Ruins

He woke up Param.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “I was asleep!”

“I know,” said Umbo. “But how can you sleep, when I have the answer?”

“What answer?”

“The answer to the problem that we don’t know enough to decide what to do about anything. We don’t even know enough to know what questions to ask.”

“For this you woke me?” asked Param. “Go away.”

“I woke you because you’re the solution.”

“You have no problems, I assure you, to which I am a possible solution.”

“We need to go into the future and meet the Visitors and see what happens with them and then come back here and figure out what to do about them.”

Param closed her eyes, but at least she was thinking about it. “So you want me to slice time to get us into the future faster.”

“And then when we’ve seen enough, I bring us right back here. Tonight. Nobody even knows we went.”

“But I’ve never sliced time that far,” said Param. “It would take weeks.”

“You’ve never wanted to slice time to that degree,” said Umbo, “because you didn’t want to miss whole days and weeks and months. But if you really pushed it . . .”

“Maybe,” said Param.

“And we still get a quick view of what’s happening. Day and night, seasons changing.”

“So we’d know when two years had passed,” said Param.

“We’re the ones with these time-shifting abilities,” said Umbo. “Let’s use them.”

“Without Rigg.”

“Rigg’s doing whatever he thinks is right. Why should we do anything less than that?”

Param sat up and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I don’t actually hate you, you know,” she said.

“That’s good to hear,” said Umbo. “Because you had me fooled.”

“I don’t like you,” said Param. “But I don’t hate you, either. The others keep lecturing me because I don’t treat you right.”

“You treated me right when you took us off the rock in Ramfold,” said Umbo. “And when you got us through the Wall. In the crisis, you come through.”

“And so do you.”

“So let’s try it. If it’s more than you can do, or want to do, you can just stop and I’ll bring us back here.”

“Can you bring us back with any kind of precision?” asked Param. “I thought you needed Rigg’s pathfinding in order to hook up with an exact time.”

“If I overshoot in coming back, then you can slice us back up to tonight. You’re precise even if I’m not.”

Param got up. Loaf stirred. Olivenko didn’t move.

Param rummaged in her bag and took out her heavy coat.

Umbo looked at her like she was crazy.

“What if it’s winter when we stop?” asked Param.

Umbo got his heavy coat out of his bag, too.

They took each other’s hands, facing each other.

“I think you two are reckless fools,” said Loaf, who was apparently awake after all.

“But we can’t stop them,” said Olivenko, who was awake as well.

“Thanks,” said Umbo. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

Param began slicing time.

Umbo had been through this before, as they leapt from the rock. It didn’t feel like they were moving forward through time at a different pace. Instead, it looked as if the rest of the world were speeding up. Only this time, Umbo didn’t see people or animals move quickly by. He didn’t see them at all. Just glimpses of a person here, a person there. Days flitted by in a blur of suns passing overhead, flickering with stars that appeared in a momentary darkness and then were gone.

Snow on the ground, gone, back, gone, deeper, melted, back again, gone again. And then spring, a profusion of green; a summer just long enough to feel the heat, and then it was cool and the leaves were gone and the grass was brown and there was snow again. Spring. Summer. And Param slowed down the world around them and gradually they came to a stop.

It was night. There was no one on the beach, no one farther inland either, as far as they could tell.

Rigg could always tell where other people were, or whether they were there at all, thought Umbo. I wish that he were here.

But then the wish passed from him. He didn’t want to be dependent on Rigg right now. He and Param could do this thing alone.

“I don’t think we want to be seen,” said Umbo. “I think we want to watch from hiding.”

“Then let’s turn invisible,” said Param with a smirk. “It’s my best trick anyway.” She took his hand again, and walked with him toward a stand of trees and bushes, as the night raced by around them.

Even when they came to a stop amid the trees, and the sun rose swiftly, Param kept on slicing time. But now the world was moving slowly enough that they could see the blur of scurrying mice. Mice everywhere among the trees and grass.

Mice going into and out of holes in the ground.

Of course they don’t build buildings. They dig holes. They don’t have to shore up tunnels so they don’t cave in; mice can move through such tiny passages that they hold themselves up without any additional support. These fields could now be a city of a hundred million mice, and no one above the surface would know it.

Rigg would know, because of the paths. But could even he sort through the movements of all these tiny mammals?

The great hole in Umbo’s plan was now obvious. They could move into the future, but where in the future did they want to be? Where would the Visitors come, when they came to Larfold?

If they came to Larfold. There was a thought. What if the Visitors saw no trace of human habitation in Larfold, and so didn’t bother to come there?

What if the mice had insisted on invading Larfold precisely because they knew the Visitors would not come, and perhaps the Destroyers would not destroy the wallfold because they thought no humans lived there? After all, the account of the destruction of “all” of Garden in the Future Books might not be accurate.

Or maybe this was where the mice were trying to construct underground shelters where they could live for decades without coming to the surface. Maybe they meant to wait until Garden was habitable again, and only then emerge and inherit the world.

Why did we always assume the mice were trying to attack Earth? All they had to do was hide deep enough to escape notice.

How much about the mice was in the ships’ logs? Would the Destroyers be looking for them? They couldn’t have been on any previous visit, because the mice had only existed for the first time on this go-round.

The Visitors will come to Larfold, thought Umbo. They’ll be thorough. The ships’ logs will tell them that there was a colony here and that somehow it went underwater. So they’ll come here looking for the site of the colony.

And that’s where we are, or nearly so.

Umbo raised a hand in a stopping gesture, and Param slowed them down. The mice resumed a normal pace—which was still pretty frantic. Almost instantly, there were mice on their clothing, up on their shoulders.

“You know who we are,” said Umbo softly. “We’re about to go into the future. If you want to see your families again, get off.”

The mice understood and scampered down their clothing and got about a meter away before they turned and sat watching Umbo and Param.

“Why did you make us stop?” asked Param.

“We want to be about three hundred meters that way.”