“Good choices as defined by them.”
“You are hardly in a position to define them, since you know almost nothing.”
Rigg recognized Father’s voice. “The expendable Ram is telling you what to say.”
“He knows you better than we do,” said the voice. “We are accepting his counsel during this conversation.”
“So you tell me I’m in command, but I’m not in command.”
“You are more in command than any other entity, human or otherwise.”
“What does that even mean? ‘More in command.’ Who am I sharing command with?”
“There is a constant process of negotiation and compromise,” said the voice.
“Only I’m not part of that process,” said Rigg.
“You are the most important part of it,” said the voice.
“But I don’t know what you’re thinking, I only know what you say!”
“We have the same dilemma,” said the ship.
“I tell you what I’m thinking.”
“You tell us what you want us to know, as a subset of what you do know, which is not very much.”
Rigg closed his eyes. “I still live in a world where my understanding is shaped by information you give me, and you still decide, without asking me, which things I should know. Therefore I can only make choices as you direct me to.”
“We know many quintillions of bits of information,” said the ship’s computer. “Your brain cannot contain all that we know.”
“I understand that you have to select which information is relevant, but you can surely be more helpful than you’ve been up to now.”
“We’ve been very helpful,” said the ship’s computers. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Loaf is wearing a facemask!”
“He is alive, your whole group is alive, and you are in control of this ship.”
Am I? wondered Rigg. “I order you to tell me how much control I will have over the Wall after I leave here.”
“If you place all the jewels into the control field, and all the ships accept your command, and if you then take the jewels with you and keep them on your person, you will be able to command that any Wall go up or down as you choose.”
“Even if the consequences might be dangerous?”
“If you’re accepted as commander of a ship, it’s your decision.”
Rigg thought for a while. “Can I change the nature of the Wall?”
“The Wall cannot be anything other than what it is.”
Wrongly worded question or final answer? Rigg couldn’t be sure without probing more. “The Wall creates a very intense field. Can I change its intensity?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“The Wall has different effects. It gives us languages, for instance.”
“There is a stimulant field coterminous with the Wall that prepares your brain to accept and produce all the phonemes, morphemes, and memes of all the languages ever spoken within a given wallfold.”
“So the languages are contained in the Wall.”
“Languages can only exist in the human mind.”
Rigg sighed. “This stimulant field that is coterminous with the Wall has enough information about languages spoken within the wallfold that it can prepare any human brain to understand and produce the language as if it were the person’s native language.”
“Yes.”
“Is there any limit to the number of languages a person can know?”
“No.”
“But humans can’t learn that many languages.”
“True,” said the voice.
Rigg wanted to demand the answer to the contradiction, but then he remembered that Father was listening, and he knew that Father would make him figure out a resolution to the contradiction by himself. “So learning a language is harder than knowing one.”
“There is no limit to the number of ways of making language that a human brain can know, but since language acquisition takes time, even for young children, there is a definite limit to the number of languages that can be learned.”
“What about vocabulary? How did I know the words to use when I talked to those ancient people who were watching the battle outside the city?”
“They were supplied to you by the stimulant field as you needed them, according to the meaning you were attempting to express.”
“This field can read my mind?”
“It evaluates the conversation and makes available to you the full range of vocabulary needed to achieve communication between you and the other person, with words made more available according to their likelihood of being needed for the topic at hand.”
Rigg was fascinated by the idea that an invisible field could anticipate the words he would need. But he must not let himself be distracted by his intense curiosity about these phenomenal machines. Instead, he forced himself to get back to the subject at hand. Whatever that was, or should be—he didn’t even know what it was important for him to think about.
“The humans from Earth. They built this ship, so all these machines and fields and all, they created them.”
“Yes.”
“So how can I guess what they’ve gone on and created in the eleven thousand years since—”
“Ram says to tell you that you’re being stupid.”
“Eleven years, not eleven thousand,” said Rigg, catching his error at once. “This ship arrived here eleven thousand years ago, but it left Earth only eleven years ago. So their technology won’t have advanced all that much over what you have here.”
“That might lead you to false assumptions. They did not supply this ship with all the technology they knew. They equipped us only with the technology that they believed we’d need.”
“So they have machines that you don’t have.”
“Including weapons,” said the voice.
“But why would they think they need weapons if they think we only arrived here eleven years ago?”
“We don’t know whether they were able to detect the temporal displacement,” said the voice. “They might think they’re coming to face a version of humanity that has had more than eleven thousand years of technological development since the two branches diverged.”
“Are they right? Is there any wallfold that maintained this level of technology? Or surpassed it?”
“There are wallfolds where technology is very advanced,” said the voice. “But none of the wallfolds started with this technology and built on it.”
“Why not?”
“Because we did not want any wallfold to develop the field technology that would allow them to bring down the Wall.”
Oh. That made sense.
“And we could not allow any wallfold to develop starflight and run the risk of encountering the human race on Earth before it was ready to receive visitors from another world.”
“Why not?” asked Rigg.
“Because we know that we did not,” said the ship. “In our timestream, humans from Garden never made any contact with Earth prior to the launching of this ship. Therefore we could not allow starflight to develop.”
“So you gave us eleven thousand years of development, but made sure we did not develop,” said Rigg.
“In certain areas.”
“But those might be precisely the areas where it was most important for us to develop if we were going to counter a threat from Earth,” said Rigg.
“Ram suggests that we say, ‘Now you’re thinking, Rigg.’ He also suggested that we tell you he suggested it.”
Rigg couldn’t help it. Angry as he was at his father—and he was very angry—a bit of praise from him still had the power to suffuse him with warmth and pride. He hated it that a machine had that kind of power over him. At the same time, he longed to see his father and sit down and talk with him, instead of this disembodied voice.
“What would you advise me to do right now?”