get
“It might be the only way,” said Rigg, refusing to take her negativism as a final answer. “Go back with them to Earth, with the chance that we die there, but with a chance that maybe we can change the outcome.”
“What makes you think the Visitors would let us go?” asked Loaf.
“What makes you think they could stop us if we want to go?” asked Umbo.
“Getting onto a human starship isn’t the same as going through the Wall,” said Rigg.
“We can do things with time,” said Param, “but we can’t fly.”
“Maybe we could use the Odinfolder technology to put something on board their ship,” said Umbo. “A plague, maybe. Something that kills them all. But we show the Visitors who are on Garden what happened to their ship, and then we take them back in time
“How would that make them not want to destroy us?” asked Loaf. “That’s the point I’m not getting. Because I think that’s a sure way to guarantee that they send the Destroyers.”
Umbo shrugged and turned away, a little angry. Rigg was so tired of the way Umbo took offense at any slight, while he felt no compunction about slighting Rigg at every opportunity. The only thing that had kept them from open quarrels during these many months was the fact that they were able to avoid each other most of the time.
“It’s not a stupid idea,” said Olivenko. “We just need to refine it.”
“We can’t use any version of it,” said Rigg. “As soon as the expendables realize what we’ve done, the orbiters destroy our wallfold. We aren’t allowed to develop weapons.”
“It’s a disease,” said Umbo, “not a weapon.”
“If we send it to their ship in order to kill people, it’s a weapon, and we get blown to smithereens,” said Rigg.
“You’re such an expert on how the ships’ computers think?” said Umbo.
“No,
Umbo’s lips tightened, but he didn’t argue with Rigg’s point. Umbo knew more than anyone about how the original starship worked, and in fact the computers would not be fooled by a sophistry like, It’s a disease, not a weapon.
“Maybe we just need to study more,” said Param.
“No,” said Umbo. “We have a deeper problem than the fact that if we went to Earth, we couldn’t travel back in time to when we were on Garden. We don’t even know if our time skills even
“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Olivenko.
“Think about it,” said Umbo. “We don’t understand anything about
“It worked fine when we flew to the Wall with Vadesh,” said Param.
“Really? Did you try any time-skipping in flight?” asked Umbo.
Param bristled. “We jumped off a rock once, if you remember.”
“We were never more than two meters from solid stone,” said Umbo.
“It’s a good question,” said Rigg, “but the flyer isn’t a real test, anyway, because it’s still tied to the gravity well of Garden. The real problem is this: Garden is flying through space as it orbits our sun. The whole solar system is also moving rapidly through space. Say we travel back in time by six months. In that amount of time, Garden has moved completely around the sun to the opposite side. Yet we travel back, not to where we were in absolute space, which would kill us instantly, but to where we were in relation to the surface of Garden. Our time-shifting is tied to the planet. So Umbo’s asking, what happens if we leave the surface of Garden and go to another planet? Do we even
Umbo glared at him. Rigg couldn’t imagine why. Hadn’t Rigg just defended Umbo’s argument? There was no figuring out what made anybody work. But now Rigg had a whole bunch of new stories to help him understand. Among the Mongols, Temujin and Jamuka had been blood brothers, but they became bitter enemies on the way to Temujin becoming Khan and taking the name Genghis, or Chinggis. It was part of human nature that best friends could easily become rivals and then deadly foes. Rigg would count himself successful if he could keep it at the level of rivalry without ever letting Umbo become his enemy.
“I think it’s obvious,” said Olivenko, “that it’s tied to whatever planet you’re on.”
“I don’t think anything’s obvious,” said Rigg. “Whatever we decide, we’re betting our lives on it. All the paths I can see are actually views into the past—I see the actual people and animals going through all the movements of their lives, and they’re tied to Garden. But they’re all people who were
“But the original pilot, Ram Odin,” said Umbo, “
“Yet the ship was displaced nineteen times,” said Rigg. “Doesn’t that tell you something? During the microseconds when the ship’s nineteen computers were separately calculating and activating the jump, the whole ship had moved far enough in space that Ram’s unconscious time-jump reached nineteen different places. We can’t go into space and use our time-shifting ability, or we’ll just create duplicate ships.”
“We don’t know that,” said Olivenko.
“But we don’t know it
“Well, there’s this,” said Olivenko. “Even if that happened, and we couldn’t save ourselves—or rather,
Param laughed. “So the fact that they haven’t already received such a Future Book proves that we succeeded?”
“Or that we decided not to do it,” said Rigg.
“Or that we did it, and failed, but the Odinfolders decided not to show us the Future Book that resulted, and just went on to try something else.”
“Or they gave up,” said Param, “and just decided to die.”
“No matter how much we learn,” said Umbo, “we never know enough.”
“All we can do is what we’ve always done,” said Rigg. “Make a try at something, and then if it doesn’t work, go back and try again. But we can’t always go back.”
Umbo leapt to his feet, “Right, there are things that stay
It struck Rigg like a knife, that this was part of what Umbo still held against him. “We already decided that we can’t, because if we did, then we’d never have gotten together to learn how to manipulate time.”
“But now we know more, we have more control, we could figure out a way to catch him partway down maybe, or—”
“Maybe we can,” said Rigg. “Maybe we can put in a net to catch him, or train a giant bird to snatch him out of the air, or a huge puff of air to blow him out to sea. But we’ll do it later—go back and save one boy after we’ve