“They suffer.”
“They have a wistful memory of an extraordinary child whom they all loved and whose disappearance shattered them. But they’ve turned it into something rather ennobling and fine, even if it looks like a shadow to you. They all share this grief. It helps unite them.”
“Including the man who actually did it.”
“Maybe it tortures him,” said Ram Odin. “Maybe he doesn’t care. What difference does that make to the other people? That girl’s life changed them all, and her death changed them all. People see the world differently because she’s gone. I don’t know how that changed their behavior, their decisions, and neither do you. But maybe there are marriages that didn’t happen, jobs that were done differently, or not done at all, because of the shadow of Onishtu’s life and disappearance. You don’t know how their lives and choices would be different. But you arrogantly assume that because her death was awful, that gives you the right to take away all the lives that have been lived in this valley since she was buried under that window.”
Rigg sat very still, thinking, thinking. “It’s what the Odinfolders did—sent back messages that wiped out billions of lives.”
“Their lives! Their own lives. And they chose to send back the Future Book in order to save the world. A knowing sacrifice. Who is getting a choice if you save this one girl from her murderer?”
“She is.”
“And nobody else. Give one girl a few more years, and obliterate all the other lives that have been lived after her death—including the children of her murderer and his wife. Do they deserve to die for a crime their father committed before they were born?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. You can lie to yourself but don’t lie to me. Because remember, you think of me as a murderer even though I never killed you—but you did kill me. Noxon didn’t, because you came back and prevented him. So tell me, Rigg. Are you and Noxon both killers? I won’t say murderers, because according to your story you acted in self-defense—and I believe you, I know I was thinking about it, I had decided to do it, but this man talking to you right now, Rigg, this me never made the final decision to take your life. But you are the very one who deliberately, calculatedly went back in time and killed me first, before I could kill you. And then you regretted it.”
“I killed you because I believed that it was you, alone, who triggered the destruction of Garden. Not just because you tried to kill me. I could have dodged you forever, to keep myself alive. I killed you to save the world.”
“But it turns out you were wrong and I didn’t blow up Garden and obliterate the life that I had been tending for eleven thousand years! What a shock! How could you have guessed!”
“I undid the killing,” said Rigg, quieting himself. The last thing they needed to do was let their shouting in the cold night air bring curious people to the barn. “I was wrong, and I undid it, and I believe you are not dead, sir.”
“And this murderer—I wonder if, after a while, he came to wish he hadn’t done it. I wonder if he might not have chosen to go back in time and stop himself from killing her—even at the risk of causing two copies of himself to exist.”
“He can’t. Nobody can. Just me and Noxon and Umbo. And the mice, in their own way. Everybody else is stuck with whatever choices they made. I know.”
“So you think because you can undo a terrible mistake like killing an innocent man—me, because I never killed anybody and I did not destroy the world—because you can undo it, you’re not a murderer. You’re an ex-killer, a former killer, but you unkilled me so—”
“I get your point. Two points. One, that I don’t have the right to wipe out all the things this village has done in response to Onishtu’s death. Two, that I don’t have the right to kill him before he has killed. You think people have the right to be vile before they get punished for their vileness. By that reckoning, do we have to let the Destroyers wipe out all life on Garden before we take action to prevent them?”
“If you can’t see the difference…”
“I can see lots of differences. I can see differences between all your comparisons.”
“Think, Rigg. When Umbo and Param prevented those plague-infected mice from boarding the Visitors’ ship, they made the decision that saving human life on Garden was not worth wiping out human life on Earth. There’s actually a limit to what they would allow the mice to do in order to save our world.”
“Noxon’s going to take mice with him.”
“Not plague mice, Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m telling you that yes, you can prevent the destruction of Garden and yes, in the process there may be people you have to kill or cause not to exist in order to prevent the death of a world. But you try to make as little change as possible. You don’t just decide that to save this one girl, you can wipe out innocent children and make it so their lives never happen.”
Rigg just sat there, not really thinking, because he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent Onishtu’s death after all, but he hated himself for listening to Ram Odin, and he now felt as ashamed as if he had stood at the door and watched the murder and had done nothing to prevent it. Because that was pretty much how things stood. He had the power to stop the rape and murder, and he wasn’t going to stop it, and it hurt.
“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m only urging you to follow the course you and Umbo have followed all along. Minimal change. All the things you did affected mostly yourselves, and nobody else’s life was going to be all that changed by it. And you were contained within Ramfold, so nothing you did could possibly transform any of the other wallfolds. Noxon and Param went off by themselves to practice chronomancy, so they wouldn’t go back in time where it might change the course of the Larfolders’ lives. And in Yinfold, you didn’t prevent the adulterous pair and you didn’t even tell on them. In fact, you covered up their betrayal so that greater evil wouldn’t come from it.”
“Adultery is not the rape and murder of a child.”
“I know that,” said Ram Odin. “And so do you. I’m talking about the principle of minimal change.”
“To be able to stop it, and choose not to, that makes me complicit.”
“No!” said Ram Odin sharply. “You have this godlike power to force other people not to do evil, but to choose not to use it doesn’t make you evil. It says that you respect other people’s freedom enough to allow them to choose to do terrible things. To reveal who they are by the choices they actually make, the things they actually do. If you didn’t have this godlike power, if you had lived in this village and realized what the murderer was going to do, and you came and saw what he was doing and decided to let it happen, then you’d be complicit. But you have a godlike power to compel people to be better—or at least less awful—than they wish to be. How many people can you keep from being moral monsters? You children are going to try to stop the destruction of a world—but even then, there are limits to how you’ll go about doing it. There are limits! The only reason you can be trusted with this power is that there are limits.”