“We all held hands,” said Ram.
“But we were all distracted. Thinking and talking about language. He should never have seen us at all. I should have disappeared us much sooner. If I had done that, nothing would have gone wrong.”
“If if if,” said Wheaton.
“I’m a timeshaper,” said Noxon. “My life is all about ifs. When we make changes, it’s always in the belief that we understand what caused the problem and what the consequences of the changes we make will be. But nothing ever has just one cause, and nothing ever has just the predicted results.”
“So you fail all the time?” asked Wheaton.
“We mostly succeed,” said Noxon. “But the edges of everything we do are fuzzy. Nothing is really sharp and clear. So we spend a little time trying to think it through so we think of more choices and then choose the one we think is best.”
Ram and Wheaton fell silent then, for a few moments.
“If I were Umbo, I could just appear to myself in a vision,” said Noxon.
“You keep talking about the amazing powers of this mythical Umbo,” said Ram. “But he’s not here.”
“What I have to do is the equivalent of that. Like a vision. So yes, I think leaving a note is the best plan. But a long note. I’m going to lay out exactly what happened here and suggest several changes. I’ll tell us that their calls are language-like, and I’ll include the chip that has the recording. But then I’ll say, slice time from the moment you arrive there, and stay together.”
“Will that do it?” asked Ram.
“I don’t know,” said Noxon. “Because we don’t know what Erectids can see. It seemed to me that while he saw Deborah most clearly, because she wasn’t slicing time at all, he also saw us, or never lost track of where we were. I think I need to tell myself to slice time much more deeply, and trust the cameras to record everything. Which means we need to arrive much earlier and place cameras. I’ll tell us to do that.”
“We should have done that in the first place,” said Wheaton bitterly.
“What happens to us then, after you leave that note. Do we just . . . disappear?”
“I don’t know,” said Noxon.
“You said Umbo did this all the time,” said Ram.
“Yes, but you see, I’ve always been the guy who gets the warning,” said Noxon. “When we change our behavior, does that eliminate the timestream of the selves that sent the warning? Or merely diverge from it, leaving them to live with the bitter consequences of the mistakes they warned us not to make?”
“You mean I might still be here, with my daughter dead?” asked Wheaton.
“I just don’t know,” said Noxon.
“Well, what if we find out that it’s so. Can we go back and give a different warning? Or appear to ourselves even before we got the note, and this time accept that yes, we’ll copy ourselves?”
“You don’t want to copy yourself,” said Noxon. “I know that.”
“You say that with absolute certainty,” said Wheaton, “but you’re the copy. You exist because of copying.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I’m the original. I’m the one who never murdered Ram Odin—a future version of him. I’m the one who got warned. Rigg was the one who had to live with the consequences of having done such a killing. He was the one who wasn’t saved.”
“None of us killed Deborah,” said Wheaton. “Unless you want to use some oblique causal chain that starts with ‘if I hadn’t insisted on seeing Homo erectus.’ But I tell you this: I don’t want to save my former self from seeing her dead, while I have to go on living in this world that doesn’t include her.”
“So you want to copy yourself?” asked Noxon.
“I don’t know what I want, except I want every version of myself to live in a world that includes a living Deborah!”
“There’s another choice,” said Ram. “We could leave Africa, go back to the States, and then go back in time and prevent the traffic accident that killed Deborah’s parents and blinded her.”
Wheaton thought about that for a long moment. “In that world, I wouldn’t raise her. I would hardly know her. I wasn’t really all that close to my brother, and Deborah’s mother never cared for me. Deborah would just be an annoying little kid that I avoided because I’d have no responsibility for her.” He grabbed his ears and squeezed hard against them, as if trying to crush his own head. “What kind of man am I? I don’t want to save Deborah, I want to save myself from losing her. And losing her by having her parents live, saving her eyesight—I hate that thought almost as much as losing her to an Erectid stone. I’m a monster.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “it’s not a bad thing, to find out a few of the monsters living inside us. Because you know you won’t act on that preference.”
“Well, one thing’s certain,” said Wheaton. “If we save Deborah’s parents and preserve her sight, she would certainly not be with us on this expedition. She’d be at home with her family. Or away at school. And probably not even interested in anthropology, because that would just be something her eccentric uncle did.”
“We can’t do that,” said Ram. “Because it changes too much. We don’t know all the influence raising Deborah had on Uncle Georgia. Without her grounding him, giving him a meaningful personal life, a purpose, who knows whether he would have been all that successful in his career? Or even alive? Men living alone don’t always take care of themselves.”
Wheaton shrugged. “So I allow Deborah’s family to die and her to suffer in order to avoid damaging my career?”
“I don’t care about your career all that much,” said Ram, “except that it’s your career that gives you the money and the privacy for us to hide out with you while we wait for the Visitors to come back from Garden and somehow persuade the people of Earth to commit planetwide genocide.”
“Thank you for reminding me of what I’m here to do,” said Noxon. “I can’t afford to lose track of that. But something Umbo and I learned early on, though we didn’t realize we had learned it for a long time: No matter what grand purposes and causes we enlist in, we still have to be decent and good to the people we meet along the way. People like Professor Wheaton here. And Deborah.”
“So what’s best for Deborah, that still allows Uncle Georgia to be helpful to our cause?” asked Ram.
They were silent for another long while.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said Noxon.
“You just decide?” said Wheaton. “Without any kind of discussion or vote?”
“It’s always my decision,” said Noxon. “Because I’m the one who actually does it. So I’m the one who bears the responsibility.”
“But without advice?”
“Hear me out and then give all the advice you want,” said Noxon.
Noxon woke up in the morning and joined the others, who were having room service breakfast. Ram fluttered a two-page note toward Noxon. “Read it,” he said. “It’s from future you. Apparently our expedition today didn’t turn out too well the first time around.”
“Because apparently I’m an idiot,” said Deborah. “Apparently my dead body appeared out there in the grass about two hundred years ago, and hyenas already had their way with me.”
“Let the man read,” said Ram Odin.
Noxon read.
“So the thing to decide,” said Noxon, “is whether to go out there at all, and trust that we’ll do better, or just go back to watching the camp.”
“I say we go,” said Deborah, “and I just won’t be an idiot.”
“He lays it out—you lay it out pretty clearly, Noxon,” said Ram. “Slice time from the start, place cameras to record everything, then watch from invisibility the way we always do.”