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Chapter 12 Choosing Masks

Umbo could have avoided Rigg’s rule and taken Loaf and Leaky through the Wall by jumping back before it was created, then leaping forward again in time. But that would be showing off, and besides, who knew what dangers there might be in the world of Garden before the colonizers shattered the biosphere and replaced most of the native life with plants and animals from Earth? Rigg could always see the paths of creatures and avoid anything large and dangerous. Umbo could not.

And since Umbo and Loaf were together, they could pass through the Wall—but not until after Rigg’s rule of two-at-a-time went into effect.

Umbo chose the time right after Rigg went back to Vadeshfold, got his facemask, then killed and then unkilled Ram Odin.

Loaf and Leaky and Umbo traveled to the Wall, however, in the time before Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf had been arrested in O—a time when no one was looking for them. Though it probably wasn’t necessary. They would be looking for a boy the age Umbo had been, and a soldierly man just Loaf’s size—but with a normal human face. They would not be looking for Leaky at all.

But even if they weren’t looking for them as they were now, it was better to travel at a time when nobody was looking for anybody.

They hired a carriage for the part of the journey that went from town to town, but the last part could only be done on foot because no roads led to the Wall. It was then, at the verge of the Wall, that Umbo pulled the others forward into the future moment when Rigg, Noxon, and Ram Odin had just left to rejoin the rest of them near the shore in Larfold. The flyer would be gone, but Vadeshex would be at home.

Passing through the Wall with permission did not involve the agony of anxiety and despair that normally made it impassable. But neither was it completely absent. Several times Umbo saw Loaf take Leaky by the hand and reassure her, because even these pale shadows of the feelings the Wall evoked were clearly upsetting her. Umbo remembered watching Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf walk this half-league—though that time there had been soldiers coming to kill Umbo and Param as Umbo held the others in the past. Umbo also remembered making the walk himself, holding Param’s hand. They had just saved each other’s lives, and Umbo was in the first throes of falling in love.

All in all, it was a place that filled him with nostalgia, as well as dread.

Umbo half-expected Vadeshex to be there to greet them, as he had been the first time. What he did not expect was to meet himself.

Or at least the image of himself. Loaf was reminding Leaky to step only where he stepped as they came near the first stream, when someone cried out, “Stop!”

They turned and saw Umbo, and knew at once it was a message from the future rather than another copy of Umbo himself, because the background was different around him, and his hair was blowing in a breeze that didn’t exist where they were.

“It doesn’t work,” said the messenger. “Leaky can’t master the facemask. We waited a year but she never came out of it.”

Leaky was angry. “Are you saying that I’m weak? I’m too weak?”

“It’s not about strength of will,” said the messenger. “You’re plenty strong, but that probably makes it worse.”

“What is it, then?” asked Umbo.

The messenger clearly didn’t want to say it, but realized that he must. “Loaf thinks it’s a matter of self-control. Leaky doesn’t have enough of it, and neither do I. Rigg and Loaf do. Go back. There’s nothing for any of you here.”

And then the messenger—future Umbo—was gone. Gone completely, gone even from the future, because his message made it so that particular future would never exist.

Leaky sank to the ground, Loaf with her, his arm around her. “Why do we have to believe him!” she said.

“Because Umbo doesn’t come back and give false messages. Why would he?”

“What if I can do it this time because I was warned?” asked Leaky.

“Warning won’t help,” said Loaf. “I know what it’s like to have this thing come over you, get inside you. It was hard for me, and that’s with the discipline of a soldier’s training. And Rigg, he was schooled by Ramex, taught a kind of self-mastery we can only guess at. It’s nothing wrong with you, Leaky. Humans weren’t designed to have a thing like this attached.”

“It makes you stronger! It repaired everything—even your scars are gone!”

“We don’t even know that your body is the reason we haven’t had a baby,” said Loaf. “Let’s go back and see what happens.”

“I do know!” she cried. “Because I had a baby once.”

Loaf did not move.

“Before we married,” she said. “When I was barely a woman. I was too young. The baby was breech and it died trying to be born. They cut it out of me. And I was so torn up inside the midwife said I’d never be able to bear.”

“You never told me,” murmured Loaf.

“You said you didn’t want children, that you couldn’t raise children, being liable to go on campaign at any moment. So it didn’t matter. But then you left the army and it did matter after all.”

“You could have told me.”

“I was ashamed!” She wept for a while.

Umbo wondered if he should leave. This was clearly a time for husband and wife. Yet by leaving he’d call attention to himself. Of course, he could simply skip forward in time and let them have their privacy. He had to admit to himself that he simply didn’t want to. He was fascinated, even though he felt sorry for her pain. Their pain.

He noticed that Loaf did not ask who the father had been, or whether Leaky had been married before.

“And now I’m ashamed again,” Leaky said more quietly. “Because I have so little self-control that I can’t master this thing that a child like Rigg was able to control.”

“Rigg’s not a child now,” said Loaf. “And even when he was a child, he was… unusual.”

This made Umbo realize that he should be feeling resentful of Rigg for being able to bear a facemask when it was certainly out of his own reach.

But no, Umbo might be envious of Rigg for many things, but not for the facemask. Not now. Yes, it made Loaf an astonishingly effective soldier. It gave Rigg and Noxon so much more control over their timeshaping. But the thing was so repulsive and deforming. Umbo had gotten used to seeing it on Loaf. Definitely not on Rigg and Noxon. And the thought of having that thing crawl over his own face, push into his ears and nose and mouth, breathing for him, probing every aperture, taking away his eyes: How did they bear it? The horror of such an invasion?

Loaf was a soldier. People had pushed foreign objects into his body from time to time. He had borne pain and horror, and yet kept fighting, kept control of himself. Umbo wasn’t exactly a big baby about such things, but he could not stop himself from leaping to conclusions—wrong ones—and acting on them in irrevocable ways. It had got Kyokay killed that day. It had kept Umbo saying things, doing things that showed his pathetic yearning for Param, his childish resentment of Rigg. He knew these things made him look foolish, and yet he had not been able to stop himself.

Rigg was able to plan and calculate. Umbo did everything he did in a rush, on impulse. Even learning to travel in time, to send himself messages—he had done it by brute force rather than by thinking it all through and understanding it. Oh, he tried to think, and maybe his thinking helped. Somehow. But mostly it was just taking his power to manipulate people’s timeflow and trying to use it in a new way. That’s why it had taken months to learn to use it on his own, without Rigg—he had no idea what he was doing, he just flung himself into it, trying different things until one worked.

I learn like a squirrel, thought Umbo. No analysis, no finesse—I just keep leaping until I finally land where I want to.

I will never have a facemask, and I’m perfectly happy. I’d rather be my second-rate self than go through what Loaf and Rigg went through—and then wear that trophy of a face the rest of my life.

But if he said to Leaky, You’re better off this way, Umbo had a feeling that her response would cost him a significant portion of his hearing, if not a limb. Because it was true. Leaky did not have self-control. That’s why it had taken him so many tries before he was able to prepare her properly to meet Loaf again, in his new condition. She could not stop herself from raging long enough to hear the whole message, not until he found exactly the right way to approach her.

Which, of course, he had learned by flinging himself into the past, finding out that one method of telling her about it failed, and then trying again. Rigg probably could have succeeded the first time.

Still, I did figure out how to jump into the future, in a limited way, and I did it without a facemask. Just because I’m not Rigg doesn’t mean I’m nothing.

“What you don’t know,” said Loaf gently, “is whether that midwife was right. It’s easy to say, You’ll never bear children, but what did she know? If she was a good midwife the baby might have been delivered alive.”

At the mention of the baby’s death, Leaky’s tears came afresh. “I can’t believe I told you,” she said. And then, “I can’t believe I went so long and never told you.”

“You’ve told me now,” said Loaf. “So hear me out. We might still have a baby, though it’s perilous, because it’ll look like me. But if you want to risk adding to the ugly in the world, then let’s see if the problem was me. But if the problem is an old injury of yours, then that’s the way it is.”

“But the facemask could have cured it.”

“It’s not a cure if it kills you,” said Loaf. “If you aren’t still my Leaky, then I don’t want you to have my babies. And as long as you are my Leaky, then I’m happy whether we have babies or not.”

She flung her arms around him and wept even more, and finally Umbo did the thing he should have done in the first place, and skipped into the future by a few hours.

They were lying on the ground. Leaky was nestled next to Loaf, his arm around her. She was asleep. Of course Loaf noticed Umbo’s return, but he raised a finger to signal silence. Umbo nodded, walked quietly away.

He took a long walk, and after a while the city came into view. The great empty city with its sad empty towers made of fieldsteel, which never weathered, never wore away. Would the fieldsteel outlast the great burning when all life on Garden was ended? Would they remain as the sole remnant of human life here? No, there were other monuments—the Tower of O was also of fieldsteel. And there were nineteen craters and upthrusts scattered around the world, where starships had crashed deliberately into the crust and changed the planet’s speed of rotation, lengthening the day and adding more debris to the Ring in the sky that made it so no clear night on Garden was ever fully dark.

That’s all we leave behind us. A few buildings and nineteen deformations of the land.

“Have you come for your facemask?” Vadeshex emerged from the door of the building where he had first served them water.

“For a drink, I suppose,” said Umbo. “And water for the ­others, though I didn’t bring their water bags.”

“I anticipated that,” said Vadeshex. “Being an old friend of the family, so to speak, I thought to welcome Leaky to Vadeshfold with some refreshment, food and drink. But she isn’t with you.”

“We ran into a messenger. From the future.”

“Then the messenger was you.”

“Not me but yes, a version of me from a future that now will never happen. He warned us that the facemask doesn’t work on Leaky. You don’t happen to have a milder version, do you? Maybe not so effective, but also easier to adapt to and get control of?”

Vadeshex shook his head. “The one your friends wear is the mildest one I’ve ever been able to breed. Facemasks are invasive. They’re not for everyone.”

“How did you choose Loaf?”

“I didn’t,” said Vadeshex.

“It was just chance?”

“It was Ram Odin who chose. He observed, and he said, Loaf, and no other until Rigg is ready.”

“So he judged us and knew who was strong enough.”

“It isn’t about strength,” said Vadesh. “It’s about self-­mastery.”

Umbo chuckled. “And here I thought my future self was terribly wise and analytical, to come up with that.”

“He was wise to explain it to you that way, though, don’t you think?” asked Vadeshex. “The woman is apt to flare up at anything, isn’t she?”

“You don’t know her.”

“Once you brought the jewels into Ramfold in the era you arrived in, Ramex knew she was important and he went to the roadhouse as a customer. He has seen her temper. It’s a marvel to behold, but then she’s filled with regret and self-recrimination. Like you.”

“We know what self-control looks like in other people,” said Umbo, “and wish we had it for ourselves.”

“Oh, you have it,” said Vadeshex. “It just doesn’t kick in until you’ve already said and done things you can’t unsay and can’t undo. Though of course you can. But it does cut out a chunk of reality and discard it in the invisible dustbin of lost futures.”

“You saw me save Kyokay.”

“And saw you cause a disastrous change in futures.”

“How can you know that?”

“You were carrying the jewels. They came back in time with you when you undid your mistake. Any future in which you carried the jewels—on the knife or in a bag—and then come back with them, we have a record of it, at least the part surrounding you. But when you send a message, the jewels don’t come back, so those futures are lost.”

“If I send a message, I don’t run the risk of copying myself. The world can find a use for two Riggs, but I can’t even find a use for the one Umbo.”

“There you go. You couldn’t stop yourself from that bit of self-pity.”

“I didn’t try to stop myself.”

“But you feel contempt for yourself for having said it, yes?”

Umbo shrugged. “If you have food for them, can you bring it?”

“It’s spread on a table,” said Vadeshex, “and even though I’m very dextrous by human standards, I’m liable to spill something if I try to carry the whole table out to them.”

“Is the flyer available?”

“It will be soon. Meanwhile sit and talk with me.”

If Vadeshex had been human, and not a lying and conniving machine, Umbo would have complied. Instead, he said, “No thank you. I think I’ll go back to them afoot. You can bring the food when the flyer comes back.”

“Let me refill your water bag before you go,” said Vadeshex.

Umbo waited. When Vadeshex returned the bag bulging, he also gave Umbo a covered bowl. “You don’t need utensils for this. It will keep them till I get there with the main meal.”

When Umbo got back, they were sitting up and talking. Umbo opened the bowl and the crisp round pastries were still hot. Each had barely more than a dot of something spicy in the middle. They were delicious.

“That machine can cook,” said Loaf.

“What machine?” asked Leaky.

“He’ll be here soon with a whole meal,” said Umbo.

“Oh, do you mean the man-shaped machine that Rigg thought of as his father?” asked Leaky.

“The same kind of machine,” said Umbo.

“Supposed to be identical,” said Loaf. “Supposed to have all their memories in common.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Umbo. “I knew Rigg’s father. He taught me, too, a little. I thought of him as a great man. We called him Golden Man. Nox called him Good Teacher. Both true. But Vadeshex? Nothing but lies, manipulation.”

“It might be,” said Loaf, “you could have swapped them and they would have acted exactly alike in each other’s situations. But you get a history with one machine, and a different history with another, it’s hard to think of them as being the same.”

“How are you doing?” asked Umbo.

Leaky shook her head. “Desolated,” she said. “But not dead.”

“And that’s a good thing,” said Loaf.

“Says you,” said Leaky.

“Says me,” said Umbo. “I can only imagine the state Loaf was in, in that future where you failed to come back out of the facemask trance. If that’s how it happened.”

“More likely I ran around screaming through the facemask till it finally opened a hole for me to yell through,” said Leaky. “I was probably lashing out and breaking things.”

“Maybe,” said Loaf. “We’ve only seen one transformation—mine. Rigg did his alone, and none of us saw it. His is newer, so he looks a lot less human than I do.”

“Human enough for me,” said Leaky.

Vadeshex came not long after, and spread out a picnic for them on the grass in sight of the Wall. He offered the suggestion that some of Leaky’s grief might be owing to their having just passed through the emotions induced by the Wall, and to the fact that they were still close to it and bound to be feeling some residual effects.

“Thank you for your suggestion,” said Loaf.

“Thank you for the meal,” said Umbo. “It was very good.”

“I don’t often get to check out my culinary routines,” said Vadeshex. Shyly? Was he actually trying to conceal a bit of pride? No, it was just the way he was designed. Or a ­deliberate manipulation, to try to change their attitude toward him. It wasn’t going to work.

Wasn’t going to work much. The food had been very good. And they had come to him to get a facemask. The old machine had its uses.

Vadeshex offered to fly them home, and they accepted. They traveled that night; Vadeshex landed them in a field a mile from Leaky’s Landing. They were home before midnight.

“I can’t believe there’s such a machine, to fly through the air. Remember how long we had to ride, how many days, and here we are on the very night.”

“People on Earth do this kind of thing all the time,” said Umbo.

“Well if we had eleven thousand years here,” said Leaky, “and you say that humans on Earth got technologies like this only ten thousand years after inventing agriculture—”

“Ten thousand, give or take,” said Loaf.

“Why haven’t we done any better?”

“We’re blocked,” said Umbo. “It’s one of the things the expendables do. And the ships’ computers. They choke off any line of development that might lead to high technology. Except in Odinfold, and that’s because Ram Odin gave it an exemption, up to a point.”

“The thing’s almost as big as the roadhouse, and it flew,” said Leaky again.

“And here we’ve gotten used to it and think of it as nothing special,” said Loaf. “You’re reminding me how miraculous it really is.”

“Don’t go yet, Vadeshex,” said Umbo. “I think I may be needing a ride back to Larfold, where my fiancee is waiting.”

“Stay with us,” said Leaky. “You hardly visited.”

“I’ll be back,” said Umbo. “The question is, when?”

“Give us a couple of years,” said Loaf. “That’s time enough. Check back and see how we’re doing.”

“I could go right now into the future and find out.”

“Then you’d be tempted to tell us,” said Loaf. “No, go somewhere else and have something like a life—whatever’s possible with the lovely Queen of Nothing Much and her Kingdom of Nowhere.”

“In other words, you’d like me to try to accomplish something before I come back pestering you.”

“No, we just don’t want you getting jealous of how in love we are,” said Loaf.

“Thank you for everything, Umbo,” said Leaky. “Especially the warning. I wish it had worked. But I’m glad that you kept me from giving up my life for nothing.”

“Thanks for trusting me enough to believe my warning,” said Umbo. He turned to Vadeshex. “Take me back to Param?”

“Wherever and whenever she is,” said Vadeshex.

“Get me to the where, and I’ll work on the when myself.”