“I know,” said Noxon. “Nobody knew that he’d not only leap the fold but go back 11,191 years into the past. Nobody knew that there’d be nineteen colonies on that one world, instead of one. Nobody knew that in those eleven millennia, we’d develop merpeople and this facemask and talking mice.”
“And timeshapers.”
“The Visitors who come to evaluate Garden don’t know about us,” said Noxon. Then he laughed at his own stupidity. “No, of course they know about us. We’re all over the ships’ logs. They definitely know about us. That’s probably why they destroy the planet—to eliminate the people who can go into the past and make erasures.”
“I can imagine they might find that terrifying.”
“But they would know that we already know about the destruction of Garden—that’s in the ship’s log from Odinfold. So they must expect that we’d attempt what I’m doing right now.”
“You have to admit that your return to Earth is a little improbable,” said Deborah.
“Yes,” said Noxon. “They might think they’re acting so fast that we wouldn’t have time to send one of us to Earth.”
“But it still seems . . . so drastic,” said Deborah. “We send out the ship. Seven years later, it leaps the fold. Then we invent faster-than-light starships and get to Garden at a time when we think you won’t even have had time to get there yet—it was supposed to take another seven years from the fold. Only you’ve already been there longer than the total of human history since the last glacial maximum.”
“Lots of surprises.”
“But to us, only fifteen years. How do they get the whole human race behind such a wanton slaughter? Genocide of our colonists.”
“The whole human race?” asked Noxon. “Why would they tell the whole human race?”
Deborah looked surprised. “Because we’re a worldwide democracy now. Lots of different nations, but everybody votes. On something as big as this, they’d—”
“They’d tell nobody,” said Noxon. “They’d destroy Garden for the good of the human race, report that the colony failed, and then use faster-than-light ships to establish new colonies. Lots of them. People wouldn’t know about us, not for a long time, maybe not ever. Purge the computer records so our logs never show up.”
“It’s hard to keep a secret like that.”
“Once Garden is gone, it can’t be undestroyed.”
“Except by you,” said Deborah.
“I hope. I wish. I can hardly believe we’ve succeeded this far.”
“Why did you come to us?”
“I’m sure Ram is in the other room, asking your father to let us hide here and eat your food while we see what happens when the Visitors return from Garden.”
“But if you’re right,” said Deborah, “they won’t tell anybody what they found. And it’s not as if Father would be in on any of the secrets. He’s a great scientist but he doesn’t know any politicians.”
“That would be our job,” said Noxon. “Well, really, mine. To get to know politicians. It’s what I was raised to do.”
“But—you’re a kid.”
“I have no idea how old I am,” said Noxon. “But yes, I’m young. But I’ll get older.”
“And you have . . . that face.”
“I saw it on my friend Loaf. The face gets more and more normal—it’s still fairly new on me. Even if it doesn’t, though, so what? I’ll just keep coming back until I find a road in. If I need to. Because the first thing we’ll do is slice forward to the time when the Visitors return and see what actually happens. Only then will we have any idea of which organizations I need to infiltrate.”
“Why you? Why the kid?”
“Because Ram Odin’s face is known throughout the world. Not yet, but it will be. He can’t very well show up while his ship is supposedly out there starting a colony.”
“I suppose it’s too late to invent a twin brother for him,” said Deborah. She laughed. “They do that kind of thing on television all the time.”
“Well, I invented a twin brother for myself, so it actually can happen,” said Noxon.
Silence between them for a few moments.
“You know what I want?” said Deborah.
“Do you really want me to guess?” asked Noxon.
“I want your mission to be completely successful. Then I want to get on a starship with you, one of the faster-than-light ones, and go to Garden and get one of those facemasks for myself.”
“You do see how ugly and inhuman it makes me,” said Noxon.
“Have you seen my face? I want eyes, Rigg Noxon. Even if they’re too far apart and one of them sags a little down onto my cheek. I want real eyes instead of something that plugs into my brain and gives me a digital raster image.”
“You don’t look so bad right now,” said Noxon. “They did good work with you. I’ve seen burn scars and you don’t look like that.”
“Noxon,” said Deborah, “that is a complete load of horse pucky.”
“It’s true.”
“I saw your face when you first looked at me at the door. It was as if you were looking at a train wreck.”
“I was trying to figure out what happened, that’s all,” said Noxon.
“I’m sure that’s what everybody thinks they’re doing. From my side, though, it looks like horrified staring. Because that’s what it is.”
“I know,” said Noxon, “because I get the same looks. Followed by pity when Ram tells them about my tropical parasite.”
“So my choice isn’t to be pretty or not,” said Deborah. “My choice is to have eyes or not. And I want the eyes.”
“I don’t know if I’m going back,” said Noxon.
“Why wouldn’t you? Is Earth so charming that you can’t bear to part with it?”
“I have a starship buried under the ice of Antarctica. It’s been there for a hundred thousand years. There are some sentient mice in a box in Peru. I have responsibilities.”
“So you have a ship already,” she said.
“One that splits into twenty pieces when it leaps through the fold.”
“That’s something to think about,” said Deborah.
“You can’t tell anyone about us, you know.”
Deborah laughed aloud. “Now you think of that? You don’t swear me to secrecy, you just blurt it all out, you give me a demonstration, and now you warn me not to tell? Rigg Noxon, I’m already strange. I don’t have to add crazy to the list. I can’t tell this to anybody.”
“I know,” said Noxon, feeling foolish. “I just . . . I’m not completely used to this either, you know. The things I can do. And Father taught me—the expendable Ramex taught me never to tell, and that’s still nagging at the back of my mind.”
“What I’m trying to figure out is why my father is taking so long to give Ram Odin an answer. Of course he’ll say yes.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Noxon. “Ram might be recognized. I’m kind of unforgettable. People might wonder, they might investigate.”
“But of course you don’t understand Ram Odin’s plan yet, do you,” said Deborah. “He’s not asking for a favor here. He’s bound to be offering Father a trade.”
“What do we have to trade?” Noxon thought of the jewels, but here on Earth they would immediately be recognized as memory crystals. Incredibly valuable, but also extremely dangerous.
“You,” said Deborah. “He’s offering you. To take Father back to see for himself whether his hypotheses about Homo erectus are true or not.”
“Oh,” said Noxon. “Of course. I could do that.”
“Then let’s go tell them that the deal is on.” Deborah held out her hand. Noxon took it. She led him out of the room and down a hall, to Professor Wheaton’s study, where Ram Odin was napping on a sofa and Wheaton was typing into a computer.
“Oh, are you done?” asked Wheaton. “Is it set?”
“He’s agreed to take you back in time to see for yourself,” said Deborah. “Of course, you can’t write any scholarly papers on it.”
“But at least from then on my guesses will all be right.”
“They always have been, Father,” said Deborah.
Wheaton held out his hand to Noxon. They shook.
“You mean the two of you were waiting for us?” asked Noxon.
“Ram explained things very quickly, and we agreed that if you could convince Deborah and make the deal, we’d be set.”
“But Ram never told me that’s what I was supposed to do.”
“And I never told Deborah,” said Wheaton. “But . . . two smart young people, drawn together by shared experiences and mutual curiosity—that’s a negotiation that has gone on only a few billion times in human history.”
“We didn’t agree to mate and make babies,” said Deborah testily.
“No hurry,” said Wheaton. “Timeshaping will do for now.”
CHAPTER 21
Neanderthals
“All I care about is Erectus,” said Wheaton. “But yes, of course I’d like a chance to look at Neanderthals. They are ancestral to all post-African humans.”
“You’re curious about everything,” said Ram. “You always have been.”
“But I wouldn’t waste my time going back to meet—whomever. Galileo. Jesus.”
“Maybe you would,” said Noxon, “if you could pass through the Wall and acquire their languages. So you could converse normally with them.”
Wheaton barked out a laugh. “I might at that. People always forget the language barrier when they imagine having dinner with some ancient celebrity. Socrates! What a miserable dinner that would be. Fifteen minutes in, he’d expose me as a fool, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that much brutal self-discovery.”
“Which is why you would choose him,” said Ram. “And why you’re willing to make our trial run with Neanderthals. Because that was your first college thesis.”
“I do want to know if bullfighting and bull-leaping are Sapient reenactments of Neanderthal hunting techniques.”
“And if it turns out that they aren’t,” said Ram, “will that count as brutal self-discovery?”
“It will count as finding out that my hypothesis was wrong,” said Wheaton. “And that is at the heart of science. Anyone who hides from the possibility of his hypothesis being wrong is not a scientist at all.”
“So brutal self-discovery is the core experience of science,” said Deborah.
“I raised her well, didn’t I?” said Wheaton.
“I discovered that entirely on my own,” said Deborah.
Noxon chuckled.
“Do you doubt the possibility of adequate self-education?” asked Deborah—so sweetly that it was clear she was hoping for a quarrel.
“All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.”
“I’ll make sure that’s inscribed in stone somewhere,” said Deborah. “Your headstone, for instance.”
“I can’t escape the teachings of my father,” said Noxon. “Everything I figure out by myself, I find him underneath it, holding it up. I find him ahead of me, leading me to where I can see new things and understand them.”
“Well, your father was an expendable,” said Deborah. “Mine was an absent-minded professor. I had to pair his socks for him. I had to lay out his underwear while he showered, so he’d remember to put some on.”
“That’s a myth,” said Wheaton. “Please, take us into the past so I can escape this conversation.”
“I can move us in time,” said Noxon. “And I can move things in space, just a little. But it won’t do us any good to go back in time until we’re in the place where you’ll be able to see the things you want to see.”
“You’re right. All the Neanderthals were dead by the time Sapiens reached America.”
“A trip to Europe,” said Deborah. “I’ve been urging that for years.”
Ram sighed. “Noxon and I will have to make the flight invisibly. No identification.”
“Not a problem, though, with time-slicing,” said Noxon. “It’s boring because we can’t talk to each other or hear anything that anybody else is saying. But I’ll slice us fast enough that we won’t be in that state for very long.”
“Can you slice me with you?” asked Deborah.
“It’s not good for you to disappear in a closed space like a plane,” said Noxon. “People will notice you’re not there.”
“I’ll go to the bathroom, and then you come to the door and take me out through it.”
“We move very slowly in slicetime,” said Noxon. “Do you think it’s fair to the other passengers to tie up a bathroom that long?”
“Then I’ll go as if toward the bathroom, and we’ll slice without leaving a closed bathroom door behind us.”
Deborah seemed so eager, but Noxon wondered how long that eagerness would last, in the boredom of slicing time. He thought of Param, who had sliced her way through so many hours, days, months of her youth, and the price she had paid for it. But Deborah has also paid a price; even with mechanical eyes, she has lacked many normal experiences. Perhaps her excitement over timeshaping is a welcome relief from an otherwise tedious life.
With this thought, Noxon looked at Deborah’s uncle, to see what he was making of her attitude.
Wheaton seemed to take Noxon’s glance as a cue to speak. “I’m glad you’re treating this scientific expedition so seriously,” he said. Sarcastically, of course, but also affectionately, or so it seemed to Noxon.
“They’re children,” said Ram. “Let them play.”
So Deborah passed most of the trans-Atlantic flight invisible, and Noxon made the time flow around them very quickly, so that the whole voyage only took a few dozen steps. But he returned her to regular time as the airport approach began, or the attendant would have noticed that she wasn’t there for the landing.
Once they were out of the airport and checked into a hotel, the first order of business was to figure out where their leap into the past should take place. Noxon’s pathfinding should allow them to pick exactly the spot they wanted—but there was a lot of Europe to search through. No point in going to all this trouble just to watch a Neanderthal take a long hike.
“I don’t know what a pathfinder can see,” said Wheaton. “But what I need is a time and place where Neanderthals were hunting bulls. Aurochs, probably, the giant Ice Age bovine.”
“But they weren’t entirely prehistoric,” said Deborah. “The last of them died in Poland in 1627. They seem to be ancestral to modern cattle. Both Asian zebus and Western taurines.”
“A fount of knowledge,” said Wheaton.
“I’m telling him that we’re not looking for cows,” said Deborah. “We’re looking for this.” She held out a tablet with a photo of an aurochs skeleton. “Note that the horns bend forward. That’s what led Father to guess that—”
“Hypothesize,” said Wheaton.
“Take a wild stab-in-the-dark guess,” Deborah recorrected him, “that the ancient Cretan depictions of bull-leaping show a sport that would have made far more sense with aurochsen rather than taurine bulls. You need to have those forward-reaching horns if you’re going to grab them and leap onto the creature’s back.”
“The real source of the hypothesis,” said Wheaton, “is the fact that Neanderthals seem to have made no projectile weapons. Their spears were useful only for stabbing. And the terrain they lived in didn’t lend itself to open running, the way Erectus hunted. I don’t care how stealthy you are, you can’t sneak close enough to an aurochs to jab it between the ribs. The last distance has to be crossed in a run, and then the Neanderthal had to jump on its back and sta
b it at the base of the skull, severing the spinal column.”
“And the aurochs held still for this,” said Ram.
“It bucked and ran like a son-of-a-bitch,” said Wheaton. “But Neanderthals are strong. They gripped with their thighs long enough to ram that spear into the spine and bring the beast crashing down.”
“Though Father’s guesswork,” said Deborah, “doesn’t explain how you jump onto a bull’s back over the horns and somehow end up facing forward.”
“They were very agile,” said Wheaton.
“Let’s go find out,” said Noxon. “Perhaps you can get me to a place where you know that aurochses were hunted.”
“Not aurochses,” said Deborah. “ ‘Aurochs’ is singular and plural.”
“But Deborah uses the pseudo-Germanic plural ‘aurochsen’ when she wants to show off,” said Wheaton.
“Like ‘ox’ and ‘oxen,’” she said.
“A place where you know they were eating aurochsoto,” said Noxon, using a plural from the trade language of the Stashi riverlands. “Then I can hunt for paths with a reasonable hope of success.”
The place turned out to be in Slovenia, a tiny nation. But it had one of the better Neanderthal settlement sites, occupied for thousands of years. What Noxon quickly realized was that it was actually occupied six times for a single season each. But there was no way the anthropologists could have seen the discontinuities.
Noxon found paths that seemed to be hunters returning from a large kill—their arrival was followed by a feast and then a lot of meat-smoking—and then sensed where they had acquired their kill. That first attempt was a dead end, though—the hunters had found a dead aurochs, brought down by a combination of dire wolves and disease.
But his second try brought the hunters back to the path of a living aurochs, and Noxon could sense that one Neanderthal’s path did indeed take him onto the aurochs’s back while it was still alive. Then he looked over the map, fitting the paths onto it as best he could. “No roads take us any closer than we already are,” he said. “So we’ve got about ten kilometers of walking to do.”