“So what is Captain Toad doing in his raids?” asked Rigg. “Considering that if I’m Captain Toad, I’m no soldier.”
“You could be,” said Loaf. “It takes training, but if there’s one thing we have, it’s time enough to do whatever we want.”
“Training would be good,” said Olivenko, “but what I had in mind was a place of refuge and a source of supplies. And here’s where Ram Odin becomes part of whatever we do. In ordinary guerrilla campaigns, the rebels have to hide. Since they’re constantly being betrayed by people who want the reward money, they have to move frequently. They can’t bring their wives and children. They can’t farm or even store up food against the winter.”
“You want a safe refuge on the far side of the Wall,” said Ram Odin.
“Where Ramfold, Vadeshfold, and Larfold come together, the land is fertile and there’s plenty of rain and good streams.”
“Some have facemask spores in them,” said Ram Odin.
“I think you’re perfectly capable of eradicating them from any stream you choose,” said Olivenko. “All I ask is that you pull back the boundary of Vadeshfold and make an enclave that isn’t inside any of the three wallfolds. Then when we recruit fighters for the rebel army, they bring their families. They farm. They hunt. They make weapons. They train. They stockpile food.”
“That could take years,” said Loaf.
“But you can always give yourself years,” said Olivenko. “Don’t make this enclave now. Make it ten years ago. The people we recruit will be the ones who are angry—their number will increase, but we can start small. The first recruits will clear land. They’ll have children. One village will turn into two or three or four.”
“Ten years ago,” said Loaf, “the People’s Revolutionary Council was the government, and the only people who hated them and wanted to rebel were former nobles like General Citizen and Param’s mother.”
“But we won’t recruit people ten years ago,” said Olivenko. “That’s just where we go to build up supplies. You bring the first recruits to the place ten years ago; then you bring later recruits to nine years ago, and eight, with each new increment clearing more land, farming more food, mining more ore, making more weapons. Your raids capture food and weapons and you bring them back to whatever time you need them. So the earliest recruits will have ten years in the enclave, but the newest will only arrive when there’s plenty for them to eat, and only with time enough to train them.”
“So we raid today, then bring the supplies to the enclave at the time we need them,” said Umbo.
“Your timeshaping is what sets you apart from other rebels, you see,” said Olivenko. “There’s no reason not to use your abilities. General Citizen or whatever he’s calling himself—he can hunt for you all he wants, but you’re not only outside the wallfold between raids, you’re also three or five or eight years in the past.”
“It’s going to take some real care not to bring people back to a time before they came to the enclave,” said Umbo. “It won’t do to have them meet themselves. Or to have you or any of us making new copies of ourselves.”
“We’ll keep a calendar,” said Rigg. “We’ll organize each cohort according to their time of recruitment, and make sure we always bring a group home from a raid to some time after they left on that raid.”
“Everything in proper order,” said Olivenko. “And we’ll also schedule the raids on various arsenals and stockpiles for times when they’re not looked for.”
“What would happen,” said Umbo, “if our first raid were the most recent—say, last Thursday—and our next raid was a week before that, and the next was two weeks earlier. So that every raid is the first one and we always have surprise.”
“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wouldn’t that make it so they were ready for us on the earlier raids after all?”
“Not if a timeshaper is always with each cohort,” said Umbo. “The successful raid already happened in the timestream of the timeshaper, and it can’t be changed by having the next raid take place earlier. Can it?”
Rigg pressed fingers to his forehead. “Just when I think I’m beginning to understand how this works, there’s some crazy new idea that changes everything.”
“It’s simple enough,” said Param. “Do one raid, and then do the next one earlier, and see if it changes the previous-but-later raid.”
“I’m still not in love with raiding, even if it works,” said Rigg. “I’m not really a killer. I only did it once, and I didn’t like it.”
“But that’s the whole point,” said Olivenko. “If it’s always a surprise, you might be able to arrange every raid so that you don’t have to kill anybody. You can look for a time of minimal wariness. Nobody watching. Everybody drunk or half the garrison out of town. Or it could be a herd of cattle being driven to where the meat will be butchered to feed Haddamander’s army.”
Umbo laughed. “Oh, I think we’re going to love trying to move whole herds of cattle through time.”
“We still have to get them across all this country,” said Loaf. “With all the times we’ve used the flyers, you may not understand yet how very big each wallfold is. If you raid on the opposite side, it can take weeks. And the whole country is settled.”
“It’s settled now,” said Rigg. “But we could move the herds or the soldiers or the families or the weapons far in the past. During the years when the colony was new. Nobody would discover us because we’d slice time a little, just enough to disappear.”
“There’d be a stretch of country where all the grass was gone and cow pies were everywhere,” said Loaf. “You’ve never seen the ground behind a military supply herd.”
“By the time any colonists see it,” said Rigg, “it’ll be nothing but meadows with some very fertile patches.”
“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “By shaping time the way you do, you can avoid all the things that make rebels angry and desperate. You can keep killing to a minimum. But it will happen. Somebody will be a hero and you’ll have to kill him. This is war, and no matter how careful we are, people will die. And not always soldiers who oppose us. Besides, plenty of soldiers will wish they could join us, but they’ll still have to fight us when we show up.”
“I’m trying to imagine this,” said Umbo. “Say we’ve done fifty raids, and the most recent one, as far as Haddamander and the queen are concerned, is really the very first one we did. When we did it, we took the garrison completely by surprise, because they didn’t even know there was a rebellion, because they knew of no previous raids. But now it’s the fiftieth raid, so they had to be aware of it—and yet the actual events can’t be changed, because the timeshaper was there and so the outcome can’t be undone.”
Rigg tried to imagine it. “I wonder if they’ll behave, during the actual raid, exactly as they did when it really happened—with them knowing nothing. But afterward, they’ll remember that they should have been alert against possible raids because there had already been forty-nine. They won’t have any explanation for King Haddamander. ‘I don’t know why the men weren’t on alert, O King-in-the-Tent. I warned them, I posted them, but when the raiders came, nobody was at his post and everybody acted as if there had never been a raid before.’”
“Off with his head,” murmured Param.
“By the fiftieth raid,” said Umbo, “maybe General Citizen will be used to the fact that we always achieve surprise and he’ll stop executing the commanders for their inexplicable lack of preparation.”
“So when our fifth raid turns the first one into the one that Haddamander thinks is fifth, he’ll execute the commanders who let him down. But then when our twentieth raid, much earlier, turns that first one into the twentieth raid, they’ll already know the pattern and that first commander won’t be killed after all.”