“So what you’re really doing is negotiating a treaty with a foreign power.”

“With an alien species. One that has a lot of the human genome, but we definitely can’t interbreed.”

Param pursed her mouth. “I don’t know which of the two images that came to my mind is the more disgusting.”

“Will you stay here and not follow me into the future?”

“Do I have to decide and take a solemn oath right now? If I don’t agree, will you decide not to go?”

“It would be a waste of your time anyway,” said Noxon. “You can’t hear their high little voices, and they talk very fast.”

“They must get so impatient, waiting for humans to finish talking.”

“They hold dozens of conversations of their own while we’re saying, ‘Well, um . . .’”

“Go,” she said abruptly. “I need some alone time anyway.”

Noxon wasn’t sure if she was angry or not. And even if she was, whom she was angry at. Him, maybe, for shutting her out of a negotiation. Or herself, for still being afraid of the mice, maybe, or for being inferior to people with facemasks, or some other unfathomable reason. Sometimes Noxon thought that if he had grown up with Param as a sister, he might have turned out even crazier than he was just getting to know her now.

It was a simple matter to return to the time of the mice in Larfold. Once they had brought the mice in, they had propagated so quickly that there wasn’t a habitable region of the wallfold that didn’t have nests and warrens. And these mice were like humans—they didn’t choose just one habitat, they adapted to every possible habitat. They lived in trees, in grass, in burrows that they dug themselves—or burrows that other animals had dug, which the mice expelled them from. They lived beside streams and in dry places, in crags and swamps. They made ordinary mice seem lazy and finicky.

They also bred themselves for particular traits. Within a few generations, the tree mice would be different from rock mice and swamp mice and field mice. But they were all part of the same species, and, like dogs, they could be quite different in size and other traits, yet still interbreed.

Noxon didn’t want to talk to them in their billions. He wanted to talk to them only a few generations after they first came to Larfold.

He rapidly sliced his way forward in time until he saw just a few of the distinctive paths of Mus sapiens, and then he abruptly stopped. At once the mice in the clearing stopped what they were doing and ran up to him. Several of them scampered up his clothing and perched on his shoulder. “Rigg or Noxon?” one voice asked.

Regular human ears would have heard only a brief squeak. Noxon imagined that a mouse could spout a lot of vilification while a cat was preparing to kill it.

“Noxon,” he replied.

“You’ve been hiding from us.” “Where’s the girl?” “Why won’t you take us with you?” “What are you doing that you don’t want us to see?”

The questions came on top of each other, from different mice that were now in various places on his body. He could sort them out because the facemask kept them clear in his memory. Noxon knew that all the questions came from all the mice. He also knew that he should answer only the questions he wanted to answer.

“I’m here to talk to you about taking you with me.”

“Into the past?” “What wallfold?” “Vadeshfold!” “Earth?”

“I’m going to try to get to Earth in a peculiar way,” said Noxon. “It may not work. It involves hooking onto a backward timeflow, and I may not be able to do it.”

“Worth the risk.” “We’ll be there.” “Let us see Earth.” “Where you fail, we may succeed later.”

“Not that simple,” said Noxon. “I said I might take you with me in the ship, but that doesn’t mean I’m taking you to Earth.”

“Where are you going if not Earth?”

“I’m going to take the ship to Earth, but I can’t land it on the planet. It’ll be in orbit. And when I go to the surface, I may or may not take mice along.”

“Then what’s the point?” “We’ve seen spaceships.” “We have all the schematics.” “A voyage just to stay in the ship?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s my point. I’m going to go down to the planet and try to learn why they destroy Garden, and then see how I can prevent it. Until I’ve seen what’s going on, I’m not bringing anyone with me. But I may need you. And if I do, I’d like to have some of you there.” He did not say: I may need you to destroy the human race, to wreck their ability to come to Garden and destroy us. He knew that they already understood what their task would be.

But that did not mean they were content to let him call the shots. “Why is it all your choice?” “You think you’re King-in-the-Tent.” “We won’t go.”

“Then don’t go,” said Noxon. “I was only inviting you, not commanding you.”

“Let us go!” “We want to go!” “Don’t leave us all behind!”

They nagged like children. Cute, too, like children. But Noxon knew just how dangerous they were.

“I know that even on the ship, you can cause trouble for me,” said Noxon.

“Not us.” “Why would we cause trouble?” “We want to help.” “Let us help.”

“You can send things in time and space. You could kill me in my sleep.”

“Why would we do that?” “We aren’t killers.”

“You most certainly are killers,” said Noxon. “I saw Param’s dead body.”

“We never actually did that.” “You got her away in time.” “We weren’t really going to do it.”

“You did it, and then we came back and undid it.” Noxon didn’t mention the attempt to infect the whole population of Earth with a plague of some kind, because they hadn’t done it yet, and it would be a bitter irony if it was Noxon who gave them the idea. “I’m sure you had very good reasons.”

“We knew you’d undo it!” “We were just trying to get you to take action!” “You were all being so complacent!” “Lazy!” “It was time to act.”

“I’m sure your motives were pure.”

“Irony!” “Lie!”

“Not a lie, and not irony,” said Noxon. “You were doing what you thought was right for Mus sapiens. It just happened to be inconvenient for Param.”

“Queen-in-the-Tent.” “We love her.” “We revere her.”

“You love no human, you revere no human.”

Silence.

“Of the biped class,” said Noxon. “I recognize you as a kind of human.”

“Then we are not Mus sapiens, we are Homo musculus.” A ­single voice. The distinction was important to them.

“You’re right,” said Noxon, drawing upon Father’s counsel about negotiations: Get your counterpart to agree with you about a common foundation, then build on it. “You are as entitled to the one name as the other. It’s really up to you whether you’re mice with human traits grafted in, or humans with the gifts that come from being small but many.”

“Good.” “Very good.” “True.” Father’s advice worked again, as it almost always did. More mice were talking than ever before. Tiny voices, but so many it was like a chord of music, held long on an organ. And instead of arguing with him, they were agreeing, amplifying.

“For all I know, you’ll be the key to solving the problem and saving Garden from the Destroyers,” said Noxon. “But you have to agree in advance that you’ll stay on the ship until I choose to bring you to Earth, and that you’ll do no mischief.”

Silence for a while, and then a lone voice: “Mischief to you might be survival to us.”

“I understand that. I’m asking you to put a lot of trust in me.”

“But you are not putting any trust in us.” “You try to control us.”

“Trust? I’m putting my life in your hands. Once you’re on the ship, I can’t possibly watch you all the time. You know how to interface with the ship’s computers, you could change our course, you could corrupt the life support. You know how to kill a man in his sleep.”

“We can’t harm you.” “You are the one who can take us into the past.” “Backflowing time is a trap only you can pull us out of.”