That evening, Umbo deliberately avoided running into Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. He knew right where they’d be, because they were as predictable as day and night. So he made sure not to pass near them.

Instead he went out among the housetrees and walked straight up to a tree where he knew several other Odinfolders lived. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

Eventually a head and shoulders emerged from the center of the tree. “What?” asked the woman tentatively.

“I’m Umbo. One of the Ramfolders.”

“I know who you are,” she said.

“I’m studying the way starships from Earth are designed, and I need to get into the Odinfold starship. How do I call the flyer?”

“You don’t,” said the woman, and then she was gone, having dropped back down into the tree.

So there it was, out in the open. He wasn’t allowed to summon the flyer.

And, just as predictably, within a few minutes Swims-in-the-Air came to find him, a bemused expression on her face. “Why didn’t you ask me or Mouse-Breeder to help you get to the starship?”

“I didn’t run into you inside and came looking for you out here, and then I thought, why not ask one of the others?”

“You’ve been here nearly a year,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Has any of them shown the slightest interest in meeting you?”

“No, and I’ve wondered about that.”

“Why should you wonder?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “You’re a symbol of our failure, after nine tries, to save the world. Here you are, this ragtag group of five, and you’re supposed to succeed where the finest minds of Odinfold have failed again and again and again? What do you think they feel.”

I thought they were forbidden to speak to us. I still think that. But of course he kept such thoughts to himself.

“I’m sorry I intruded on them,” said Umbo. “Fortunately, I think the woman I talked to will recover from the injury I caused her.”

“It was more injury than you think,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “You don’t understand us, what we go through.”

“Go through! This is a utopia, everybody’s happy and everything’s perfect.”

“If I thought you believed that,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “I’d worry about your sanity. But we still have our sense of irony, my young friend. Ours is a bleak and dreadful life here in the borderland, and you’d do well to remember that most of us value our solitude. In fact, all of us do, but Mouse-Breeder and I decided to make ourselves available to you. Somebody had to do it.”

“What do you mean, a bleak and dreadful life?”

“In the shadow of the Wall.”

“So move! Move away from the Wall, take back a few scraps of that vast game preserve.”

Swims-in-the-Air shook her head. “How can you not understand? We have to live near the Wall. We need the Wall.”

“Need it? How can you use the Wall?”

“Why, by walking into it, of course.”

“That would be insane.”

“Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “It fills us with terror and despair, and yet we walk inside the Wall every day, some of us for miles, deep inside, where it’s all we can do to keep from killing ourselves, or going mad with fear.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Why do you think we have no children?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “How do you think we keep ourselves from bonding into families? The Wall is the antidote for our humanity. It keeps us insane enough to reduce our population from six billion to a mere ten thousand. Children come along once a decade.”

“Though even at that rate, we never see them.”

“Him, you mean. Him, the one child who was born shortly before you got here. He lives on the far side of Odinfold. The previously born child is older than you. And that’s it, out of our entire wallfold. Two children.”

“Yours, then?” asked Umbo, thinking of that part of her name.

“My children are only thirty or forty years younger than me,” she answered. “They’re not children anymore, and I don’t keep track of their movements.”

“But you keep track of mine.”

“There are dangers here. But yes, Umbo, since you ask so sweetly, I’ll take you to our starship.”

Umbo almost blurted, “You will?” But that would have revealed that he hadn’t expected them to take him. And if they realized that, they would be bound to understand that he didn’t trust them, that he thought they were withholding things from him.

“When can we go?”

“The flyer can be here in an hour or so, if we summon it right now. I wish you wouldn’t, though.”

Ah, here it comes. “Why not?”

“Because there’s no way to call the flyer without Odinex knowing, no way to visit the starship without Odinex being there.”

“Can’t he go somewhere else while I’m there?” asked Umbo. “And really, what harm will it do?”

“If he sees you, if he converses with you, you’ll show up in the ships’ memory as a person instead of as a series of activities and dialogues. The Visitors will have everything from the ships’ computers before they ever reach the surface of Garden. They’ll know about you.”

“Let them,” said Umbo. “If it wrecks everything this time for me to visit the starship and meet your expendable, it’ll make no difference in the long run, because I won’t visit the starship on our next go-round, and so there’ll be nothing to report next time.”

“All right,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Who’s going with you?”

“Nobody,” said Umbo.

“Because you’re afraid they’d stop you if they knew you were going?”

“Do you think they would? My only thought was that it wasn’t worth disturbing them. I’m the only one who cares so much about the starships.”

“I think you should tell them,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“You know what?” said Umbo. “I don’t think so. I think I’ll just go as soon as the flyer gets here.”

Swims-in-the-Air shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Umbo felt a slight chill. Her reaction had told him all that he needed to know. She had tried to manipulate him, to play on his uncertainties and self-doubt, to delay or forestall this visit to the starship. The Odinfolders were not quite so open-minded as they had seemed. They had a plan, and intended to shape events so that the Ramfolders would carry it out.

It was only when he was in the air, sitting in the flyer, that it occurred to him that perhaps the manipulation had been on the opposite tack—perhaps she had suggested he wait for one of the others to join him precisely because she knew he would stubbornly refuse, leaving him completely alone, as she had wanted all along.

It was impossible to know what other people were thinking. Not for the first time, Umbo wondered if it wasn’t better to be straightforward like Loaf, saying what he thought and letting events fall in place however they would. Loaf didn’t try to outguess people. He just looked at what they did, judged the likely results, and reacted accordingly. While Umbo, by trying to be clever, left himself open to being even more easily deceived.

Or maybe nobody was being clever at all, and Umbo was simply outsmarting himself because of his suspicions.

The flyer skimmed over the surface of a rolling grassland, cut here and there by rivers and streams. But then there came a familiar sight: a steep row of cliffs extending for kilometers in either direction. It was Upsheer Cliff all over again, rock thrust upward in a huge circle around the point where a starship crashed into Garden eleven thousand years before.

The flyer rose, surmounting the cliffs. Behind them, a higher mountain stood alone. Where Upsheer had been surrounded by forest, this escarpment rose out of grassland, and it was grass that topped the cliffs. Higher up the mountain, trees formed a ragged pine forest. But Umbo suspected that the other side of the mountain was lush rain forest, given the direction of the prevailing winds.

The flyer settled onto a grassy flatland well back from the cliff edge. The door opened, and a voice said, “Proceed eastward until you are met.”