“You mean I might still be here, with my daughter dead?” asked Wheaton.

“I just don’t know,” said Noxon.

“Well, what if we find out that it’s so. Can we go back and give a different warning? Or appear to ourselves even before we got the note, and this time accept that yes, we’ll copy ourselves?”

“You don’t want to copy yourself,” said Noxon. “I know that.”

“You say that with absolute certainty,” said Wheaton, “but you’re the copy. You exist because of copying.”

“No,” said Noxon. “I’m the original. I’m the one who never murdered Ram Odin—a future version of him. I’m the one who got warned. Rigg was the one who had to live with the consequences of having done such a killing. He was the one who wasn’t saved.”

“None of us killed Deborah,” said Wheaton. “Unless you want to use some oblique causal chain that starts with ‘if I hadn’t insisted on seeing Homo erectus.’ But I tell you this: I don’t want to save my former self from seeing her dead, while I have to go on living in this world that doesn’t include her.”

“So you want to copy yourself?” asked Noxon.

“I don’t know what I want, except I want every version of myself to live in a world that includes a living Deborah!”

“There’s another choice,” said Ram. “We could leave Africa, go back to the States, and then go back in time and prevent the traffic accident that killed Deborah’s parents and blinded her.”

Wheaton thought about that for a long moment. “In that world, I wouldn’t raise her. I would hardly know her. I wasn’t really all that close to my brother, and Deborah’s mother never cared for me. Deborah would just be an annoying little kid that I avoided because I’d have no responsibility for her.” He grabbed his ears and squeezed hard against them, as if trying to crush his own head. “What kind of man am I? I don’t want to save Deborah, I want to save myself from losing her. And losing her by having her parents live, saving her eyesight—I hate that thought almost as much as losing her to an Erectid stone. I’m a monster.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “it’s not a bad thing, to find out a few of the monsters living inside us. Because you know you won’t act on that preference.”

“Well, one thing’s certain,” said Wheaton. “If we save Deborah’s parents and preserve her sight, she would certainly not be with us on this expedition. She’d be at home with her family. Or away at school. And probably not even interested in anthropology, because that would just be something her eccentric uncle did.”

“We can’t do that,” said Ram. “Because it changes too much. We don’t know all the influence raising Deborah had on Uncle Georgia. Without her grounding him, giving him a meaningful personal life, a purpose, who knows whether he would have been all that successful in his career? Or even alive? Men living alone don’t always take care of themselves.”

Wheaton shrugged. “So I allow Deborah’s family to die and her to suffer in order to avoid damaging my career?”

“I don’t care about your career all that much,” said Ram, “except that it’s your career that gives you the money and the privacy for us to hide out with you while we wait for the Visitors to come back from Garden and somehow persuade the people of Earth to commit planetwide genocide.”

“Thank you for reminding me of what I’m here to do,” said Noxon. “I can’t afford to lose track of that. But something Umbo and I learned early on, though we didn’t realize we had learned it for a long time: No matter what grand purposes and causes we enlist in, we still have to be decent and good to the people we meet along the way. People like Professor Wheaton here. And Deborah.”

“So what’s best for Deborah, that still allows Uncle Georgia to be helpful to our cause?” asked Ram.

They were silent for another long while.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said Noxon.

“You just decide?” said Wheaton. “Without any kind of discussion or vote?”

“It’s always my decision,” said Noxon. “Because I’m the one who actually does it. So I’m the one who bears the responsibility.”

“But without advice?”

“Hear me out and then give all the advice you want,” said Noxon.

Noxon woke up in the morning and joined the others, who were having room service breakfast. Ram fluttered a two-page note toward Noxon. “Read it,” he said. “It’s from future you. Apparently our expedition today didn’t turn out too well the first time around.”

“Because apparently I’m an idiot,” said Deborah. “Apparently my dead body appeared out there in the grass about two hundred years ago, and hyenas already had their way with me.”

“Let the man read,” said Ram Odin.

Noxon read.

“So the thing to decide,” said Noxon, “is whether to go out there at all, and trust that we’ll do better, or just go back to watching the camp.”

“I say we go,” said Deborah, “and I just won’t be an idiot.”

“He lays it out—you lay it out pretty clearly, Noxon,” said Ram. “Slice time from the start, place cameras to record everything, then watch from invisibility the way we always do.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Noxon. “But what about his other suggestion?”

“His?”

“Future me wrote this note,” said Noxon. “I didn’t. So it’s his suggestion, not mine.”

“I don’t remember my parents,” said Deborah to Professor Wheaton. “Not enough to want to trade them for you.”

“It’s not a trade,” said Noxon. “What he’s suggesting will copy us. You—the you of right now, eyeless and brilliant and semi-annoying—”

“Thanks for that ‘semi,’” said Deborah.

“You will still exist,” said Noxon. “But that other you, the baby with parents and eyes, that version of you will continue. And live a completely different life. She’ll never know you existed.”

“She’ll probably get hit by a bus at age twelve,” said Ram. “There are no guarantees.”

“Or her parents might get divorced. Or all kinds of bad things. But she’ll have that life, and whatever happens, she’ll see it happening with her own eyes,” said Noxon. “And meanwhile, the four of us will still exist because we’re the agents of change. And we’ll jump forward in time and go calling on the other version of Professor Wheaton, and he’ll take us in because he’s a generous guy.”

“I’ll be living in a garret somewhere,” said Wheaton. “Or a homeless shelter. Or I’ll be dead.”

“And if you are, then the four of us will find some other way to survive,” said Noxon. “It isn’t hard for me to make a killing on the stock market. We don’t need some version of Professor Wheaton’s pension. That’s just the simpler way.”

“Why are we even thinking of going back to save my parents?” asked Deborah. “That was never part of the plan.”

“It’s what future Noxon said,” Wheaton answered her. “We saw you dead. And we couldn’t help but think, as long as we’re saving her life, why not save her original life?”

“We don’t have to do that,” said Deborah. “We can prevent my death out on the savannah today—or a million and a half years ago, or whatever. And then we just go home and wait for the human race to monstrify ourselves.”

“That’s one choice,” said Ram Odin.

“But it’s the one I’m going to make,” said Noxon. “Because my friend Umbo—”

“The legendary Umbo,” said Ram quietly.

“Never forgot about his brother who died when we first started messing with time. And if I know Umbo, he’s probably already found some stupid elaborate way to save Kyokay’s life. Because he couldn’t go on unless he did.”

“But that hardly applies to you, Noxon,” said Wheaton.

“And it certainly doesn’t apply to me,” said Deborah, “because I think I turned out just fine.”