In answer to her words—or to the deaths of the mice she had stepped on—more mice came into the room, until the floor and table were as solidly covered as if they were carpeted. No, as if they had grown a pelt and now had muscles that throbbed and surged under the many-colored fur.
She didn’t want to kill any more of them, and besides, they were frightening her. It was a sign of how much she had changed that she had not gone invisible the moment she noticed there were too many mice in the room. But even if she no longer sliced time by reflex, she could certainly do it as a matter of good sense. There was no reason to stay in this place, trampling mice and snuffing out their annoying little lives.
She went invisible, and began to walk out of the room.
But something was very wrong.
In one sense, everything worked perfectly normally. She could now walk right through the mice without crushing them.
On the other hand, the mice did not speed up or scurry around madly the way people did when Param slowed herself down. Usually they sped up and scampered like mice; but these mice did nothing of the kind. In fact, for a moment Param wondered if she had somehow acquired the opposite talent, and had frozen them in time, for they did not move at all. They stayed in place, noses pointing toward her.
But they were moving. Tiny movements, yes, but it made the carpet of mouse fur undulate and shift constantly. And those shifts were as rapid as she would have expected—she was indeed slicing time and skipping forward in tiny increments, walking as she did.
As she made her slow progress along the floor toward the door, she realized that the mice were not staring at the place where she had been. They were staring at where she was now.
They could see her.
It was impossible! When she sliced time, she never remained in the same place long enough to be visible to humans, whose brains couldn’t register an object that was passing through each location for only a split second at a time.
But mice were not human. Their metabolisms were faster. Did this mean that they also perceived more rapidly? Did it mean that they could see and register her presence for the tiny moment she spent in any one place?
Then something else. The mice were moving a thick cylinder of steel through the room, bringing it closer to her.
How could they lift it?
They weren’t lifting it at all. It was jumping from place to place. Near the door; halfway across the room; at the base of the table; up onto the table. It stayed in each place for what might have been five or ten minutes, though to Param it seemed only seconds.
They were shifting it in time and space. Or no, the mice weren’t doing it—how could they? The Odinfolders must be using their time-sender to move the thick cylinder from place to place.
A thick cylinder of solid metal that could be placed anywhere in space and time.
She thought of Mother ordering her soldiers to sweep the air with swords and metal rods, in the effort to pass metal through her body and kill her. It was not hard to imagine that the Odinfolders controlling this cylinder had something similar in mind.
Now she could see that each time the cylinder moved, the mice moved out of its way first. It damaged none of them. In fact, it might well be that the cylinder could not move until the mice had cleared enough space for it; that might be the reason for its staying in each place for minutes at a time, waiting for the mice, their noses and paws and tails, to get out of the way.
She thought of Olivenko and his discussion of rules of physics. Two objects unable to occupy the same space at the same time. That was the principle that made Param slightly sick when she moved through soft things, like people and organic walls and doors—wooden things. Since most of any object was the empty space between and within atoms, there were surprisingly few collisions when she jumped ahead in time. When Rigg and Umbo shifted back in time, they never ended up inside a tree or a rock. They could move into a volume of air without causing the annihilation of more than a few particles.
Was that what this cylinder was doing? They could move it in time and space, but they couldn’t move it into a location occupied by something as substantial as a mouse. The mice had to move first.
But that was the second most frightening thing: The mice were moving. Whoever was controlling the movement of the cylinder was also controlling the mice.
The most frightening thing was the way the mice continued to stare at her, seeing exactly where she was. They could see her; she was not invisible. Their eyes were pointing to her. Whoever was controlling the cylinder could therefore put it into the space occupied by her heart or her brain during one of the gaps between her time-slicing jumps, and when she reappeared in that spot a fraction of a second later, that organ of her body would be annihilated.
Nor could she easily stop her time-slicing and reenter the normal timeflow. For then her feet would occupy the same space as the mice underfoot. It would not kill her, but she would be crippled. In agony. Her feet would be unable to hold her. It might take weeks for her feet to heal. And the mice themselves would be quite dead.
Why should she care if mice died? Someone was using them to try to kill her!
And they would succeed. Any moment they wanted to, they could put the cylinder into her body space and, when she came back into momentary existence, it would be sliding downward through her body, drawn by gravity while she was not there, then suddenly stopped and cradled by the skin and bones of her body when she did reappear with the cylinder inside her.
I’m going to die, she thought, and her stomach went sick and her head felt light and she was filled with more terror than she had felt before, more than the fear she had felt when she and Umbo leapt from the high rock and slowly fell downward toward the metal being waved around by Mother’s men.
The difference was that then she had Umbo with her—Umbo, who could jump backward in time and take her with him.
Who would save her now? Even if Rigg or Umbo showed up, they couldn’t see her; Rigg could see her path, but even he could not reach into the slices of time and take hold of her.
Why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t they go back to an earlier time and give me one of Umbo’s trademarked visions of his future self, saying, Get out of this room! Or simply taking her by the hand and moving her to another time or place.
Maybe they can’t get back into the library. Maybe when they found out I was dead, the Odinfolders kept them from coming here, where they could intercept me and prevent this terrible moment and save my life.
But then, they could always go back to a time before we came to the library. Back when we first came to Odinfold, but before the Odinfolders knew that we were here. Why didn’t they?
She knew the answer. If they went back and warned the whole group that Param would be murdered here, nearly a year after they arrived, then they would turn aside and would not learn all the things that they had learned. They wouldn’t know about the Visitors and the Destroyers. Nor would they know about the high technology of the Odinfolders and the billions of people who lived in these vast ruins when they were still mighty cities.
They had to choose between what they had learned in Odinfold, and saving my life at the cost of never learning it. And they chose correctly. What was her death, compared to the need to know about the end of the world and save it?
I am like a soldier who dies in battle. Regrettable, but an unavoidable loss.
Unless . . .
They didn’t have to warn her. They could come back and simply take her. A warning would make them all turn away, change the past, annihilate the months they had just lived through. But if they came back to the moment of their first arrival, they could take her away and drag her into some other time, earlier or later. She would be prevented from learning anything she had learned, but they would keep the knowledge that they had, because they would still have lived through all these months and would keep their memories when they shifted in time.
But they didn’t do it.
No, no. They did
n’t do it in this timeflow, because they couldn’t possibly know to do it unless they found out that I was killed. It is my death that provokes them into going back to change time and save me. So I have to go through this whole process, I have to see my death coming and then, most terribly, die.
Only then can they travel back in time and interfere with the forward flow of it, snatching me out of time before I can be murdered in this way. That version of myself will never live through these terrible minutes. Because in that version of time, I didn’t die.
But in this one, I will die. I won’t remember it, in that other timeflow, but it has to happen in order for them to save me, so my death will still be real, because it will still have its residual effects, even though a version of myself, a copy, will move forward into the future without this death.
To that version of me, this death will seem unreal, temporary; it will seem to have been avoided.
But it will not be avoided. I will live through it. I will die, and I will stay dead, I will; this version of me will be extinguished and I don’t want to die.
The cylinder disappeared again, and almost immediately Param felt a searing agony in her throat, the heat of billions of molecules being torn apart, some of them becoming radioactive as atoms collided and tore each other apart and then reassembled. She lived just long enough to feel the heat pulse through her entire body, every nerve screaming with the pain of burning to death in a searing moment.
Param noticed the room was full of mice. They were scrambling up onto the table, swarming all over the floor. Annoyed and a little frightened, Param was proud of herself for not time-slicing by simple reflex. No, she would get up and leave the room.
But before she could even push back her chair, Rigg appeared in the air above the table, his feet a few inches above its surface. He dropped to the table, crushing mice under his feet. He reached out his hand to her.
Something terrible must be about to happen, Param realized. Rigg is coming back to save me.
She held out her hand and clasped his.
And suddenly the mice were gone.
Rigg pulled her to her feet, then jumped off the table. “Come on,” he said. There were several mice in the room.
“They can see us,” said Param.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Rigg. “We have to get outside, to the flyer.” He took her hand again and began drawing her after him, out into a corridor. “We should never have let ourselves spend so much time in these underground rooms. It’s devilishly hard getting in and out.”
They turned a corner and there was Mouse-Breeder, coming down a flight of stairs.
Rigg squeezed her hand and she saw him give her a warning glance.
“Mouse-Breeder!” Rigg called out. “I hope there isn’t a rule against running in the library!”
“None that I know of,” he said cheerfully. “Where are you headed?”
“Up for sunlight!” said Rigg. “I had a sudden need for air, and my sister decided to join me.”
“Have fun,” said Mouse-Breeder.
They ran past him up the stairs.
“He doesn’t know.”
“It’s six months ago,” said Rigg. “But the moment he runs into one of us in this time, he’ll realize that he saw us running because we came from the future.”
“What does it matter?” said Param. “Wherever we go, whatever we do, they can use their time machine to send something to kill us—a sword in the heart, poison into our bodies, we’ll never be safe.”
“Stop talking and run again,” said Rigg. “And don’t worry, they won’t do it.”
“How do you know?” asked Param.
“Because there is no machine,” said Rigg.
“But . . .”
“Run,” said Rigg.
She was utterly out of breath, her lungs on fire and her legs leaden with exhaustion when they reached the surface and came out into sunlight.
There was Umbo, watching intently. And suddenly a flyer appeared behind him, and Loaf and Olivenko stood beside it.
They must have transported Rigg back in time the way they used to do it, when they worked together. Rigg must have found a path that would take him to the exact time he wanted to reach. Then Umbo must have slowed time down so he could take hold of that path. Umbo waited here so that he could bring them back into the present when Rigg returned to the out-of-doors with Param in tow.
By the time Rigg and Param reached the flyer, Olivenko and Loaf were already inside it. Umbo waited till they arrived. Then he reached out and took, not her hand, but Rigg’s, and drew them up the ramp into the flyer.
“Good work,” said Loaf.
“Rigg and Umbo just saved you from a terrible death,” said Olivenko.
The flyer took off.
“What, the mice were going to attack me?” asked Param, incredulous.
“Not by nibbling you to death, no,” said Olivenko.
“A cylinder of metal in the throat,” said Rigg. He demonstrated the size of it with his hands. “They slipped it into place during one of the gaps in your time-slicing. It tore your head off your body and burned you up.”
Param felt ill. “Why? What did I do?”
“I think they wanted to show us how easily we could be killed,” said Olivenko.
“I think they wanted to force us to use our powers and get out of here,” said Loaf.
“Why?” asked Param. “All they had to do was ask us to leave!”
“The people who wanted us to go may have been in the minority,” said Loaf. “We only ever met Swims-in-the-Air and Mouse-Breeder. It gave us an impression of perfect unity among the Odinfolders. But there may well have been a powerful faction that wanted us gone.”
“By killing me?”
“They knew we wouldn’t leave you dead,” said Rigg. “And they knew that we wouldn’t stay.”
“But what about meeting the Visitors?” asked Param. “I thought we were supposed to figure out a way to convince them not to wipe out Garden.”
“I don’t think so,” said Umbo. “I don’t think that was ever the plan.”
“They’ve been lying to us?”
“Of course they have,” said Loaf. “They’re only human.”
“Why did we believe them?” said Rigg, shaking his head. He imitated Swims-in-the-Air’s melodious voice. “‘We want you to figure things out yourselves. We want you to find your own way to convince the Visitors that we’re worth saving.’ Silbom’s right heel!”
“What did they want?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Loaf.
“I have a theory,” said Umbo.
“Which is?” asked Rigg.
“You’ll think it’s stupid,” said Umbo.
“Probably,” said Rigg. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t be right.”
“Or lead us to a right answer,” said Loaf.
“I think they’ve given up completely on changing the Visitors’ minds,” said Umbo. “I think they only wanted us to get on the Visitors’ starship long enough to smuggle a weapon aboard. A weapon that they’d carry back to Earth and wipe out the human race there before they can possibly send the Destroyers to kill all the people of Garden.”
“A weapon?” asked Param. “I thought we couldn’t build weapons.”
“Not literally a weapon,” said Umbo. “They can’t make a weapon. They haven’t made a weapon. Not mechanical, not biological, no such thing.”
“Then what is it that they’re supposedly going to smuggle back to Earth?” asked Rigg.
In reply, Umbo gestured toward Loaf.
Only now did Param notice that a couple of mice were perched on Loaf’s shoulders.
“Mice?” she asked.
“I told you there was no machine,” said Rigg. “But they think there is one. They think they’ve seen it, they think they know how it works. Instead, what they’ve seen is a very solid-seeming hologram. And when things get sent back in time and over to some distant location, they think the machine is doing
it.”
Param realized what he was leading up to. “But it’s the mice doing it.”
“Mouse-Breeder’s mice,” said Umbo. “They have human genes in them. Including the genes of time manipulation. Only in these mice, the genes are expressed by time-displacement of inanimate objects. They can put anything anywhere.”
“So when they put a cylinder in my throat—”
“It’s what some Odinfolder humans told them to do,” said Umbo. “And they obeyed, because they knew that we could retrieve you.”
“Though it was harder than they thought,” said Rigg. “Because we didn’t want to retrieve you from a point before you learned all that you could learn here.”
“Whatever it is you learned,” said Olivenko. Was there a bit of scorn in his voice?
“We’ve spent nearly a year here, all told—a whole year since we left Ramfold and went to Vadeshfold. Which of the things that happened in that time should be erased?” asked Loaf. “We wanted to save your life, of course, but we didn’t want to kill a year of it in the process.”
Param felt uneasy, thinking of a version of the future in which her burnt-up body had no head left on it. “What will we do now?”
“Go to the border with Larfold,” said Rigg. “The wallfold to the north. Where Father Knosso was murdered.”
“We’re going to go back earlier and save him?” asked Param.
“We don’t dare,” said Umbo. “Not yet, anyway. We can’t go back before the time when Rigg took control of the Wall.”
“The flyer won’t pass through the Wall,” said Umbo. “We have to walk through. I’d rather not do it while experiencing the agony of the Wall.”
“We’ll go through the Wall at almost exactly the time Rigg took control,” said Loaf. “While we were still hiking around in Vadeshfold. Before we ever appeared here.”
“But they’ll see us,” said Param.
“Who?” asked Rigg.
“The Odinfolders.”
“Oh, well—they probably will,” said Rigg, “since they seem to cluster around the Wall. But they won’t know to stop us.”
“Unless the mice send them another Future Book,” said Umbo, laughing.
“Is that who’s been writing the Books of the Future?” asked Param.