“That’s true,” said Ram Odin. “And I would be duly ashamed of myself except that near-universal slavery persisted for centuries, corrupt and oppressive in the extreme, and there was no revolution. And then we were getting close enough to the end of the world that I decided that instead of letting millions die in a social upheaval that would not only mean bloody war but also economic dislocations that would lead to poverty and starvation and misery on a large scale, I would simply tidy things up and let all these ­people have what happiness was possible within this strange, oppressive system, until the Destroyers come and wipe them all out.”

“I don’t know if that was a good decision,” said Rigg. “You could just as easily have decided that since they were going to die anyway, you might as well let them die fighting for freedom as passively waiting like cattle in the slaughterhouse.”

“I’ll admit that I’m getting old,” said Ram Odin. “Struggling for a cause looks like a much better idea to the young than to the old.”

“Because you’re getting tired?”

“Because I’ve seen that reforms are never as transformative as the reformers imagine that they’ll be. Nothing works as planned. What I did definitely made a bad system better.”

“But if Noxon succeeds, and the Destroyers don’t come . . .”

“You want me to make the Lord of Walls go on a long vacation.”

“I think it’s time for you and the expendable Gathuuriex to have the Lord of Walls take a long vacation and let the former Wallmen fight it out among them until the people revolt and make whatever progress toward freedom they can.”

“Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!”

“It sounds like you’re making a speech.”

“Echoing one. So you’re thinking the Walls won’t come down?”

“I’m seeing reasons why they shouldn’t all come down.”

“You’ll see more reasons as we continue these tours.”

“I want to continue as a Wallman for a few more days.”

“Better than being an itinerant Finder of Lost Things?”

“It’s the same job,” said Rigg. “I go back into the past and find out what actually happened. Then I do something about it.”

“Ah, but what do you do.”

“Any complaints?”

“So far so good.”

“I get the idea,” said Rigg, “that while I’m judging the wallfolds, you’re judging me.”

“I already know the wallfolds. You I’m just starting to get acquainted with.”

CHAPTER 11

In Reverse

Noxon had all the time in the world, and so he walked to Ramfold. Having spent almost every waking moment with Param for the past few months, it was a relief to be alone. Nothing against his sister. He had come to love her, and perhaps even understand her as well as one person can understand another. But he needed to be alone for a while, and this was that while.

Well, not alone. Mice all over him, but they weren’t chatty and that was fine with him. They were sulking because of the rules he had laid out for them. Once they got to Ramfold, they were not free to go off and start trying to populate the place with their species. Because of the facemask, they knew that even when he slept, Noxon was keeping a continuous count, and if he needed to, he could catch them. Well, not so much catch as crush. But that was the deal they made in order to be able to accompany him on the voyage.

It’s not that he really had all the time in the world—he had more. The world had only a finite number of years. Noxon could have more years than that, if he wanted. He could just keep going back to other times, and live on until he died of old age. People who couldn’t shift time were stuck with the life they had. If somebody came and burned all life from the surface of the world, well, that was too bad; they were cheated out of all their potential life after that.

But how was that different from the way the world worked all the time? You could get sick, you could take a fall, someone could kill you, there might be a flood, a drought, starvation. So many ways to die without living out your normal span. Everybody died of something, didn’t they? The only thing that made the end of Garden so tragic was that everybody met up with the same death at the same time.

No. That wasn’t the only thing. It wasn’t even the main thing. What made the end of the world so terrible, so vile, so urgent to prevent, were two things.

First, nobody would be there to remember. Everything would be lost. You couldn’t leave anyone or anything to continue work you had just begun. Any other death would at least leave a memory of what had once been. But not this one.

Second, and worse, was that somebody did it on purpose. It wasn’t an act of nature, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of chance. It was the murder of a world. Nineteen worlds, nineteen collections of human history and culture.

But during his walk, Noxon didn’t just think deep philosophical thoughts about why it was worth risking his life to try to prevent the end of the world. He also replayed old arguments with Father, pondered questions he had never had a chance to answer, thought about what Rigg might do, if Noxon succeeded in his mission—how he might finish out their shared life. If he might marry and have children, and if so, what wallfold he would choose to do it in, since by then he would know them all.

We are no longer the same person now, Rigg and I, thought Noxon. He is getting to know this world; I am leaving it. He has a future on Garden; I will never come back.

Even if he succeeded in changing Earth’s future so that the Destroyers did not come, that did not even hint at a possibility that the new future would have room in a starship for Noxon to return to Garden. If by some miracle he managed to arrive on Earth, it would be at the time when Ram Odin’s voyage—the first interstellar flight in human history—was just about to launch. He could not tell them he was a native of this world, because at that point Garden had not yet been settled, let alone named. Who would believe him if he tried to explain that by some bizarre stroke of fate, Ram Odin’s ship was replicated into nineteen forward copies and one backward one, and that they were thrown back in time 11,191 years? From what Rigg had read in Odinfold, most nations on Earth would treat him kindly; few would lock him up as a madman. But certainly no one would believe him, and he would spend a lot of time conversing with doctors whose compassionate purpose would be to bring him back from this delusion of his. He certainly couldn’t talk anyone into sending him home to Garden.

Nor could he slice time in order to be invisible and stow away on Ram Odin’s original voyage. It would not do for him to run the risk of being noticed by the ship’s computers on the outbound voyage, because they would then inform Ram Odin of everything that was going to happen.

Or would they? Did they lie to him, too? Or withhold information that he wouldn’t think of asking for? Did all the expendables know from the start what would happen?

No. They would have acted, deliberately or inadvertently, in such a way as to change the future. Or would they?

Was this present time precisely the future that the ship’s computers already knew would be reached, because the jewels he carried provided them with knowledge of every single action the computers and expendables would ever take?

There was no answer to this, but it didn’t stop Noxon from thinking of possible ways that such things might work—or not work at all. It was a pleasure to be alone with his thoughts. Especially because he did not waste time thinking about the one vital thing: what he would find when he followed Ram Odin’s path backward to the moment of the anomaly that created all these copies and plunged them back more than eleven millennia in time.