“Then unless Umbo’s an idiot,” said Loaf, “it’s unanimous.”
“I’m an idiot,” said Umbo, “but I still vote for it. Which should prove to all of you that it’s an absolutely stupid idea.”
“I agree,” said Rigg. “It’s cowardly and overly cautious and I wish somebody would think of a better plan. But for the meantime, it’s what we’re planning to do. Right?”
Right.
CHAPTER 14
The Knife
Umbo had always had mixed feelings about school. On the one hand, it got him away from home, and he didn’t have to work all that hard. On the other hand, he envied his friend Rigg for the way he only came to school now and then, and spent the rest of the year out in the deep forest with his father, trapping animals and bringing home the furs.
Then he learned that Rigg’s time in the forest was spent in a kind of schooling far more rigorous than the country school Umbo attended. And, after traveling with Rigg in varying degrees of wilderness, from the edges of civilization beside the Stashik River to the untouched wilderness of Vadeshfold, and seeing how hard Rigg had to work to find food and water for them all, and good campsites where they’d be safe from animals, Umbo had a new appreciation for the rigors of that supposedly free life that Rigg had lived.
Here in Odinfold, Umbo felt like he was back in school—and as a rather poor student, too. Knowing he could never catch up with Rigg’s sophisticated education, Olivenko’s deep scholarly training with King Knosso, and Param’s courtly training at her mother’s knee, Umbo set himself a much simpler, but very practical task—to learn everything he could about the starships from Earth.
He worked hard at this, and mastered it as well as could be expected. Now that he knew he had the heredity to be very bright, he enjoyed testing his own memory, wondering if he was a match for Rigg’s nearly perfect recall, or even Rigg’s superior.
But it was all a deception, because Umbo had a much more important purpose—one he could not speak of to anyone, not until he learned something useful.
There were deep holes in the things that the Odinfolders had told them, subjects they simply didn’t touch on. Moreover, the only Odinfolders who ever spoke to them were Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. They were affable, likeable, patient adults—but Umbo didn’t like the fact that apparently the rest of the people who lived here near the Wall were either forbidden to talk to the Ramfolders or uninterested in them, which seemed extravagantly unlikely.
Weren’t the Odinfolders supposed to be completely free? Weren’t they brilliant, creative people? Why, then, were they acting so incurious? Here were people who could manipulate the flow of time as if it were just another bodily function, and the Odinfolders didn’t want to meet them, talk to them, see a demonstration? No, there was a reason nobody talked to them, and Umbo was pretty sure that it was to keep the Ramfolders from learning things that the Odinfolders didn’t want them to know.
They only had the Odinfolders’ word for it that any person that developed serious weapons would be killed, that they had broken into the programs that controlled the Wall but for some reason couldn’t break into the programs controlling the orbiters. It also seemed unbelievable to Umbo that the Odinfolders were really going to leave all the decisions up to the Ramfolders. That had to be illusory. They would think they were making the decisions, but in fact they were being shaped, forced into a certain path by the information the Odinfolders gave them, and the information they withheld.
Yet how could he discuss his doubts with any of his party? Down in the library, surrounded by mice that seemed to understand human speech, it seemed likely that everything they said was recorded for later study by the Odinfolders. And the mice were outdoors, too. A spy network covering the entire wallfold.
One question that bothered Umbo was the way the villages of the ten thousand remaining Odinfolders were all clustered near the Wall, according to their own maps, leaving the vast center of their country for the animals, which were reputedly wild but were quite possibly as domesticated as the mice.
Another question was why all the wallfolds were named for the colonist who played the dominant role in their earliest years. And yet this wallfold and Umbo’s home wallfold were both named for the same man, Ram Odin, the captain of the starship. Supposedly Ram Odin had only come to the surface of Garden in the one fold, Ramfold; why, then, was Odinfold also named for him? And if the story was wrong, and there was a copy of Ram Odin in every wallfold, just as there was a copy of everyone else, why did he dominate in only two of the colonies? Why not all of them?
Yet these matters were not discussed in any of the books Umbo found. He deliberately asked for books that dealt with the earliest history of all the wallfolds, supposedly looking for references to the starships buried in each wallfold, but what he searched for was any reference to Ram Odin. Yet even in Ramfold and Odinfold, it was as if the man were legendary from the start, never actually living among the people.
How could he not live among them? He had descendants—the time-shifters of Ramfold were supposedly all descended from him. Were the time-shifting machines of the Odinfolders also using some ability that came from Ram Odin? Had he fathered children in both wallfolds? If so, then why not others?
Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air were so nice, so patient, so wise—but Umbo wondered how nice they’d be if he started asking these questions openly. They were such obvious matters that Umbo couldn’t believe he was the only one who thought of them—yet no one said anything or asked anything. It was as if they all knew that these subjects were forbidden even to think about.
But Umbo thought about them. Thought and studied and tried to get around the lack of information, but what the Odinfolders didn’t want him to find, he did not find.
After the meeting where they had decided to do nothing and merely observe the Visitors this time around, Umbo went back to his lonely studies, just as the others did. Oh, they were sociable enough at mealtimes, sharing interesting tidbits from their research, joking with each other, offering theories about the people of Earth. But they never said anything personal or important, at least not in front of Umbo.
Is everyone silent with everyone else? Umbo wondered. Or is it just around me that they say nothing significant? Am I being frozen out, or are we all living in private worlds?
Human beings were not meant to lead such solitary lives.
And then one day it dawned on him that he might have a tool that would let him get answers in spite of the Odinfolders’ evasions, deceptions, and concealments. He had the knife.
The knife that the Odinfolders admitted to having made and then planted on the person Rigg stole it from, the first time they deliberately combined their talents in order to travel into the past. The knife that had replicas of the nineteen jewels embedded in the hilt.
How faithfully had the stones been replicated? Could they also control the ships? Control the Wall? Could the knife be used to communicate with the orbiters?
What had the Odinfolders made it for? Why had they given it to them? What did they make of the fact that it was Umbo who had been in control of it since Rigg was arrested in O, and even after his escape, when he could have taken it back?
Yet how could Umbo test the knife? What could he possibly do without being reported on to the Odinfolders?
And then it dawned on him: Why conceal it? Why not simply ask to go to the ship that was buried somewhere in the heart of Odinfold? It was a natural culmination of his study of the starships.
“I need to go to the starship,” Umbo announced at dinner.
“Want company?” asked Rigg. “Or is this a solitary adventure?”