“He’ll be here soon with a whole meal,” said Umbo.

“Oh, do you mean the man-shaped machine that Rigg thought of as his father?” asked Leaky.

“The same kind of machine,” said Umbo.

“Supposed to be identical,” said Loaf. “Supposed to have all their memories in common.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Umbo. “I knew Rigg’s father. He taught me, too, a little. I thought of him as a great man. We called him Golden Man. Nox called him Good Teacher. Both true. But Vadeshex? Nothing but lies, manipulation.”

“It might be,” said Loaf, “you could have swapped them and they would have acted exactly alike in each other’s situations. But you get a history with one machine, and a different history with another, it’s hard to think of them as being the same.”

“How are you doing?” asked Umbo.

Leaky shook her head. “Desolated,” she said. “But not dead.”

“And that’s a good thing,” said Loaf.

“Says you,” said Leaky.

“Says me,” said Umbo. “I can only imagine the state Loaf was in, in that future where you failed to come back out of the facemask trance. If that’s how it happened.”

“More likely I ran around screaming through the facemask till it finally opened a hole for me to yell through,” said Leaky. “I was probably lashing out and breaking things.”

“Maybe,” said Loaf. “We’ve only seen one transformation—mine. Rigg did his alone, and none of us saw it. His is newer, so he looks a lot less human than I do.”

“Human enough for me,” said Leaky.

Vadeshex came not long after, and spread out a picnic for them on the grass in sight of the Wall. He offered the suggestion that some of Leaky’s grief might be owing to their having just passed through the emotions induced by the Wall, and to the fact that they were still close to it and bound to be feeling some residual effects.

“Thank you for your suggestion,” said Loaf.

“Thank you for the meal,” said Umbo. “It was very good.”

“I don’t often get to check out my culinary routines,” said Vadeshex. Shyly? Was he actually trying to conceal a bit of pride? No, it was just the way he was designed. Or a ­deliberate manipulation, to try to change their attitude toward him. It wasn’t going to work.

Wasn’t going to work much. The food had been very good. And they had come to him to get a facemask. The old machine had its uses.

Vadeshex offered to fly them home, and they accepted. They traveled that night; Vadeshex landed them in a field a mile from Leaky’s Landing. They were home before midnight.

“I can’t believe there’s such a machine, to fly through the air. Remember how long we had to ride, how many days, and here we are on the very night.”

“People on Earth do this kind of thing all the time,” said Umbo.

“Well if we had eleven thousand years here,” said Leaky, “and you say that humans on Earth got technologies like this only ten thousand years after inventing agriculture—”

“Ten thousand, give or take,” said Loaf.

“Why haven’t we done any better?”

“We’re blocked,” said Umbo. “It’s one of the things the expendables do. And the ships’ computers. They choke off any line of development that might lead to high technology. Except in Odinfold, and that’s because Ram Odin gave it an exemption, up to a point.”

“The thing’s almost as big as the roadhouse, and it flew,” said Leaky again.

“And here we’ve gotten used to it and think of it as nothing special,” said Loaf. “You’re reminding me how miraculous it really is.”

“Don’t go yet, Vadeshex,” said Umbo. “I think I may be needing a ride back to Larfold, where my fiancee is waiting.”

“Stay with us,” said Leaky. “You hardly visited.”

“I’ll be back,” said Umbo. “The question is, when?”

“Give us a couple of years,” said Loaf. “That’s time enough. Check back and see how we’re doing.”

“I could go right now into the future and find out.”

“Then you’d be tempted to tell us,” said Loaf. “No, go somewhere else and have something like a life—whatever’s possible with the lovely Queen of Nothing Much and her Kingdom of Nowhere.”

“In other words, you’d like me to try to accomplish something before I come back pestering you.”

“No, we just don’t want you getting jealous of how in love we are,” said Loaf.

“Thank you for everything, Umbo,” said Leaky. “Especially the warning. I wish it had worked. But I’m glad that you kept me from giving up my life for nothing.”

“Thanks for trusting me enough to believe my warning,” said Umbo. He turned to Vadeshex. “Take me back to Param?”

“Wherever and whenever she is,” said Vadeshex.

“Get me to the where, and I’ll work on the when myself.”

CHAPTER 13

Where Not to Go

“Have I ever resisted your visiting any of the wallfolds?” asked Ram Odin.

“We’ve only been to two,” said Rigg.

“Well, we happen to have come rather early to the one that I will advise you not to visit.”

“You understand that it makes me all the more determined to go there.”

“I took that into account,” said Ram Odin. “But I have no choice. Janefold is as interesting as any of the others. It has only one statistical quirk.”

“Which is?”

“The life expectancy is about half that of other wallfolds.”

“And why is that?”

“Disease,” said Ram Odin. “This is the place where plagues begin.”

“Because it’s tropical?” asked Rigg.

“I don’t know why, though that may be part of it. Some of the diseases are vectored through biting insects, some of them through other mammals. Some originated in animals that thrive in this climate. None of the diseases depend on microbes native to Garden. Nothing smaller than a facemask or a mantle has yet jumped the barrier between the biotas of Earth and of Garden.”

“So you don’t want me to go there because you’re afraid I might die?”

“I’m reasonably sure you would die.”

“How sure?”

“Your odds of survival are about one in fifty. But that’s a guess, since you’d be the first visitor from outside the wallfold since I last visited there about ten thousand years ago, give or take.”

“Did you get sick?”

“Almost died. And the really interesting diseases hadn’t started up yet. This is the incubator of hellish death, Rigg. If it weren’t for the Wall, diseases from Janefold would sweep across the world, killing half each time.”

“Then why is there anyone left there at all?” asked Rigg.

“They’ve built up resistance. Not individually. But each time a new plague comes up, the only survivors are those with natural defenses. The deadly disease that almost killed me is now no more than an itchy rash and a case of sniffles—to the Janefolders. But if it got out of the wallfold, it would probably have the twenty percent kill rate that it had when I caught it.”

Rigg thought about this. “If they have resistance to disease, then why is their life expectancy so low?”

“They develop resistance to each disease. But the newer the disease, the more people it kills with each resurgence. And some of them mutate, so that people who lived through one iteration have no defense, or little defense, against its successor.”

“I hate to be offensive, but this makes me wonder what’s hiding there. What you don’t want me to see.”

“What’s hiding there is death, and what I don’t want you to see is the inside of your coffin lid.”

“So you keep me out of Janefold with a threat of plagues. What will be the excuse the next time you want me not to visit a place? Earthquakes? Really bad weather? Ill-behaved children?”

“This is how the world works,” said Ram Odin. “It happened on Earth. There were a couple of places that spawned plagues that covered the world, because trade routes connected them to everybody. But there were other places that were cut off. The Americas didn’t spawn a lot of diseases because population density never got that high, and because there weren’t a lot of primates to incubate diseases that would be particularly apt to kill humans. When people from Eurasia landed there, those worldwide diseases, in combination, had a killoff of about ninety percent of the locals.”