Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

  Dariah nodded and reached for the baby.

  “Smells like poo,” said Leaky. “You already cleaned him up?”

  Umbo wondered how she knew the baby’s sex. Or maybe she called all babies “he” till she knew better.

  “As best I could, but he needs a clean diaper,” said Umbo. “I don’t think that flour sack is going to be absorbent enough.”

  “It is, if you fold it properly,” said Leaky. “I thought you had younger brothers and sisters.”

  “And a mother who did the diapering and a father who said that baby care was women’s work and no son of his would fertilize his hands with baby manure.”

  “You haven’t missed much,” said Dariah.

  “He misses almost everything,” said Leaky. “Not an observant boy. What’s the baby’s name?”

  For a moment Umbo thought Leaky had been asking Dariah, and he waited for her to answer.

  “Well I don’t know,” said Dariah impatiently.

  Umbo thought of how Leaky had named the baby, and how naming happened in the land she came from. “I’ve been calling him Square Meal, since that’s all he seems to need to be happy.”

  “I didn’t ask what you’ve been calling him,” said Leaky. “I asked his name.”

  “Then his name is Square Meal,” said Umbo. “But you can call him Biscuit.”

  “That’s only a snack,” said Leaky.

  “He’s only a baby,” said Umbo, meeting her gaze.

  “Do you want to nurse him here?” asked Leaky. “Not you, Umbo, I’ve seen you with your shirt off and your teats aren’t good for anything.”

  “I’ll give him a quick supper and then take him home.” She looked at Umbo. “Is that all right with His Majesty here?”

  Because he thought of her as knowing that he was the Rebel King, Umbo was taken aback. “I’m not a—”

  Dariah burst into giggles. “Isn’t he precious? Doesn’t recognize a joke when he hears it.”

  “Do I need to go with you?” asked Umbo.

  “No, you don’t,” said Leaky. “She needs to go with her brothers, who are waiting downstairs. And you need to come help me in the kitchen garden.”

  “It’s full dark,” said Umbo.

  “The crop we’re planting thrives best by ringlight,” said Leaky.

  When they got downstairs and out the back, Loaf was already waiting for them.

  “You have some answering to do,” said Loaf.

  “And I’ll give you all those answers,” said Umbo. “I’m eager to do it, when the time is right.”

  “And when, in your feeble imagination, do you think the time will be right?” asked Leaky.

  “When you answer a couple of my questions,” said Umbo.

  “If you think—” began Leaky.

  Loaf raised a hand. “Leaky, I know this look on his face, and I know this man. Whatever he’s done, it was for a good purpose, and if he needs us to answer questions, we will if we can.”

  “It’s going to sound personal, offensive, and irrelevant,” said Umbo.

  “That describes most of your questions,” said Loaf, “leaving out only ‘impertinent’ and ‘incomprehensible.’”

  Umbo nodded, acknowledging the remark as having some justification. “I only need to know. Leaky, are you pregnant yet?” The question wasn’t completely out of the blue. Given the age the carpenter had told him for the child named Round, it was highly likely that he had been conceived before they went to Vadeshfold, and was already a couple of months along.

  “None of your—” said Leaky.

  “Yes,” said Loaf. “She is.”

  Umbo nodded. “It’s a boy,” he said. “You’re planning to name him Round. That’s a horrible name, by the way.”

  “It’s a fine name,” said Loaf mildly. “Far nobler to be named for a geometrical abstract than for a hunk of bread.”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Umbo.

  “You knew I was pregnant,” said Leaky. “You went into the future and you knew. Is that our baby she’s suckling upstairs?”

  “It’s not the baby you’re pregnant with right now,” said Umbo, “but it’s yours all right. This second one you named Square.”

  “Why did you kidnap him?” asked Loaf—surprisingly mild about it.

  “I didn’t,” said Umbo. “A later version of Dariah kept him safe after the two of you were killed.”

  That got their attention, and they listened without interruption as he told the story.

  “General Citizen had them kill the baby?” asked Leaky, her voice soft.

  “Yes,” said Umbo. “Or so they said. I have no reason to doubt them.”

  “And Dariah kept this baby safe,” said Leaky.

  “A version of her. A later version,” said Umbo. “But in the future we’re making now, she never will, because you’ll be long gone before your first son is born, let alone the second.”

  “Not so hasty,” said Loaf. “These troubles begin more than a year from now.”

  “But we don’t know when surveillance started,” said Umbo.

  “It’ll arouse suspicion if we simply walk away,” said Loaf. “I need to make a good-faith effort to sell this place. The money will be useful, but mostly it’s so that life goes on normally here, but without us in it. If we can’t sell it in a few weeks, then we’ll walk away, because . . . Leaky’s mother is dying.”

  “I have no idea if she’s alive or dead at this point,” said Leaky.

  “Well, mine is definitely dead, if anybody even believes I had a mother,” said Loaf. “So it has to be yours.” He looked searchingly at Umbo. “This really is our baby?”

  “It’s ugly and has the personality of grass,” said Umbo. “How can you doubt?”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Loaf. “You’ll go to the Wall and summon a flyer. You’ll park it somewhere nearby—in the past, if you need to—and then come get us just after we conclude the sale or give up trying.”

  “How will I know when that is?”

  “You’ll keep checking in till the answer is yes,” said Leaky impatiently. “If you can’t think of things like that, I’m in awe that you can even dress yourself.”

  It took two weeks to find a buyer for the roadhouse. They didn’t even suggest bringing Dariah with them, because, as Leaky said, “There are breasts full of milk in Larfold, too, and Dariah’s in no danger with us gone.”

  When they arrived at the meeting beach in Larfold, Rigg and Ram Odin had just arrived themselves.

  “I’d comment on the coincidence,” said Umbo, “only I’m betting that Ramex told some expendable or another where we were.”

  “Not many people have authority to call for a flyer,” said Rigg. “I always planned to get back here just before you arrived.”

  “I think we need to get General Citizen out of the Tent of Light,” said Param. “Is that what the rest of you think?”

  It was.

  “Then we need to make a plan,” said Param. “Rigg as Captain Toad and Umbo as Rebel King sound fine. But that’s only the start of it. Did anybody think to bring Olivenko? It’s time for whatever military wisdom he’s acquired.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Hiding from the Future

  Noxon was not as relieved as he should have been. The first stage of his quest had been a complete success. He had managed to get the starship—and therefore Ram Odin and the mice and all the sleeping colonists—back into the normal stream of time, moving from past into future.

  Yet now, orbiting Earth, Noxon realized that this had been a mere mechanical hurdle. The real purpose of his journey still lay ahead of him. He had to get into position and observe the return of the Visitors from Garden, so he could find out why Earth then sent the Destroyers to wipe out all life on Garden. What difference would it make that he had flipped the ti
meflow of a lost starship, if he failed to save Garden?

  “It’s not easy to figure out exactly when it is on Earth right now,” said Ram Odin. “We’re before any kind of electronic signals, so we can’t mine a datastream and get time and date.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring us back to a pre-measured time,” said Noxon, “but I was jumping blind.”

  “Nobody’s criticizing you,” said Ram Odin.

  “We are,” said a mouse very near to Noxon’s ear. Maybe it was joking.

  But no. The mice clinging to his body clamored, and the facemask sorted out the voices.

  “Why waste time figuring out when we are right now?”

  “We can’t stay in this time, whenever it is.”

  “We’re a new star and somebody’s going to notice.”

  “Just because they don’t have spaceships doesn’t mean they don’t see us.”

  “Where are you going to hide the ship? That’s the question!”

  Noxon had to silence them just to hear himself think. “Wait, stop,” he said.

  “Talking to the mice?” asked Ram Odin.

  The expendable explained. “The mice are very excitable.”

  “They have a valid point,” said Noxon. “It doesn’t matter what time we’re in right now. What matters is that we need to figure out how we’re going to hide this ship and then get to the future and figure out why the human race decided to destroy Garden.”

  “Hide the ship?” Ram Odin said. “If they don’t have telescopes . . .”

  “We have to leave the ship somewhere while we travel into the future,” said Noxon. “We can’t leave it in orbit.”

  “Agreed,” said the expendable. “Even if we station ourselves in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific, we become a fixed star to the Polynesians. And once the Europeans get there, we are the most intensely studied object in the sky.”

  “Once humans get space travel,” said Ram Odin, “this ship is the first thing they’ll visit, long before they have the technology to build anything like it. Leaving the ship in space will change everything.”

  “It may already have changed things,” said the expendable, “and every minute spent debating about it creates new folklore about this strange star in the sky.”

  “At least we’re not geosynchronous over Bethlehem,” said Ram Odin.

  “Palestine is too far north of the equator for that,” said the expendable. “And the ship now has a tentative date, based on settlement patterns and existing technology. No railroads, no significant canals. But Constantinople’s new buildings are Turkish and there are European settlements in the Americas. For all we know, Galileo is studying us on each orbital pass. We don’t want Copernicus to try to work us into his ­heliocentric model.”

  “Take us farther back,” said Ram Odin.

  “I still can’t find anybody’s path from this far out,” said Noxon.

  “Just fling us back again,” said Ram Odin. “Only farther. A lot farther.”

  Noxon gripped a handhold on the wall, and reached out to Ram Odin.

  “Do we have to do that every time?” asked Ram Odin.

  “I don’t know,” said Noxon. “What if we don’t do it, and it turns out we should have?”

  Ram Odin took Noxon’s hand. “Are the mice all still attached to you?”

  “Their little footprints are all over my body,” said Noxon. Then he sliced rapidly into the past.

  Again, there was nothing to see—inside the starship, there were no observation windows. After a little while, though, the ship’s computers put up a display of the huge swath of Earth that was visible from their orbit about three hundred kilometers above the surface.

  “It’s very white,” said Noxon. “Is it an unusually cloudy day?”

  “We’re over the northern hemisphere,” said the expendable, “and we appear to be in a glacial maximum.”

  “An ice age,” said Ram Odin. “Any idea which one?”

  “There would be humans all over the place,” said the expendable. “Sapiens and Neanderthal, during the most recent one, but it was nearly a hundred thousand years long and so it’ll take a few passes to get a clear fix. And if it’s an earlier glacial maximum we’ll still have Homo erectus, and they got control of fire about half a million years ago.”

  “The last ice age ended more than ten thousand years ago,” said Ram Odin to Noxon. “So you definitely took us a long way back.”

  “I was aiming for at least eleven thousand years,” said Noxon. “Like when I followed a barbfeather’s path before you crashed nineteen starships into Garden.”

  “Not me,” said Ram Odin. “It was a copy of me did all that.”

  “What matters is that astronomical observations from this era aren’t going to be remembered and written down,” said the expendable. “But we still have to deal with the problem of concealment.”

  Because the Moon was so large and strange to Noxon, and because it showed only one face to Earth, his first thought was to put the starship on the back side of it. But Ram Odin laughed out loud. “Humans had satellites going behind the Moon taking pictures long before this ship was built. And then there’s the little matter of half the moon getting sucked away.”

  “So we can’t leave it anywhere in space,” said Noxon. “But it’s not as if we can lay it down on Earth, either. By the time this ship gets built, the surface of Earth will have been fully explored, won’t it?”

  “Satellite photography even finds buried civilizations after thousands of years, by the traces of their irrigation ditches and house foundations,” said the expendable.

  “So we can’t even bury the ship,” said Noxon.

  “And the hull can’t withstand underwater pressures,” said Ram Odin. “So we can’t drop it into the ocean without risk of debris washing up on shore and getting discovered.”

  “Even with the fields that protected it from impact with the surface of Garden?” asked Noxon.

  “The energy cost of maintaining that strong a field can only be paid once, using the heat gathered during reentry. In the ocean, it would have to last thousands of years under relentless pressure. And it still might be found.”

  “It might be found because of the fields,” said the expendable. “Don’t forget that it’s technology from Earth that creates those fields. There is no chance that such a field anywhere on or under the planet’s surface will go undetected once we get close to the time when the ship was built.”

  Again, the mice were full of suggestions. Noxon sorted them out and relayed the most cogent one. “The mice keep saying to put it under the ice.”

  “We can go back in time before the top hundred meters of Antarctic ice formed,” agreed the expendable. “But either the ice will crush the ship, or the fields that prevent the ice from doing so will give away our location years before this starship was built.”

  Noxon and Ram Odin looked at each other in glum silence.

  Inside Noxon’s clothing, the mice gathered and murmured to each other and then settled into a chant: “Stupid stupid stupid.”

  “The mice are saying that we’re stupid,” said Noxon. To the mice he said, “Do you include yourselves in that? Or do you have some obvious solution that we’ve overlooked?”

  The explanation, when Noxon understood it, was charmingly simple. “Oh, of course,” he said, and then relayed it to Ram Odin. “The mice suggest that the ship doesn’t have to survive intact. Park it a hundred thousand years back, at the beginning of the last glacial period, and then let the ice crush it and grind it. We aren’t going to use it at the end of that period, we just need it not to be found, and not to give off detectable signals or heat or fields of any kind.”

  Ram Odin nodded. “We’re going to go back in time and pick it up right after we left it there. When it’s still virtually brand-new. So what happens to the shi
p a week after we park it there is irrelevant.”

  “Not completely,” said Noxon. “For instance, if we left the mice on the ship and they took it over, they could lift it off the surface long before the ice formed any kind of impediment. Then they could destroy the human race before it became numerous, and have the planet to themselves.”

  The howls of protest from the mice were loud enough that Ram Odin could hear them, though he couldn’t distinguish any of their words.

  “They’re saying,” said Noxon, “that they would never do that and it didn’t even cross their minds and shame on you for thinking them capable of such treachery.”

  “You believe them?” said Ram Odin.

  “I’m quite sure that’s exactly what they were planning,” said Noxon. “Their only goal all along has been to get to Earth and prevent the destruction of Garden. Keeping the human race from evolving in the first place would do the job.”

  Again, the howls from the mice. But they were both angrier and briefer in their protests. Which Noxon took as a sign that his guess was dead on.

  “Still, their point is valid,” said Noxon. “We don’t have to leave a living ship to be picked up in the high-technology future. We’re going to come back to the beginning of the ice age to pick it up. So whatever happens between the time we leave the ship and the far future, when we find out why the Visitors attack Garden, doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re suggesting that we kill everybody aboard?” said Ram Odin.

  “Without stasis fields, all the colonists will rot away within a few decades, no matter how strong the seal on their sleep chambers is,” said the expendable.

  “So the kindest thing,” said Ram Odin to the expendable, “would be to park the ship where we know the ice will form, kill everybody aboard, leave you awake long enough to make sure it’s fully covered with ice, and then you shut everything down permanently.”

  Killing everybody aboard would obviously include the mice, unless Noxon took them with him into the future. Which he clearly had no intention of doing, since they could not be trusted.