“Then I want to learn how the starships work,” said Umbo. “And all about the machines that govern them.”

“It’s a lifetime’s study,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“And your lifetimes are shorter than ours,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“I don’t have to learn how to build one,” said Umbo. “But I assume that the design of whatever the Visitors use to come here will be based on the same principles. They rely on machines, as you do. More than you do. Right?”

Rigg was surprised that Umbo had thought of such a project, and seemed determined to pursue it. Umbo had no particular education in science and technology. He would be duplicating the kind of education that Father had given Rigg as they wandered the forests. Rigg well knew what effort it had taken him with the best teacher in the world.

And then Rigg realized that he was assuming Umbo was less capable of learning than Rigg himself was. But that wasn’t so. Umbo was half Odinfolder, while Rigg and Param were only one-quarter. If they really had bred for superior intelligence, Umbo might be even smarter than the two royal children were.

How quickly I bought into the class biases of the Sessamids, thought Rigg. Thinking I was Father’s son, I assumed I was as smart as he was—he knew everything, I thought. Turns out he was a machine, and I was the son of the Queen- and King-in-the-Tent. So I turned all my sense of superiority toward the royal family, and once again, I was wrong.

Wrong and wrong again, and again, and probably now as well. Let Umbo study what he wants. He’ll learn as quickly as I will, or more quickly.

Soon they all had books, except Loaf, who pleasantly insisted on going out into the world. He asked for a flyer, and they produced one—a duplicate of the one they had ridden in when Vadesh brought them to the Wall. Within three days he was back, saying little about what he saw, and then settled into the same life they were leading: Hours on end sitting or standing or walking about in the library, reading whatever the mice made appear at their request, then discarding what they were done with, which promptly vanished, yet reappeared again upon request, open to the very page they had been on when they closed it.

But it wasn’t all reading. There were meals, and at the meals they talked, and sometimes in between. Umbo and Olivenko were the sort of student who has to talk about or show whatever excites them. Rigg understood the principle, but Father had curbed it in him, if only because whatever Rigg had learned, he had learned from Father—from Ramex—and in the deep forest there was no one to tell but him, and what was the point of that?

Rigg was annoyed sometimes at the interruptions from Umbo and Olivenko, but then he changed his mind when he realized that it was good for him to know the extent of what they learned, as well as their questions and conclusions about it. It’s not that Rigg actually knew everything they knew, but he knew what they had said about what they knew, and didn’t forget it, so that he would be able to ask them questions and have some idea of whether they’d know the answer.

Param, on the other hand, talked about nothing she was learning, and showed her annoyance if anyone asked. For a few hours once he asked the mice to show him what Param had been reading, and he skimmed through the books, finding that she was, indeed, reading histories of the Sessamids. But very quickly he found that she was beyond—before—the royal family, backtracking through the entire history of Ramfold. It was a world she had never really seen, he realized, and by studying the whole history and geography of it, she was, in a way, seeing what she had been kept from seeing her entire life.

Olivenko immersed himself in the culture of Earth, but not the modern history that would be familiar to the Visitors who would come to Garden only a year or so from now. Instead, he was discovering all he could about the evolution of the human race and then about the earliest histories, the movement of ancient tribes, the formation of nations. “I have to know why humans are the way they are,” said Olivenko.

Rigg took note of how Olivenko spoke of humans as “they,” though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The Odinfolders looked rather simian, with their shorter legs and semi-grasping feet. It was easy to see that they would not register as fully human. But as far as the Visitors would be able to see, Rigg and his company were fully human. Except for Loaf, and that was only because of the parasite he bore on his face. And Olivenko had no share in the inborn time-centered powers that were the unique achievement of Ramfold. In what sense should he think of humans as other than himself, or of himself as other than human?

To Rigg, there was no doubt that he was human, and the others as well—including the yahoo-bodied Odinfolders. It took a little getting used to, the way their strides were shorter, their running slower, but their reach longer, their strength much greater than any of the Ramfolders but Loaf. Still, they spoke human languages, thought human thoughts, ate human food, and had the same tribal and personal instincts as any human. Self-preservation, yet the willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community; personal pride and ambition, and yet a willingness to be modest in order to retain their acceptance by others. Rigg could see no particular difference in the way they thought and acted, the social rules that governed them.

The only real difference was that the Odinfolders were so self-controlled. They might feel the same imperatives as the people Rigg had known in Ramfold, but they knew what was happening to them as they felt these things, and chose rationally whether to act on those feelings or not. He could see in their faces as the decisions were made, the momentary hesitation, and instinctive move that they held in check. But it seemed to cause no stress. Reining in their passions was as natural to them as eating and drinking and talking. So perhaps they had evolved to a higher level, another stage. Once they started getting the Future Books, they had transformed themselves again and again, remaking their history from that moment forward, over and over, and learning from each failure, only to fail again. Perhaps that process had bred in them a calm acceptance of defeat, or a readiness to take the long view of things.

There came a time when Rigg realized he had to read the Future Books in order to try to make guesses about what might have struck the Visitors as so terrifying or disgusting about the people of Garden that they came back to destroy the world. No matter how much Rigg read from the histories, biographies, and literature of Earth, it made no sense to him. The stories all seemed to champion tolerance, acceptance of the strange, the need to change in order to adapt, survive, grow.

Indeed, the whole colonizing project was born of a fear that Earth was too crowded, too polluted, too endangered after years of botched development. An outlet was needed precisely so that humans had a chance of becoming something different. And so Ram Odin had been sent out in command of a starship that would use the new technology of jumping through space to reach another habitable planet as quickly as possible; but if the jump hadn’t worked, the ship could have continued at a much slower speed, with passengers and pilot in stasis until they reached the planet that Ram named Garden. The idea was to succeed in establishing the human race on another world. And in this the colony project had succeeded astonishingly well.

It was hardly the fault of the people of Garden that there had been a time anomaly in the first jump, and they had been thrust back in time by eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years. Nor was it their fault that another anomaly caused the ship to make the passage nineteen times, so that nineteen complete copies of the colony ship, including all the people on it, reached Garden at the same time. What could possibly have caused the Visitors to ignore their own ethos, the innocence of the people of Garden, and a human history longer than that of recorded human history on Earth?