Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

“I can only agree,” said Ram Odin.

  “So I think our best course of action,” said Noxon, “is to assume the mice are still alive, assume the flyer won’t return to liberate them, and get out of here so our future selves have time to get here and dig them up alive if the expendable hasn’t already done it.”

  “And if the mice happen to be dead already?” asked Ram Odin.

  “We’ll shed a gentle tear or two, and move on,” said Noxon. “It’ll only matter if it turns out we needed them. And if we really need them, we can always come back to the moment right after we buried them and flew away.”

  “Which is another reason not to dig them up right now,” said Ram Odin.

  “I really don’t want to know whether they’re still there,” said Noxon. “Because if they’re gone, it means our mission failed and we needed them to destroy the human race.”

  “So we don’t wait for the flyer,” said Ram Odin.

  “It’s time for us to get on with our mission,” said Noxon. He held out his hand. Ram Odin took it.

  Noxon sliced rapidly forward in huge leaps, until he reached a time with human paths nearby. Then he sliced his way ahead until their original marker appeared. And beyond. And beyond. Until there were paths of people in airplanes flying overhead. Lots of them.

  That was when they hiked their way out. Within a half hour, they were among tourists.

  “Of course, we don’t have passports,” said Ram Odin.

  “What’s a passport?” asked Noxon.

  “Believe me, Noxon, up to now we’ve only been dealing with time-shifting, the laws of causality, computers that lie, and perfidious talking mice. Now we’ll be dealing with bureaucrats. This is when it gets complicated.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Council of War

  The time-shifters and their friends gathered beside the stream where the Larfolders assembled to tell tales, to learn to walk, and to make decisions that required speech. Their intention was only to greet each other, as Olivenko returned to them from Odinfold, and Umbo, Loaf, and Leaky from Ramfold.

  Inevitably, they gave an account of themselves. Loaf and Leaky had a baby to explain—though of course it was Umbo who did the explaining, because he had rescued Square before removing the future in which he had been born. That tale could not be told without a mention of the Rebel King, and of Captain Toad, the ugly soldier who was leading raids all over Stashiland.

  “I don’t know if we should go to war,” said Param, “merely because it seems we’ve already done so.”

  “I think we always intended to,” said Rigg. “Why else did we send Olivenko to study military history and strategy? Why else did you need to learn to slice backward as well as forward in time?”

  “But now that we’re face to face with it,” said Param, “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it.”

  “Maybe that’s why the people I met spoke only of the Rebel King,” said Umbo.

  “Even that is significant,” said Olivenko. “Rigg’s the son of King Knosso. Shouldn’t they be calling him ‘the rightful king’?”

  “Only after we win,” said Umbo. “Right now, if Haddamander’s soldier came through town and somebody remembered you ever saying ‘the rightful king’ about Rigg Sessamekesh . . .”

  “You’re missing the point,” said Loaf. “‘The Rebel King’ isn’t referring to Rigg. Rigg is obviously Captain Toad, and he isn’t making any claim to the Tent of Light. The Rebel King is the husband of Queen Param.”

  “I was afraid of that,” said Umbo.

  “Though at some point,” said Rigg, “Param and you really should make it official. The sooner you have an heir, the better.”

  “That’s . . . practical,” said Umbo.

  “And really intrusive,” said Param.

  “You know you have to go to war,” said Olivenko. “Rigg and Ram Odin decided the Walls aren’t coming down—we all agreed to that, once we heard the things they learned. But we still have to live somewhere. For now, the Larfolders are providing us a ­refuge, mostly because they don’t spend that much time on land. But Larfold has mice all over it.”

  “Not to mention mermasks in the water,” said Param. “If we tried to live here, our children or grandchildren would envy the Larfolders their life in the sea, and they’d ask for mermasks and leave the land and become . . .”

  “Become a different kind of human being,” said Rigg. “It wouldn’t be a tragedy, but it’s not wrong for us, as land dwellers, to want our children to build lives on the land.”

  “Vadeshfold is empty,” said Loaf.

  “But it has wild facemasks in the water,” said Umbo.

  “There’s an obvious solution to that,” said Loaf. “Anyone who has a facemask like mine will be immune to the wild facemasks.”

  “But not everyone can bear them,” said Leaky. Her tone of voice was emotional, bordering on anger.

  “I’m only saying,” said Loaf, “that we shouldn’t think of Vadeshfold as empty.” He touched his facemask, which was still obvious, even though it had gone so far toward converging with a natural human face. “Someday, there may be people who want to live with these as closely as the Larfolders live with their mermasks. Vadeshfold should belong to them.”

  “All of this is pointless,” said Param, “if Noxon doesn’t prevent the destruction of Garden.”

  “True,” said Loaf. “But only in the sense that nothing we do will last for more than a few years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to give the people of Ramfold some hope of relief from General Citizen.”

  “From Mother, you mean,” said Param.

  “We don’t know how much influence your mother still has,” said Olivenko. “She might be as much a prisoner now as ever.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that she isn’t guilty of any of King Haddamander’s oppression,” said Rigg.

  “We know better,” said Param. “If anything, she’s the one goading him to be more and more cruel.”

  “That’s not an unreasonable guess,” said Rigg. “But the ­people Umbo met spoke only of King Haddamander, just as they spoke only of the Rebel King and Captain Toad.”

  “Meaning that Mother and I have become unimportant,” said Param.

  “Meaning that war is the business of men,” said Olivenko, “as it always has been, even when women fight alongside us.”

  “What worries me,” said Loaf, “is that we might move in circles here. Umbo went into the future and learned that there’s a Rebel King, and a Captain Toad who leads raids all over Stashiland. But we still haven’t decided if putting Umbo forward as king is a good idea, or that our war should consist of doing a bunch of raiding. The Sessamids didn’t conquer and unite all of Stashiland—the whole of Ramfold, eventually—by raiding. Raiding is what they did when they were still a tribe of horse-riding nomads from the northwest.”

  “It would be easy to take note of the decision we apparently already made, and spare ourselves the trouble of discussing it,” said Ram Odin.

  “I’m not quite sure that you are part of the decision,” said Param.

  “I forgot that I was speaking to a queen,” said Ram Odin.

  “What you forgot,” said Param, “is that you are not part of our company. You tried to kill Rigg. He may have forgiven you, but I don’t trust you or whatever advice you give.”

  “He hasn’t forgiven me,” said Ram Odin. “Because he also killed me, and whereas I have no memory of my attempt on his life, he has a very clear memory of—what did you do? Stab me? Break my neck?”

  Rigg sighed. “He’s teasing us both,” said Rigg. “And we’d be fools not to listen to his counsel, because he knows far more than we do about Ramfold and all the others.”

  “But he also lies, and tells the expendables to lie to us.”

  “True,” said Rigg. “So let’s ask another source
of information. Olivenko, what would you advise us to do, as our student of military history?”

  “I came with two plans,” said Olivenko. “And the guerrilla campaign by Captain Toad was one of them, though the name isn’t one I would have chosen.”

  “How is that plan supposed to work, since there’s at least one version of the future in which we chose it?”

  “Guerrilla campaigns can’t bring victory by themselves,” said Olivenko. “But if you run it properly, you can win over the ­people while humiliating and terrifying the government. The foolish way to do it is to force the villages to feed your men and assassinate anyone who opposes you, so that all the villagers obey you out of fear—and betray you the first chance they get.”

  “That’s why I was surprised to learn we had chosen it,” said Rigg.

  “I doubt that you did, because, as I said, it’s foolish. Fools resort to those tactics because they expect the people to support them voluntarily, and when they don’t, the rebels become angry and take vengeance. But you’re not fools. You know that the villagers can’t pay taxes to King Haddamander and to the Rebel King. When they hid their meager supplies from Haddamander’s tax collectors, they weren’t saving it for us and our army.”

  “So what is Captain Toad doing in his raids?” asked Rigg. “Considering that if I’m Captain Toad, I’m no soldier.”

  “You could be,” said Loaf. “It takes training, but if there’s one thing we have, it’s time enough to do whatever we want.”

  “Training would be good,” said Olivenko, “but what I had in mind was a place of refuge and a source of supplies. And here’s where Ram Odin becomes part of whatever we do. In ordinary guerrilla campaigns, the rebels have to hide. Since they’re constantly being betrayed by people who want the reward money, they have to move frequently. They can’t bring their wives and children. They can’t farm or even store up food against the winter.”

  “You want a safe refuge on the far side of the Wall,” said Ram Odin.

  “Where Ramfold, Vadeshfold, and Larfold come together, the land is fertile and there’s plenty of rain and good streams.”

  “Some have facemask spores in them,” said Ram Odin.

  “I think you’re perfectly capable of eradicating them from any stream you choose,” said Olivenko. “All I ask is that you pull back the boundary of Vadeshfold and make an enclave that isn’t inside any of the three wallfolds. Then when we recruit fighters for the rebel army, they bring their families. They farm. They hunt. They make weapons. They train. They stockpile food.”

  “That could take years,” said Loaf.

  “But you can always give yourself years,” said Olivenko. “Don’t make this enclave now. Make it ten years ago. The people we recruit will be the ones who are angry—their number will increase, but we can start small. The first recruits will clear land. They’ll have children. One village will turn into two or three or four.”

  “Ten years ago,” said Loaf, “the People’s Revolutionary Council was the government, and the only people who hated them and wanted to rebel were former nobles like General Citizen and Param’s mother.”

  “But we won’t recruit people ten years ago,” said Olivenko. “That’s just where we go to build up supplies. You bring the first recruits to the place ten years ago; then you bring later recruits to nine years ago, and eight, with each new increment clearing more land, farming more food, mining more ore, making more ­weapons. Your raids capture food and weapons and you bring them back to whatever time you need them. So the earliest recruits will have ten years in the enclave, but the newest will only arrive when there’s plenty for them to eat, and only with time enough to train them.”

  “So we raid today, then bring the supplies to the enclave at the time we need them,” said Umbo.

  “Your timeshaping is what sets you apart from other ­rebels, you see,” said Olivenko. “There’s no reason not to use your ­abilities. General Citizen or whatever he’s calling himself—he can hunt for you all he wants, but you’re not only outside the wallfold between raids, you’re also three or five or eight years in the past.”

  “It’s going to take some real care not to bring people back to a time before they came to the enclave,” said Umbo. “It won’t do to have them meet themselves. Or to have you or any of us making new copies of ourselves.”

  “We’ll keep a calendar,” said Rigg. “We’ll organize each cohort according to their time of recruitment, and make sure we always bring a group home from a raid to some time after they left on that raid.”

  “Everything in proper order,” said Olivenko. “And we’ll also schedule the raids on various arsenals and stockpiles for times when they’re not looked for.”

  “What would happen,” said Umbo, “if our first raid were the most recent—say, last Thursday—and our next raid was a week before that, and the next was two weeks earlier. So that every raid is the first one and we always have surprise.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wouldn’t that make it so they were ready for us on the earlier raids after all?”

  “Not if a timeshaper is always with each cohort,” said Umbo. “The successful raid already happened in the timestream of the timeshaper, and it can’t be changed by having the next raid take place earlier. Can it?”

  Rigg pressed fingers to his forehead. “Just when I think I’m beginning to understand how this works, there’s some crazy new idea that changes everything.”

  “It’s simple enough,” said Param. “Do one raid, and then do the next one earlier, and see if it changes the previous-but-later raid.”

  “I’m still not in love with raiding, even if it works,” said Rigg. “I’m not really a killer. I only did it once, and I didn’t like it.”

  “But that’s the whole point,” said Olivenko. “If it’s always a surprise, you might be able to arrange every raid so that you don’t have to kill anybody. You can look for a time of minimal wariness. Nobody watching. Everybody drunk or half the garrison out of town. Or it could be a herd of cattle being driven to where the meat will be butchered to feed Haddamander’s army.”

  Umbo laughed. “Oh, I think we’re going to love trying to move whole herds of cattle through time.”

  “We still have to get them across all this country,” said Loaf. “With all the times we’ve used the flyers, you may not understand yet how very big each wallfold is. If you raid on the opposite side, it can take weeks. And the whole country is settled.”

  “It’s settled now,” said Rigg. “But we could move the herds or the soldiers or the families or the weapons far in the past. During the years when the colony was new. Nobody would discover us because we’d slice time a little, just enough to disappear.”

  “There’d be a stretch of country where all the grass was gone and cow pies were everywhere,” said Loaf. “You’ve never seen the ground behind a military supply herd.”

  “By the time any colonists see it,” said Rigg, “it’ll be nothing but meadows with some very fertile patches.”

  “Exactly,” said Olivenko. “By shaping time the way you do, you can avoid all the things that make rebels angry and desperate. You can keep killing to a minimum. But it will happen. Somebody will be a hero and you’ll have to kill him. This is war, and no matter how careful we are, people will die. And not always soldiers who oppose us. Besides, plenty of soldiers will wish they could join us, but they’ll still have to fight us when we show up.”

  “I’m trying to imagine this,” said Umbo. “Say we’ve done fifty raids, and the most recent one, as far as Haddamander and the queen are concerned, is really the very first one we did. When we did it, we took the garrison completely by surprise, because they didn’t even know there was a rebellion, because they knew of no previous raids. But now it’s the fiftieth raid, so they had to be aware of it—and yet the actual events can’t be changed, because the timeshaper was there and so
the outcome can’t be undone.”

  Rigg tried to imagine it. “I wonder if they’ll behave, during the actual raid, exactly as they did when it really happened—with them knowing nothing. But afterward, they’ll remember that they should have been alert against possible raids because there had already been forty-nine. They won’t have any explanation for King Haddamander. ‘I don’t know why the men weren’t on alert, O King-in-the-Tent. I warned them, I posted them, but when the raiders came, nobody was at his post and everybody acted as if there had never been a raid before.’”

  “Off with his head,” murmured Param.

  “By the fiftieth raid,” said Umbo, “maybe General Citizen will be used to the fact that we always achieve surprise and he’ll stop executing the commanders for their inexplicable lack of preparation.”

  “So when our fifth raid turns the first one into the one that Haddamander thinks is fifth, he’ll execute the commanders who let him down. But then when our twentieth raid, much earlier, turns that first one into the twentieth raid, they’ll already know the pattern and that first commander won’t be killed after all.”

  “The more raids we do, the more lives we’ll save,” said Param.

  “What matters,” said Olivenko, “is that it will be General Citizen who’s executing his own officers and men. He’ll be made to look like a fool, and his soldiers will be frantic with despair, because no matter how much they prepare, they’re always taken by surprise.”

  “If the physics of it actually work the way we’re supposing it might,” said Rigg.

  “It feels like cheating,” said Leaky.

  “It’s war,” said Loaf. “Any time I can find a way to cheat so I win without losing so many of my men, I’ll do it.”

  Olivenko smiled at Leaky. “I’ve read a lot of military history, Mistress Leaky.”

  “Leaky. No ‘mistress,’” said Leaky.

  “The commanders who are called geniuses are the ones who won by maneuver rather than brute force battles. The ones who thought up ways to surprise the enemy and get them to surrender or run away. The ones who ended up with an intact, undamaged army while the other side is captured or dispersed, hopelessly disorganized.”