“It’s a bitter story.”
“The man built another house years later, and he has five children now.”
“Is it someone we know? Not our host, I hope.”
“You’ve talked with him some in the Cave,” said Rigg. “He’s never said a word to me, but he has friends, a normal life. She was his one obsession, and he never did such a thing again.”
“So much for having no anonymity here in these villages,” said Ram Odin.
“This house-building thing,” said Rigg. “If they all pretend not to know who’s a-building, that means they don’t cast their eyes toward a house under construction. The first floor of these houses is always half buried, so once a man has dug the hole, he’s out of sight. But they know who’s gathering stones from old abandoned houses and reusing them. If I even said, ‘It was a man who had built a house for her,’ I’ll bet they’d figure out who it was, pretty quick.”
“They just wouldn’t be able to figure out how you knew,” said Ram Odin.
“Exactly. But if I go back in time, I can prevent it.”
“Really? How?”
Rigg knew Ram Odin was taunting him. “There are plenty of ways. Distract her and keep her from going after the ewe that day.”
“He’d just wait for another day. You plan on spending your life watching her?”
“Maybe I’d have a talk with him. He’s bigger than me but with the facemask I’m a match for anyone.”
“A match? How would such a fight end?”
“I wouldn’t have any qualms about killing a murderer.”
“But when you do it, he won’t be a murderer yet.”
“Even if he hasn’t done it yet, he built that house with space behind the wall to hide a corpse.”
“I’m surprised the stink of putrefaction didn’t bring them.”
Rigg shook his head. “The body wouldn’t have rotted yet when they went searching. And people avoid a house under construction that hasn’t been offered yet. I would have to actually go to that time to know whether the house was finished at the time, but I’m guessing not. I think he took her to a house that only had the walls up to ground level, say, and he said, ‘I’m building this for you, say you’ll marry me,’ but after she went missing, he still had months of work to do on it. So they’d think he hadn’t asked a girl yet, and the girl he wanted was one of the ones of age. If he was smart, he’d wait until a likely girl accepted another man’s house, and then stop his own building. So nobody would think he built the house for Onishtu.”
“What you’re really saying,” said Ram Odin, “is that you prefer to kill this man. You think he deserves to die. And I agree—today, even after all these years, he deserves whatever penalty these people put on a rapist and cold-blooded murderer. But when you go back in time, Rigg, he won’t be a murderer.”
“No, he’ll just be a man planning murder.”
“But at that point, he still might not do it. He might even believe that he won’t really do it, even as he hollows out that space for her body.”
“It doesn’t matter. I know he does it.”
“You know, from here, that he did it. But when you’re there, do you see his future path?”
“Of course not.”
“You can’t just go killing people because you know they’re going to do something terrible.”
“Explain to me why not,” said Rigg.
“Because until he does the murder, he doesn’t deserve to die.”
Rigg shook his head. “But I know.”
“But justice doesn’t know,” said Ram Odin. “Look at it the other way. In your own life, when you did something stupid and wrong, Umbo would appear to you and warn you not to do it after all. So you were constantly undoing your own actions and trying something else. So… did you do those bad things, or didn’t you?”
“The me-that-was did them, but I didn’t.”
“Should you be punished for your misdeeds? How many times did Umbo and Loaf try to break into that bank to get the missing jewel back? Are they thieves?”
Rigg shook his head.
“And why not? Say it, Rigg Sessamekesh.”
“Because they didn’t actually do it. The realities in which they did are gone.”
“And the reality in which this man killed Onishtu also doesn’t exist, at the time you plan to kill him.”
“It’s not the same.” Rigg understood his point, but he couldn’t doubt the reality of what he knew about this man. And how much more valuable Onishtu’s life was than any justice owed to her murderer.
“Fine,” said Ram Odin. “I see you’re not convinced, but I don’t mind, because that’s not my real argument.”
“You have another?” Rigg almost laughed. “A stronger one?”
“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “If you save her, will she never die?”
“No, of course she’ll die. But she might never be raped.”
“Do you plan to undo all the rapes and murders that ever happened in Singhfold?”
“If that’s your argument, then—”
“That’s groundwork. Listen up. You don’t know if saving her from this admittedly terrible death will prolong her life for a week or ninety years. You don’t know if the life you’re giving her will be happy or sad.”
“I don’t even care about that,” said Rigg. “All I care about is that she have the right to choose her own life.”
“Because the life she chooses to live, that’s who she is, yes? She’ll decide whether to be joyful or sad within the events and years of her life, yes?”
“That’s what life is.”
“That’s what life is, unless a timeshaper comes along,” said Ram Odin.
“Oh, come on,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to make her do anything.”
“You’re going to make this murderer die without having raped or murdered anybody,” said Ram Odin. “So what happens to this man’s eventual wife and children?”
“She marries somebody else.”
“So those children never exist.”
Rigg had no answer that sounded right in his own mind. But he said one of them, anyway. “Never existing is not the same thing as murdering somebody.”
“But you’ll be taking away all those choices in life. Those children will never exist so they’ll never have those experiences, they’ll never become anybody at all. At least Onishtu had years enough to win the hearts of a village, to live on in their memory, to color the way the whole valley looks at the world outside. But now they’ll never become who they are.”
“Suspicious and resentful and sad,” said Rigg.
“Have they gone to war over it? Made a revenge raid on another village? Killed one girl in each of the other valleys in order to retaliate?”