Visitors

Chapter 13 Where Not to Go

“Have I ever resisted your visiting any of the wallfolds?” asked Ram Odin.

“We’ve only been to two,” said Rigg.

“Well, we happen to have come rather early to the one that I will advise you not to visit.”

“You understand that it makes me all the more determined to go there.”

“I took that into account,” said Ram Odin. “But I have no choice. Janefold is as interesting as any of the others. It has only one statistical quirk.”

“Which is?”

“The life expectancy is about half that of other wallfolds.”

“And why is that?”

“Disease,” said Ram Odin. “This is the place where plagues begin.”

“Because it’s tropical?” asked Rigg.

“I don’t know why, though that may be part of it. Some of the diseases are vectored through biting insects, some of them through other mammals. Some originated in animals that thrive in this climate. None of the diseases depend on microbes native to Garden. Nothing smaller than a facemask or a mantle has yet jumped the barrier between the biotas of Earth and of Garden.”

“So you don’t want me to go there because you’re afraid I might die?”

“I’m reasonably sure you would die.”

“How sure?”

“Your odds of survival are about one in fifty. But that’s a guess, since you’d be the first visitor from outside the wallfold since I last visited there about ten thousand years ago, give or take.”

“Did you get sick?”

“Almost died. And the really interesting diseases hadn’t started up yet. This is the incubator of hellish death, Rigg. If it weren’t for the Wall, diseases from Janefold would sweep across the world, killing half each time.”

“Then why is there anyone left there at all?” asked Rigg.

“They’ve built up resistance. Not individually. But each time a new plague comes up, the only survivors are those with natural defenses. The deadly disease that almost killed me is now no more than an itchy rash and a case of sniffles—to the Janefolders. But if it got out of the wallfold, it would probably have the twenty percent kill rate that it had when I caught it.”

Rigg thought about this. “If they have resistance to disease, then why is their life expectancy so low?”

“They develop resistance to each disease. But the newer the disease, the more people it kills with each resurgence. And some of them mutate, so that people who lived through one iteration have no defense, or little defense, against its successor.”

“I hate to be offensive, but this makes me wonder what’s hiding there. What you don’t want me to see.”

“What’s hiding there is death, and what I don’t want you to see is the inside of your coffin lid.”

“So you keep me out of Janefold with a threat of plagues. What will be the excuse the next time you want me not to visit a place? Earthquakes? Really bad weather? Ill-behaved children?”

“This is how the world works,” said Ram Odin. “It happened on Earth. There were a couple of places that spawned plagues that covered the world, because trade routes connected them to everybody. But there were other places that were cut off. The Americas didn’t spawn a lot of diseases because population density never got that high, and because there weren’t a lot of primates to incubate diseases that would be particularly apt to kill humans. When people from Eurasia landed there, those worldwide diseases, in combination, had a killoff of about ninety percent of the locals.”

“I read about that.”

“Africa was the opposite. It was isolated, too—not a lot of trade, because traders had to cross oceans and deserts. Sick people tended to die before they could spread the diseases to the rest of the world. But when Europeans got there, if they went ashore for a week they simply didn’t come back. If they went ashore for a day, they came back to their ship and infected everybody else and some ships were found drifting, with a one hundred percent killoff.”

“And you’re saying the Wall has protected the rest of the world from Janefold. If I visit there—”

“It would be miraculous if you didn’t catch something incurable and highly contagious. And here’s the problem. You can’t go back in time and change it because you’ll have the disease in you already.”

“I also have the facemask.”

“So you’ll have much keener awareness of your symptoms and be able to track the progress of your disease quite clearly, as you die.”

“The facemask doesn’t help keep me healthy?”

“It helps keep you robust,” said Ram Odin. “It doesn’t filter out diseases that your immune system can’t cope with, because it can only detect disease agents from Earthborn biology if your body senses them.”

“Yet people live there.”

“If they make it through childhood, then they tend to have lives of normal length. Childhood is when disease weeds out the weak and selects for those who adapt well, whose bodies resist. The longer the disease has been around, the more children live through it. But there are some diseases that are less than a thousand years old, and those are still taking a lot of children. So at birth, half the life expectancy. But if you live to adulthood, then the survivors have normal lives.”

“Do they have larger families?”

“Some cultures within Janefold do, some don’t. Some don’t bond with their children until they’re older. Some break their hearts loving all their children from the start. Some regions and tribes avoid large concentrations of people. Some keep their children isolated. Some deliberately allow their children to get exposed to everything—I suppose to end the suspense. Some villages, some tribes routinely burn down the houses of families who have a few key symptoms—open sores all over the body, bleeding from eyes, nostrils, and ears, blood in sneezes and coughs, that sort of thing.”

“Burn them down with the people inside.”

“That’s the point.”

“So you’re just protecting me.”

“If somebody comes at you with a knife, you can pop back in time and save yourself. If somebody comes at you with a sneeze, you have nowhere to run.”

“But I don’t breathe,” said Rigg. “The facemask does.”

“The facemask doesn’t have an Earthborn biology. It will pass the disease through to you without noticing it’s there.”

“You have to understand, Ram Odin. I’ve been lied to so much.”

“Not by me.”

“We only just met, and your lie-to-truth ratio is pretty high. Plus most of the expendables’ lies originated with you. Or they were invented in order to protect your secrets. What are you protecting in Janefold?”

“The future of the human race on Garden,” said Ram Odin. “By not letting that poisonous place kill you.”

“The future of the human race here no longer depends on me,” said Rigg. “You’re thinking of my other self, Noxon.”

“We don’t know how that mission will turn out. Rigg, please trust me on this one. There are no great secrets in Janefold, except death. Maybe because of systematic isolation, there are a few more languages. Some intriguing philosophies, a few death-worship religions, a lot of fatalism. One religion that for almost a thousand years was almost universal in Janefold, not because the doctrines were so convincing, but because the believers routinely risked their own lives to care for the sick and dying, and to bury the dead.”

“That made the religion more attractive?”

“It made the believers seem more sincere, and filled others with gratitude and admiration. Rigg, all the records are open to you. Explore this one from inside the ship and save your legwork for a healthier place.”

Because the facemask picked up subtle nuances he would normally have missed, Rigg could trust his judgment more than he used to, when it came to discerning whether people were telling him the truth. He became mostly convinced that Ram Odin meant what he was saying, whether it was true or not.

“So if we skip Janefold,” said Rigg, “where next?”

“Anywhere else. When I said this was the only one I’d resist your visiting, I meant it.”

“Singhfold,” said Rigg.

“An intriguing one. The only wallfold where the crater from the ship’s impact is the most level ground. Singhfold is mountainous, with lots of valleys and a huge range of cultures.”

“Are the individual tribes very small? That usually implies that the culture isn’t going to rise very high.”

“There is a broad, well-watered coastal plain where some pretty high civilizations have risen and fallen. But most of the people, most of the time, have lived in those isolated valleys. Shall we give it a go?”

“I reserve the right to come back to Janefold. To do it last.”

“Whenever you go there, Rigg,” said Ram Odin, “you’ll do it last.”

What Rigg thought was: I’ll go back in time, to when the colony in that wallfold was young, and so were the diseases that infest them. Because people who live in the constant immanence of sudden, miserable death by an invisible hand—it has to change them.

And if we ever have to protect ourselves against the people of Earth…

“Ram Odin,” said Rigg. “All this information about Janefold was available to the Odinfolders, right?”

“I kept a few secrets, but not that. Yes, they knew.”

“And the mice can move things remotely, through space and time. Things as small as DNA molecules.”

“Those are big molecules.”

“They’re still molecules,” said Rigg.

“That’s how Umbo was made. By genetic manipulation conducted remotely, by the mice.”

“So the mice that were boarding the Visitors’ ship, the ones that Umbo and Param warned the Visitors about—they could have gotten their diseases from Janefold.”

“You don’t know if a disease is virulent unless you test it,” said Ram Odin. “Janefold is by far the best disease laboratory in the world.”

Rigg chuckled at himself. “I wasn’t sure if Umbo and Param were right about the mice being sent to Earth to wipe out the human race. Where would they get such a disease? And I didn’t believe you, though I didn’t disbelieve you, either. About Janefold.”

“But combine the two doubts, and… certainty?” asked Ram Odin.

“Not certainty. But a major shift in my view, yes.”

“So you’ll stay away from Janefold. For real this time, not just an empty promise to placate me?”

“The mice got their species-wrecking plague from somewhere.”

“Oh, you might go farther,” said Ram Odin. “They probably enhanced it, and tested it in some of the villages.”

Rigg took that in for a moment.

“You did understand that the mice are not human. They have no more qualms about testing a disease on human subjects than we would have testing it on mice.”

“They got their sentience from us,” said Rigg.

“And for how many generations should that make them grateful and subservient? But I don’t know they did this. I’m only guessing from what I know about them. They did kill Param, though.”

“That was the Odinfolders’ idea, wasn’t it?”

“It might have been,” said Ram Odin. “But for a long time now, all Odinfolder decisions are based on data that is supplied to them…”

“By the mice,” said Rigg.

“So whether the mice decided for themselves, or provided shaped data to the Odinfolders so they reached the desired ­conclusion—”

“Nothing much happens in Odinfold unless it’s what the mice want,” said Rigg.

“I think that’s a fair way of summing it up.”

“So this business of the Odinfolders reshaping their own bodies into stumpy dung-throwers, into yahoos—”

“They began that before they began mouse-breeding.”

“Oh. It just seemed like deliberate humiliation, as if the mice were getting even.”

“For what?” asked Ram Odin.

“For making them mice,” said Rigg. “They, who have the genes to be human, to have hands, to stand tall. I’d say there’s grounds for resentment.”

“Irrational grounds.”

“Resentment is irrational,” said Rigg.

“Not always,” said Ram Odin. “Like Umbo’s resentment of you.”

“How is that rational!”

“Now, now, Rigg. Leave out how it makes you feel. Umbo doesn’t have his feelings in order to annoy or hurt you. Umbo has good reason for thinking of himself as perhaps the more talented timeshaper. Yet because of the way you were educated, because you’re the son of the king—however empty that title might be—everyone defers to you, and nobody defers to him.”

“I do,” said Rigg.

“But he thinks of that as condescension.”

“Umbo is the only friend I have,” said Rigg. “I’m sorry his resentment is ruining that. But that certainly applies to the mice. Humans made them. Why? To have convenient slave-mice. Yet they think of themselves as selves, they see the whole group of them as a people. A great civilization. So it’s not unnatural for them to resent humans in general, and Odinfolders in particular.”

“And yet we’re sending a batch of them along with Noxon to try to save the human race on Garden.”

Rigg chuckled at that. “To save Garden. If it also saves the humans, they can put up with that unintended outcome. For a while longer.”

“Maybe we’ve underestimated the danger of the mice,” said Ram Odin.

“If Janefold is as dangerous as you say. If all the other wallfolds are as vulnerable as the Americas when the Europeans came. Then the mice already have the power to pick up those plagues and put them wherever they want. In effect, as soon as the mice decide, the Wall is down as far as disease is concerned. They use our timeshaping to save Garden, and then get rid of us just as the Destroyers did—only with more finesse. Leaving the mice to inherit the planet.”

“Devious,” said Ram Odin.

“But possible.”

“Using us now, planning to kill us later.”

“They really do have human genes,” said Rigg.

“I wish we hadn’t sent them with Noxon,” said Ram Odin.

“Maybe sending them with Noxon,” said Rigg, “is the only reason the mice allowed him to go. Maybe it’s the only reason they’re letting us live. Because if all humans are gone before the Visitors arrive, then…”

“Then they have no reason to come back and destroy all life on Garden.”

“I think we’re talking ourselves into a serious case of musophobia,” said Rigg.

“Or maybe you go back in time and warn Noxon before he left,” said Ram Odin.

“He left?”

“A few days ago. Were you going to have a tearful good-bye?”

Rigg ignored the sarcasm. “Time enough to stop him when the plague starts.”

“Maybe they kill you before they start the plague,” said Ram Odin.

“The facemask will protect me from the mice, even if it can’t protect me from the plague.”

“Probably so,” said Ram Odin. “And for all we know, the mice are deeply devoted to us.”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “And whatever xenocide they commit against our species, they’ll regret it and sing little mouse songs about it for a thousand years.”

Ram Odin looked very earnest. “I would rather Garden survive with mice as the dominant species, and not a human left, than to have no life on this world at all.”

“Then you are even less trustworthy than I thought,” said Rigg.