Ruins

CHAPTER 13 In the Library

The library was deep underground, down many stairways, yet the air felt fresh, and there was a light breeze in the corridors. The walls were covered with paintings and murals, with sculptures in many corners and sometimes filling entire rooms. Tables here and there were surrounded with comfortable-looking chairs, and always the light was bright enough to make reading easy.

Yet there was not a book in sight.

“How is this a library?” asked Rigg.

“It contains every book ever written in the entire history of our wallfold, and every other,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“Not to mention every book from Earth that was brought to Garden with the colony ships,” added Mouse-Breeder. “And every work of art ever made, though we can’t display them all at once.”

“But where are they?” asked Umbo.

Mouse-Breeder smiled modestly, and Swims-in-the-Air laughed. “Now is when Mouse-Breeder shows you his babies.”

“Come, children,” said Mouse-Breeder softly.

At once small arched doorways appeared in the baseboards of the room. Dozens of mice, white, brown, black, tan, yellow, red, swarmed out onto the floor, and many of them came up onto the tables.

“Can you show us sculptures from the Greeks of Earth?” asked Mouse-Breeder.

Rigg wasn’t sure which mice made the change, but suddenly the sculptures in the four corners of the room changed to brightly painted, lifelike, life-sized stone sculptures. Yet when Rigg put his hand out to touch one, his fingers passed within the “stone.”

“Illusion,” said Olivenko.

“Trickery,” said Param.

Loaf only chuckled.

“You knew,” said Rigg.

“The mask was not deceived,” said Loaf, “and so I saw the difference between the dancing light of the illusion and the solidity of the walls.”

“But you still see the beauty of the art?” asked Swims-in-the-Air.

“As much as I ever could have without the mask,” said Loaf. “It adds nothing to my appreciation of artificial beauty.”

“So art does not speak to you?” asked Mouse-Breeder.

“Your art with the mice speaks to me very clearly,” said Loaf. “The mice only understand your language, am I right?”

“They’ll learn yours quickly enough,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“But when the Visitors come, they won’t be able to get access to any of the books that are invisibly stored in this place.”

Mouse-Breeder nodded, his smile even slighter, if that were possible. “Only with the help of the mice can anyone find any book or diagram or map or work of art in all of Odinfold.”

“So if someone killed the mice?” asked Umbo. “You’d lose your whole library?”

“You must have another way,” said Olivenko. “Another key to the library.”

“Something mechanical,” said Loaf.

“No,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Back doors can be found. Machines can be discovered. No, it’s mice and mice alone.”

“But we’re mindful of the chance of loss,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“He’s too modest to tell you himself,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “These mice are actually a genetic hodgepodge of astonishing variety. More than three thousand species, and no two in this room are genetically close. A disease that wiped out all the mice of any one species, or even all the closely related species, would still leave most of the mice untouched.”

“If you have three thousand species,” said Olivenko, “how many individuals are there of each?”

“We can’t count them all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “They reproduce like mice, you see, and then they teach their children how to manipulate the electronics, so nothing is lost. The great prairies of Odinfold have thousands of different kinds of grass, and the mice thrive on all the seeds. There are hundreds of billions of mice.”

“So where three billion humans once lived . . .” began Olivenko.

“A hundred times as many mice. And also the owls and foxes, ferrets and cats that feed on them, and the hawks and eagles and wolves that feed on them,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And grazing animals to keep any one grass from crowding out all others, and the great cats that feed on the grazing animals, and the hyenas and other scavengers that gather at their kills. Our great wallfold is a garden of life, dotted with the ruins of our ancient civilization, and only tree-dwelling yahoos to show that humans once lived here.”

“An elegant disguise,” said Rigg.

“Which failed,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And so we bring you to our library, in hopes that you can find a better way.”

“I take it the mice will bring us books,” said Olivenko.

“Just say what you want to study—the topic, the source, a specific title, an author, or even a question. Sit at the table, or lean against a wall, or ask while you’re walking, and the mice will cause the book you want to appear before you.”

“Mouse-Breeder is our best librarian,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“She means the best one living,” said Mouse-Breeder, “because our ancestors designed and built and collected so well and thoroughly that there was hardly anything left to do when I came along.”

“So using intelligent mice for access is just a bit of decoration?” asked Olivenko wryly.

“I want to see a book,” said Rigg.

Instantly there was a book lying on the table. And then another, and another, two or three appearing, another disappearing, as if the books were works of sculpture being displayed in rapid succession.

“This one,” Olivenko said, putting his finger into one. At once it rose into the air, exactly the right distance from his eyes for comfortable reading. It opened. “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World,” said Rigg. “By Jonathan Swift.”

“Commonly known as Gulliver’s Travels,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Part four, chapter one, in which Gulliver meets the Yahoos.”

“You can’t expect us to believe that he happened to choose that title by chance,” said Loaf.

Mouse-Breeder looked pained. “Of course not. No matter what book he chose, it was going to contain Gulliver’s Travels.”

“Is that what we’re required to read first?” asked Param.

“You’re not required to do anything at all,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “The only way this will work is if you freely choose for yourselves, follow up on whatever interests you. Of course, we expect your most important results will come from studying the culture of the society that launched the colony ships—to us, eleven thousand years ago, but to the Visitors, only half a generation.”

“But I can study the history of Ramfold if I want?” asked Param.

“If you wish,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“And I can study the wallfold where Knosso was killed?” asked Olivenko.

“Unfortunately, they have no writing,” said Mouse-Breeder ruefully. “We can’t collect oral histories from other wallfolds, because our machines can’t pick up sounds. Only things that persist in time.”

“What if I want to roam through Odinfold,” asked Loaf. “To see this place for myself?”

“Go where you want,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “But you should be careful. The predators have no fear of humans, which means they have no respect for us, either. We look like meat to the larger ones, and we carry no weapons.”

“I do,” said Loaf.

“And how effective will they be against a pack of wolves? A pride of lions? A troop of hyenas?” Mouse-Breeder shook his head. “Of course, if you’re killed, your friends can go back in time to rescue you, but it seems a waste of time.”

“I’m not going hunting,” said Loaf. “I want to see the prairie you describe.”

“It’s interesting for about a day,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But be our guest. There are no restrictions. Whatever you think you need to know before you meet the Visitors. Or whatever you simply want to know to satisfy your own curiosity. All our plans have come to nothing. We have no plans for you, beyond providing you with access to all the information we have.”

“Then I want to learn how the starships work,” said Umbo. “And all about the machines that govern them.”

“It’s a lifetime’s study,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“And your lifetimes are shorter than ours,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“I don’t have to learn how to build one,” said Umbo. “But I assume that the design of whatever the Visitors use to come here will be based on the same principles. They rely on machines, as you do. More than you do. Right?”

Rigg was surprised that Umbo had thought of such a project, and seemed determined to pursue it. Umbo had no particular education in science and technology. He would be duplicating the kind of education that Father had given Rigg as they wandered the forests. Rigg well knew what effort it had taken him with the best teacher in the world.

And then Rigg realized that he was assuming Umbo was less capable of learning than Rigg himself was. But that wasn’t so. Umbo was half Odinfolder, while Rigg and Param were only one-quarter. If they really had bred for superior intelligence, Umbo might be even smarter than the two royal children were.

How quickly I bought into the class biases of the Sessamids, thought Rigg. Thinking I was Father’s son, I assumed I was as smart as he was—he knew everything, I thought. Turns out he was a machine, and I was the son of the Queen- and King-in-the-Tent. So I turned all my sense of superiority toward the royal family, and once again, I was wrong.

Wrong and wrong again, and again, and probably now as well. Let Umbo study what he wants. He’ll learn as quickly as I will, or more quickly.

Soon they all had books, except Loaf, who pleasantly insisted on going out into the world. He asked for a flyer, and they produced one—a duplicate of the one they had ridden in when Vadesh brought them to the Wall. Within three days he was back, saying little about what he saw, and then settled into the same life they were leading: Hours on end sitting or standing or walking about in the library, reading whatever the mice made appear at their request, then discarding what they were done with, which promptly vanished, yet reappeared again upon request, open to the very page they had been on when they closed it.

But it wasn’t all reading. There were meals, and at the meals they talked, and sometimes in between. Umbo and Olivenko were the sort of student who has to talk about or show whatever excites them. Rigg understood the principle, but Father had curbed it in him, if only because whatever Rigg had learned, he had learned from Father—from Ramex—and in the deep forest there was no one to tell but him, and what was the point of that?

Rigg was annoyed sometimes at the interruptions from Umbo and Olivenko, but then he changed his mind when he realized that it was good for him to know the extent of what they learned, as well as their questions and conclusions about it. It’s not that Rigg actually knew everything they knew, but he knew what they had said about what they knew, and didn’t forget it, so that he would be able to ask them questions and have some idea of whether they’d know the answer.

Param, on the other hand, talked about nothing she was learning, and showed her annoyance if anyone asked. For a few hours once he asked the mice to show him what Param had been reading, and he skimmed through the books, finding that she was, indeed, reading histories of the Sessamids. But very quickly he found that she was beyond—before—the royal family, backtracking through the entire history of Ramfold. It was a world she had never really seen, he realized, and by studying the whole history and geography of it, she was, in a way, seeing what she had been kept from seeing her entire life.

Olivenko immersed himself in the culture of Earth, but not the modern history that would be familiar to the Visitors who would come to Garden only a year or so from now. Instead, he was discovering all he could about the evolution of the human race and then about the earliest histories, the movement of ancient tribes, the formation of nations. “I have to know why humans are the way they are,” said Olivenko.

Rigg took note of how Olivenko spoke of humans as “they,” though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The Odinfolders looked rather simian, with their shorter legs and semi-grasping feet. It was easy to see that they would not register as fully human. But as far as the Visitors would be able to see, Rigg and his company were fully human. Except for Loaf, and that was only because of the parasite he bore on his face. And Olivenko had no share in the inborn time-centered powers that were the unique achievement of Ramfold. In what sense should he think of humans as other than himself, or of himself as other than human?

To Rigg, there was no doubt that he was human, and the others as well—including the yahoo-bodied Odinfolders. It took a little getting used to, the way their strides were shorter, their running slower, but their reach longer, their strength much greater than any of the Ramfolders but Loaf. Still, they spoke human languages, thought human thoughts, ate human food, and had the same tribal and personal instincts as any human. Self-preservation, yet the willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community; personal pride and ambition, and yet a willingness to be modest in order to retain their acceptance by others. Rigg could see no particular difference in the way they thought and acted, the social rules that governed them.

The only real difference was that the Odinfolders were so self-controlled. They might feel the same imperatives as the people Rigg had known in Ramfold, but they knew what was happening to them as they felt these things, and chose rationally whether to act on those feelings or not. He could see in their faces as the decisions were made, the momentary hesitation, and instinctive move that they held in check. But it seemed to cause no stress. Reining in their passions was as natural to them as eating and drinking and talking. So perhaps they had evolved to a higher level, another stage. Once they started getting the Future Books, they had transformed themselves again and again, remaking their history from that moment forward, over and over, and learning from each failure, only to fail again. Perhaps that process had bred in them a calm acceptance of defeat, or a readiness to take the long view of things.

There came a time when Rigg realized he had to read the Future Books in order to try to make guesses about what might have struck the Visitors as so terrifying or disgusting about the people of Garden that they came back to destroy the world. No matter how much Rigg read from the histories, biographies, and literature of Earth, it made no sense to him. The stories all seemed to champion tolerance, acceptance of the strange, the need to change in order to adapt, survive, grow.

Indeed, the whole colonizing project was born of a fear that Earth was too crowded, too polluted, too endangered after years of botched development. An outlet was needed precisely so that humans had a chance of becoming something different. And so Ram Odin had been sent out in command of a starship that would use the new technology of jumping through space to reach another habitable planet as quickly as possible; but if the jump hadn’t worked, the ship could have continued at a much slower speed, with passengers and pilot in stasis until they reached the planet that Ram named Garden. The idea was to succeed in establishing the human race on another world. And in this the colony project had succeeded astonishingly well.

It was hardly the fault of the people of Garden that there had been a time anomaly in the first jump, and they had been thrust back in time by eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years. Nor was it their fault that another anomaly caused the ship to make the passage nineteen times, so that nineteen complete copies of the colony ship, including all the people on it, reached Garden at the same time. What could possibly have caused the Visitors to ignore their own ethos, the innocence of the people of Garden, and a human history longer than that of recorded human history on Earth?

When he started reading the Future Books, he asked the mice to show him which of his party had already read them. When the list appeared, he was surprised and rueful when he learned that he was the last, not the first, to read the Future Books. To his surprise, the first had been Loaf.

For many months they had been leading the studious life that the Odinfolders had invited them to lead, preparing as best they could to learn useful things about the Visitors, about the people of Earth, and about their own world, in the effort to understand what would provoke genocide by the Destroyers. But when Rigg reached the end of his third detailed pass through the Future Books, and still understood nothing, he called a meeting that he realized was long overdue.

He brought them out of the library, out of the ruined city, to the brow of a hill overlooking a wide reach of prairie. It happened that a herd of elephants was busy destroying a copse of trees in the distance, and Loaf amused them for a while by describing in detail the way a young elephant was trying to push down a tree until an older female finally shoved him out of the way and took it down with a single surge. With the vastly superior eyes given him by the facemask, Loaf had no need of telescopes or other tools to see things that were a tiny blur to the others. And that gave Rigg the question with which he began the meeting.

“Loaf’s eyes are better than ours, because he’s been partially merged with a highly altered life form from Garden,” said Rigg. “But that can’t be why the Visitors rejected Garden, can it?”

There was a brief digression as Param pointed out that since the Visitors had never seen Loaf wearing a facemask on any of the previous passages through this period of time, it couldn’t possibly have any influence.

“Not Loaf in particular,” said Olivenko. “For all we know there are other wallfolds that have been transformed just as radically, and the Odinfolders just don’t know about it. That isn’t what Rigg is asking.”

If they failed, Rigg knew he would have to return to his original plan of visiting every wallfold himself. This time, though, he was spending his time studying the most vital world of all, the one the Visitors would come from.

“The whole literature of Earth is full of condemnation of people who hate others just for being strange and different,” said Rigg. “Their histories are full of self-congratulation about how they’ve left such base impulses behind them. The worst thing their biographers and historians can say about a person is that he judges people on the basis of differences in their physical attributes, their languages, their cultures. How can they possibly come here and violate everything they believe?”

Loaf only laughed. “Rigg, you’re still so young. What would your father have said?” When Olivenko started to bring up Knosso, Loaf held up a hand. “I mean Ramex, the expendable who raised him.”

Rigg sighed. “Yes, I know. The very fact that they condemn xenophobia so harshly is proof that they hadn’t overcome it at all.”

“An aspirational virtue, not an achievement,” said Olivenko.

“Whatever that means,” said Umbo.

“Oh, drop the pose of youthful ignorance,” said Param impatiently. “I’ve seen what you’re reading. By now you could probably build a starship yourself.”

“I only understand a fraction of what I’m reading,” said Umbo. “I don’t know how anything works, I just know what the machines are supposed to do and where you can find them in each ship. And since the Visitors’ starship design is probably completely different, I doubt anything I’ve learned is useful.”

“So you’ve wasted your time here,” said Param. “But don’t pretend that you don’t know what ‘aspirational virtue’ means.”

“A virtue that you admire but don’t actually have,” said Umbo, “yes, I understand it. I just think it sounds absurd for us to talk like philosophers when we’re just us.”

“Sorry,” said Rigg. “But the fact that the people of Earth recognize that they still have a serious problem with xenophobia makes it seem all the more absurd that they could come here, see how strange we are—but also how much the different wallfolds have accomplished in eleven thousand years—and then decide that they hate us and fear us so much we have to be wiped out.”

“We don’t know that’s what the Visitors decided,” said Olivenko.

“You think the Future Books are lying about the Destroyers?” asked Rigg.

“I think there’s no shortage of lying here in Odinfold, but no, I think the Future Books are telling the truth. But the very fact that they call one group from Earth the Visitors, and the second group by a different name, Destroyers, should be a clue to a real possibility—that the humans who came to destroy Garden are not the same group that first came to visit.”

“Two separate groups with starship technology?” asked Umbo doubtfully.

“No,” said Olivenko. “But how do we know that there wasn’t a political revolution, a coup, a war during the gap between the Visitors’ return and the Destroyers’ departure? Maybe the Visitors came back with a brilliantly glowing report, but a group of xenophobes took over the government. And maybe they didn’t last long in power—just long enough to send the Destroyers. We have no way of knowing whether by the time the Destroyers returned to Earth, there wasn’t a new government in place that deeply regretted the destruction of Garden.”

“I suppose nobody has ever been there to receive their apology,” said Param.

“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “Maybe no matter what the Visitors see, the Destroyers come, for reasons having to do with the politics of Earth. Aren’t there powerful groups that still espouse xenophobia?”

Rigg nodded. “They aren’t the people with the high technology, but yes, there are widespread cultures that believe in killing everyone who doesn’t comply with their cultural practices. But they’ve been kept in check for centuries by the superior technology of the more enlightened cultures.”

“Enlightened?” asked Loaf. “Who’s judging now?”

“I’m judging,” said Rigg, “and I’m using the only standard that matters to us: Enlightened people are the ones who don’t want to destroy Garden, and the Destroyers are ignorant monsters. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, don’t you?”

They agreed readily enough.

“We’re ignorant monsters,” said Param. “Look how Mother and General Citizen treated us. How Vadesh treated us—and how we judged him and the facemask people. Humans judge each other and we kill each other when we decide the other people are too bad to allow them to live.”

“But not everybody,” said Rigg.

“Everybody,” said Param. “No exceptions.”

“Not me,” said Rigg. “Not you.”

“You wouldn’t kill somebody who was trying to kill you?” asked Param.

“That’s self-defense,” said Rigg.

“But Jesus and Gandhi and a lot of others say that you have no right of self-defense,” said Param.

“I’m not sure that’s what they said,” said Rigg, “but I’m glad to know you’ve been reading Earth literature, too.”

“I skimmed it a little,” said Param. “Look, human nature hasn’t changed. What does it matter if the Visitors liked Garden and the Destroyers are a different group? Garden ends up just as dead.”

“What I’m saying,” said Rigg, “is that maybe we need to be prepared to go back to Earth with the Visitors.”

“Where they’d kill us,” said Param. “And then we’d be so far from here that we couldn’t go back in time and get here, we’d only travel back in time on Earth. That’s a deeply terrible idea.”

“It might be the only way,” said Rigg, refusing to take her negativism as a final answer. “Go back with them to Earth, with the chance that we die there, but with a chance that maybe we can change the outcome.”

“What makes you think the Visitors would let us go?” asked Loaf.

“What makes you think they could stop us if we want to go?” asked Umbo.

“Getting onto a human starship isn’t the same as going through the Wall,” said Rigg.

“We can do things with time,” said Param, “but we can’t fly.”

“Maybe we could use the Odinfolder technology to put something on board their ship,” said Umbo. “A plague, maybe. Something that kills them all. But we show the Visitors who are on Garden what happened to their ship, and then we take them back in time before we implanted the plague, so that they’ll understand that we could kill them but we chose not to.”

“How would that make them not want to destroy us?” asked Loaf. “That’s the point I’m not getting. Because I think that’s a sure way to guarantee that they send the Destroyers.”

Umbo shrugged and turned away, a little angry. Rigg was so tired of the way Umbo took offense at any slight, while he felt no compunction about slighting Rigg at every opportunity. The only thing that had kept them from open quarrels during these many months was the fact that they were able to avoid each other most of the time.

“It’s not a stupid idea,” said Olivenko. “We just need to refine it.”

“We can’t use any version of it,” said Rigg. “As soon as the expendables realize what we’ve done, the orbiters destroy our wallfold. We aren’t allowed to develop weapons.”

“It’s a disease,” said Umbo, “not a weapon.”

“If we send it to their ship in order to kill people, it’s a weapon, and we get blown to smithereens,” said Rigg.

“You’re such an expert on how the ships’ computers think?” said Umbo.

“No, you are,” said Rigg.

Umbo’s lips tightened, but he didn’t argue with Rigg’s point. Umbo knew more than anyone about how the original starship worked, and in fact the computers would not be fooled by a sophistry like, It’s a disease, not a weapon.

“Maybe we just need to study more,” said Param.

“No,” said Umbo. “We have a deeper problem than the fact that if we went to Earth, we couldn’t travel back in time to when we were on Garden. We don’t even know if our time skills even work off the surface of Garden.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Olivenko.

“Think about it,” said Umbo. “We don’t understand anything about how we’re able to travel back in time—or how Param can make microjumps into the future, skipping the moments in between. But we do know some obvious things about the rules of time-shifting. It’s absolutely tied to the surface of the planet.”

“It worked fine when we flew to the Wall with Vadesh,” said Param.

“Really? Did you try any time-skipping in flight?” asked Umbo.

Param bristled. “We jumped off a rock once, if you remember.”

“We were never more than two meters from solid stone,” said Umbo.

“It’s a good question,” said Rigg, “but the flyer isn’t a real test, anyway, because it’s still tied to the gravity well of Garden. The real problem is this: Garden is flying through space as it orbits our sun. The whole solar system is also moving rapidly through space. Say we travel back in time by six months. In that amount of time, Garden has moved completely around the sun to the opposite side. Yet we travel back, not to where we were in absolute space, which would kill us instantly, but to where we were in relation to the surface of Garden. Our time-shifting is tied to the planet. So Umbo’s asking, what happens if we leave the surface of Garden and go to another planet? Do we even have time-shifting ability there? Or is our time-shifting still relative to the surface of Garden? If we’re on Earth, in a certain position millions of kilometers away from Garden, and travel back in time, do we end up in exactly that position relative to Garden? Because Earth and Garden move so differently from each other, that we’d end up in cold deep airless space if we’re still tied to Garden.”

Umbo glared at him. Rigg couldn’t imagine why. Hadn’t Rigg just defended Umbo’s argument? There was no figuring out what made anybody work. But now Rigg had a whole bunch of new stories to help him understand. Among the Mongols, Temujin and Jamuka had been blood brothers, but they became bitter enemies on the way to Temujin becoming Khan and taking the name Genghis, or Chinggis. It was part of human nature that best friends could easily become rivals and then deadly foes. Rigg would count himself successful if he could keep it at the level of rivalry without ever letting Umbo become his enemy.

“I think it’s obvious,” said Olivenko, “that it’s tied to whatever planet you’re on.”

“I don’t think anything’s obvious,” said Rigg. “Whatever we decide, we’re betting our lives on it. All the paths I can see are actually views into the past—I see the actual people and animals going through all the movements of their lives, and they’re tied to Garden. But they’re all people who were born here, who lived their whole lives here. And think of when we went downriver, Loaf, Umbo—when I was a prisoner in the cabin of that boat, I tried to catch on to the paths of previous travelers, and I couldn’t, because their paths hung in the air over open water, and I could only reach them for a moment or two as our boat passed under them. It might work that way no matter how far we get from Garden—paths just hanging there in space, long after the ship is gone.”

“But the original pilot, Ram Odin,” said Umbo, “he had time gifts. That’s where all our abilities come from. And he did time stuff when he was in a ship in space.”

“Yet the ship was displaced nineteen times,” said Rigg. “Doesn’t that tell you something? During the microseconds when the ship’s nineteen computers were separately calculating and activating the jump, the whole ship had moved far enough in space that Ram’s unconscious time-jump reached nineteen different places. We can’t go into space and use our time-shifting ability, or we’ll just create duplicate ships.”

“We don’t know that,” said Olivenko.

“But we don’t know it won’t happen. Or worse,” said Rigg. “Please remember that when I suggested going back to Earth with the Visitors, I wasn’t counting on the idea that we could keep ourselves out of trouble by using time-jumping. For all we know, that’ll be a sure ticket to our deaths. My idea was to go back, to make the attempt, and if they kill us, then they kill us.”

“Well, there’s this,” said Olivenko. “Even if that happened, and we couldn’t save ourselves—or rather, you couldn’t save us with your time-shifting—the Odinfolders would send another book into the past and tell them—and us—that having us get on the Visitors’ ship was a very bad idea and we shouldn’t do it.”

Param laughed. “So the fact that they haven’t already received such a Future Book proves that we succeeded?”

“Or that we decided not to do it,” said Rigg.

“Or that we did it, and failed, but the Odinfolders decided not to show us the Future Book that resulted, and just went on to try something else.”

“Or they gave up,” said Param, “and just decided to die.”

“No matter how much we learn,” said Umbo, “we never know enough.”

“All we can do is what we’ve always done,” said Rigg. “Make a try at something, and then if it doesn’t work, go back and try again. But we can’t always go back.”

Umbo leapt to his feet, “Right, there are things that stay terrible. For instance, Rigg, that you’ve completely forgotten about going back to save my brother Kyokay’s life.”

It struck Rigg like a knife, that this was part of what Umbo still held against him. “We already decided that we can’t, because if we did, then we’d never have gotten together to learn how to manipulate time.”

“But now we know more, we have more control, we could figure out a way to catch him partway down maybe, or—”

“Maybe we can,” said Rigg. “Maybe we can put in a net to catch him, or train a giant bird to snatch him out of the air, or a huge puff of air to blow him out to sea. But we’ll do it later—go back and save one boy after we’ve figured out how to save the whole world.”

“So you’re saying Kyokay has to stay dead, so that we can do whatever useless stupidity we’ve done since we found out how to do this stuff?” said Umbo. “Well, you know what? Maybe the best thing would be to stop Kyokay from falling in the first place, so we don’t ever learn to do our little time tricks, and then all the rest of our miserable history doesn’t happen!”

“And then,” said Param bitterly, “you get to enjoy living with your brother in your happy home, under the authority of your beloved father, while I get murdered by my mother and General Citizen because Rigg isn’t there to save me.”

“But if Citizen didn’t capture Rigg and realize who he was—” began Umbo.

“Whatever Citizen and Hagia Sessamin were plotting, it didn’t begin with Rigg’s capture,” said Olivenko scornfully. “Your father would probably have killed you by now, Umbo, and meanwhile Param would also have been murdered, and even if none of those things happened, the Visitors would come and then the Destroyers and kill us all, so what exactly are you saying here, that having a few more years with your brother—who would probably have found some other colorful way to get himself killed—that would be worth the destruction of the planet?”

Umbo buried his face in his hands. “I just want to stop all this. When did this become my job?”

“It’s not,” said Param. “It’s my job, and Rigg’s, because we were born with responsibility.”

“Stop it,” said Rigg. “Let’s just face the fact that we can’t fix every bad thing that ever happened, because every change we make brings about new bad things, because in the real world, bad things happen, period, that’s it. People die and we can’t always unkill them, that’s how it is. I’m sorry Kyokay died, Umbo, and I’m sorry we can’t fix it yet without making a whole bunch of terrible unpredictable changes. And I’m sorry that Param is such a provincial twit that she makes stupid arrogant remarks about how the royal family is born to responsibility—”

“We are!” cried Param, leaping to her feet.

“At least you got angry,” said Rigg, “instead of disappearing on us.”

“I really like the way you’re making peace here, Rigg,” said Loaf.

“Was that Loaf or the facemask talking?” asked Rigg. “Listen, we have plenty of reasons to be angry and resentful and suspicious and whatever else we’re feeling. Grief-stricken, terrified, whatever it is, it’s completely justified. And if we all hate each other what difference does it make? We have these abilities, which may be worthless, but we have them, and if there’s any chance we can use them to save the world, then let’s do it, and if we fail, well, we’re all dead so who cares, and if we succeed, then we’ll have plenty of time to feud and bicker like children, and no, I’m not saying I’m any better, I’m so lonely and angry all the time that I can hardly sleep, and I wish my father had really been my father and not some stupid machine, so don’t tell me what it’s like to lose somebody you loved, or to be disappointed in life, or whatever else is going wrong. Loaf misses Leaky. I miss my father. Param’s mother, the only person she trusted, tried to kill her. Olivenko’s mentor, Knosso, got dragged out of his boat and drowned. Have I given the complete list of Things We Haven’t Been Able To Change?”

“No,” said Loaf, “but it was a pretty good start.”

“We’ve been studying forever, and the Visitors are close to arriving, and while we might end up trying the idea of getting on the Visitors’ starship, if they’ll even let us, and going back to Earth, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not what we should do first.”

“What should we do, then?” asked Olivenko.

“Not one thing,” said Rigg. “Nothing. The Visitors come, we watch from a distance, we see for ourselves what they are. Or maybe we even meet them and talk to them. But then they go, and we think about what we learned from them, and we go on studying everything we can, and then the Destroyers come, and we see what that looks like, and then we jump back in time to right after we got here, and then we decide what to do.”

They all sat there, looking at the ground, at the distant ruins, at the sky, at the elephants, at passing insects or the mice scurrying through the grass—anywhere but at each other, anywhere but at Rigg.

And finally Olivenko said, “That sounds like the best plan I’ve heard.”

“I think so, too,” said Param.

“Then unless Umbo’s an idiot,” said Loaf, “it’s unanimous.”

“I’m an idiot,” said Umbo, “but I still vote for it. Which should prove to all of you that it’s an absolutely stupid idea.”

“I agree,” said Rigg. “It’s cowardly and overly cautious and I wish somebody would think of a better plan. But for the meantime, it’s what we’re planning to do. Right?”

Right.