Noxon had all the time in the world, and so he walked to Ramfold. Having spent almost every waking moment with Param for the past few months, it was a relief to be alone. Nothing against his sister. He had come to love her, and perhaps even understand her as well as one person can understand another. But he needed to be alone for a while, and this was that while.
Well, not alone. Mice all over him, but they weren’t chatty and that was fine with him. They were sulking because of the rules he had laid out for them. Once they got to Ramfold, they were not free to go off and start trying to populate the place with their species. Because of the facemask, they knew that even when he slept, Noxon was keeping a continuous count, and if he needed to, he could catch them. Well, not so much catch as crush. But that was the deal they made in order to be able to accompany him on the voyage.
It’s not that he really had all the time in the world—he had more. The world had only a finite number of years. Noxon could have more years than that, if he wanted. He could just keep going back to other times, and live on until he died of old age. People who couldn’t shift time were stuck with the life they had. If somebody came and burned all life from the surface of the world, well, that was too bad; they were cheated out of all their potential life after that.
But how was that different from the way the world worked all the time? You could get sick, you could take a fall, someone could kill you, there might be a flood, a drought, starvation. So many ways to die without living out your normal span. Everybody died of something, didn’t they? The only thing that made the end of Garden so tragic was that everybody met up with the same death at the same time.
No. That wasn’t the only thing. It wasn’t even the main thing. What made the end of the world so terrible, so vile, so urgent to prevent, were two things.
First, nobody would be there to remember. Everything would be lost. You couldn’t leave anyone or anything to continue work you had just begun. Any other death would at least leave a memory of what had once been. But not this one.
Second, and worse, was that somebody did it on purpose. It wasn’t an act of nature, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of chance. It was the murder of a world. Nineteen worlds, nineteen collections of human history and culture.
But during his walk, Noxon didn’t just think deep philosophical thoughts about why it was worth risking his life to try to prevent the end of the world. He also replayed old arguments with Father, pondered questions he had never had a chance to answer, thought about what Rigg might do, if Noxon succeeded in his mission—how he might finish out their shared life. If he might marry and have children, and if so, what wallfold he would choose to do it in, since by then he would know them all.
We are no longer the same person now, Rigg and I, thought Noxon. He is getting to know this world; I am leaving it. He has a future on Garden; I will never come back.
Even if he succeeded in changing Earth’s future so that the Destroyers did not come, that did not even hint at a possibility that the new future would have room in a starship for Noxon to return to Garden. If by some miracle he managed to arrive on Earth, it would be at the time when Ram Odin’s voyage—the first interstellar flight in human history—was just about to launch. He could not tell them he was a native of this world, because at that point Garden had not yet been settled, let alone named. Who would believe him if he tried to explain that by some bizarre stroke of fate, Ram Odin’s ship was replicated into nineteen forward copies and one backward one, and that they were thrown back in time 11,191 years? From what Rigg had read in Odinfold, most nations on Earth would treat him kindly; few would lock him up as a madman. But certainly no one would believe him, and he would spend a lot of time conversing with doctors whose compassionate purpose would be to bring him back from this delusion of his. He certainly couldn’t talk anyone into sending him home to Garden.
Nor could he slice time in order to be invisible and stow away on Ram Odin’s original voyage. It would not do for him to run the risk of being noticed by the ship’s computers on the outbound voyage, because they would then inform Ram Odin of everything that was going to happen.
Or would they? Did they lie to him, too? Or withhold information that he wouldn’t think of asking for? Did all the expendables know from the start what would happen?
No. They would have acted, deliberately or inadvertently, in such a way as to change the future. Or would they?
Was this present time precisely the future that the ship’s computers already knew would be reached, because the jewels he carried provided them with knowledge of every single action the computers and expendables would ever take?
There was no answer to this, but it didn’t stop Noxon from thinking of possible ways that such things might work—or not work at all. It was a pleasure to be alone with his thoughts. Especially because he did not waste time thinking about the one vital thing: what he would find when he followed Ram Odin’s path backward to the moment of the anomaly that created all these copies and plunged them back more than eleven millennia in time.
Either he would be able to detect the paths across that 11,191-year gap, or he would not. Either he would be able to detect the timeflow of the one backward copy of the ship, or he would not. And if he detected that impossible ship, either he would be able to attach himself to it, or he would not.
Fretting about it would not relieve his ignorance or allow him any insight into what it would be like, and how he would deal with it. There was a very good chance—the ship’s computer had implied as much several times—that in trying to make any of these possible jumps, Noxon would find himself stranded outside the rational universe and never be able to get back. If this happened in the cold of empty space, his last moments would be mercifully brief. And he would not spend them wishing he could have saved Garden—if he failed and died, it would no longer be his responsibility.
Only if he failed but lived would he need to regret whatever mistakes he might be about to make that would lead to that failure.
Not a productive line of thought.
But as he walked from Larfold to Ramfold, he gradually lost interest in all the thoughts that he had wanted to think, and by the time he reached the Wall, he was weary of the journey. He even got to the point where he started speaking now and then to the twenty mice embedded in his clothing and in his small pack of tools and supplies. They must have been getting bored, too, because they answered now and then. Not that there was any real attempt at conversation. They might be sentient beings with a lot of human genes in common, but they were definitely not of the same village or the same tribe as Noxon. They had little in common, except this mission.
It was no problem for Noxon to pass through the Wall without one of his erstwhile human companions. The computers did not bother distinguishing between the two Riggs, so they were both exempt from the rule. He knew that the ships’ computers monitored the Wall continuously, and when he entered Ramfold, that meant the expendable Ramex would be alert to his presence. So in the midst of the Wall he spoke aloud. “I’d like the flyer, please, Father.”
Since he had had no itinerary, being content to eat whatever came to hand as he traveled, as he emerged from the Wall he had no idea where in Ramfold he might be, except that he was near the eastern Wall somewhere well to the north of the latitude of Aressa Sessamo. This was wild land, where various villages and tribes lived in an uneasy relationship with the central government. Never conquered and never assimilated into the Stashiland culture, these people paid, not taxes, but tribute. And not very much of that, because they were poor.
Or at least they made themselves seem poor when the emissaries of the Sessamids or the taxmen of the People’s Revolutionary Council came for a visit. Who knew? A few of their people spoke Stashi; nobody from Stashiland spoke their language.
Except Noxon, since he had passed through the Wall and had all possible human languages instilled in him.
It would have been interesting to get to know these people, as he imagined Rigg was getting to know people in other wallfolds. But that was not his errand. He would rather avoid contact with them.
Yet he could not avoid it in the obvious ways—by slicing time, or jumping back and forth in time as the people’s paths made it seem advisable. For if he strayed from this exact timeline, how would the flyer find him?
He saw the path of the man who spotted him, as he watched, then ran off through the woods to report. He saw the paths of the people gathering to intercept him. Apparently strangers here were rare—or at least, strangers coming from the direction of the Wall. He wondered how long it would take the flyer to reach him. He knew they were fast, but this fast? And would the ship send the flyer with urgency? Or at leisure?
Noxon walked to the middle of a large meadow and stood there waiting. Soon they formed a ring around him, out of sight to his eyes, just inside the shelter of the trees.
“I am a visitor from beyond the Wall,” said Noxon.
They made no sound, but he imagined their consternation at hearing their own language spoken by a stranger. Especially a stranger with a weird, semi-human face.
Then he saw the arrows coming toward him and realized that people responded to consternation in different ways. One of them was to kill the alarming stranger.
By now he was able to jump into time-slicing almost as quickly as Param. But he did not dare to slice his way too rapidly into the future. He had to remain in this spot until the flyer arrived.
Which was almost immediately, though it might have felt to Noxon like less time than actually passed. Certainly the first wave of arrows had all hit the ground, having passed through seeming nothingness—though Noxon felt them all as heat passing through him. They were very good at hitting what they aimed at. He knew the flyer had arrived by the way the people, who had started walking out into the meadow, suddenly rushed back to the cover of the trees.
A ladder dropped down out of the sky. Noxon stopped his time-slicing, dashed for the ladder, and began to climb. The flyer rose into the air, the ladder rose into the flyer, and they were gone before any arrows could find the range.
Inside the flyer, Noxon found Father waiting for him.
“You timed your arrival well,” said Noxon.
“Good thing, too. The flyer was all for leaving when it found you had disappeared.”
“Do you mind if I call you Father?”
“You can call me whatever you like,” said Father. Or Ramex. “Do you expect me to call you Noxon instead of Rigg?”
“I wish you would. I once was Rigg, back when we spent so many years together, but I’ve been Noxon for months now and I need to make that identity completely my own.”
“As you wish,” said Ramex.
Father would never have said that, so this was the obedient expendable, not the domineering tutor.
It took very little time to reach the starship in Ramfold. Noxon watched out the windows and then on the screen that showed what was passing directly under and a little ahead of the flyer. They passed over Upsheer right at the falls. He barely caught a glimpse of the handful of buildings that made up Fall Ford. He couldn’t see the stairway but he did see the broken-off nubs of the most recent of the bridges over the top of the falls. The others had long since crumbled away, becoming boulders in the pool at the base of the falls, and eventually becoming ever smaller rocks and stones as one rock broke another.
“You didn’t want to linger, did you?” asked Father. “Stop by and say a fond farewell to Nox? I think she’d be flattered that you took her name.”
“I think she’d be annoyed. And with this thing on my face, I doubt she’d believe that I’m me.”
“She would if I told her to.”
“She’d be alarmed to see you back from the dead.”
“Less alarmed than you might think,” said Father. “I think she has some idea of my seeming immortality. I’m not sure if she believed your story.”
“If she had thought I was lying—”
“She would never have protected you, I know. But there’s a difference between believing in your honesty and believing in the factuality of the story you were telling. If you believed it, then it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t necessarily the truth, either.”
“I don’t want to stop in and see her.”
“I think the flyer would have been hard to conceal from prying eyes,” said Father. “But I do miss the old village.”
“No you don’t,” said Noxon. “You just pretend to have feelings like a human being.”
“I have much nicer feelings than most.”
“I’m sure,” said Noxon.
He had wandered for years through the forest on the plateau of the starship’s crater. Now it seemed small. They passed over it so quickly, and then straight down the shaft to the starship itself.
The starship of Ramfold was no different from any other. Except for a difference that only Rigg and Noxon could see. This one had Ram Odin’s continuous path. Not the Ram Odin that was with Rigg, touring the world right now—that was the Ram of Odinfold. No, these paths were of the Ram Odin who had ordered the expendables to kill all the others, and then brought out his colonists when the land was habitable again. This was the Ram Odin who had married, had children who then had children of their own, and so on until that time-traveling gene had made its way into the embryo that grew up to be Noxon.
That Ram’s path was all over the inside of the starship, but it was very, very old.
There were several iterations of more recent paths, too—the Ram Odin of Odinfold had visited here now and then over the years. But Noxon could see the faint but detectable differences between the paths of the two Ram Odins. They had begun to diverge once the copies had been made, and now Noxon could tell them apart with only a moment’s hesitation, and not just because the Ram of Odinfold had all the recent paths.
Noxon went right to work, finding the very oldest path. It began in the pilot’s seat in the small control room—just like the room where Rigg had come to stop Noxon from killing Ram Odin before Ram Odin could come and kill him.
But it could not begin in the pilot’s seat. “He wasn’t born here, in that chair.”
“But he arrived here that way. You know your paths are tied to the surface of the planet, not to any vehicle.”
“Then I’ve failed before I even began.”
“You don’t know that,” said Father. “You don’t know anything about what the paths do when the starship is not on a planet’s surface. Besides, what you’re seeing may not be the ship’s arrival here. It might be the moment when the ship passed through the fold. Ram Odin was sitting in that chair for that, too.”
“If I could see a path for you, I might be able to tell.”
“But the facemask lets you see more than the mere path. Look closely. Even if you can’t see me, you can see whether he’s talking to me.”
Noxon looked. “He’s talking to you in all the paths. Talking to you seems to have been his main activity.”
“It was,” said Father. “I’m excellent company. Part of my programming.”
“And sounding proud of it—that’s part of your programming, too?”
“And a bit shy—don’t forget that I also had a hint of modesty as well as pride.”
“Well done,” said Noxon. Now that he knew Father was a machine, he wasn’t half so frightening. Nor, to tell the truth, was he trying to dominate Noxon the way he had dominated the child named Rigg.
“After he ordered the killing of the other Ram Odins,” said Father, “I recall that he turned around in his seat in this direction. Because I was standing here.”
Noxon looked at the oldest moments of the path and yes, there was indeed such a turn.
“Of course, I often stood here, and he always turned in that direction to face me, when he felt the need to face me. That time, though, he was looking to see if I was going to kill him—he didn’t know if his command was the one with primacy.”
“He looks relieved,” said Noxon. “It’s subtle—Ram Odin doesn’t show much—but the facemask can detect the difference in expression.”
“I think we can safely say that the evidence indicates that the paths here in the starship go all the way back to the moment of division.”
“The moment after.”
“The moment of or the moment after. That will make a difference, won’t it?” said Father.
“When I appear, the computers will read the jewels, won’t they?”
“Oh my,” said Father. “How full of perplexing possibilities that question is.”
“Can the computers detect the jewels if I’m slicing time?”
“Slice away and we’ll see,” said Father.
Noxon sliced a little, and then moved very quickly. Father did not move, so it was hard to gauge just how far he had gone.
He came out of time-slicing. “Well?” he asked.
“Did you have to do it for a whole day?”
“You didn’t move,” said Noxon. “It was hard to gauge duration or speed.”
“The answer is that for just a few minutes, the jewels were detectable but not readable. Then they became undetectable for the rest of the day.”
“So if I slice time at a moderate pace, you can tell that I’m there. But when I really race, you can’t.”
“Here’s a question,” said Father. “You can slice time in such a way as to skip over fractions of a second in rapid succession, moving forward in time much faster than normal people do. But can you slice the other way? No, not backward—I know you can do that, too, though not as smoothly. No, I mean can you jump back into the past at the rate of one second every second, so that you freeze in exactly the same moment?”
“Except for the millions of collisions between the atoms of myself that would cause me to burst into flame or explode, yes, I think I could do that.”
“Oh,” said Father. “That’s right. Slicing means you’re nearly in the same place for a long time, but never in the same time at all. In fact, mostly not there at all.”
“You raise an excellent point, though,” said Noxon. “When I’m slicing—backward or forward—everything outside of me moves much faster. Which means that I’ll have even less time to observe what’s going on, at precisely the moment when I need to have as long as possible to observe.”
“I’m not sure of the math on this,” said Father—which Noxon, by old habit, took to mean that Father was sure to the hundredth decimal place—“but the exact moment of the jump has no duration at all. It isn’t a moment. It isn’t in time at all.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“But don’t you see? If you can get to that moment, you can stay there as long as you want. Observe everything.”
“Or I can be completely obliterated.”
“Well, that was your gamble from the start, wasn’t it?”
The tone of voice was Father’s “what did you think?” and, just as if he were still a child, it made Noxon feel hopelessly stupid.
“It’s not as if you can do any of this,” said Noxon. And, for having responded like a child, he now felt that he deserved to feel stupid.
“You can do what you can do,” said Father, “and I can do what I can do.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Noxon.
“No one ever does,” said Father. “But at least we expendables always know what we did. You humans can’t even hold on to your memories, just the echo of a shadow of a dream.”
Noxon didn’t bother arguing. “You are superior in every way,” he said placidly. “I’m content with my second-rate yet biologically active state.”
“And every bug is content to be a bug.”
“Proud to be a bug, and don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t,” said Father.
Noxon laughed. “I’m having so much fun, it makes me want to kill and skin a beast of some kind. Just for old times’ sake.”
“Old times,” said Father. “I don’t suppose you want to take me back to the beginning with you.”
“Then there’d be two of you in Ramfold, and no way to hide you from your old self.”
“I just want to know what happens,” said Father. “You can understand my curiosity.”
“No, I can’t,” said Noxon. “That’s such a human emotion.”
“It’s in my programming. I have to know.”
“And yet you won’t.”
“But the mice will,” said Father.
“If I decide to bring them,” said Noxon.
“And if you don’t?”
“We can’t have them infesting Ramfold,” said Noxon. “They know that. So if I go, and I leave them behind, it’s your job to make sure they never get off this ship.”
“My job to kill them.”
“You’ve done it before,” said Noxon. “After all, you’re expendable yourself.”
“But you’re going to take them,” said Father.
“I haven’t decided.”
“But you are.”
“I’ve killed and skinned a thousand animals. More. Do you think the deaths of these mice will bother me?”
“Yes,” said Father.
“Well, you’re right. And I’m taking them. If I die, they die. If I live, they’ll share my fate.”
“They’re not saying anything about your magnanimous decision,” said Father.
“They weren’t sent on this mission because they were the chattiest of mice,” said Noxon. “And I don’t imagine they’re rejoicing that I’m not going to have you kill them here, but instead I’m going to take them to die with me in oblivion between stars and between millennia.”
“Or they weren’t expecting to die even if you decided not to take them. You forget how much of my programming they understand.”
“Now there’s something it’s easy to forget, since none of us learned anything about your programming,” said Noxon.
“The Odinfolders know a lot,” said Father. “But the mice know more.”
“Do the mice know everything?”
“They know everything that can be known by mice,” said Father.
“What does that mean?”
“That it’s good to keep them guessing.”
“I think I’m going to go now,” said Noxon. “It was good to see you again.”
“Every time you see any of the expendables, you see me,” said Father. “I have all their memories. They have all of mine.”
“But I know that you’re the one who raised me from a pup.”
“You think you know that,” said Father. “How do you know we don’t swap wallfolds every now and then? How do you know it was the same version of me that came back from every trip?”
“That’s right. Shatter my confidence just before I’m really going to need it.”
“It’s my job,” said Father. “Keep him guessing. Never let him feel too smart.”
“You really are good at that part of your job. So I know this will mean nothing to you. And if it does mean something, you won’t tell me anyway. But here it is. I forgive you for lying to me constantly as I was growing up. I thank you for teaching me all the things you taught me, and helping me learn to think the way I think.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
“One more thing,” said Noxon.
“Don’t say it,” said Father.
“Why not?”
“Because you know that if I answer, it will be a lie.”
“I don’t care whether it is or not,” said Noxon. “I love you.”
Father sighed. Part of his programming. “I love you too,” he said.
Noxon attached to the earliest possible moment on Ram Odin’s path, and then jumped just a hair, just a titch, just the tiniest bit beyond it.
Noxon was still on the ship. Still in the cabin. Ram Odin was there, in his pilot’s seat. The expendable was standing exactly where Ram Odin would look for him in just a few moments, as soon as the expendable could tell him what had happened.
Only it hadn’t happened yet.
Or, more precisely, it was happening right now. In this moment, this infinite unchanging moment, there was only one ship, but there were twenty potential ships coming into existence. It was jumping from one point in space to another that was many lightyears away and yet, at this moment, perfectly adjacent. It was passing from the moment zero of the year zero to a time 11,191 years earlier.
It had been the right guess, that the moment of transition existed but had no duration, and having no duration, therefore could not end. Infinitely brief, yet also infinitely long. Not so much outside of time as deeply within. Full of imminent creation and movement; yet because there was no duration, movement was impossible.
What Noxon had not guessed, and Father had not guessed, and Ram Odin had not guessed, was that in this timeless moment, Noxon could not move. The mice could not move. The electric signals of the computers hesitated and could not move on. Noxon’s heart could not beat, he could not take a breath, but he also did not need a breath, did not need a heartbeat, because no cell in his body craved oxygen. All processes were in complete stasis because there was no movement and no causality and no possibility of change.
Yet something in him was still functioning. Because he could still see Ram Odin and the expendable. Or could he? Had that image simply frozen on his retina, in the place in his brain where vision was constructed? It could not change but it also could not fade away or leave?
Yet I am thinking, thought Noxon.
Only that’s not what he thought, because to his surprise he could not form words or even clear ideas. He could not remember language. What would have caused him to form the conscious thought “I am thinking” was really an inchoate recognition of himself. And the knowledge that his self-realization contradicted the idea that nothing could happen, because his mind, at some level deeper than the brain, was still functioning.
And even if he could not turn away from the image of Ram Odin and the expendable and the pilot’s seat and the different stations that the pilot could move to on his chair, if he could move, Noxon could see the paths.
Not see the paths. But whatever it was in him that sensed them, could sense them now. He had always been able to see the paths without turning his head. He only had to turn his attention. He could see them through walls. He could see them behind hills, though not as well. He was aware of them.
But the facemask was not helping him see them as he had become used to seeing them. The facemask was as frozen as the rest of his body, and it could not do for him any of the things that it was supposed to do. He was on his own.
What he saw were not the enhanced paths that were really people moving through space and time, as the facemask showed them. Nor were they the paths that he had seen since earliest childhood, a streak of something that he thought of as color, that he thought of as a line or a wind or a memory in the air.
What he saw now had no dimension because it had no duration. It was not a path, but an instantaneous slice of the path. A single moment of path.
He concentrated on that spark of path in Ram Odin. With all his other senses inert, each with its last message frozen in place, Noxon could sort his nonphysical observation of Ram Odin’s path from all the physical noise and bring it to the center of his attention.
Still there were no words in his mind, but he was beginning to realize that far from being less clear for the lack of language, his thoughts were more clear. It’s as if language itself, along with all the other noise of his senses, all the tumult in his brain, had been a barrier, a fog that kept him from achieving real clarity of thought. Without the necessity of explaining to himself in language, he was able to comprehend that nub of a path as it really was.
There were really twenty-one paths intersecting there.
One led into the past. It was the end of the causal chain that had brought this starship and Ram Odin to the moment of the leap across the fold.
Nineteen of them led forward into the future. He could not see where they led, because in this moment they still led nowhere, but there was causal potential in them: They would yet have more effects, whereas the path that had brought Ram Odin here had spent its causality. It was done.
None of these mattered to Noxon. Though he could not put his mission into words, he had not forgotten it. He knew that going back to the past to the beginning of Ram Odin’s outbound voyage was his last resort—he would only follow it if he could not find the twenty-first path.
The twenty-first path was as rich with causality as the others. It was not spent like the past. But it was also somehow their opposite. They each pointed to slightly different destinations. But this one pointed somewhere else entirely, and he could not see or understand where that might be.
Without words, he realized: If I attach to this twenty-first path, then I will truly be cut off from the rest of the universe. But it’s what I came for. This is my purpose. This is my gamble in order to save Garden from the Destroyers.
What he felt was not fear—fear was an emotion tied to the body. He felt nothing, not in the usual sense. But he knew that attaching to that nub of backward-streaming path could mean utter failure or complete success.
He remembered that there were two of him, and he wondered what the other version of himself might do if he were here instead of Noxon. Rigg was the one who had seen the need to kill Ram Odin, and he had done it. Then Rigg was the one who saw the need not to have killed him, and so he undid it. But from this choice there would be no undoing.
Noxon could hesitate as long as he wanted. His body would not decay here. He could not die.
But neither could he live. Neither could he act and make changes in the world.
Of course, heading backward he couldn’t make changes outside the limits of this starship. It would be a very small world indeed. And who knew if, once caught in that timeflow, the regular stream of causality would not become as invisible as backward-flowing time had been to him till now.
Filled with uncertainty, filled with determination, Noxon mentally attached himself to that nub of a path, that path of a kind and color he had never seen before. He attached to it, and left that moment of nothingness.
The moment he could sense motion again—and it felt completely normal, he felt like himself, nothing had changed, and that infinite moment between everything was now infinitesimal in his memory—in that moment he began to slice time so that he would be invisible and undetectable to the computers.
He did not know if he had acted quickly enough. He did not know how long it would take the computers to be aware of the presence of the jewels he carried with him. Or how long it would take the computers to upload all the contents of the jewels, containing as they did the entire history of the human race in every wallfold of Garden. And the history of Ram Odin on all nineteen starships.
But even if it had absorbed every speck of those memories, it didn’t matter the way it would have if he had joined with any of the nineteen forward-moving copies of the ship. Because this ship was going back to Earth, but undetectably. As it now was, this ship could not have any effect on the rest of the universe.
Noxon’s job was to find an appropriate opportunity, after the ship returned to Earth, and take the whole ship with him back into regular time, so that he could learn what motivated the people of Earth to wipe out life on Garden, and prevent it if he could.
For now, though, his only job was to stay alive through the seven-year voyage.
If the expendable knew that there were jewels aboard, he showed nothing. Noxon could not hear the words they were saying, because he was slicing time so sound could not reach him in any intelligible form. But there was only the frustration of realizing that they were the loser in the lottery of ships, that they were the one that would never found a colony, the one that would never reach any destination at all.
Ram Odin was a man so young, so childlike compared to the old man Noxon had known. He and the expendable conversed. Ram got up and talked. The expendable talked. They walked here and there. They did inexplicable things that didn’t matter to Noxon at all.
All that Noxon cared about was the place where he could use the jewels to take control of the ship. Of course, it was possible that the ship would not let him take control, since Ram Odin was the commander.
But it was also possible that once Noxon had allowed the ship to upload the contents of the jewels, the ship’s computers would realize that Noxon was the commander of the only mission that mattered now, and that Noxon was the only person who could possibly bring the ship back into forward-time.
After the huge gamble he had already taken, wouldn’t it be ironic if the ship refused to pay off on this small bet.
It took Noxon more than a day of ship’s time to cross the small room to the jewel station. Then he kept sidling left and right, waiting for Ram to leave the room again.
At last he did.
Instantly Noxon stopped slicing time. His hand was already poised over the reader. He dropped all the jewels at once out of the bag.
They did not bounce off the surface because they were immediately locked in place, held in an invisible field that kept them all moving relative to each other. Noxon remembered the dialogue he had used before, the words he was supposed to say. But the ship’s computer did not speak to him.
Instead, it spoke to the mice.
Noxon could hear the high-pitched, rapid words, because the facemask allowed him to. It meant that the ship’s computer knew that with the facemask Noxon could understand this language, and therefore the computer used it so Ram Odin could not hear what it was saying. Or it meant that the ship’s computer, having reached its own conclusions from whatever was on the jewels, wished only to deal with the mice.
No. The words were to him. “Rigg Noxon,” said the ship’s computer. “We understand why you are here and we regard you as the commander of this vessel, superceding this Ram Odin because the older, better informed, and therefore more authoritative Ram Odin has certified you as his true successor in every one of these jewels. Do not speak because I must use the expendable to explain you to him before he sees you.”
“No,” said Noxon aloud. “I will explain myself.”
“The shock might harm him.”
“I have had far too much experience with ships’ computers and with expendables to believe that you have actually surrendered control to me, or that you will actually say what I would wish you to say.”
“It is unfortunate that you have such an untrusting attitude.”
“The mice that are now escaping from this room are to be contained on this ship and not allowed to leave it under any circumstances, until I specifically authorize each instance of their departure.”
“Understood.”
From down the corridor, he could hear Ram Odin’s voice. “I’m hearing a voice and it isn’t yours and it isn’t mine.”
“And you will preserve both my life and Ram Odin’s life, from each other and from ourselves as well as from you, the expendable, or any other peril.”
“Understood.”
Ram Odin came into the room. Noxon turned to face him. Ram Odin looked at him and kept a remarkable degree of composure. Which is to say, he leaned against his chair and then sank into it. But he did not point or shout or ask questions like “Who are you?” and “How did you get here?”
“First,” said Noxon, “I am fully human. My face looks like this because I have a symbiotic relationship with a parasite that enhances my perceptions and my reaction time. My name is Noxon.”
Ram Odin said nothing.
“Second, I am in control of this ship now.”
Ram looked at the expendable. The expendable nodded.
“Third, there are now mice aboard this ship. They are sentient, they are untrustworthy, but they might be quite useful to us at some later time, so do not harm them.”
Ram nodded slowly.
“Fourth, you know that we’re cut off from the normal flow of time. I was able to join you on this timestream only because I entered this path from the moment of intersection, where all the copies of the ship came to be. I don’t know if I can get us back onto the normal timestream, but if I can’t, nobody can, nothing can. I am your only hope to get back to the world of causality.”
Ram Odin kept looking at him.
“That’s all I’ve got,” said Noxon. “You can talk now.”
Ram Odin shook his head. Then, his voice choked and croaking, he said, “No I can’t.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “I’ve met your very old self. One copy of yourself, anyway. I know that you’re a sneaky conniving arrogant murderous son-of-a-bitch. I also know that you are willing to sacrifice whatever needs sacrificing in order to save your people. Even though you’re not the copy of Ram Odin who actually founded nineteen colonies on the planet Garden, you could have become him. You meant to found a colony. I’m asking you to preserve the results of your own work. The lives of your own children. I’m one of those children. I’m here to keep your life’s work from being obliterated.”
Ram Odin nodded. “I’m listening,” he said.
So Noxon told him about the world of Garden, and all the things Ram Odin had done, and all the things Noxon and his companions had done. He didn’t hurry the telling. The story was spread across several days. When his memory was incomplete or inaccurate, the expendable prompted him, for all these stories were now a part of the ship’s memory.
When he was done, Ram Odin said, “I’m in.”
“You’re in what?” asked Noxon.
“I’m in the game. I’m with you. Let’s save the world. Your world. My children’s world.”
“Garden,” said Noxon.
“Right,” said Ram Odin. “Let’s save Garden.”