“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.
Singhfold was also a linguist’s heaven, or would be, if anyone but Singhex traveled enough to realize how many languages were spoken, and how they revealed deep secrets of history by the groups and families of languages, and how they were interlaced among the valleys.
Along with the languages came a variety of folkways—from which valley the young people of a village might seek a spouse, and into which it was forbidden to marry. Some villages practiced strict exogamy; some regarded “foreign” spouses with suspicion and treated their children and grandchildren as strangers.
“I love Singhfold,” said Ram Odin. “My regret is that because I’ve tried to prolong my life by sleeping through the years in stasis, I never have time to visit here for more than a few days. It’s the life I think humans were meant to lead—intensely involved with a community that knows you too well, that’s always in your face and in your business.”
“I think those sound like reasons not to like the life here,” said Rigg.
“People don’t understand how evolution has shaped us to hunger for human company,” said Ram Odin. “Even the shyest of introverts suffer from being alone.”
“Meaning yourself,” said Rigg. “Because what human on Garden has been as much alone as you?”
“I feel it more than most, it’s true,” said Ram Odin. “But that doesn’t mean my observation isn’t true. Shy people might take their doses of companionship like an ill-tasting medicine, but they need it, and they suffer a thousand maladies, physical and mental, if they don’t have it.”
“Well, then, this must be the healthiest place in the world,” said Rigg.
“It is,” said Ram Odin. “Partly because there’s no anonymity. Everybody is always with people who know who they are.”
“No traveling merchants or peddlers? No show people, no bards? No wars to force one village to bow to another?”
“At different times and places such people have arisen, and such events have happened. It’s in human nature to come to blows sometimes. Every few generations, one of the cities of the plain, weary of the struggle to live with little water, gets the grand idea of conquering the mountain valleys.”
“But they fail?”
“Oh, they succeed easily. The valleys don’t have enough people to defend them against a relentless enemy. But the valleys farther in take the refugees, and the people of the plain don’t know how to work the land, or what crops grow. And when do you stop? Which valley is the last one you’ll conquer? Whatever place you choose, the people in all the nearby valleys will shun your trade, and if you’ve been particularly brutal, the neighboring valleys conduct a relentless guerrilla campaign. If the conquerors leave a small force, it will be killed one by one. If they leave a large one, it will starve or freeze.”
“So their history is the same thing over and over,” said Rigg.
“All history is the same thing over and over,” said Ram Odin. “The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don’t. In the valleys of Singhfold, most of the villages and hamlets have found and held on to customs that allow the most happiness for the most people.”
“First you tell me that there’s infinite variety here, and then—”
“The superficial customs vary extravagantly,” said Ram Odin. “But the underlying principles of village civilization are still served by all of them. Which is why Singhfold could reward a lifetime’s study—and can be discovered almost completely in a few days.”