“How long since we buried them?” asked Ram Odin.
“Not sure how precisely we handled our return time, but I’m betting they’re still in there,” said Noxon.
“If you open the box to see,” said Ram Odin, “they’ll be out of it in a second and we’ll never get them back.”
“Oh, I have no intention of letting them out,” said Noxon. “What I’m wondering is, what are the odds that as soon as we slice forward in time from here, the flyer will return and the expendable will dig them up?”
“I think seventy-five percent against it,” said Ram Odin. “But it’s impossible to be sure.”
“In my experience, the only creatures more devious than the mice are the expendables.”
“To be fair,” said Ram Odin, “their deviousness on Garden could have been due to their following Old Ram’s instructions.”
“They’re very good at giving truthful answers to the wrong questions,” said Noxon.
“And humans are very good at coming up with all the wrong questions,” said Ram Odin.
“We never have complete control over anything,” said Noxon.
“No,” said Ram Odin. “Because at some point, we have to trust machines and people to do what they say they’ll do.”
“And every now and then,” said Noxon, “their disobedience is actually wiser than if they had done what we commanded. Because they have their own wisdom, and we have no guarantee that ours is wiser.”
“Trust and obedience,” said Ram Odin. “Every cruel dictator in history has only had the power to do evil because so many other people were willing to obey him and carry out his orders.”
“And every wise and good leader has been repeatedly stymied,” said Noxon, “because no matter how wise his commands, some bureaucrat somewhere believed that it wasn’t in his self-interest to carry them out.”
“So what are you going to do about this?” asked Ram Odin.
“Well,” said Noxon. “I could stay here with you and slice time for a few months, watching to see if the flyer returns. We wouldn’t leave the surface here until we were sure the mice were dead.”
“We’d also see that we didn’t return from the future during that time,” said Ram Odin.
“The first time through, we’d see that,” said Noxon. “The problem is that the second time through, we would see ourselves come back, and that would change our behavior, and therefore it would create two new copies of the two of us because we would then behave differently.”
“At least we’d know the mice and the expendables hadn’t disobeyed us,” said Ram Odin.
“There are enough copies of me in the universe,” said Noxon, “and way past enough copies of you.”
“I can only agree,” said Ram Odin.
“So I think our best course of action,” said Noxon, “is to assume the mice are still alive, assume the flyer won’t return to liberate them, and get out of here so our future selves have time to get here and dig them up alive if the expendable hasn’t already done it.”
“And if the mice happen to be dead already?” asked Ram Odin.
“We’ll shed a gentle tear or two, and move on,” said Noxon. “It’ll only matter if it turns out we needed them. And if we really need them, we can always come back to the moment right after we buried them and flew away.”
“Which is another reason not to dig them up right now,” said Ram Odin.
“I really don’t want to know whether they’re still there,” said Noxon. “Because if they’re gone, it means our mission failed and we needed them to destroy the human race.”
“So we don’t wait for the flyer,” said Ram Odin.
“It’s time for us to get on with our mission,” said Noxon. He held out his hand. Ram Odin took it.
Noxon sliced rapidly forward in huge leaps, until he reached a time with human paths nearby. Then he sliced his way ahead until their original marker appeared. And beyond. And beyond. Until there were paths of people in airplanes flying overhead. Lots of them.
That was when they hiked their way out. Within a half hour, they were among tourists.
“Of course, we don’t have passports,” said Ram Odin.
“What’s a passport?” asked Noxon.
“Believe me, Noxon, up to now we’ve only been dealing with time-shifting, the laws of causality, computers that lie, and perfidious talking mice. Now we’ll be dealing with bureaucrats. This is when it gets complicated.”
Chapter 19
Council of War
The time-shifters and their friends gathered beside the stream where the Larfolders assembled to tell tales, to learn to walk, and to make decisions that required speech. Their intention was only to greet each other, as Olivenko returned to them from Odinfold, and Umbo, Loaf, and Leaky from Ramfold.
Inevitably, they gave an account of themselves. Loaf and Leaky had a baby to explain—though of course it was Umbo who did the explaining, because he had rescued Square before removing the future in which he had been born. That tale could not be told without a mention of the Rebel King, and of Captain Toad, the ugly soldier who was leading raids all over Stashiland.
“I don’t know if we should go to war,” said Param, “merely because it seems we’ve already done so.”
“I think we always intended to,” said Rigg. “Why else did we send Olivenko to study military history and strategy? Why else did you need to learn to slice backward as well as forward in time?”
“But now that we’re face to face with it,” said Param, “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it.”
“Maybe that’s why the people I met spoke only of the Rebel King,” said Umbo.
“Even that is significant,” said Olivenko. “Rigg’s the son of King Knosso. Shouldn’t they be calling him ‘the rightful king’?”
“Only after we win,” said Umbo. “Right now, if Haddamander’s soldier came through town and somebody remembered you ever saying ‘the rightful king’ about Rigg Sessamekesh…”
“You’re missing the point,” said Loaf. “‘The Rebel King’ isn’t referring to Rigg. Rigg is obviously Captain Toad, and he isn’t making any claim to the Tent of Light. The Rebel King is the husband of Queen Param.”
“I was afraid of that,” said Umbo.
“Though at some point,” said Rigg, “Param and you really should make it official. The sooner you have an heir, the better.”
“That’s… practical,” said Umbo.
“And really intrusive,” said Param.
“You know you have to go to war,” said Olivenko. “Rigg and Ram Odin decided the Walls aren’t coming down—we all agreed to that, once we heard the things they learned. But we still have to live somewhere. For now, the Larfolders are providing us a refuge, mostly because they don’t spend that much time on land. But Larfold has mice all over it.”
“Not to mention mermasks in the water,” said Param. “If we tried to live here, our children or grandchildren would envy the Larfolders their life in the sea, and they’d ask for mermasks and leave the land and become…”
“Become a different kind of human being,” said Rigg. “It wouldn’t be a tragedy, but it’s not wrong for us, as land dwellers, to want our children to build lives on the land.”
“Vadeshfold is empty,” said Loaf.
“But it has wild facemasks in the water,” said Umbo.
“There’s an obvious solution to that,” said Loaf. “Anyone who has a facemask like mine will be immune to the wild facemasks.”
“But not everyone can bear them,” said Leaky. Her tone of voice was emotional, bordering on anger.
“I’m only saying,” said Loaf, “that we shouldn’t think of Vadeshfold as empty.” He touched his facemask, which was still obvious, even though it had gone so far toward converging with a natural human face. “Someday, there may be people who want to live with these as closely as the Larfolders live with their mermasks. Vadeshfold should belong to them.”