“The mice got their species-wrecking plague from somewhere.”
“Oh, you might go farther,” said Ram Odin. “They probably enhanced it, and tested it in some of the villages.”
Rigg took that in for a moment.
“You did understand that the mice are not human. They have no more qualms about testing a disease on human subjects than we would have testing it on mice.”
“They got their sentience from us,” said Rigg.
“And for how many generations should that make them grateful and subservient? But I don’t know they did this. I’m only guessing from what I know about them. They did kill Param, though.”
“That was the Odinfolders’ idea, wasn’t it?”
“It might have been,” said Ram Odin. “But for a long time now, all Odinfolder decisions are based on data that is supplied to them…”
“By the mice,” said Rigg.
“So whether the mice decided for themselves, or provided shaped data to the Odinfolders so they reached the desired conclusion—”
“Nothing much happens in Odinfold unless it’s what the mice want,” said Rigg.
“I think that’s a fair way of summing it up.”
“So this business of the Odinfolders reshaping their own bodies into stumpy dung-throwers, into yahoos—”
“They began that before they began mouse-breeding.”
“Oh. It just seemed like deliberate humiliation, as if the mice were getting even.”
“For what?” asked Ram Odin.
“For making them mice,” said Rigg. “They, who have the genes to be human, to have hands, to stand tall. I’d say there’s grounds for resentment.”
“Irrational grounds.”
“Resentment is irrational,” said Rigg.
“Not always,” said Ram Odin. “Like Umbo’s resentment of you.”
“How is that rational!”
“Now, now, Rigg. Leave out how it makes you feel. Umbo doesn’t have his feelings in order to annoy or hurt you. Umbo has good reason for thinking of himself as perhaps the more talented timeshaper. Yet because of the way you were educated, because you’re the son of the king—however empty that title might be—everyone defers to you, and nobody defers to him.”
“I do,” said Rigg.
“But he thinks of that as condescension.”
“Umbo is the only friend I have,” said Rigg. “I’m sorry his resentment is ruining that. But that certainly applies to the mice. Humans made them. Why? To have convenient slave-mice. Yet they think of themselves as selves, they see the whole group of them as a people. A great civilization. So it’s not unnatural for them to resent humans in general, and Odinfolders in particular.”
“And yet we’re sending a batch of them along with Noxon to try to save the human race on Garden.”
Rigg chuckled at that. “To save Garden. If it also saves the humans, they can put up with that unintended outcome. For a while longer.”
“Maybe we’ve underestimated the danger of the mice,” said Ram Odin.
“If Janefold is as dangerous as you say. If all the other wallfolds are as vulnerable as the Americas when the Europeans came. Then the mice already have the power to pick up those plagues and put them wherever they want. In effect, as soon as the mice decide, the Wall is down as far as disease is concerned. They use our timeshaping to save Garden, and then get rid of us just as the Destroyers did—only with more finesse. Leaving the mice to inherit the planet.”
“Devious,” said Ram Odin.
“But possible.”
“Using us now, planning to kill us later.”
“They really do have human genes,” said Rigg.
“I wish we hadn’t sent them with Noxon,” said Ram Odin.
“Maybe sending them with Noxon,” said Rigg, “is the only reason the mice allowed him to go. Maybe it’s the only reason they’re letting us live. Because if all humans are gone before the Visitors arrive, then…”
“Then they have no reason to come back and destroy all life on Garden.”
“I think we’re talking ourselves into a serious case of musophobia,” said Rigg.
“Or maybe you go back in time and warn Noxon before he left,” said Ram Odin.
“He left?”
“A few days ago. Were you going to have a tearful good-bye?”
Rigg ignored the sarcasm. “Time enough to stop him when the plague starts.”
“Maybe they kill you before they start the plague,” said Ram Odin.
“The facemask will protect me from the mice, even if it can’t protect me from the plague.”
“Probably so,” said Ram Odin. “And for all we know, the mice are deeply devoted to us.”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “And whatever xenocide they commit against our species, they’ll regret it and sing little mouse songs about it for a thousand years.”
Ram Odin looked very earnest. “I would rather Garden survive with mice as the dominant species, and not a human left, than to have no life on this world at all.”
“Then you are even less trustworthy than I thought,” said Rigg.
Chapter 14
Opportunists
“I’m not going to experiment with timeflow on this ship until we’re in much closer proximity to Earth.”
“We’re invisible to them right now,” said Ram Odin, “but when we rejoin the normal flow of time, we’ll be perfectly visible. And if you don’t speed us up or slow us down, we’ll also be trying to occupy the same space as the original of this ship.”
“I know,” said Noxon.
“In fact, anywhere you put us back into the normal timeflow,” said Ram Odin, “we’re going to make a big explosion, because we’ll be exactly, atom for atom, in the same space as the original ship.”
“You’re telling me how timeshaping works?” Noxon tried not to sound too scornful, but didn’t think he succeeded.
But Ram Odin took it. “Then explain to me why we won’t explode.”
“I’m not playing with timeflow here because there’s not too much I can do. The only paths visible to me are your own—your own since the jump, when this version of the ship came into being. Nothing from the outbound voyage.”
“And you need these paths to travel in time?”
“I need them to travel into the past. I also suspect I’ll need them to get us back into the normal timeflow.”
“So you have to get back to where there are more people and therefore more paths.”
“Yes. And I need to get to a place where the past is deeper, reaching much farther back.”
“That still doesn’t solve the exploding starship problem,” said Ram Odin.
“If I can find a path at all that’s going the right way,” said Noxon, “it will be farther in the past. Therefore, when I jump to it, the original ship will already be somewhere else, so we won’t be in the same space and time.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.”
“If I can do this at all,” said Noxon, “I’ll make sure I jump us back to a time when there were no starships. No satellites. Nothing for us to collide with. And nobody on Earth prepared to think of this starship as anything other than a point of light—a meteor or planet or previously undiscovered star.”
“Yes, that would be a stealthy return to Earth,” said Ram Odin. “But then?”
“If we’re going the right direction, then I can slice time forward so that in a few days, we can return to a more useful time.”
“But then the starship will appear in a time when people will notice it.”
“I didn’t say I’d bring the starship forward into the future with us,” said Noxon. “We can stash it in the past and go back and get it when we need it again.”