“Now the philosopher comes out,” said Olivenko. “You’ve discovered the soul.”

“Rigg did,” said Loaf. “And Umbo.”

“When?” Umbo demanded.

“Not me,” said Rigg.

“The paths, Rigg,” said Loaf. “The part of you that sees into the past. Where is that in the genome?”

“The Odinfolders said that they had clipped the genes that had those powers and . . .” Then Rigg fell silent. They had left him with that impression, but no, they hadn’t actually said so.

“If they could find the genes that produced time-shifting,” said Loaf, “what would they need you for?”

“They’re searching for those genes,” said Olivenko.

“They’ve spent all these months studying every genetic trace you’ve left behind,” said Loaf. “They have the mice gather them up. They have the mice study them.”

“And have the mice found nothing?”

“There’s nothing to find,” said Loaf. “It’s not in the genes. The part of us that lays down paths through time, tied to the gravity of a planet—it’s not in the brain.”

“Animals leave paths, too,” said Rigg. “Even plants, in their fashion.”

“Life is the soul,” said Loaf. “Living things have souls, have minds, have thought. Living individuals have their own relationship to the planet they dwell on. Their past is dragged along with their world through space and time. But it persists. Long after the organism dies, its path remains, and all that it was can be recovered, every moment it lived through can be seen, can be revisited.”

Rigg blushed with embarrassment before he could even speak aloud the thought he had just had. “I should have seen it all along.”

“Should have, but didn’t,” said Loaf.

“Seen what!” demanded Umbo.

“That the paths of the mice in Odinfold aren’t mousepaths,” said Loaf.

“You read minds now?” asked Olivenko.

“I knew what he had to be thinking about,” said Loaf. “And when he realized, and blushed—”

“Their paths are small,” said Rigg, “but they’re bright. And they have the same—it’s not color, but it’s like color—they have the same feel as human paths. It’s right there in front of me, and I didn’t even realize it, because—”

“Because you have a human mind,” said Loaf. “The brain sees all, but the mind has focus. That’s our great power, the ability to home in on something and understand it to its roots—the brain can’t do that. But that same focus shuts out things that the brain is constantly aware of. So we don’t notice what we can plainly see; and yet we understand things that we can’t see.”

“And all living things can do this?” said Umbo.

“At some level or other,” said Loaf. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. Because the facemask lets me see like a beast, even though I think about what I see the way a man does. I can see a range of detail that is impossible to an ordinary human. But the facemask, which perceives it all, can’t do anything with it, because its mind is at such a primitive level. When mice were bred with human genes inside them, it was as if humans were born in tiny bodies. They have human souls, or close to it.”

“What are they, where do they come from?” demanded Olivenko.

“They’re life,” said Loaf. “I can’t explain it better than that because it’s all I’ve figured out. All that the mice have figured out, either. Living things have this thing in them, this connection with the planet, with each other. And humans have more of it than any other living thing, just as animals all have more of it than plants. And that’s what Rigg sees: the life, the soul, the mind, whatever you call it, persisting eternally through time, linked to the gravity well of the world.”

Rigg thought of the paths of humans who had crossed the various bridges at Stashi Falls; as the falls eroded, lowering and backing away, the paths remained exactly where they had been, never shifting relative to the center of the planet Garden.

“So what happens when we go into space?” asked Rigg. “Do we lose our souls?”

“Of course not,” said Loaf. “Or the colonists would all have arrived here lifeless.”

Rigg looked at the oldest paths that had passed through this room. The colonists as they were revived, the paths faded with the passage of eleven thousand years, but still present, still accessible.

And one path in particular. The one who had walked through the ship long before the others were revived. The path of Ram Odin.

“Should I look at him?” asked Rigg aloud. “Should I talk to him?”

“And say what?” asked Loaf.

“Talk to whom?” said Olivenko.

“Ram Odin,” said Umbo.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Ask him . . . what he was thinking. What he had in mind.”

“And what does that matter now?” asked Loaf. “What will you learn from him? His desires don’t matter to us right now—what matters to us is what the Odinfolders are planning. What the Visitors will conclude when they come. Why the Destroyers came a year later. What the ships and the expendables will do.”

“If you showed yourself to Ram,” said Umbo, “it might wreck everything.”

“Unless we already live in the future that was created by our going back and talking to him,” said Rigg.

“You’d be experimenting with the entire history of Odinfold,” said Olivenko. “You can’t do it. You might destroy everybody.”

“Not us,” said Rigg. “We’d be safe if we all went together.”

“And the billions of other people?” asked Loaf.

“But we don’t destroy them, do we?” said Rigg. “We know their lives happened because they remain part of our past.”

“The ships’ log keeps memories of lost futures,” said Umbo, “even if we carry the ship’s log back with us through the Wall.”

With that, they all insisted that Umbo recount what he had learned about the ship’s logs, the remote storage of their data on the jewels, the way the ship’s log became the official means of transferring authority and control from one captain, one admiral to the others.

When Umbo was finished, Rigg said, “Good job, Umbo.”

Umbo’s temper flared. “I don’t need your pat on the head,” he snapped.

Loaf reached out and slapped him again. Umbo cried out in pain.

“Stop that,” Rigg said to Loaf. “Stop hitting him.”

“You don’t have control of me,” said Loaf. “And I’ll hit him like the father he needs would have hit him.”

“My father hit me plenty,” said Umbo. “More than I needed!”

“He wasn’t your father. He hit you because of his needs. But I’m an experienced officer. I’m hitting you because you need to be slapped out of your self-pitying resentment and wakened up to your responsibilities.”

Rigg wanted to intervene, to say something, but he realized that he needed to trust Loaf to help Umbo in ways that Rigg was too young and inexperienced even to attempt.

“I don’t need anybody to wake me to anything!” said Umbo.

“Those very words are proof of how much you need it,” retorted Loaf. “A soldier like you is a danger to every man in his unit. He can’t function as part of the team, he can’t do his part.”

“I’m not one of your mice!” said Umbo.

“But that’s how the mice learned how to do it,” said Loaf. “By getting the genes of humans, by become humans in mouse bodies. Humans who could subsume themselves in the group identity and do their part with perfect trust that others would do theirs—those are the humans who had a better chance to survive, the ones who became the primary vehicles of human evolution. The resentful, suspicious man alone—the alpha male—that’s the gorilla that beats up or drives away all the other males. He wants everything for himself, hates all comers, and he’s stupid and helpless against much weaker primates who act together.”

“You’re saying I’m like that,” said Umbo resentfully.

“I don’t have to say it,” said Loaf. “That’s the way you’ve been thinking and acting for a year. You’re the would-be alpha male who absolutely hates being in the same troop with another alpha. You’re getting ready to challenge, you’ve already challenged, but you back away, waiting, biding your time. But that knife in your hand—it wanted to spring, didn’t it. It wanted Rigg’s heart, didn’t it.”