Ruins

CHAPTER 22 Warning

When Umbo walked back to the others, they were full of questions. They had seen the flyer take off, and when Umbo explained that Rigg was gone, Param was hurt, Olivenko baffled, and Loaf enraged.

“The fool!” he cried. “He thinks he wants one of these? What for? To put himself in Vadesh’s hands again—Vadesh is the champion of all the liars, and that’s saying something, since I don’t think one word in ten that I’ve heard in my life was true! And none since we left Ramfold, not one thing that anyone has told us.”

But it was done, and they didn’t blame Umbo for it.

“Arrogant little twit,” Loaf grumbled. “Rigg I mean, not you, Umbo. Arrogant foolish stupid brave little—he’s going to take this whole thing on himself, I’m sure of it.”

“I think he’s backed out of it,” said Param. “I think he’s frightened.”

“Well, he’s not,” said Umbo.

“I think he doesn’t want to face the Visitors,” said Param. “They’ll be here in only two years, and he’s making sure he’s not with us.”

“Why talk him down, when you’re glad he’s gone?”

“I am not!”

“You want your father all to yourself. You hated it when he was so happy to see Rigg—I was watching you,” said Umbo.

“Stop it,” said Olivenko. “We don’t know what Rigg is doing and we don’t know what his motive is but we know that we can trust him to do right, because he’s had so many chances to do wrong and he’s never taken them. But it’s up to us to act as if whatever he’s doing won’t work, so it’s all entirely up to us to try to stop the Visitors from reaching whatever decision they reach that leads to the destruction of this world. Don’t you think?”

“Father will tell us what to do,” said Param.

“He won’t tell me what to do,” said Umbo. “Though I’ll listen to suggestions.”

“You’re just jealous because I have a father,” said Param.

“I’ve had a father,” said Umbo, “and I’m not impressed.”

“When the two of you become capable of rational thought,” said Loaf, “consider this: The Larfolders have their own way of remembering things, and they know a few facts that somehow missed the all-knowing Odinfolders. I’m for laying out all that we know for them to hear, and getting their counsel.”

“All we know?” asked Umbo. “Even about the mice?”

“Yes,” said Olivenko.

“No!” cried Param.

“We don’t know anything about the mice,” said Loaf, “except what they’ve told us themselves, and they’re liars.”

“We know that there are thousands of them here,” said Umbo, “and that we brought them, and in the day since we arrived they’ve probably already had a thousand babies.”

“Mice aren’t that quick,” said Loaf.

“Really? How many of them were pregnant?” asked Umbo. “How many were about to pop?”

“Probably half of them,” said Olivenko. “The real question is, will telling the Larfolders make them trust us more, or less?”

“They’ll stop talking to us,” said Param. “They’ll cut us off from Father. Or hurt him because he’s one of us.”

“He has a mantle like theirs,” said Loaf. “He’s not one of us.”

“He’s more a part of me than you are,” said Param.

“Whatever you say,” said Loaf, turning away from her impatiently.

Umbo wanted to answer Param: You’re not part of us and never have been. But he knew that Loaf’s silence was the wiser course, and added nothing to it. He knew he shouldn’t have said as much as he already had.

“I think we need to tell them everything,” said Olivenko. “Or we’re as deceptive as the mice.”

“They’re actually good at deception,” said Param.

“We resent how little we can trust others,” said Olivenko, “so let’s be the kind of people that others can believe. They may not approve of what we do, but they can believe what we say.”

“If we tell the Larfolders about the mice, then we’re betraying their trust,” said Param.

“The mice already don’t trust us,” said Loaf, “and we never promised them we wouldn’t tell.”

Umbo realized that there was no point in arguing any further. When it involved a secret, one person’s decision to tell would always defeat any number of other people’s decision not to.

The real problem was figuring out what the mice intended to do. Umbo didn’t really know what the mice could do, without full-sized humans creating the real technology. He had never figured out the problem of how their tiny hands could do any serious work. They could never work with hot metals, for instance—a man with a heavy glove and apron could get close enough to a fire for him to lift iron out of it with tongs. But a short-armed mouse trying to lift a teeny-tiny bit of molten metal with teeny-tiny tongs would still have to stand so close to the fire that its entire body would be instantly cooked.

So how could they make anything comparable to what humans made? What could their technology be in Larfold, where Odinfolders hadn’t already created an infrastructure of tools and machinery?

The mice manipulated genes—they admitted to having done that, when they claimed to have created Knosso and Umbo. Well, actually, it was the Odinfolders who had claimed those feats, but then it became clear that really accurate displacement was done only by the mice.

So the Odinfolders had worked metal and built mighty cities; the mice worked with time and with genes, and made new species.

Then Umbo reached the only sensible conclusion. The mice must use time-and-space displacement for everything that humans used tools for. They never had to stand close to a fire; they could shift masses far too heavy for them to move by hand.

So if the mice made it all the way to Earth undetected, what if their time displacement didn’t work? There was no reason to believe that any of this planet-rooted time-shifting could function away from Garden. If it didn’t, what was their fallback plan? To reproduce at an insane rate, eat all the food on Earth, and starve the human race to death? Not likely—mice were too easy to kill.

Perhaps they could genetically manipulate the humans of Earth. But in what way? Any genetic change they made would take many long human generations to take effect. It couldn’t stop the destruction of Garden a year after the Visitors left.

And now that he was here in Larfold, Umbo couldn’t go to the library in Odinfold and try to learn more about what the mice could do. He couldn’t even ask Mouse-Breeder, which he’d like to do, even though he knew Mouse-Breeder would probably lie to him. Or the mice were lying to Mouse-Breeder so any answer he gave would be wrong.

The mice could move items from one place to another, and from one time to another. If that power continued to work on Earth, they would have a wide range of possibilities. They had killed Param by inserting a slab of metal into her body. But could they have simply removed a vital organ from her?

What were the rules governing their powers? How many mice did it take to handle a single displacement? Did the items they shifted in time and space have to be already detached or detachable from all other items? Or could they move a section of a pillar out of place and collapse a roof? And how large an object could they move? A building? A starship?

Could they move the Visitors’ starship into space very near the Sun and let it roast?

No, that couldn’t be it—if the Visitors did not return to Earth, it would only signal the humans of Earth that Garden posed some kind of threat.

All Umbo’s questions went around and around in his head.

Until, in the middle of the night, he got the answer.

He woke up Param.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “I was asleep!”

“I know,” said Umbo. “But how can you sleep, when I have the answer?”

“What answer?”

“The answer to the problem that we don’t know enough to decide what to do about anything. We don’t even know enough to know what questions to ask.”

“For this you woke me?” asked Param. “Go away.”

“I woke you because you’re the solution.”

“You have no problems, I assure you, to which I am a possible solution.”

“We need to go into the future and meet the Visitors and see what happens with them and then come back here and figure out what to do about them.”

Param closed her eyes, but at least she was thinking about it. “So you want me to slice time to get us into the future faster.”

“And then when we’ve seen enough, I bring us right back here. Tonight. Nobody even knows we went.”

“But I’ve never sliced time that far,” said Param. “It would take weeks.”

“You’ve never wanted to slice time to that degree,” said Umbo, “because you didn’t want to miss whole days and weeks and months. But if you really pushed it . . .”

“Maybe,” said Param.

“And we still get a quick view of what’s happening. Day and night, seasons changing.”

“So we’d know when two years had passed,” said Param.

“We’re the ones with these time-shifting abilities,” said Umbo. “Let’s use them.”

“Without Rigg.”

“Rigg’s doing whatever he thinks is right. Why should we do anything less than that?”

Param sat up and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I don’t actually hate you, you know,” she said.

“That’s good to hear,” said Umbo. “Because you had me fooled.”

“I don’t like you,” said Param. “But I don’t hate you, either. The others keep lecturing me because I don’t treat you right.”

“You treated me right when you took us off the rock in Ramfold,” said Umbo. “And when you got us through the Wall. In the crisis, you come through.”

“And so do you.”

“So let’s try it. If it’s more than you can do, or want to do, you can just stop and I’ll bring us back here.”

“Can you bring us back with any kind of precision?” asked Param. “I thought you needed Rigg’s pathfinding in order to hook up with an exact time.”

“If I overshoot in coming back, then you can slice us back up to tonight. You’re precise even if I’m not.”

Param got up. Loaf stirred. Olivenko didn’t move.

Param rummaged in her bag and took out her heavy coat.

Umbo looked at her like she was crazy.

“What if it’s winter when we stop?” asked Param.

Umbo got his heavy coat out of his bag, too.

They took each other’s hands, facing each other.

“I think you two are reckless fools,” said Loaf, who was apparently awake after all.

“But we can’t stop them,” said Olivenko, who was awake as well.

“Thanks,” said Umbo. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

Param began slicing time.

Umbo had been through this before, as they leapt from the rock. It didn’t feel like they were moving forward through time at a different pace. Instead, it looked as if the rest of the world were speeding up. Only this time, Umbo didn’t see people or animals move quickly by. He didn’t see them at all. Just glimpses of a person here, a person there. Days flitted by in a blur of suns passing overhead, flickering with stars that appeared in a momentary darkness and then were gone.

Snow on the ground, gone, back, gone, deeper, melted, back again, gone again. And then spring, a profusion of green; a summer just long enough to feel the heat, and then it was cool and the leaves were gone and the grass was brown and there was snow again. Spring. Summer. And Param slowed down the world around them and gradually they came to a stop.

It was night. There was no one on the beach, no one farther inland either, as far as they could tell.

Rigg could always tell where other people were, or whether they were there at all, thought Umbo. I wish that he were here.

But then the wish passed from him. He didn’t want to be dependent on Rigg right now. He and Param could do this thing alone.

“I don’t think we want to be seen,” said Umbo. “I think we want to watch from hiding.”

“Then let’s turn invisible,” said Param with a smirk. “It’s my best trick anyway.” She took his hand again, and walked with him toward a stand of trees and bushes, as the night raced by around them.

Even when they came to a stop amid the trees, and the sun rose swiftly, Param kept on slicing time. But now the world was moving slowly enough that they could see the blur of scurrying mice. Mice everywhere among the trees and grass.

Mice going into and out of holes in the ground.

Of course they don’t build buildings. They dig holes. They don’t have to shore up tunnels so they don’t cave in; mice can move through such tiny passages that they hold themselves up without any additional support. These fields could now be a city of a hundred million mice, and no one above the surface would know it.

Rigg would know, because of the paths. But could even he sort through the movements of all these tiny mammals?

The great hole in Umbo’s plan was now obvious. They could move into the future, but where in the future did they want to be? Where would the Visitors come, when they came to Larfold?

If they came to Larfold. There was a thought. What if the Visitors saw no trace of human habitation in Larfold, and so didn’t bother to come there?

What if the mice had insisted on invading Larfold precisely because they knew the Visitors would not come, and perhaps the Destroyers would not destroy the wallfold because they thought no humans lived there? After all, the account of the destruction of “all” of Garden in the Future Books might not be accurate.

Or maybe this was where the mice were trying to construct underground shelters where they could live for decades without coming to the surface. Maybe they meant to wait until Garden was habitable again, and only then emerge and inherit the world.

Why did we always assume the mice were trying to attack Earth? All they had to do was hide deep enough to escape notice.

How much about the mice was in the ships’ logs? Would the Destroyers be looking for them? They couldn’t have been on any previous visit, because the mice had only existed for the first time on this go-round.

The Visitors will come to Larfold, thought Umbo. They’ll be thorough. The ships’ logs will tell them that there was a colony here and that somehow it went underwater. So they’ll come here looking for the site of the colony.

And that’s where we are, or nearly so.

Umbo raised a hand in a stopping gesture, and Param slowed them down. The mice resumed a normal pace—which was still pretty frantic. Almost instantly, there were mice on their clothing, up on their shoulders.

“You know who we are,” said Umbo softly. “We’re about to go into the future. If you want to see your families again, get off.”

The mice understood and scampered down their clothing and got about a meter away before they turned and sat watching Umbo and Param.

“Why did you make us stop?” asked Param.

“We want to be about three hundred meters that way.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where the colony was, so that’s where the Visitors will come.”

Almost at once, the mice took off in the direction Umbo had indicated. “It’s nice to be regarded as an authority by somebody,” he said.

“Since the mice already know where we’re going, can we just walk there in realtime?”

“Sure,” said Umbo. “Though if there are any Larfolders on shore, they’ll see us. Not to mention the Visitors themselves, who might be watching from space right now.”

Param sighed. “I’ve spent plenty of time slicing time already. A little more won’t kill me.”

Though of course if the mice decided to try their little stunt with metal again, it might kill her. “Never mind,” said Umbo. “I prefer to walk in realtime myself.” He let go of her hand and started to walk out into the open.

She hesitated a moment, then followed him.

“I wonder,” said Umbo, “what would happen if I peed while time-slicing. I mean, as soon as the piss leaves my body, it’s not part of me. So does it keep moving in sliced time, or does it immediately become part of realtime? So I’d pee, and it’s like it would move really fast and hit the ground almost before I peed it.”

“I can’t believe you’re making me listen to something so disgusting,” said Param.

“Come on, you can’t tell me you never thought of it. I bet you tried it.”

“It was better when we were slicing time,” said Param. “We couldn’t talk then.”

“So if you don’t like what I think of to say, you say something.”

For a minute or two she remained silent. Then she spoke. “Thank you for not making me slice time when the mice knew where I’d be.”

“I think if they wanted us dead, they’d find a way, but sure, I could see why you didn’t want to do it. And I didn’t want you to run the risk either.”

“So thanks,” she said.

Umbo wanted to laugh. It was such a simple thing, saying thanks, but for her it was hard. Probably not hard to say thanks—just hard to say it to him.

“We’re going to have to slice time eventually, though,” said Param. “We didn’t pack a lunch.”

Something perverse in him made Umbo return to the previous subject. “Farting, too,” said Umbo. “Bet it completely fades before we can smell it, if you fart while slicing time. And no, I absolutely won’t believe it if you tell me you never did that while slicing time.”

“I never—”

“I have sisters,” said Umbo. “Girls fart and snore and belch and pee and all the really gross offenses. They just pretend they don’t, and expect everybody else to go along with the lie.”

Umbo expected Param to say something cutting. Or move away from him in disgust. Or disappear.

Instead she farted.

“Oh, you couldn’t wait till we time-sliced,” said Umbo.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I’m sure it was a collective fart from all the mice around us.”

“The mice broke wind?” she said. “How advanced of them. They have evolved to the level of boys. Still, that leaves a long way to go.”

Umbo smiled. Only a little. Maybe she wouldn’t notice. Wasn’t it amazing that she could say rude things one moment and it felt like hatred, and then say equally rude things the next moment, and it sounded like an offer of friendship.

They reached the boundary of the colony, as far as he remembered from the map in the flyer’s display. But he had a good memory for where things were, a good eye for landmarks. It was here.

“Tired?” asked Umbo.

“You woke me out of a sound sleep two years ago and I’ve been walking continuously since,” said Param. “How could I be tired?”

“Can you slice time in your sleep?”

Param hesitated. “Sometimes I wondered if I disappeared in my sleep. If it was such a reflex that I slept all night but only got a couple of hours’ sleep.”

“Tired all the time?”

“I wanted to go back to bed the moment I woke up.”

“Sounds like my mother,” said Umbo.

Param was about to say something, then thought better of it.

Something insulting about Umbo’s mother. And then a decision that this might be out of bounds.

Good call, Param.

“The mice know we’re here. So we could probably both sleep at once. But I’ll keep watch if it makes you feel safer.”

They were in the shadow of the woods now, and Umbo piled up this year’s leaves to make a large sleeping area without much work. Param lowered herself gracefully onto the leaves. Umbo sat up with his back leaning against a tree.

After a little while, Param moved herself closer to him. She held out one hand.

Umbo looked at the hand.

“Hold my hand,” she said. “In case I slice time in my sleep.”

Umbo took her hand.

It felt good.

In a few moments, she was snoring. She didn’t slice time. The mice left them alone. So instead of waking her to take her turn, Umbo eventually lay down beside her, still holding her hand, and caught some sleep as well. When he woke up, she was awake. But still holding his hand.

“Did I fart much?” asked Umbo.

“It’s been so long since you bathed, it’s hard to tell,” said Param.

“That was good,” said Umbo. “You’re getting good at this.”

“At insulting you? That’s not even a sport, Umbo,” she said. “It’s so easy.”

But because she called him by name, it didn’t sting. In fact, it made him feel kind of good.

Awake now, they took care of their morning ablutions, taking turns going down to the river, which was near enough to have been of use to the colony when it was new. Unlike the facemasks in Vadeshfold, the mantles in Larfold were larger and easy to avoid in the water.

Rested and a bit cleaner and emptier, Umbo mentioned that they should have thought of food, and Param said that she hardly thought of anything else, and then she sliced time again, days, weeks, until . . .

There was a flyer setting itself down a few hundred meters away.

Param and Umbo moved swiftly toward it. Of course, because they were in sliced time, the people around them moved even quicker.

They watched as the Visitors set up all kinds of equipment whose purpose Umbo couldn’t guess at. And very soon, mantled Larfolders began showing up to talk with the Visitors.

The Visitors looked like regular people. There were sharp differences between them—some with skin so light you might call it white, others so black it was blue. Far more variety than the rather uniform brown of the wallfolds they had visited so far.

Umbo decided this meant that on Earth, races that originated in one geographical area tended to marry within their tribe, while on Garden, everybody had intermarried so much within each wallfold that, because the colonies had been identical at startup, they all evolved into the same intermediate brown.

We won’t learn anything if we don’t talk to them, thought Umbo. That meant coming out of sliced time and taking things at a normal—and visible—pace.

Then there was a flurry of motion near the Visitors’ flyer, and Umbo realized what it was. Mice were scurrying up a bit of cable dangling from the ramp leading up to the flyer’s door.

Not all scurrying, though. Some of them moved downright sluggishly.

Why so slow?

Pregnant, he thought. More babies.

No. They wouldn’t want their babies to be born en route. It would be hard enough to conceal adults; younglings would be impossible to hide.

So why else might some mice be more sluggish than others in climbing the rope?

And then Umbo realized: They were sick.

Why would they send sick mice as their agents?

Because the sickness was the purpose of their stowing away.

The mice had created a disease of which they were themselves the vector. They would go to Earth and pass the disease to humans.

A crowd of Larfolders assembled. Umbo signaled a stop and Param slowed the movements of the people around them to a speed approaching normal.

One of the Visitors, a woman, was talking, and after a very short time, Umbo understood the language. She would speak a sentence, and then a Larfolder would translate for her. How does the interpreter know the Visitors’ language, he wondered. Then Umbo remembered that the Larfolders had held on to the ancient language with some stubbornness. And because they could ordinarily speak only on shore, they spoke more rarely, and so their language would evolve less. Maybe it was still very similar to whatever the Earth people spoke.

“I know what the mice are doing,” whispered Umbo.

“Sneaking on board the ship?

“With a disease,” said Umbo.

“I wonder which disease.”

“I don’t want to find out by catching it,” said Umbo.

“Poisoning them,” said Param. “The mice are going to murder the entire population of Earth.”

“Have you got her language?” asked Umbo.

“Yes,” said Param.

“You go to them invisible, then appear and warn them,” said Umbo. “I’ll take you back in time with me the moment you show me a fist.”

“What message?” asked Param.

Umbo thought for a moment. “A warning. Something about how the mice are smart and very dangerous and they can’t let a single one reach Earth.”

Param nodded and disappeared.

Umbo kept his eyes on the Visitors; he could not afford to be looking away at the moment Param appeared. They’d only have a few second before the mice would react. Perhaps by killing her again.

Param appeared. The Visitor who had been speaking stopped and inclined her head to look at Param, then said something to her.

Param held up her hand in a gesture of silence. Wait. And then she was blurting out something and suddenly her fist was extended. It was the signal. Umbo took hold of her and dragged both of them backward in time.

Param dropped in a heap to the ground. The flyer was gone, so her position on the ramp had become a point in midair.

But she was unhurt, and in this particular timeframe there wasn’t a soul here. Not even the mice.

“I think I may have brought us back a little earlier than I wanted,” said Umbo.

“Or later,” said Param. “I don’t know if it will matter.”

They walked back toward the camp in realtime.

Whatever doubts he might have had, Umbo found as they approached that it was the very night when they had left. There was Loaf, and there was Olivenko, exactly as they had been; and there were Umbo and Param, asleep.

“No,” whispered Umbo when Param seemed about to speak. “Say nothing if you can help it, not till our earlier selves are gone. We don’t want to let them see us. It complicates things sometimes.”

“I was going to say,” said Param softly, “that you got us here within half an hour of the time we left.”

“In the wrong direction,” said Umbo.

“Before is better than after,” said Param.

They waited in sliced time then, wordless until the sleeping version of themselves woke up, packed quickly, and set out, disappearing moments after they started walking.

Was that the same way it had been earlier? Or did Umbo remember that Param started splitting time before they walked away from camp. Was it possible that they had inadvertently changed something in the past? Might they have therefore bifurcated themselves, so that a complete duplicate set of themselves would be wandering around, thinking they were the real Umbo and Param?

Maybe they were.

Param and Umbo walked back into camp.

“What did you learn?” asked Loaf.

Umbo had forgotten that Loaf and Olivenko had been awake when they left. “The Visitors came but I didn’t have much chance to hear them.”

“We saw mice getting in their flyer,” said Param. “They moved sluggishly. As if they were sick.”

“We thought, what if the mice developed a disease to carry back to Earth?” said Umbo. “Something the humans of Earth can’t defend against.”

“So instead of learning the answer to your ‘what if,’ so you could decide whether to intervene,” said Loaf, “you intervened.”

When he put it that way, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“Did you know that any mice were sick?” asked Loaf.

“They looked sick,” said Param defiantly.

Umbo was grateful that she was backing him up on this; she could so easily have laid all the blame on him. In fact, he suspected that the blame was his. But then, to blame him would imply that she had been taking orders from him. Her pride could never let her do that.

“What did your intervention consist of?” asked Olivenko.

“I told them that the mice on their ship were smart and deadly,” said Param, “and they needed to kill every last one of them so they’d return to Earth with none aboard.”

“And the mice didn’t stop you,” said Loaf.

“I’m not sure any of them saw that she was there,” said Umbo. “Param delivered her message so quickly.”

“So you’re going to get away with having a whole bunch of half-human mice slaughtered,” said Loaf. “What a relief.”

“What if having the mice reach Earth was the only way to save Garden?” asked Olivenko.

“Then next time around,” said Umbo, “we’ll let them go.”

“What next time?” asked Loaf. “Maybe next time, the mice won’t alter Knosso’s genes, or give you your real father. What if they completely undo us so that next time we won’t interfere in their plans?”

“You forget,” said Umbo. “They can’t go back in time.”

“They can write letters,” said Loaf, “and send them back, and read them, and act on them.”

“On your information-gathering mission, did you learn anything to guide us on how to prevent the Visitors from hating and fearing us?” asked Olivenko.

“We were too busy trying to save the lives of all the humans on Earth,” said Param.

“I thought saving the lives of all the humans on Garden was a slightly higher priority,” said Olivenko.

“Isn’t it enough to have learned what the mice were doing?” asked Umbo.

Olivenko shook his head. “You saw mice getting on the Visitors’ flyer, and you assumed that they were doing what you already thought they were doing. You assumed that your previous guesses were right. But you had no evidence.”

“Are you a lawyer now?” asked Param.

“I try not to be part of indiscriminate murder,” said Olivenko. “Which is pretty much what you just did. Will do.”

“Maybe warning the Visitors will prove to them that they shouldn’t get us all killed,” said Umbo. “Maybe we just saved Garden and Earth.”

“Think!” said Loaf. “We know they destroyed Garden nine times—before the half-human mice were ever created. So how can warning them about the mice stop them from doing something they repeatedly did before there were ever any mice at all?”

Why hadn’t Umbo thought of all this himself? Why had he just . . . acted? For that matter, why hadn’t Param thought of all these objections even if for no other reason than to undercut Umbo? Why, this time of all possible times, did Param actually cooperate with him?

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.