Loaf.”
“So you did prepare it for Loaf.”
“I prepared it for whoever chose to accept it,” said Vadesh.
“Loaf took it to save me.”
“He chose to be a hero. Who was I to refuse to allow him to play the role?”
“But you weren’t going to force it on me?” said Rigg. He found that hard to believe.
“I don’t force anyone to do anything,” said Vadesh. “I explain and let them decide for themselves.”
“You didn’t explain anything to Loaf,” said Rigg.
“He didn’t give me time.”
Rigg searched back in his memory. Did Loaf really cause the facemask to leap onto his body, or did Vadesh flip it up into place? Human memory was so unreliable. As soon as Rigg tried to imagine either scenario, each seemed equally real and equally false.
“Did you bring a flyer, or were you going to carry me to the starship?” asked Rigg.
“Do you want a flyer? You merely asked me to meet you.”
Rigg shook his head. “Bring the flyer and take me there. Or don’t, and I’ll walk. I enjoy solitude and I know my way around a forest.”
Of course the flyer was close by—expendables could move faster than humans, but not fast enough to get to the Wall without using a flyer, not in the amount of time Rigg had given Vadesh to comply with his orders.
“Why did you decide on my poor primitive facemask instead of those wonderful Companions of the Larfolders?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg did not answer.
“Are you going to leave me in suspense?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg wanted to retort, Why would a machine feel suspense? But instead he did not answer at all. Why should he pretend that the normal human courtesies applied in a conversation between a man and a machine? Especially when the man was the one who supposedly commanded all the ships and expendables.
Or commit a monstrous crime.
One or the other.
The flight was without incident. They landed, not at the city, where they would need to take the high-speed tram through the mountain, but at a structure inside the crater made by the ancient impact when the starship collided with Garden. Then there was an elevator ride down to the starship far below.
But they crossed the same bridge from the wall of the stone chamber to the outside door in the starship’s side. All the starships dwelt inside an identical wound in the stone of the world, because all those wounds had been shaped by the forcefield that protected the starship and its passengers from all the effects of collision and sudden changes in inertia.
Rigg followed Vadesh carefully, trying to be aware of any new hazards, trying to notice all kinds of things he had overlooked before.
But the main thing Rigg searched for was the path of Ram Odin.
It was surprisingly easy to find, now that he knew it might exist. It was the oldest path in the starship. It was also the newest. It led again and again from the control room to the stasis chambers and then to the revival room and then back to the control room.
But in the past eleven thousand years, Ram Odin had not left the starship. Not since he crossed through the Wall from Ramfold.
Interesting. The Ram Odin that had been on the Vadeshfold copy of the starship had been killed by his expendable. And yet his path was here in the ship. A path markedly older than the already ancient passage of Ram Odin from Ramfold into Vadeshfold.
For a moment, Rigg wondered if that meant that the Ram Odin of this starship had not been killed; maybe all of them had lived, the way the Ram Odin of Odinfold had lived.
But no. That most ancient path moved throughout the ship, and then abruptly ended in the control room a few decades before another version of Ram Odin came through the Wall.
Thus Rigg learned the answer to a question that had bothered both him and Umbo ever since they learned about the starships. Paths were tied to the gravity of planets, and moved through space with the world where the paths were laid down. But when people were in space, their paths stayed with the ship transporting them. Unlike boat passengers on the Stashik River, whose paths stayed in the same position relative to the river, and not with the boats, the path of Ram Odin during the starship’s voyage stayed with the starship, even after the ship impacted with the planet’s surface.
I can see it all, thought Rigg. When the time comes, I can watch Vadeshex murder the Ram Odin of this starship.
But no. Being there as an observer would be hard to conceal from the expendable, who would then know there were such things as time-shifting humans from the future. It might cause the expendable—all the expendables—to behave differently. It might utterly change the course of history.
It couldn’t erase Rigg, of course—he and Umbo had settled that long ago. The agents of time change could not be undone by the shifts they themselves caused. They called it the “conservation of causality,” like the conservation of matter and energy. As causers, they had to remain in existence, even if the future they came from was otherwise erased.
But I’m not the only one whose existence I need to protect.
Rigg followed Vadesh to the revival chamber. “I need to do it here in case you have an adverse physical reaction,” Vadesh explained. “Loaf was robust and needed no life support. You might need to be sustained during your struggle for control.”
“When will you know if I’ve failed?”
“I’ll know,” said Vadesh.
“Tell me the symptoms that will lead you to that conclusion,” said Rigg.
Vadesh said nothing.
“I think I gave you a command.”
“I don’t have an answer,” said Vadesh. “I don’t know the symptoms that would lead to that conclusion, because you’re only the second person to receive one of this particular genotype of facemask, and the first one did not fail.”
“You’ve seen failure with early genotypes.”
“They were so different that they
Rigg didn’t believe him. But should he show that, or would it lead Ram Odin—who was no doubt giving orders to Vadesh from his current location in the control room—to suspect that he knew too much?
“What concerns me,” said Rigg, “is that you might conclude that I had failed when I don’t think I’ve failed.”
“Here’s a simple test,” said Vadesh. “If you think, from my actions, that I have concluded that the facemask is in complete control, all you have to do to avoid my actions is to jump into the past and out of my reach.”
“Here’s a simpler test,” said Rigg. “I order you not to take any action at all concerning me and the facemask for three years, and even then you have to tell me what you’re planning to do.”
“In three years,” said Vadesh, “the Destroyers will be here.”
“That’s why I chose that number,” said Rigg.
Vadesh paused a moment, then said, “I will obey your command.”
“How nice of you. Did you have any choice?”
“I don’t have to obey a command that cannot take effect until after your death. But my programming does not permit me to regard facemask domination as death. Rather it is temporary disablement, so I will follow those rules instead of the death rules.”
“How nice of you,” said Rigg.
“You asked,” said Vadesh.
Rigg sat on the edge of the revival table. “Get me my facemask now,” said Rigg. “I assume you already have one picked out?”
