“Loaf’s ability to hear the mice and keep track of them was one of the reasons I knew I needed to have a facemask of my own. For this voyage.”
“Kill them,” said Ram Odin. “I know they’re not ordinary mice, but this was treason.”
“I’m not king,” said Noxon. “Well, technically I suppose I am, in Aressa Sessamo, but that’s a dangerous thing to be. I’m not going to kill them. I might need them.”
“For what?” asked Ram Odin. “You can’t trust them.”
“I can trust them to do what they think is in their own interest,” said Noxon.
“In the interest of the world of Garden,” said a mouse.
“In the interest of the mice of Garden,” Noxon corrected him.
There was no argument from the mice.
“But now I’m sure that I will slice time with you,” said Noxon to Ram Odin. “Only we’ll bring the mice with us. The less time they have to figure out ways to fiddle with the ship, the better off we’ll be.” Then Noxon turned to the expendable. “Thank you for your quick action.”
“It was the obvious thing to do,” said the expendable. “Remember that I have a complete record of all the things the mice have done. Including the attempt to send a devastating plague to Earth, and the murder of Param. I have been watching the mice continuously since you appeared here. I recognized them as soon as the memory transfer was complete.”
“Thank you for taking the obvious action, then,” said Noxon.
The expendable nodded graciously.
“Give me your hand,” said Noxon to Ram Odin. Noxon scooped up the box of mice, tucking it against his body. “By the way,” Noxon asked the expendable, “why did you happen to have an empty box lying around?”
“This is a colony ship,” said the expendable. “We have hundreds of containers of various sizes for the use of the colonists.”
“They can’t chew through this, can they?” asked Noxon.
“It would break their little teeth,” said the expendable.
“Then by all means,” said Noxon to the mice, “go ahead and give it a try.”
“I’ve seen people talk to their pets before,” said Ram Odin, “but you’re the first person who actually got answers.”
“Not this time,” said Noxon. “I think they’re pouting.”
“They had a near-death experience,” said Ram Odin. “I think I know just how low our friend here took the oxygen level. They were desperate for air.”
“As we will be,” said Noxon, “if I can’t take the ship with us back to regular time.”
“Cheer up,” said Ram Odin. “You probably won’t be able to find regular time, so it’s a moot question. But let’s get close to Earth and see.”
Noxon turned to the expendable. “We’ll be moving very quickly. What should I look at to know when we’re nearing the gravity well of Earth, but are still outside it?”
“Gravity goes on forever,” said the expendable. “The Earth is already exerting a faint but noticeable tug on this ship. What threshold am I looking for?”
“I don’t know,” said Noxon.
“When we come within the average orbital distance of Pluto,” said Ram Odin.
“I didn’t even think about the outer planets,” said Noxon. “What if one of them captures our timeflow?”
“We don’t come in through the plane of the ecliptic. Our course brings us toward Earth from the North Pole. Or rather toward L5, a point balanced between the gravity wells of Earth and the Moon.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I don’t think this will work if we’re at such a point of balance.”
“As we approach,” said Ram Odin reassuringly, “Earth will have a much stronger pull on us than the Moon, until right before we arrive at the point where this ship was built.”
Noxon thought of something else. “Do you have any control over this ship?” he asked.
The expendable cocked his head. “The other computers and I are the ship.”
“No. I mean… can you make the ship go where you want?”
“I haven’t tried to change it,” said the expendable.
“We’re facing the wrong way,” said Ram Odin. “If we could deploy our ram scoop it would still be behind us. So we’re not capable of gathering fuel. The engines seem to be running, but I don’t know how.”
“Our best calculation,” said the expendable, “is that as hydrogen dust is consumed in the engines of the outbound ship, it powers the movement of both ships, the outbound and the inbound.”
“So matter is crossing over.”
“No,” said the expendable. “It remains entirely in the normal timeflow.”
“Then energy is crossing.”
“No,” said the expendable. “Energy and matter are the same thing, in a fusion engine.”
“Something is crossing over,” said Ram Odin impatiently.
“As near as we can tell,” said the expendable, “and that’s not very near, because there is no way to measure this, the only thing crossing over is momentum.”
“Is momentum actually a thing, in physics?” asked Noxon.
“It is not,” said the expendable, “at least not the way we’re using the term. Our hypothesis is that there’s some unknown force binding the subatomic particles to each other, forward and backward.”
“You know what?” asked Ram Odin. “I don’t actually care how it works. I only know that when and if we do break free and jump back into ordinary time, we’ll be hurtling toward Earth in reverse. That’s another argument in favor of making the switch before we come too close to Earth.”
“Yet if we try it too far out, we can’t bring the ship with us,” said Noxon.
“That’s all we were doing,” said a mouse. “Trying to figure these things out in advance.”
“I believe you completely,” said Noxon to the mice.
“No you don’t,” said the mouse.
“Apparently you don’t believe me,” said Noxon.
“I will alert you by standing exactly here and raising my arm like this when we’re approaching Earth but are still well back from it. Maybe a week or two out. Would that be good?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “Make it three weeks. I want to see when I start getting a sense of paths that are tied to Earth rather than to spaceships. And that means I need to start looking well before the point of no return.”
“So shall we slice time?” asked Ram Odin. “I’m looking forward to my first actual time-shift.”
“You just had one.”
“Only an hour or so. And I didn’t feel anything.”
“You won’t feel anything. Nothing in the ship will change, unless he moves around. We’ll be moving, of course, but if I do this right, we won’t complete even a single step.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Ram Odin. “We have nothing to lose but seven years of mind-numbing boredom.”
“All right,” said Noxon, and he took a step as he sliced forward.
Chapter 15
Building a House
Singhfold wasn’t all up-and-down, mountains and valleys—there was a coastal plain, and some high plateaus. But the level ground was in the rain shadow of the mountains, and those who lived there scratched out a living by damming the occasional streams and laboriously irrigating the fields.
In most of the mountain valleys, however, rain fell often, and snow-fed streams never disappeared. The ground was rarely level, and farming required terracing. But nimble goats and sheep thrived on the grass that grew wherever the snow abated, and if winters were long, there were many labors that resulted in artifacts for trade. It was a good life for people who were willing to work hard, and each community learned to be self-sufficient.