If Rigg went along, then it would be Rigg’s expedition, and if any good came from it, it would be Rigg’s achievement. Not because Rigg took credit. If anything, Rigg shunted praise away from himself. But that very fact would make it all the more likely that people would give him credit for anything Umbo found in the starship.
What Umbo wanted was for Param to go with him. He wanted Param to invite herself, to choose to be with him.
But she was so lost in her own thoughts that Umbo wondered how she managed to get the food into her mouth instead of smearing it all over her face.
She had no use for him, that was plain. But Umbo’s consolation was that she showed no special favor toward Olivenko, either. She wasn’t closing herself off by disappearing constantly, as she had done in Flacommo’s house. So it wasn’t that she objected to their company or fled it; she simply didn’t have the same need to connect with other people that Umbo had.
Nonsense. Human beings had the need to be part of a community, even if they were introverted or shy or suspicious of others, even if they weren’t joiners. So how was Param meeting that need? What was she part of? If it was this group, Umbo saw no sign of it. She treated them as distantly as she did the Odinfolders.
Or maybe she behaved completely differently when Umbo wasn’t around. Maybe the others all regarded Umbo as the weak one, the untrustworthy one. The one who had cried when he found out he wasn’t his father’s son. The one who had been sniping at Rigg in obvious, childish resentment. Umbo wasn’t ashamed of having felt as he did—Rigg really did assume command at times when he didn’t know any more than any of the others. But Umbo wished he had borne it in patience, never letting his resentment show. Because he suspected that now the others all regarded him as the one who couldn’t be told things, or he’d make a scene, cause a problem.
Sometimes it’s better to face a small problem now than a huge one later, that’s how he wanted to answer them.
But since he didn’t absolutely know that they were all freezing him out in order not to rile him, he couldn’t confront anybody about it without seeming paranoid.
Umbo wasn’t a loner. He liked being part of a community. He liked having close friends. He liked feeling accepted and trusted. And when he felt that he wasn’t accepted, wasn’t trusted, it made him feel lonely and angry and hurt and resentful. Precisely the feelings that had probably cost him the others’ trust in the first place.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to try to make things right with Rigg. Let him apologize! He was the one who had created a rift between them, with his officious attitude, the way he and everybody else treated Umbo as if he were unworthy of being consulted.
“I’ll go alone,” said Umbo, wishing that someone, anyone—Loaf, Olivenko—would insist on coming along, if only to look out for him, cover his back.
But of course none of them was so paranoid as to suspect the Odinfolders of being untrustworthy. And so they said nothing, except for Olivenko, who only said, “I wonder if they’ll actually take you there.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Umbo, nonchalantly. It was as close as they’d come to openly discussing the possibility that the Odinfolders were holding them more as prisoners or spies than as compatriots in the common cause.
“It’s a long walk, that’s all I’m thinking. I wonder if they’ll let you use their flyer, the way Loaf did.”
And that was that. The conversation moved on to other things.
That evening, Umbo deliberately avoided running into Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. He knew right where they’d be, because they were as predictable as day and night. So he made sure not to pass near them.
Instead he went out among the housetrees and walked straight up to a tree where he knew several other Odinfolders lived. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”
Eventually a head and shoulders emerged from the center of the tree. “What?” asked the woman tentatively.
“I’m Umbo. One of the Ramfolders.”
“I know who you are,” she said.
“I’m studying the way starships from Earth are designed, and I need to get into the Odinfold starship. How do I call the flyer?”
“You don’t,” said the woman, and then she was gone, having dropped back down into the tree.
So there it was, out in the open. He wasn’t allowed to summon the flyer.
And, just as predictably, within a few minutes Swims-in-the-Air came to find him, a bemused expression on her face. “Why didn’t you ask me or Mouse-Breeder to help you get to the starship?”
“I didn’t run into you inside and came looking for you out here, and then I thought, why not ask one of the others?”
“You’ve been here nearly a year,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Has any of them shown the slightest interest in meeting you?”
“No, and I’ve wondered about that.”
“Why should you wonder?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “You’re a symbol of our failure, after nine tries, to save the world. Here you are, this ragtag group of five, and you’re supposed to succeed where the finest minds of Odinfold have failed again and again and again? What do you think they feel.”
I thought they were forbidden to speak to us. I still think that. But of course he kept such thoughts to himself.
“I’m sorry I intruded on them,” said Umbo. “Fortunately, I think the woman I talked to will recover from the injury I caused her.”
“It was more injury than you think,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “You don’t understand us, what we go through.”
“Go through! This is a utopia, everybody’s happy and everything’s perfect.”
“If I thought you believed that,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “I’d worry about your sanity. But we still have our sense of irony, my young friend. Ours is a bleak and dreadful life here in the borderland, and you’d do well to remember that most of us value our solitude. In fact, all of us do, but Mouse-Breeder and I decided to make ourselves available to you. Somebody had to do it.”
“What do you mean, a bleak and dreadful life?”
“In the shadow of the Wall.”
“So move! Move away from the Wall, take back a few scraps of that vast game preserve.”
Swims-in-the-Air shook her head. “How can you not understand? We have to live near the Wall. We need the Wall.”
“Need it? How can you use the Wall?”
“Why, by walking into it, of course.”
“That would be insane.”
“Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “It fills us with terror and despair, and yet we walk inside the Wall every day, some of us for miles, deep inside, where it’s all we can do to keep from killing ourselves, or going mad with fear.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Why do you think we have no children?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “How do you think we keep ourselves from bonding into families? The Wall is the antidote for our humanity. It keeps us insane enough to reduce our population from six billion to a mere ten thousand. Children come along once a decade.”
“Though even at that rate, we never see them.”
“Him, you mean. Him, the one child who was born shortly before you got here. He lives on the far side of Odinfold. The previously born child is older than you. And that’s it, out of our entire wallfold. Two children.”
“Yours, then?” asked Umbo, thinking of that part of her name.
“My children are only thirty or forty years younger than me,” she answered. “They’re not children anymore, and I don’t keep track of their movements.”
“But you keep track of mine.”
“There are dangers here. But yes, Umbo, since you ask so sweetly, I’ll take you to our starship.”