“Let’s go out and see,” she said.
Rigg reached for the lever.
“Wait!” she said. “What if somebody’s out there?”
“I’d know it if they were,” said Rigg. “There’s nobody.”
“When we go out, we can’t talk any more.”
“But there’s always tomorrow. And the next day.”
“Rigg,” she said, and hugged him again. “You know I’ve gotten younger, waiting for you,” she said.
“Younger?”
“When I rush, the rest of the world flies by. When I’m going really fast, whole days can pass in what seems like a few minutes to me. Most of the time I don’t rush so hard, but—”
“How do you know how much time has passed for you?” asked Rigg. “How do you measure time when you’re rushing?”
“Let’s just say . . . it’s a pretty accurate method. I know how many days have passed in the regular world, and I can—I measure my time by the month. Do you understand? I know when a month has passed for me. And since I went into seclusion, it’s only been two months for me. Everybody else has aged more than a year. But two months for me. So they think I’m sixteen now, but my body has barely lived through fifteen years. At this rate I’ll live forever—only I’ll have no life at all.”
She was crying. Not like a child, face bunched up and whining noises, but like a woman, silently, her shoulders heaving as he held her. “Param, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Getting out of this house isn’t enough. They’ll hunt us down in the city, in the library, wherever we go.”
“Umbo and Loaf will come,” said Rigg. “We’ll find a way. You’ll get your life back. We both will.”
“You’re my little brother,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the one making promises to you.”
“I know,” said Rigg. “You can tell me bedtime stories when we’re out of here. But we’ve got to go now, while there’s still time to figure out how to close the door from the other side.”
In the end, they didn’t look for a broom or anything else. Rigg just cupped his hands and boosted her up. With Param leaning against the wall while stepping onto his shoulder, she could reach the corner. Naturally, they tried the wrong spot first. Nothing happened and Rigg was ready to despair until she pointed out that they were probably pressing the spot that opened it. Sure enough, when she pressed hard in the other corner—and he knew just how hard, since her feet pressed downward into his shoulders—the wall slid silently back into place. There was no sign that it was any different from the other walls.
When she was back down on the floor, she kissed him on the cheek and then she was gone.
In the whole time he had barely caught a glimpse of her face. The silvery mirrored light in the secret passage, the flickering candlelight in the corridor—Rigg wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her if he saw her in broad daylight.
But she was real and alive and he had finally done what Father told him to do—he had found his sister. And she was expecting him. Father had said that he would set her free.
Father trusted me.
She trusts me now.
I’d better not let her down.
CHAPTER 18
Digging in the Past
“We have nineteen starships,” said Ram. “And only one world.”
“That gives us nineteen times the chance of success,” said the expendable.
“Nineteen times the likelihood of terrible confusion between colonies that have exactly the same personnel,” said Ram. “Nineteen times the likelihood of deadly rivalries, adulteries, even murders. Constant comparison between the lives of persons bearing the same names, DNA, even fingerprints. And in the end, our nineteen ships will still end up populating only one world.”
“We have no likely target worlds for the remaining ships,” said the expendable. “And we have only the one captain.”
“One of the best things about settling the human race on a new planet is that a disaster that strikes one human world won’t affect the other, so the species can’t be extinguished by a single event.”
“Except the explosion of the galactic core,” said the expendable helpfully.
“Yes, there is that chance, but there’s not much we can do about that.”
“Yet,” said the expendable.
“Meanwhile,” said Ram, “I think there’s another benefit we might enhance a little. The plan was always for the human race to exist on two planets. What no one planned was for our colony to be separated by more than eleven thousand years in time from the starfaring culture we came from. There is no chance of interbreeding between Earth and this world. It’s a true Galapagos opportunity to see where genetic drift takes the two versions of the human race in complete isolation for more than four hundred generations.”
“Technically, only this world will have 447 generations, using the average of twenty-five years,” said the expendable. “Earth will have had no time elapse at all.”
“So we will drift genetically, and they will not,” said Ram. “We will evolve and they will not.”
“Eleven thousand years is not really very long, in terms of evolution,” said the expendable. “Human populations that were separated for seventy thousand years during the great drought in Africa remained capable of interbreeding.”
“The separation probably wasn’t complete,” said Ram. “If you’re talking about the genetic bottleneck after the explosion of Mount Toba, it only lasted twenty thousand years. And the southern African group was known to be a seafaring one, since they colonized all around the Indian Ocean, including Australia and New Guinea.”
“I used the longer timespan to make my point clear,” said the expendable, “but even your shorter genetic bottleneck was twice as long as the isolation of this colony is going to last.”
“And at the end of it, modern humans were far different. Longer-legged, lighter in weight. Endurance runners who could chase prey until it collapsed from oxygen depletion. Spear throwers and expert blade makers. Storytellers who could use language to create a map that others could follow through strange lands to find water. Creative thinkers who could learn from others and then innovate and adapt, and then spread the cultural innovations across hundreds of miles in a single generation.”
“You seem to have made a detailed study of this,” said the expendable.
“After your question about the human species, of course I did,” said Ram. “Ten thousand years is plenty of time for real change in the human species, because this time the isolation will be complete.”
“But you have a question for us, dealing with nineteen starships and one world,” said the expendable.
“What if we could establish nineteen colonies, each knowing nothing about the others? They would never encounter their genetic doubles. There would be no rivalry. One would not triumph over all the others. These nineteen colonies, plus Earth, would divide the human race into twenty parts. Potentially, our species could explore twenty different paths of development, genetically, culturally, intellectually. All of human history, all the wars and empires and technology and languages and customs and religions, they all evolved in less time than we’ll have here. There is enough land mass to create nineteen enclaves larger than Europe, larger than the land from Egypt to Persia, larger than the Americas from the Aztecs down to the Incas.”
“No doubt the humans in every enclave will oblige you by becoming Egypt or Athens or Tenochtitlan.”
“I hope not Tenochtitlan,” said Ram. “I’d like to think we’d retain some of the progress we already made back on Earth, and leave human sacrifice behind.”