Visitors

Chapter 20 Allies

Noxon and Ram Odin rode down from the high Andes in a rattle­trap truck with a family of Indians. Noxon had to do all the talking, since he was the one who had passed through the Wall and was therefore fluent in the exact dialect of Quechua that the family spoke.

This was Ram Odin’s native era on Earth, and he was able to get a duplicate copy of the credit chip belonging to his younger self. That took care of paying for their plane tickets. All Noxon had to do was pretend to be a Quechua boy as Ram explained that he was taking fifteen-year-old Noxon to Atlanta to consult with a plastic surgeon “to see if anything can be done for him.”

The story explained Noxon’s obvious ignorance of airport procedures, made the deformity of his facemask into an asset rather than a liability, got them a lot of sympathy from airline personnel, and allowed Noxon to get through security without identification papers. As Ram whispered to him as they walked through the terminal to the gate, “Behind that facemask you could be fifteen or fifty. But nobody expects a fifteen-year-old Indian kid from the high Andes to have identification.”

Meanwhile, Noxon looked at everything and everyone they passed. This was his first view of the Earth that would soon send the Destroyers to kill Garden; he had to learn who these people were.

He knew of high technology from the starships that were buried in each wallfold of Garden. He had conversed with computers, he had been raised by a mechanical man, and he had flown from place to place in flyers. He had seen the library in Odinfold, and the empty ruins of their great cities. But he had not been prepared for the degree to which technology pervaded the lives of ordinary people on Earth.

“Everybody’s rich,” said Noxon to Ram Odin, as they sat together on an airplane flying from Lima to Atlanta.

“Shhh,” said Ram Odin softly. “They think they’re poor, because they know that somebody somewhere has something they don’t have.”

“Anybody can buy passage on a flyer here,” said Noxon softly.

“To be fair, this is only an airplane,” said Ram Odin. “It can’t go into space.”

“They can talk to anybody, anywhere in the world, and it takes no time at all. Where I come from, rulers and generals have to send messengers, and it takes days to get a reply.”

“Remember, please, that high technology was deliberately suppressed where you come from,” whispered Ram Odin. “In eleven thousand years, you would certainly have surpassed this level of technology, if you hadn’t been so closely watched. The Odinfolders did.”

“It’s better to be a commoner here than a king in Aressa Sessamo,” said Noxon.

“Kings in Aressa Sessamo tend to be killed,” said Ram Odin, “so I can’t disagree with your point. Just remember how close Earth came to being destroyed by a comet only a few decades ago.”

“And remember how few years will pass before Garden is—”

A flight attendant interrupted them. “Can I bring you anything to drink?” she asked Ram Odin. Then, to Noxon, she said, “I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything alcoholic, young man, but we have a good selection of soft drinks and juices.”

Noxon only smiled at her. He had no idea what to ask for.

“He’ll have apple juice,” said Ram Odin, “and so will I.”

“You have to keep yourself in shape, I know,” said the flight attendant.

Ram Odin grinned at her.

“Why did she say that?” asked Noxon. “It seems presumptuous of her.”

“I think I picked the wrong time to travel,” said Ram Odin. “I’ve already been named as one of the possible pilots of the foldship, so people who are following the starship program know who I am.”

“A pilot is famous?” asked Noxon.

“A very low level of fame,” said Ram Odin. “It won’t get crazy until I’m selected as the pilot.”

“We could have sliced our way through this trip,” said Noxon. “They would never have known we were on the airplane, and the trip would have been over in a few minutes.”

“Next time,” said Ram Odin. “I have to admit that I’m enjoying being home on Earth. I like having money and something to spend it on.”

“Are you rich here?”

“I make a decent living,” said Ram. “But no, not rich.”

Noxon had had his misgivings when they boarded the plane. But he couldn’t say anything at the time, since officially he could speak only Quechua. “Isn’t the pre-voyage version of yourself going to find out you’re here?”

Ram Odin grinned. “He’s going to find out that somebody got a duplicate of his credit chip. My guess is that the police will be waiting to arrest me as an identity thief when we land in Atlanta.”

“How does that help us accomplish our purpose here?” asked Noxon.

“It doesn’t. So we will slice our way off the plane.”

In Atlanta, the police boarded the plane before any passengers were allowed to leave. But by then, Noxon’s and Ram Odin’s seats appeared to be empty. Because time slicing slowed down their movements so much, they were the last ones off the plane before the door closed, and by the time they got to the head of the ramp into the terminal, the police had abandoned their search.

Inside the terminal, Noxon sliced them forward by several days. Ram Odin quickly abandoned his credit chip. “Sorry,” he said to Noxon. “I won’t do that again.”

“You’re going to be recognized,” said Noxon.

“I really am about twelve years older now than I was at this point in the past. My face is thicker and as you can see, I’m ­letting my beard grow. Plus, I expect to spend a lot of time invisible, thanks to you.”

“I have a better idea,” said Noxon. He took Ram’s hand, attached to a path, and popped back to the year before. “Are you famous now?” asked Noxon.

“No,” said Ram Odin. “But it still doesn’t solve the money problem. We can’t afford to walk to where we’re going, and without money, we can’t get transportation.”

“Why can’t we walk?” asked Noxon. “If it takes too long, when we arrive I’ll take us back in time.”

“It’s not the time, or not just the time it takes to walk. It’s that nobody does it. There aren’t roads with places for pedestrians.”

“Can’t we work somewhere for a few days and earn passage?” asked Noxon. “Loaf and Umbo did that on a riverboat.”

“You have to have a certified identity to get hired anywhere, for any job,” said Ram. “And we don’t have any.”

“How do we get them?”

“Be born on Earth, and don’t have a duplicate of yourself running around getting resentful when you claim to be him.”

“How do we get identities?” asked Noxon.

“We don’t,” said Ram Odin. “We sneak aboard public transportation and ride in discomfort, for free.”

Fortunately, Noxon’s time-slicing was now so effective that they could get on a bus and walk slowly up the aisle and back to the door during the five-hour ride to Huntsville. To them it took only three minutes and a few steps.

“I warn you,” said Noxon, as they walked through town. “We can’t steal food while we’re slicing, because our hands just go right through anything we’re picking up.”

“Why don’t we sink into the ground?” asked Ram Odin.

“Because we don’t,” said Noxon. “For the same reason that paths stay in a fixed position relative to a spinning planet. I don’t understand the rules, but we stay on the surface.”

Noxon was used to walking hundreds of miles in a row, stopping only for sleep and meals. Ram Odin was not. So when they reached the door of the house Ram was looking for, miles from the bus station, he was sweaty and exhausted, while Noxon wasn’t even tired.

“Why do you think these people will help us?” asked Noxon.

“Because we have something to trade,” said Ram Odin.

“What do we have?” asked Noxon.

“Time travel,” said Ram Odin.

“This already sounds like a bad idea,” said Noxon.

“It’s a brilliant idea, and I think you’ll enjoy every minute of it. Well, maybe not the first few minutes, but all the rest of them.”

“What happens in the first few minutes?”

“We have to prove to them that we’re not insane.”

The door was answered by a young woman wearing large opaque glasses. “I don’t think I know you. Do you have an appointment?”

“A long-standing one, and you do know me, Deborah Wheaton. I’m betting you left your glasses in reading mode.”

“I did. But it can’t be you, Cousin Ram, because you’re in Houston training and competing to be pilot of the first starship.”

“Oh, I’m definitely there right now. I remember it well. But to me that was nine years ago, I think. And I’m quite sure your father wants to talk to me, with or without an appointment.”

“That’s always true,” said Deborah. “And with or without your right mind.”

“He’s never had a right mind,” said a man behind her, a thin, spectral figure with ordinary glasses and disheveled hair, as if he often ran his hands through it, but never a comb.

“Uncle Georgia,” said Ram.

“Who’s your friend?” asked Uncle Georgia.

“This is Rigg Noxon. He’s been pretending to be a Quechua from Peru, here to consult with a plastic surgeon.”

Georgia leaned in close to study Noxon’s face. “Odd placement of the eyes, and they seem protuberant. I don’t see brow ridges at all. Do those eyes actually work?”

“Yes,” said Noxon. “Since you’re not my uncle, what do I call you?”

“I’m not his uncle, either. I’m Professor Wheaton, to my students. ‘Wheat’ to my colleagues. ‘Georgia’ was a nickname given to me within the family, when I first showed interest in primitive anthropes. After an action-movie archaeologist named Ohio Jackson or something. As if archaeologists had anything to do with anthropes.”

“So you’re from Georgia?” asked Noxon.

“I’m from Iowa,” said Wheaton. “I think my cousins enjoyed calling me Georgia. It was a slur on my masculinity. Naturally, to overcompensate, I went into erectology.”

Ram chuckled, and explained to Noxon. “Nothing to do with urology. Uncle Georgia studies Homo erectus.”

“The first true humans,” said Wheaton. “Or so I have tried to prove. They had complete mastery of fire. They evolved the articulate hand, the running foot. They had also mastered weaving and wore clothing, though not for the purposes we use it for now. And agriculture—not just cultivation—at least two hundred thousand years before anybody else believes it started, and maybe a million. Just because Western civilization used cereal grains doesn’t mean that’s how agriculture began. It was yams, young man! Yams and taro root, legumes and berries. Nothing that would show up in the fossil record, but the signs are in the teeth! Small ones. Can’t evolve small teeth unless you’re eating soft food!”

“We’re still standing on the porch,” said Ram Odin.

“Is that my fault? Is the door locked? Don’t your feet work? Come in, uninvited visitors. I was just thinking of peeing when the doorbell rang, and I’m of that age when it doesn’t pay to ignore nature’s call.” Wheaton disappeared inside the house. Deborah ushered Noxon and Ram into what might have been a library. It was lined with books, books and journals were stacked everywhere, and on top of most stacks were fossils inside acrylic boxes.

“It feels like home,” said Ram Odin.

“It looks like the basement of an ill-run museum,” said Deborah, “but I think that’s what you meant.”

Noxon picked up an acrylic box with a bone inside.

“Please leave things where they are, without fresh fingerprints,” said Deborah. “What’s with your face?”

The question seemed quite direct, but Noxon knew how to answer. “What’s with yours?”

“I asked you first,” said Deborah. “But mine is easy to explain. A car crash and a fire. I lost both eyes and my face is one big scar. Plastic surgeons were able to give me a nose and you might see that around my mouth, they’ve grown me new lips and the musculature needed to make them work properly. But they can’t regrow eyes. I opted for digital glasses. Your turn.”

“It’s a parasite,” said Noxon. “A specially bred variant of a creature called ‘facemask,’ designed for symbiosis with humans.”

“So your having it wasn’t an accident,” said Deborah.

“I asked for it,” said Noxon. “It augments the human brain and body. Speeds up reactions, maintains health, sharpens perceptions.”

“Your eyes are out of place. Too far apart.”

“The first thing the facemask takes is the eyes. Then it grows new ones, better than before. But it’s a little careless about placement. It takes a few years for them to migrate to the normal positions.”

“The skin seems repulsively unnatural,” said Deborah. “Or is that just an artifact of my glasses?”

“No, you’re seeing rightly enough,” said Noxon. “At least the facemask did a good job of matching my skin color.”

“What race are you?” asked Deborah. “Too light for African or Dravidian, too dark for Malay. And you’re not big enough for Fijian.”

“I’m the same color as everyone else in my homeland. I think we may be the original race. That is, we represent a complete mixing of the deliberately diverse sampling of nationalities of the colonists on the starship that Ram Odin is going to pilot.”

“That’s such a bizarre assertion that I’m wondering if it might be truthful, and if so, how.”

“I’m sure Ram is explaining everything to your… father?”

“He’s my father, yes. Now. He’s actually an uncle that took me in. My parents died in the crash that blinded me. I don’t remember them, I wasn’t yet two years old.”

“Do you even remember seeing through regular eyes?” asked Noxon.

“I have memories, but I don’t know if they’re really from that time, or manufactured in dreams and imagination. Where are you from?”

“Not Peru,” said Noxon.

“Ram admitted as much when he said you were pretending to be a Quechua speaker.”

“I’m not pretending that,” said Noxon. “I’m fluent in Quechua.”

“But not from Peru.”

“I’m from Ramfold, one of the nineteen wallfolds on the planet Garden.”

“Planet,” said Deborah.

“The colony world that Ram Odin founded. The younger Ram Odin, the one that’s going to pilot the starship in a few years.”

“So there are two Rams.”

“More than that,” said Noxon. “There are two of me, as well. The other one kept the original name, Rigg. I go by Noxon so our friends know which one they’re talking about.”

“I don’t mean to quibble,” said Deborah. “But if Ram hasn’t founded the colony yet, how can you be from there? And how has there been time for the races to mix so thoroughly that you think you’ve recovered the original skin color of the human species.”

“Homo sapiens. I have no idea about Homo erectus.”

“Nobody does,” said Deborah. “So what’s your claim? How can this be true? A time machine?”

“Not a machine. More like an inborn ability.”

“You just naturally hop around in time?”

So Noxon explained his original ability with paths, and how Umbo’s time-slowing talent showed him that the paths were ­people from the past. And now the facemask allowed him to latch on to paths without any help from Umbo.

She heard him out. And then said nothing.

“You don’t believe me,” said Noxon.

“I’m trying to decide whether you believe you. Between your dispassionate face and my fake eyes, I can’t tell if I’m missing your tells.”

“I have a simple remedy,” said Noxon. He started to get up from the chair he was sitting in, and as he moved, he sliced time. He didn’t slice very much—just enough to disappear—and he took only a couple of steps before he stopped slicing. While he was invisible, moving slower than the rest of the world, he saw Deborah reach out to where he had been—where, in fact, he still was—then stand up and walk through him. He felt the heat of her passage, speeding up his slicing a little as she intersected his space, so neither of them would be damaged. She walked to the window, looked outside, then turned around and surveyed the whole room. Perhaps she was wondering where he would be when he reappeared. If he reappeared.

And then he reappeared.

“Neat trick,” she said, showing no surprise.

“Not a trick,” said Noxon.

“I’ve seen people seem to disappear before.”

“I’ve seen people move through the space where I’m walking, too, but it never gets old,” said Noxon.

“You were really there the whole time.”

“I was,” said Noxon. “It’s one of the reasons why time-slicing isn’t useful as a getaway technique. If your enemy knows what you’re doing, all he needs to do is put a slab of metal into the space where you are. The heat of a billion atomic collisions cooks you to death.”

“You’ve seen this?”

“My sister died that way, once,” said Noxon.

Deborah looked stricken.

“No, it’s all right. As soon as we knew what had happened, we went back in time and rescued her before it happened.”

“So she didn’t die.”

“She was dead when we found her,” said Noxon. “That’s the nice thing about timeshaping. You can sometimes undo some really bad things.”

Those words hung in the air.

“You’re thinking of your parents,” said Noxon.

“I didn’t really know them,” said Deborah. “And I’m trying to think what would happen if you went back and saved them.”

“If I went back, alone, then I would change your whole life. Everything you’ve done since the accident will unhappen. You won’t remember any of this, because the toddler who was saved from that fiery wreck will have her normal face and eyes, and her parents, and no reason to be so close with Uncle Georgia.”

“How do I know if that other life would be better than the life I’ve led? Yes, my parents were cheated out of raising me. Or maybe they were spared an ugly divorce. Or maybe I’d hate my serial killer little brother.”

“Such a dark imagination.”

“But if I went back with you,” she said. “You seemed to imply there were two alternatives.”

“If I took you into the past and you were causally connected to the change in behavior that saved your parents and the ­toddler version of yourself, then you would continue to exist, with all your memories. The two-year-old would also be you. There’d be two copies. The way there are two copies of me, this one on Earth and the one still back on Garden.”

“But Father?”

“Professor Wheaton would have no idea who you are. He wouldn’t have raised the little burned and blind girl who survived the wreck. He’d be a different man. And you’d be a stranger.”

“So I would survive, but I’d be lifted out of my own life.”

“Not really—you’d just be erased from theirs.”

Deborah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I must be a horrible human being, not to want to save my parents, but… this timeshaping thing you do, it can’t save everybody. Death still comes.”

“Eventually,” said Noxon. “But you’re right. My friend Umbo has always regretted that we couldn’t go back and save his little brother Kyokay, but it was his death that brought us together to discover what we could do.”

“Wouldn’t the two of you still exist?”

“Now I know that we would. There’d just be a copy of Umbo back in Fall Ford, getting beaten by his father until he either runs away or kills the man. And there’d be a version of me who didn’t meet up with Umbo and so had no idea of what it meant to see these paths.” Then Noxon shuddered. “And I would have gone back in time to save my dead father. That’s when I would have found out he wasn’t a man at all.”

“A woman?”

“Not human. An expendable.”

“But that’s illegal. For an expendable to pass for human.”

“It may be illegal, but that’s what they’re designed for. Complete with an anus that passes convincing feces. I lived with him in the forest for months at a time. If he hadn’t seemed perfectly normal in every way, I would have known.”

“Designed to pass for human. I didn’t know. They wear special uniforms and talk in these leaden voices so that you can always tell.”

“My father—all the expendables—they spoke perfectly normally. They seemed like people. You’d have no reason to doubt them until you noticed that they live forever and don’t get older.”

“That’s such a crime.”

“There are worse crimes,” said Noxon. “Like sending a fleet to blow up a planet and kill billions of people.”

“Who would do that?” asked Deborah.

“That’s why I’m here,” said Noxon. “Because that’s what the people of Earth do to the people of Garden.”

“But your colony is the hope of humanity! After the comet tore up the Moon and nearly ended life on Earth, we knew we had to establish ourselves on another world so that one cosmic accident wouldn’t wipe us out. And the fact that you exist proves that it worked.”

“I know,” said Noxon. “Nobody knew that he’d not only leap the fold but go back 11,191 years into the past. Nobody knew that there’d be nineteen colonies on that one world, instead of one. Nobody knew that in those eleven millennia, we’d develop merpeople and this facemask and talking mice.”

“And timeshapers.”

“The Visitors who come to evaluate Garden don’t know about us,” said Noxon. Then he laughed at his own stupidity. “No, of course they know about us. We’re all over the ships’ logs. They definitely know about us. That’s probably why they destroy the planet—to eliminate the people who can go into the past and make erasures.”

“I can imagine they might find that terrifying.”

“But they would know that we already know about the destruction of Garden—that’s in the ship’s log from Odinfold. So they must expect that we’d attempt what I’m doing right now.”

“You have to admit that your return to Earth is a little improbable,” said Deborah.

“Yes,” said Noxon. “They might think they’re acting so fast that we wouldn’t have time to send one of us to Earth.”

“But it still seems… so drastic,” said Deborah. “We send out the ship. Seven years later, it leaps the fold. Then we invent faster-than-light starships and get to Garden at a time when we think you won’t even have had time to get there yet—it was supposed to take another seven years from the fold. Only you’ve already been there longer than the total of human history since the last glacial maximum.”

“Lots of surprises.”

“But to us, only fifteen years. How do they get the whole human race behind such a wanton slaughter? Genocide of our colonists.”

“The whole human race?” asked Noxon. “Why would they tell the whole human race?”

Deborah looked surprised. “Because we’re a worldwide democracy now. Lots of different nations, but everybody votes. On something as big as this, they’d—”

“They’d tell nobody,” said Noxon. “They’d destroy Garden for the good of the human race, report that the colony failed, and then use faster-than-light ships to establish new colonies. Lots of them. People wouldn’t know about us, not for a long time, maybe not ever. Purge the computer records so our logs never show up.”

“It’s hard to keep a secret like that.”

“Once Garden is gone, it can’t be undestroyed.”

“Except by you,” said Deborah.

“I hope. I wish. I can hardly believe we’ve succeeded this far.”

“Why did you come to us?”

“I’m sure Ram is in the other room, asking your father to let us hide here and eat your food while we see what happens when the Visitors return from Garden.”

“But if you’re right,” said Deborah, “they won’t tell anybody what they found. And it’s not as if Father would be in on any of the secrets. He’s a great scientist but he doesn’t know any politicians.”

“That would be our job,” said Noxon. “Well, really, mine. To get to know politicians. It’s what I was raised to do.”

“But—you’re a kid.”

“I have no idea how old I am,” said Noxon. “But yes, I’m young. But I’ll get older.”

“And you have… that face.”

“I saw it on my friend Loaf. The face gets more and more normal—it’s still fairly new on me. Even if it doesn’t, though, so what? I’ll just keep coming back until I find a road in. If I need to. Because the first thing we’ll do is slice forward to the time when the Visitors return and see what actually happens. Only then will we have any idea of which organizations I need to infiltrate.”

“Why you? Why the kid?”

“Because Ram Odin’s face is known throughout the world. Not yet, but it will be. He can’t very well show up while his ship is supposedly out there starting a colony.”

“I suppose it’s too late to invent a twin brother for him,” said Deborah. She laughed. “They do that kind of thing on television all the time.”

“Well, I invented a twin brother for myself, so it actually can happen,” said Noxon.

Silence between them for a few moments.

“You know what I want?” said Deborah.

“Do you really want me to guess?” asked Noxon.

“I want your mission to be completely successful. Then I want to get on a starship with you, one of the faster-than-light ones, and go to Garden and get one of those facemasks for myself.”

“You do see how ugly and inhuman it makes me,” said Noxon.

“Have you seen my face? I want eyes, Rigg Noxon. Even if they’re too far apart and one of them sags a little down onto my cheek. I want real eyes instead of something that plugs into my brain and gives me a digital raster image.”

“You don’t look so bad right now,” said Noxon. “They did good work with you. I’ve seen burn scars and you don’t look like that.”

“Noxon,” said Deborah, “that is a complete load of horse pucky.”

“It’s true.”

“I saw your face when you first looked at me at the door. It was as if you were looking at a train wreck.”

“I was trying to figure out what happened, that’s all,” said Noxon.

“I’m sure that’s what everybody thinks they’re doing. From my side, though, it looks like horrified staring. Because that’s what it is.”

“I know,” said Noxon, “because I get the same looks. Followed by pity when Ram tells them about my tropical parasite.”

“So my choice isn’t to be pretty or not,” said Deborah. “My choice is to have eyes or not. And I want the eyes.”

“I don’t know if I’m going back,” said Noxon.

“Why wouldn’t you? Is Earth so charming that you can’t bear to part with it?”

“I have a starship buried under the ice of Antarctica. It’s been there for a hundred thousand years. There are some sentient mice in a box in Peru. I have responsibilities.”

“So you have a ship already,” she said.

“One that splits into twenty pieces when it leaps through the fold.”

“That’s something to think about,” said Deborah.

“You can’t tell anyone about us, you know.”

Deborah laughed aloud. “Now you think of that? You don’t swear me to secrecy, you just blurt it all out, you give me a demonstration, and now you warn me not to tell? Rigg Noxon, I’m already strange. I don’t have to add crazy to the list. I can’t tell this to anybody.”

“I know,” said Noxon, feeling foolish. “I just… I’m not completely used to this either, you know. The things I can do. And Father taught me—the expendable Ramex taught me never to tell, and that’s still nagging at the back of my mind.”

“What I’m trying to figure out is why my father is taking so long to give Ram Odin an answer. Of course he’ll say yes.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Noxon. “Ram might be recognized. I’m kind of unforgettable. People might wonder, they might investigate.”

“But of course you don’t understand Ram Odin’s plan yet, do you,” said Deborah. “He’s not asking for a favor here. He’s bound to be offering Father a trade.”

“What do we have to trade?” Noxon thought of the jewels, but here on Earth they would immediately be recognized as memory crystals. Incredibly valuable, but also extremely dangerous.

“You,” said Deborah. “He’s offering you. To take Father back to see for himself whether his hypotheses about Homo erectus are true or not.”

“Oh,” said Noxon. “Of course. I could do that.”

“Then let’s go tell them that the deal is on.” Deborah held out her hand. Noxon took it. She led him out of the room and down a hall, to Professor Wheaton’s study, where Ram Odin was napping on a sofa and Wheaton was typing into a computer.

“Oh, are you done?” asked Wheaton. “Is it set?”

“He’s agreed to take you back in time to see for yourself,” said Deborah. “Of course, you can’t write any scholarly papers on it.”

“But at least from then on my guesses will all be right.”

“They always have been, Father,” said Deborah.

Wheaton held out his hand to Noxon. They shook.

“You mean the two of you were waiting for us?” asked Noxon.

“Ram explained things very quickly, and we agreed that if you could convince Deborah and make the deal, we’d be set.”

“But Ram never told me that’s what I was supposed to do.”

“And I never told Deborah,” said Wheaton. “But… two smart young people, drawn together by shared experiences and mutual curiosity—that’s a negotiation that has gone on only a few billion times in human history.”

“We didn’t agree to mate and make babies,” said Deborah testily.

“No hurry,” said Wheaton. “Timeshaping will do for now.”