“Why you? Why the kid?”
“Because Ram Odin’s face is known throughout the world. Not yet, but it will be. He can’t very well show up while his ship is supposedly out there starting a colony.”
“I suppose it’s too late to invent a twin brother for him,” said Deborah. She laughed. “They do that kind of thing on television all the time.”
“Well, I invented a twin brother for myself, so it actually can happen,” said Noxon.
Silence between them for a few moments.
“You know what I want?” said Deborah.
“Do you really want me to guess?” asked Noxon.
“I want your mission to be completely successful. Then I want to get on a starship with you, one of the faster-than-light ones, and go to Garden and get one of those facemasks for myself.”
“You do see how ugly and inhuman it makes me,” said Noxon.
“Have you seen my face? I want eyes, Rigg Noxon. Even if they’re too far apart and one of them sags a little down onto my cheek. I want real eyes instead of something that plugs into my brain and gives me a digital raster image.”
“You don’t look so bad right now,” said Noxon. “They did good work with you. I’ve seen burn scars and you don’t look like that.”
“Noxon,” said Deborah, “that is a complete load of horse pucky.”
“It’s true.”
“I saw your face when you first looked at me at the door. It was as if you were looking at a train wreck.”
“I was trying to figure out what happened, that’s all,” said Noxon.
“I’m sure that’s what everybody thinks they’re doing. From my side, though, it looks like horrified staring. Because that’s what it is.”
“I know,” said Noxon, “because I get the same looks. Followed by pity when Ram tells them about my tropical parasite.”
“So my choice isn’t to be pretty or not,” said Deborah. “My choice is to have eyes or not. And I want the eyes.”
“I don’t know if I’m going back,” said Noxon.
“Why wouldn’t you? Is Earth so charming that you can’t bear to part with it?”
“I have a starship buried under the ice of Antarctica. It’s been there for a hundred thousand years. There are some sentient mice in a box in Peru. I have responsibilities.”
“So you have a ship already,” she said.
“One that splits into twenty pieces when it leaps through the fold.”
“That’s something to think about,” said Deborah.
“You can’t tell anyone about us, you know.”
Deborah laughed aloud. “Now you think of that? You don’t swear me to secrecy, you just blurt it all out, you give me a demonstration, and now you warn me not to tell? Rigg Noxon, I’m already strange. I don’t have to add crazy to the list. I can’t tell this to anybody.”
“I know,” said Noxon, feeling foolish. “I just . . . I’m not completely used to this either, you know. The things I can do. And Father taught me—the expendable Ramex taught me never to tell, and that’s still nagging at the back of my mind.”
“What I’m trying to figure out is why my father is taking so long to give Ram Odin an answer. Of course he’ll say yes.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Noxon. “Ram might be recognized. I’m kind of unforgettable. People might wonder, they might investigate.”
“But of course you don’t understand Ram Odin’s plan yet, do you,” said Deborah. “He’s not asking for a favor here. He’s bound to be offering Father a trade.”
“What do we have to trade?” Noxon thought of the jewels, but here on Earth they would immediately be recognized as memory crystals. Incredibly valuable, but also extremely dangerous.
“You,” said Deborah. “He’s offering you. To take Father back to see for himself whether his hypotheses about Homo erectus are true or not.”
“Oh,” said Noxon. “Of course. I could do that.”
“Then let’s go tell them that the deal is on.” Deborah held out her hand. Noxon took it. She led him out of the room and down a hall, to Professor Wheaton’s study, where Ram Odin was napping on a sofa and Wheaton was typing into a computer.
“Oh, are you done?” asked Wheaton. “Is it set?”
“He’s agreed to take you back in time to see for yourself,” said Deborah. “Of course, you can’t write any scholarly papers on it.”
“But at least from then on my guesses will all be right.”
“They always have been, Father,” said Deborah.
Wheaton held out his hand to Noxon. They shook.
“You mean the two of you were waiting for us?” asked Noxon.
“Ram explained things very quickly, and we agreed that if you could convince Deborah and make the deal, we’d be set.”
“But Ram never told me that’s what I was supposed to do.”
“And I never told Deborah,” said Wheaton. “But . . . two smart young people, drawn together by shared experiences and mutual curiosity—that’s a negotiation that has gone on only a few billion times in human history.”
“We didn’t agree to mate and make babies,” said Deborah testily.
“No hurry,” said Wheaton. “Timeshaping will do for now.”
CHAPTER 21
Neanderthals
“All I care about is Erectus,” said Wheaton. “But yes, of course I’d like a chance to look at Neanderthals. They are ancestral to all post-African humans.”
“You’re curious about everything,” said Ram. “You always have been.”
“But I wouldn’t waste my time going back to meet—whomever. Galileo. Jesus.”
“Maybe you would,” said Noxon, “if you could pass through the Wall and acquire their languages. So you could converse normally with them.”
Wheaton barked out a laugh. “I might at that. People always forget the language barrier when they imagine having dinner with some ancient celebrity. Socrates! What a miserable dinner that would be. Fifteen minutes in, he’d expose me as a fool, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that much brutal self-discovery.”
“Which is why you would choose him,” said Ram. “And why you’re willing to make our trial run with Neanderthals. Because that was your first college thesis.”
“I do want to know if bullfighting and bull-leaping are Sapient reenactments of Neanderthal hunting techniques.”
“And if it turns out that they aren’t,” said Ram, “will that count as brutal self-discovery?”
“It will count as finding out that my hypothesis was wrong,” said Wheaton. “And that is at the heart of science. Anyone who hides from the possibility of his hypothesis being wrong is not a scientist at all.”
“So brutal self-discovery is the core experience of science,” said Deborah.
“I raised her well, didn’t I?” said Wheaton.
“I discovered that entirely on my own,” said Deborah.
Noxon chuckled.
“Do you doubt the possibility of adequate self-education?” asked Deborah—so sweetly that it was clear she was hoping for a quarrel.
“All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.”
“I’ll make sure that’s inscribed in stone somewhere,” said Deborah. “Your headstone, for instance.”
“I can’t escape the teachings of my father,” said Noxon. “Everything I figure out by myself, I find him underneath it, holding it up. I find him ahead of me, leading me to where I can see new things and understand them.”
“Well, your father was an expendable,” said Deborah. “Mine was an absent-minded professor. I had to pair his socks for him. I had to lay out his underwear while he showered, so he’d remember to put some on.”
“That’s a myth,” said Wheaton. “Please, take us into the past so I can escape this conversation.”