To Kathleen Bellamy

Part of every project,

Shepherd of so many sheep:

Thank you for the freedom and support

CHAPTER 1

Copies

The Place:

From the surface of the planet Garden, it looks like a plateau surrounded by a steep cliff, with a mountain in the middle. But from space, it is plain that the plateau is a huge crater, and the mountain is its center point.

Buried deep beneath that central mountain is a starship. It crashed into the planet Garden 11,203 years ago.

Yet the starship was launched from near-Earth orbit only nineteen years ago. It journeyed seven years, then made the jump that was meant to create an anomaly in spacetime and appear near Garden instantaneously.

It was instantaneous to Ram Odin, the pilot of the starship—the only living person awake on the starship.

But compared to the surrounding universe, the ship arrived 11,191 years before it made the jump.

In the process, it divided into nineteen ships, one for each of the onboard computers that calculated the jump. All those ships contained a duplicate of Ram Odin, along with all the other humans lying in stasis, waiting to arrive at the world they would colonize.

All nineteen ships were deliberately crashed into the surface of the planet Garden. The simultaneous impact slowed the rotation of the planet, lengthening the day. Each impact formed a crater. Protected by anti-inertial and anti-collision fields, all the starships and their colonists survived.

Nineteen colonies were created, each separated from the ­others by a psychoactive field called “the Wall.”

This starship is in the middle of the wallfold called Vadeshfold.

The People:

In the control room of the starship, there are either four men, or three, or two, or one, depending on how you count them.

One of them is the sole surviving Ram Odin. If you say that there is only one man in the control room, he is that man. He has survived all these centuries by rising out of stasis for only one day in each fifty years, or sometimes for one week after a hundred years—whatever is needed in order to make the decisions that the ship’s computers are not competent to make without him.

Another of them looks like an adult man, and speaks like one, but he is really a machine, an expendable. He is called Vadeshex. All the humans in his colony were wiped out in terrible warfare more than ten thousand years before. In the years since then, he has devoted himself to creating a version of a native parasite that might be a suitable symbiotic partner for humans, if they ever came to Vadeshfold again.

The two other men were born as a single human being named Rigg Sessamekesh, fifteen years before the present day. Arguably they are not men but boys.

Both of them wear upon their heads, covering their faces, the symbiotic facemask created by Vadeshex. The facemask penetrates their brains and bodies, enhancing their senses, quickening their movements, strengthening their bodies, so that some might consider them no longer to be human at all, but rather some strange new hybrid, only half human at best.

The Situation:

A half hour ago, Ram Odin attempted to murder Rigg, but with his faster reflexes, Rigg avoided him. Then, using the time-shifting power he was born with, he went back half an hour in time and preventively killed Ram Odin. It was not just a matter of self-defense. Rigg believed that it was Ram Odin whose actions were destined to destroy the world.

Then Rigg went forward two years and saw that eliminating Ram Odin had done nothing to prevent the complete destruction of the human race on Garden. Far from being the worst ­menace to the humans of Garden, Ram Odin was the only source of information Rigg would need to figure out how to save Garden. So he went back in time and prevented himself from killing Ram Odin, and Ram Odin from killing the earlier version of Rigg.

The result was that now there were two copies of Rigg—the one who had done the killing, then learned it had done no good and returned; and the one who had been prevented from doing the killing or being killed, who had not experienced the inevitable coming of the Destroyers, and who now called himself Noxon, recognizing that he could never be the same person as the other Rigg.

Thus there are four men, by stature and general shape: Ram Odin, Rigg, Noxon, and Vadeshex.

But Vadeshex is not a living organism, so there are only three men.

Rigg and Noxon are really one person, divided into two separate beings half an hour ago. So there are only two genetically and biographically distinct men.

The Riggs are only fifteen years old by calendar. Older than that by the number of days they have lived through, then repeated, but still they are only boys, not men.

And the Riggs are both deeply and permanently connected to the alien facemask, making them by some reckonings only half human, and by other reckonings not human at all.

So only Ram Odin, of all the four, is a pure man; yet he is weakest of them all.

Far away, in another wallfold, Rigg’s sister Param and Rigg’s friend Umbo also have power over the flow of time, and are also working to save the world of Garden from the Destroyers. But it is these four in Vadeshfold who among them have control over a starship; it is these four who know that a version of Ram Odin is still alive; and it is these four who must now decide what each of them will do in order to save the human race on Garden.

For the one thing that never changes is that, despite many attempts to reshape history by the manipulation of time, the Visitors come from Earth, see what the human race has become in the nineteen wallfolds of Garden, and then send the Destroyers to blast all nineteen civilizations into oblivion.

The Conversation:

“The biggest problem we have is ignorance,” said Rigg Noxon. “We don’t know what causes the people of Earth to decide to destroy our whole world.” Though in fact the biggest problem he was having at the moment was the realization that he was capable of killing someone in cold blood.

It was the other Rigg who had actually done the killing, but Rigg Noxon knew that they were the same person. If Rigg had not come back and prevented the killings, Noxon would certainly have done just what Rigg did. Only now, because he hadn’t taken those actions, both Noxon and Rigg continued to exist as separate people with nearly identical pasts.

Am I a killer, because I know I could and would commit murder? Or am I innocent, because something prevented me from doing it? After all, the person who prevented me was myself. A version of myself.

The killer version.

“Which is why your friends have to allow the mice from Odinfold to go back to Earth with the Visitors,” said Ram Odin.

“They’re deciding whether to stop themselves from warning the Visitors about the stowaway mice,” said Rigg-the-killer.

Ram Odin shook his head. “Why is it up to them? You go back and prevent them from giving warning.”

“They had good reason for preventing the mice from getting aboard the Visitors’ ship,” said Rigg-the-killer. “The mice weren’t going back to find out what happened. They were infected with a disease which was no doubt designed to wipe out the human race on Earth.”