“Of course,” said Param.
“We have so many questions,” said Olivenko.
“I never thought I’d meet a king,” said Umbo.
“Well, technically you have,” said Knosso, indicating Rigg. “Though I’m not dead, I think I can be considered to have abdicated my right to the Tent of Light. So Rigg is king, if you believe in kings. And if you don’t, then Param’s next in line to be the queen. Or neither of them is anything, if you’re republican.”
“More to the point,” said Loaf, “we’re not in Ramfold, so we really don’t care anymore, and won’t care in the future, either, unless we decide to go back to Ramfold.”
“A born republican,” said Knosso, “but I remember meeting you as a soldier in my army, I believe.”
“Yes,” said Loaf. “We met once at a victory celebration, sir, but why would you remember me?”
“Left to myself, I wouldn’t have,” said Knosso. “But my Companion brings all my memories to life, and the moment I saw you, the mantle saw behind your facemask and knew you, and replayed for me the memory of when we met.”
Loaf bowed his head. “I am republican,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I bear any enmity against the royal house.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Knosso. “And now good-night. Sleep peacefully in the sharp hard air of land; I’ll be rocked to sleep in cool darkness for another night.”
The Larfolders were on their feet, walking into sea and river, their mantles rising, covering them, their gills emerging as they sank or splashed or launched themselves into the water. And soon the Ramfolders were alone on the shore, and filled with wonder, all of them.
All of them but Rigg, who was filled with something else. There had been a plague at the very beginning of human life on Garden that forced the Larfolders into the water. And the expendables had told each other far more than the Odinfolders had known, or admitted they knew. Had the mice known all this?
Rigg looked around and saw that there had been no mice here listening today. Good. For the moment I know something that they don’t know. Or at least, I know something that they knew but didn’t want to share with me. Either way, I’m ahead of them by just a little. For I know now what the mice intend to do, and I know that I must stop them, and I cannot do the thing from here, from Larfold, and I cannot do the things that I must do with anyone beside me. I will have to act alone, and quickly, before it can be known or guessed by anyone what I must do.
“May I borrow the knife from you, Umbo?” Rigg asked.
“Of course,” said Umbo, drawing it out and handing it to him.
“Thank you,” said Rigg. “I’ll try to return it as soon as possible after this moment.”
Rigg started walking back to the flyer.
“Where are you going?” asked Umbo, falling into step beside him.
“To Vadeshfold,” said Rigg.
“That liar? That snake? What for?”
“I need to ask him something,” said Rigg.
“And what might that be?” Umbo asked.
“I need to ask him for a facemask,” said Rigg. “And I need to know when Ram Odin died, and which wallfold he was in when he did.”
“You’re going back,” said Umbo. “You’re going to talk to him.”
“No,” said Rigg. “That might undo the whole world. It might undo ourselves.”
“Nothing we do undoes ourselves,” said Umbo. “We’ve had that discussion too many times. Or at least Loaf and I have.”
“I’m going forward,” said Rigg.
“You can’t do that,” said Umbo. “Only Param moves forward in time.”
“Not true,” said Rigg. “All of us move forward, at the rate of one minute per minute.”
“Well, yes, that way. What do you mean? That you’re going to just . . . pass the time away from us? Take me with you! I can keep you company.”
“The thing I’m going to do, Umbo, I wouldn’t ask you to do, and you wouldn’t do it if I did.”
“I’ll do whatever you think is right. Don’t you believe me, Rigg? I’m over being jealous of you. I really am. I’m your friend, and loyal to you to the end.”
“I’ll come back to you and give this knife to you when my job is done, if I succeed in it.”
“What job?”
But they were at the flyer now, and Rigg solemnly shook Umbo’s hand, a thing which he couldn’t remember ever having done before. “You’re the most powerful shifter in the world,” Rigg said to him. “Learn all you can from Knosso—he’s wise and clever, and he’s a pathfinder, too. So if you need to go into the past the way a pathfinder can help you do, he’ll help you.”
“He looks like you, Rigg, but he’s not you. I don’t know him.”
“Get to know him, then. And please don’t be angry with Param. She’s what she was raised to be, and she’s trying to get over it.”
“I’m not angry,” said Umbo. “I just don’t like her.”
“I know,” said Rigg. “And that’s a shame, considering that you’re still in love with her, and it doesn’t make sense for either of you to marry anybody but each other.”
And with those words, Rigg left a flabbergasted Umbo behind him as he jogged up the ramp into the flyer and gave the command to take him to the Vadesh Wall.
CHAPTER 22
Warning
When Umbo walked back to the others, they were full of questions. They had seen the flyer take off, and when Umbo explained that Rigg was gone, Param was hurt, Olivenko baffled, and Loaf enraged.
“The fool!” he cried. “He thinks he wants one of these? What for? To put himself in Vadesh’s hands again—Vadesh is the champion of all the liars, and that’s saying something, since I don’t think one word in ten that I’ve heard in my life was true! And none since we left Ramfold, not one thing that anyone has told us.”
But it was done, and they didn’t blame Umbo for it.
“Arrogant little twit,” Loaf grumbled. “Rigg I mean, not you, Umbo. Arrogant foolish stupid brave little—he’s going to take this whole thing on himself, I’m sure of it.”
“I think he’s backed out of it,” said Param. “I think he’s frightened.”
“Well, he’s not,” said Umbo.
“I think he doesn’t want to face the Visitors,” said Param. “They’ll be here in only two years, and he’s making sure he’s not with us.”
“Why talk him down, when you’re glad he’s gone?”
“I am not!”
“You want your father all to yourself. You hated it when he was so happy to see Rigg—I was watching you,” said Umbo.
“Stop it,” said Olivenko. “We don’t know what Rigg is doing and we don’t know what his motive is but we know that we can trust him to do right, because he’s had so many chances to do wrong and he’s never taken them. But it’s up to us to act as if whatever he’s doing won’t work, so it’s all entirely up to us to try to stop the Visitors from reaching whatever decision they reach that leads to the destruction of this world. Don’t you think?”
“Father will tell us what to do,” said Param.
“He won’t tell me what to do,” said Umbo. “Though I’ll listen to suggestions.”
“You’re just jealous because I have a father,” said Param.
“I’ve had a father,” said Umbo, “and I’m not impressed.”
“When the two of you become capable of rational thought,” said Loaf, “consider this: The Larfolders have their own way of remembering things, and they know a few facts that somehow missed the all-knowing Odinfolders. I’m for laying out all that we know for them to hear, and getting their counsel.”
“All we know?” asked Umbo. “Even about the mice?”
“Yes,” said Olivenko.
“No!” cried Param.
“We don’t know anything about the mice,” said Loaf, “except what they’ve told us themselves, and they’re liars.”
“We know that there are thousands of them here,” said Umbo, “a
nd that we brought them, and in the day since we arrived they’ve probably already had a thousand babies.”
“Mice aren’t that quick,” said Loaf.
“Really? How many of them were pregnant?” asked Umbo. “How many were about to pop?”
“Probably half of them,” said Olivenko. “The real question is, will telling the Larfolders make them trust us more, or less?”
“They’ll stop talking to us,” said Param. “They’ll cut us off from Father. Or hurt him because he’s one of us.”
“He has a mantle like theirs,” said Loaf. “He’s not one of us.”
“He’s more a part of me than you are,” said Param.
“Whatever you say,” said Loaf, turning away from her impatiently.
Umbo wanted to answer Param: You’re not part of us and never have been. But he knew that Loaf’s silence was the wiser course, and added nothing to it. He knew he shouldn’t have said as much as he already had.
“I think we need to tell them everything,” said Olivenko. “Or we’re as deceptive as the mice.”
“They’re actually good at deception,” said Param.
“We resent how little we can trust others,” said Olivenko, “so let’s be the kind of people that others can believe. They may not approve of what we do, but they can believe what we say.”
“If we tell the Larfolders about the mice, then we’re betraying their trust,” said Param.
“The mice already don’t trust us,” said Loaf, “and we never promised them we wouldn’t tell.”
Umbo realized that there was no point in arguing any further. When it involved a secret, one person’s decision to tell would always defeat any number of other people’s decision not to.
The real problem was figuring out what the mice intended to do. Umbo didn’t really know what the mice could do, without full-sized humans creating the real technology. He had never figured out the problem of how their tiny hands could do any serious work. They could never work with hot metals, for instance—a man with a heavy glove and apron could get close enough to a fire for him to lift iron out of it with tongs. But a short-armed mouse trying to lift a teeny-tiny bit of molten metal with teeny-tiny tongs would still have to stand so close to the fire that its entire body would be instantly cooked.
So how could they make anything comparable to what humans made? What could their technology be in Larfold, where Odinfolders hadn’t already created an infrastructure of tools and machinery?
The mice manipulated genes—they admitted to having done that, when they claimed to have created Knosso and Umbo. Well, actually, it was the Odinfolders who had claimed those feats, but then it became clear that really accurate displacement was done only by the mice.
So the Odinfolders had worked metal and built mighty cities; the mice worked with time and with genes, and made new species.
Then Umbo reached the only sensible conclusion. The mice must use time-and-space displacement for everything that humans used tools for. They never had to stand close to a fire; they could shift masses far too heavy for them to move by hand.
So if the mice made it all the way to Earth undetected, what if their time displacement didn’t work? There was no reason to believe that any of this planet-rooted time-shifting could function away from Garden. If it didn’t, what was their fallback plan? To reproduce at an insane rate, eat all the food on Earth, and starve the human race to death? Not likely—mice were too easy to kill.
Perhaps they could genetically manipulate the humans of Earth. But in what way? Any genetic change they made would take many long human generations to take effect. It couldn’t stop the destruction of Garden a year after the Visitors left.
And now that he was here in Larfold, Umbo couldn’t go to the library in Odinfold and try to learn more about what the mice could do. He couldn’t even ask Mouse-Breeder, which he’d like to do, even though he knew Mouse-Breeder would probably lie to him. Or the mice were lying to Mouse-Breeder so any answer he gave would be wrong.
The mice could move items from one place to another, and from one time to another. If that power continued to work on Earth, they would have a wide range of possibilities. They had killed Param by inserting a slab of metal into her body. But could they have simply removed a vital organ from her?
What were the rules governing their powers? How many mice did it take to handle a single displacement? Did the items they shifted in time and space have to be already detached or detachable from all other items? Or could they move a section of a pillar out of place and collapse a roof? And how large an object could they move? A building? A starship?
Could they move the Visitors’ starship into space very near the Sun and let it roast?
No, that couldn’t be it—if the Visitors did not return to Earth, it would only signal the humans of Earth that Garden posed some kind of threat.
All Umbo’s questions went around and around in his head.
Until, in the middle of the night, he got the answer.
He woke up Param.
“What do you want?” she demanded. “I was asleep!”
“I know,” said Umbo. “But how can you sleep, when I have the answer?”
“What answer?”
“The answer to the problem that we don’t know enough to decide what to do about anything. We don’t even know enough to know what questions to ask.”
“For this you woke me?” asked Param. “Go away.”
“I woke you because you’re the solution.”
“You have no problems, I assure you, to which I am a possible solution.”
“We need to go into the future and meet the Visitors and see what happens with them and then come back here and figure out what to do about them.”
Param closed her eyes, but at least she was thinking about it. “So you want me to slice time to get us into the future faster.”
“And then when we’ve seen enough, I bring us right back here. Tonight. Nobody even knows we went.”
“But I’ve never sliced time that far,” said Param. “It would take weeks.”
“You’ve never wanted to slice time to that degree,” said Umbo, “because you didn’t want to miss whole days and weeks and months. But if you really pushed it . . .”
“Maybe,” said Param.
“And we still get a quick view of what’s happening. Day and night, seasons changing.”
“So we’d know when two years had passed,” said Param.
“We’re the ones with these time-shifting abilities,” said Umbo. “Let’s use them.”
“Without Rigg.”
“Rigg’s doing whatever he thinks is right. Why should we do anything less than that?”
Param sat up and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I don’t actually hate you, you know,” she said.
“That’s good to hear,” said Umbo. “Because you had me fooled.”
“I don’t like you,” said Param. “But I don’t hate you, either. The others keep lecturing me because I don’t treat you right.”
“You treated me right when you took us off the rock in Ramfold,” said Umbo. “And when you got us through the Wall. In the crisis, you come through.”
“And so do you.”
“So let’s try it. If it’s more than you can do, or want to do, you can just stop and I’ll bring us back here.”
“Can you bring us back with any kind of precision?” asked Param. “I thought you needed Rigg’s pathfinding in order to hook up with an exact time.”
“If I overshoot in coming back, then you can slice us back up to tonight. You’re precise even if I’m not.”
Param got up. Loaf stirred. Olivenko didn’t move.
Param rummaged in her bag and took out her heavy coat.
Umbo looked at her like she was crazy.
“What if it’s winter when we stop?” asked Param.
Umbo got his heavy coat out of his bag, too.
They took each other’s hands, facing each other.
“
I think you two are reckless fools,” said Loaf, who was apparently awake after all.
“But we can’t stop them,” said Olivenko, who was awake as well.
“Thanks,” said Umbo. “We’ll be back in a minute.”
Param began slicing time.
Umbo had been through this before, as they leapt from the rock. It didn’t feel like they were moving forward through time at a different pace. Instead, it looked as if the rest of the world were speeding up. Only this time, Umbo didn’t see people or animals move quickly by. He didn’t see them at all. Just glimpses of a person here, a person there. Days flitted by in a blur of suns passing overhead, flickering with stars that appeared in a momentary darkness and then were gone.
Snow on the ground, gone, back, gone, deeper, melted, back again, gone again. And then spring, a profusion of green; a summer just long enough to feel the heat, and then it was cool and the leaves were gone and the grass was brown and there was snow again. Spring. Summer. And Param slowed down the world around them and gradually they came to a stop.
It was night. There was no one on the beach, no one farther inland either, as far as they could tell.
Rigg could always tell where other people were, or whether they were there at all, thought Umbo. I wish that he were here.
But then the wish passed from him. He didn’t want to be dependent on Rigg right now. He and Param could do this thing alone.
“I don’t think we want to be seen,” said Umbo. “I think we want to watch from hiding.”
“Then let’s turn invisible,” said Param with a smirk. “It’s my best trick anyway.” She took his hand again, and walked with him toward a stand of trees and bushes, as the night raced by around them.
Even when they came to a stop amid the trees, and the sun rose swiftly, Param kept on slicing time. But now the world was moving slowly enough that they could see the blur of scurrying mice. Mice everywhere among the trees and grass.
Mice going into and out of holes in the ground.
Of course they don’t build buildings. They dig holes. They don’t have to shore up tunnels so they don’t cave in; mice can move through such tiny passages that they hold themselves up without any additional support. These fields could now be a city of a hundred million mice, and no one above the surface would know it.
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