywhere—the streets were of a very durable grass. Not this high grass, but a low grass that you could walk on and it wouldn’t die.”

“Then I’m surprised it ever went away,” said Olivenko.

“It had to be misted with water every day,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And this prairie grass blew in as seeds, then became so tall, and thrived so well in dry seasons, that it blocked the old paving grass from any access to sunlight. It only took a few years.”

“Why are we talking about grass?” asked Param. “I want to know about the people.”

“They lived in these buildings, and worked in them, and went to school in them,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “There are still some of the bridges connecting them, do you see? You’ve never lived in such crowds, I know—but you’ve come closer than we who live in Odinfold today ever have. It seems so anonymous, to speak of a million people. But they all had lives, and families, and hopes, and disappointments. Every life was its own story, its own thread in the network of life.”

“Why did this Future Book kill them?” asked Param.

“No, no, you don’t understand at all. It simply changed their purpose.” Swims-in-the-Air corrected herself. “Our purpose. We still worked to advance science, but now we were in the business of saving the world. Because it was our fault, don’t you see? Whatever the Visitors saw in us, they went back and made such a report that the people of Earth resolved to destroy us.”

“So you spent five thousand years preparing for war,” said Loaf.

“No!” said Mouse-Breeder with horror. “First, it wouldn’t work. If we had defeated that fleet, they would have sent a larger one. If we had developed better weapons, they would have returned with weapons better still. The only hope of victory would have been to go back and destroy Earth itself. And we were not prepared to do that. Ever.”

“Not that there weren’t factions who wanted to try it,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “But we had long since learned that we couldn’t defeat the programming in the ships. The expendables monitored us, you see, and they were very good at it. In most wallfolds, the expendables were there to nurture beneficial changes, to enhance human survival. But in our wallfold—and a few others, over the millennia—they were watching out to keep us from developing technologies that could defeat the protections on the programs.”

“And weapons,” said Mouse-Breeder. “If anyone started to work on weapons systems that might eventually reach beyond the Wall or up into space, the expendable simply came and killed him. No trial, no questions, he was dead.”

“I thought you said you broke into the programs,” said Umbo.

“We read them,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And we found that there were some we could change—like the programs controlling the Wall. But we couldn’t defeat any of them. And we found code that clearly warned us that any attempt to defeat or change anything significant would cause the destruct system on the orbiter to burn out the entire wallfold.”

“So you couldn’t defend yourselves,” said Loaf.

“These systems weren’t designed to defend us from the human race. From Earth,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“But the expendables said that their whole purpose was helping us to get in place to protect Garden,” said Rigg.

“It is now,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But they’re limited by the same programming that blocks us. We had to find a way to get the Visitors to reach a different conclusion about the people of Garden.”

At first, the Odinfolders feared that the Visitors had been frightened by Odinfold’s magnificent achievements. So they began reducing their population and concealing their technological achievements. But within a dozen years of their first efforts along these lines, they got another book.

This time the book was only a single sheet, and it was on gold instead of a complicated alloy. The message was also simpler. It outlined what had been attempted, and reported on its complete failure. The outcome was the same as before.

More plans were made. More drastic cutbacks in population. A deliberate reduction in technological change. And yet there came another Future Book.

So they tried again. Instead of cutting back on technology and science, they pushed it forward, trying to offer dazzling brilliance as an incentive—something to sell, something that might earn their survival.

Another Future Book showed that as a dead end.

“Nine books in all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The last one came only three thousand years ago. That was when we decided on the yahoo strategy. We got the idea from a book from Earth, Gulliver’s Travels. It ended with the traveler visiting a land where the sentient residents had evolved from horses, and the creatures that looked like humans were tree-dwelling beasts that grunted and threw their dung at strangers. We bred ourselves for that, in a flurry of new generations, and then sat back and waited.”

“That was when we gave ourselves shorter legs and semi-grasping feet. Learning from the primate ancestors of humans on Earth,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And when there were about ten thousand of us, long-lived, intelligent, but able to pass for beasts, our beautiful ancestors allowed themselves to die out, so that only we were left.”

“What good is it?” said Param. “How do you even know it was your wallfold that convinced the Visitors that Garden had to be destroyed?”

“Ours was the only one we could change,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“Be accurate,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“I should have said,” Swims-in-the-Air replied, “that ours was the only wallfold we could change as drastically as this. We didn’t have the right to interfere in the others at anything like this level. But we did fiddle here and there.”

“How?” asked Param.

“You mean, what changes did we make? Or how did we manage to make changes?” Mouse-Breeder said. “You know that we can send things back in time to any place on Garden, the way we did with the jewel. Well, we also assembled all the jewels—originally, each wallfold contained only its own control jewel. We put them together, and we gave them to Ramex.”

“Ramex,” said Rigg. “The expendable who raised me?”

“In this language,” said Mouse-Breeder, “we name each expendable with the name of the founder of the wallfold, plus ‘ex’ for expendable. So we speak of Vadeshex, Ramex, Odinex.”

“Where is your expendable?” asked Olivenko.

“Off doing whatever he does,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Vadeshex met you in Vadeshfold because it has no other sentient inhabitants. But if a stranger came to Ramfold, do you think Ramex would be there to greet him?”

Param was impatient with such digressions. “Why did you assemble the stones? And when you did, why didn’t you use them yourselves?”

“Because we can’t,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You have to pass completely through a Wall without using the stones before you gain the ability to control a ship and pass freely through the Wall.”

“So if we had only had the one stone,” said Param.

“You would have had to present your stone at that starship and gain the right to control the Wall surrounding only your own wallfold.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you gave all the stones to us,” said Param.

“Because you are the most powerful,” said Mouse-Breeder, with a shrug. “Though truth to tell, we didn’t understand about your ability, Param. We figured that Rigg would be able to attach to the past and go through before the Wall existed.”

“But then we never would have acquired the language ability,” said Umbo.

“Truth is, if Umbo hadn’t pulled us back to the present when we were still short of the edge of the Wall, Loaf and Rigg and I wouldn’t have had any effect from the Wall,” said Olivenko.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” said Umbo.

“They were about to kill us!” said Param.

“I know that,” said Olivenko, sounding annoyed.

Param couldn’t believe she had spoken so sharply to Olivenko. But it really had sounded as if he was criticizing Umbo, and he had no right—he wasn’t there. Yes, he experienced the agony of the Wall because of it—twice, because he and Loaf heroically went back to rescue Rigg—but to phrase it as if it had been Umbo’s fault . . .

“Nobody’s blaming anybody for anything,” said Rigg. “It’s obvious they’re not telling us the whole truth, but—”

Rigg waved off the Odinfolders’ protests.

“You can’t tell us everything at once,” said Rigg. “You also want us to pursue a particular course of action, so you’re framing the information you provide us in order to maximize the likelihood of our doing what you want. Since I would do exactly the same thing, I’m not criticizing you. I’m just waiting to find out what you’re planning for us. And I want to know just how much you’ve already bent our course without our knowledge.” He held up his hand. “Again, that’s not a criticism. Can we all stop being so sensitive? Short of leaving us notes, which we wouldn’t have understood or believed anyway, you couldn’t explain anything to us. And thanks for the stones. I don’t know why you have that kind of trust in us, but I hope to live up to your expectations wherever I agree with them.”

Param listened to Rigg’s speech and was both proud of him and annoyed that he was so eloquent. He was so aware of how the others were taking the things he said. It was obvious that the Gardener—Ramex—had done a splendid job of training Rigg to be a leader, and Rigg himself was doing a splendid job of using that training wisely and well. She found herself thinking: He should be King-in-the-Tent. And then answering herself, I am the queen’s heir! And then answering, Mother has repudiated me, tried to kill me, and I am reduced to following my younger brother, whom I barely know, and pining over a scholar from the city guard like a moonstruck girl in a romance.

“How have we changed your course of action?” said Swims-in-the-Air coldly. “You want the entire list right now?”

“Yes,” said Param, without hesitation.

“Tell it in the order that you planned,” said Rigg.

“Tell it now,” said Umbo.

The attitude of the Odinfolders had changed completely. The warmth was gone. “Everything depends on you,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The yahoo thing—that’s what we tried last time, and it failed.”

“So you didn’t tell us the truth the first time around,” said Olivenko.

“As Rigg already guessed,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Here’s what we did. We learned how to transfer very, very tiny things to very, very precise times and locations. Specifically, we learned how to pick up the genetic material from a fertilized egg before it implanted itself in the uterine wall, alter it as we desired, and reimplant it a microsecond later.”

Param’s mind was reeling. “Whom did you do that to?”

“We did it to your father, Knosso, in his mother’s womb,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Then we made just a couple of tweaks to ensure that it was Knosso your mother married, producing the two of you.”

“What changes did you make in Father’s genes?” asked Rigg.

“We knew both his parents had very strong gifts in time manipulation. So we added our ability to his genes, and hoped the recombination would be interesting and productive. It was—it gave us a timesplitter and a pathfinder.”

Param looked at Rigg, trying to see if he was as devastated as she was. But he showed nothing. “How dare you,” she said softly to Swims-in-the-Air.

“My name includes the title Saves-the-World,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “How do you think I earned it?”

“What other changes did you make?” asked Rigg.

“A certain knife,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Which we placed very early, so it had a history, and then moved to the hip of a man whom you encountered the first time you and Umbo did time-shifting together.”

“The knife,” said Umbo, touching his waist, where it was sheathed under his shirt. “But why?”

“You’ve already noticed that the hilt contains duplicates of all the jewels of control,” said Mouse-Breeder.

Param hadn’t known anything about that; but then, she hadn’t had many opportunities to see either the knife or the jewels.

“That’s not all,” said Rigg. “You can’t tell me that you left anything to chance. What about Loaf?”

“Loaf was chance,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And Olivenko. But you chose your companions well. You could hardly have done better.”

Loaf showed no reaction, but Olivenko turned his face. To show disgust, but Param guessed that he was also flattered, and wanted to conceal the fact.

“But yes, Rigg,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “we didn’t just hope you’d run into someone who could help you use your pathfinding to get into the past. It might have taken years of training, and we didn’t have years. So we gave you Umbo.”

“Gave me Umbo?” asked Rigg.

Param saw that Umbo’s face was red. Anger? Embarrassment?

“What am I?” asked Umbo. “Another genetic experiment?”

“Not like Knosso,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Your mother was extraordinarily gifted, but your father was nothing.”

Umbo nodded.

“So we preempted all of his sperm, when you were conceived,” said Mouse-Breeder, “and gave you sperm from our most gifted displacer.”

To Param’s surprise, tears spilled out of Umbo’s eyes and down his cheeks.

“He’s not my father,” said Umbo.

“You have nothing of him in you,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“And your best displacer—who is he?”

“Dead,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We went back to get his sperm, too.”

“So I’m half . . . half Odinfolder,” said Umbo.

“Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Your father was from the time after we bred ourselves to be small, but before we made ourselves into yahoos.”

Umbo bent over till his face was touching his knees, almost hiding him in the grass, and wept. Loaf sat down beside him, put his arm across his shoulders, and Umbo leaned into his embrace.

“So Umbo’s the smartest of us,” said Rigg.

“Umbo has all the potential of an Odinfolder,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But you and Param carry our intellectual potential as well.”

“We made the decision not to try to solve the problem ourselves,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “because in nine tries, we failed every time. Instead, we chose genetic threads in the other most promising wallfold, and combined our own best traits to produce you. And it is in your hands we will place the solution to the problem.”

“The problem of getting the Visitors not to go back to Earth and make a report that results in the destruction of Garden,” said Rigg. “Just to make sure I understand what the goal is here.”

“You have understood it perfectly,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“How much time do we have?” asked Rigg. “Because we’re not ready.”

“You have all the time you need,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“I thought you said the coming of the Visitors was only two years away,” said Rigg.

“It is. But look at who you are,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Let the Visitors come—we’ll hide you from them so you can continue your education. Your preparation. Then you just go back in time—something we could never do—and continue your education in another village, so you aren’t constantly running into yourselves. You can do that as often as you need.”

“Though there is some thought,” said Mouse-Breeder, “that the more iterations of you there are, the harder it will be to conceal you from the Visitors. From the Future Books, we get the idea they’re quite intrusive and clever, and they get a lot of information from the expendables.”

“That’s why we have made sure that Odinex doesn’t see all that we do. He agrees—we’re not lying to him about it. But what he doesn’t know can’t be learned from him. So he’s not going to meet you. He’s not even going to know you’re here.”

“But Father knows about us,” said Rigg.

“He knows about you up to the moment of his death,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “After that, he’s seen nothing of you, heard nothing about you. He doesn’t know how any of his plans came out.”

“Not true,” said Rigg. “He was prompting the starship in Vadeshfold when I first took control.”

Swims-in-the-Air made a dismissive gesture. “So he was called on when he was needed. That can’t be helped.”

“Our advantage,” said Mouse-Breeder, “is that we absolutely know that the Visitors have no knowledge of time travel. In fact, all their theories say that it’s impossible, that your alterations of the past are self-destructive loops that can’t happen. But they can, and that gives us a chance. As long as you don’t actually get yourselves killed, you can meet the Visitors again and again, trying to get it right.”

“As you did,” said Olivenko.

“Not as we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We were limited to sending messages. You can personally do things over and over. As Loaf and Umbo proved in their efforts to retrieve the Ramfold jewel from the bank in Aressa Sessamo.”

“We just made things worse,” said Loaf softly. “Until it became completely impossible.”

“So now you know the danger,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You won’t keep trying the same thing over and over.”

Rigg sighed. “How much of this did Vadesh know?”

Swims-in-the-Air laughed. “Nothing. He saw what he saw, of course, but he doesn’t know your real origin. He doesn’t know that by bringing you here he was, in effect, taking you home.”

“How do you keep it from him?” asked Rigg.

“Our expendable lies to him,” said Mouse-Breeder. “All the expendables lie to him.”

“He’s a complete failure, you see,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “All his humans died.”

“Not a complete failure,” said Loaf, indicating the facemask he wore.

“Yes,” said Mouse-Breeder. “One look at you, and the Visitors will absolutely want to make sure no harm comes to Garden.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t be part of our . . . whatever-we’re-doing?” asked Loaf.

“I’m saying nothing at all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We didn’t call you into being in order to do our bidding. If we had a plan, we’d do it ourselves. We needed you to come up with a plan and carry it out. We’re here to serve you and prepare you in whatever way you think you need to be prepared.”

“We have only one suggestion,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“Your suggestion, not mine,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“All right, I have only one suggestion,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Don’t delay too long. Don’t go back and try new things for too many cycles. You might pass through the same two years a dozen times—but you’ll age two dozen years in the process. And I think you need to do whatever you do while you’re still young.”

“Why?” asked Loaf. “Because it’s too late for me and Olivenko. ‘Young’ is already history.”

“Rigg and Param and Umbo look like adolescents. Not threatening at all. Not dangerous. And if you and Olivenko are obviously obeying them, then perhaps it will buy you some time, maybe even a little trust. Some compassion. Something. I hope. I think. What I’m saying is, you can’t learn everything and you definitely can’t anticipate everything. Take the year or so before they come and learn all you can; then see what they do and learn from that. Maybe there’ll be a different outcome—we have no way of predicting—and so you won’t even have to do the mission. But if the Destroyers come yet a tenth time, go back and learn more, this time based on your own observations and experiences. You see? Just don’t do it too often; don’t age too many years. Take your action, whatever it is, while you’re still young.”

“Very eloquently put, my dear,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And pointless. They’ll decide for themselves.”

“Yes, but I’ve put the thought in their minds and there it is,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Now, do you want to see the library?”