“I’ve seen people move through the space where I’m walking, too, but it never gets old,” said Noxon.
“You were really there the whole time.”
“I was,” said Noxon. “It’s one of the reasons why time-slicing isn’t useful as a getaway technique. If your enemy knows what you’re doing, all he needs to do is put a slab of metal into the space where you are. The heat of a billion atomic collisions cooks you to death.”
“You’ve seen this?”
“My sister died that way, once,” said Noxon.
Deborah looked stricken.
“No, it’s all right. As soon as we knew what had happened, we went back in time and rescued her before it happened.”
“So she didn’t die.”
“She was dead when we found her,” said Noxon. “That’s the nice thing about timeshaping. You can sometimes undo some really bad things.”
Those words hung in the air.
“You’re thinking of your parents,” said Noxon.
“I didn’t really know them,” said Deborah. “And I’m trying to think what would happen if you went back and saved them.”
“If I went back, alone, then I would change your whole life. Everything you’ve done since the accident will unhappen. You won’t remember any of this, because the toddler who was saved from that fiery wreck will have her normal face and eyes, and her parents, and no reason to be so close with Uncle Georgia.”
“How do I know if that other life would be better than the life I’ve led? Yes, my parents were cheated out of raising me. Or maybe they were spared an ugly divorce. Or maybe I’d hate my serial killer little brother.”
“Such a dark imagination.”
“But if I went back with you,” she said. “You seemed to imply there were two alternatives.”
“If I took you into the past and you were causally connected to the change in behavior that saved your parents and the toddler version of yourself, then you would continue to exist, with all your memories. The two-year-old would also be you. There’d be two copies. The way there are two copies of me, this one on Earth and the one still back on Garden.”
“But Father?”
“Professor Wheaton would have no idea who you are. He wouldn’t have raised the little burned and blind girl who survived the wreck. He’d be a different man. And you’d be a stranger.”
“So I would survive, but I’d be lifted out of my own life.”
“Not really—you’d just be erased from theirs.”
Deborah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I must be a horrible human being, not to want to save my parents, but . . . this timeshaping thing you do, it can’t save everybody. Death still comes.”
“Eventually,” said Noxon. “But you’re right. My friend Umbo has always regretted that we couldn’t go back and save his little brother Kyokay, but it was his death that brought us together to discover what we could do.”
“Wouldn’t the two of you still exist?”
“Now I know that we would. There’d just be a copy of Umbo back in Fall Ford, getting beaten by his father until he either runs away or kills the man. And there’d be a version of me who didn’t meet up with Umbo and so had no idea of what it meant to see these paths.” Then Noxon shuddered. “And I would have gone back in time to save my dead father. That’s when I would have found out he wasn’t a man at all.”
“A woman?”
“Not human. An expendable.”
“But that’s illegal. For an expendable to pass for human.”
“It may be illegal, but that’s what they’re designed for. Complete with an anus that passes convincing feces. I lived with him in the forest for months at a time. If he hadn’t seemed perfectly normal in every way, I would have known.”
“Designed to pass for human. I didn’t know. They wear special uniforms and talk in these leaden voices so that you can always tell.”
“My father—all the expendables—they spoke perfectly normally. They seemed like people. You’d have no reason to doubt them until you noticed that they live forever and don’t get older.”
“That’s such a crime.”
“There are worse crimes,” said Noxon. “Like sending a fleet to blow up a planet and kill billions of people.”
“Who would do that?” asked Deborah.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Noxon. “Because that’s what the people of Earth do to the people of Garden.”
“But your colony is the hope of humanity! After the comet tore up the Moon and nearly ended life on Earth, we knew we had to establish ourselves on another world so that one cosmic accident wouldn’t wipe us out. And the fact that you exist proves that it worked.”
“I know,” said Noxon. “Nobody knew that he’d not only leap the fold but go back 11,191 years into the past. Nobody knew that there’d be nineteen colonies on that one world, instead of one. Nobody knew that in those eleven millennia, we’d develop merpeople and this facemask and talking mice.”
“And timeshapers.”
“The Visitors who come to evaluate Garden don’t know about us,” said Noxon. Then he laughed at his own stupidity. “No, of course they know about us. We’re all over the ships’ logs. They definitely know about us. That’s probably why they destroy the planet—to eliminate the people who can go into the past and make erasures.”
“I can imagine they might find that terrifying.”
“But they would know that we already know about the destruction of Garden—that’s in the ship’s log from Odinfold. So they must expect that we’d attempt what I’m doing right now.”
“You have to admit that your return to Earth is a little improbable,” said Deborah.
“Yes,” said Noxon. “They might think they’re acting so fast that we wouldn’t have time to send one of us to Earth.”
“But it still seems . . . so drastic,” said Deborah. “We send out the ship. Seven years later, it leaps the fold. Then we invent faster-than-light starships and get to Garden at a time when we think you won’t even have had time to get there yet—it was supposed to take another seven years from the fold. Only you’ve already been there longer than the total of human history since the last glacial maximum.”
“Lots of surprises.”
“But to us, only fifteen years. How do they get the whole human race behind such a wanton slaughter? Genocide of our colonists.”
“The whole human race?” asked Noxon. “Why would they tell the whole human race?”
Deborah looked surprised. “Because we’re a worldwide democracy now. Lots of different nations, but everybody votes. On something as big as this, they’d—”
“They’d tell nobody,” said Noxon. “They’d destroy Garden for the good of the human race, report that the colony failed, and then use faster-than-light ships to establish new colonies. Lots of them. People wouldn’t know about us, not for a long time, maybe not ever. Purge the computer records so our logs never show up.”
“It’s hard to keep a secret like that.”
“Once Garden is gone, it can’t be undestroyed.”
“Except by you,” said Deborah.
“I hope. I wish. I can hardly believe we’ve succeeded this far.”
“Why did you come to us?”
“I’m sure Ram is in the other room, asking your father to let us hide here and eat your food while we see what happens when the Visitors return from Garden.”
“But if you’re right,” said Deborah, “they won’t tell anybody what they found. And it’s not as if Father would be in on any of the secrets. He’s a great scientist but he doesn’t know any politicians.”
“That would be our job,” said Noxon. “Well, really, mine. To get to know politicians. It’s what I was raised to do.”
“But—you’re a kid.”
“I have no idea how old I am,” said Noxon. “But yes, I’m young. But I’ll get older.”
“And you have . . . that face.”
“I saw it on my friend Loaf. The face gets more and more normal—it’s still fairly new on me. Even if it doesn’t, though, so what? I’ll just keep coming back until I find a road in. If I need to. Because the first thing we’ll do is slice forward to the time when the Visitors return and see what actually happens. Only then will we have any idea of which organizations I need to infiltrate.”