After a little while, Param moved herself closer to him. She held out one hand.
Umbo looked at the hand.
“Hold my hand,” she said. “In case I slice time in my sleep.”
Umbo took her hand.
It felt good.
In a few moments, she was snoring. She didn’t slice time. The mice left them alone. So instead of waking her to take her turn, Umbo eventually lay down beside her, still holding her hand, and caught some sleep as well. When he woke up, she was awake. But still holding his hand.
“Did I fart much?” asked Umbo.
“It’s been so long since you bathed, it’s hard to tell,” said Param.
“That was good,” said Umbo. “You’re getting good at this.”
“At insulting you? That’s not even a sport, Umbo,” she said. “It’s so easy.”
But because she called him by name, it didn’t sting. In fact, it made him feel kind of good.
Awake now, they took care of their morning ablutions, taking turns going down to the river, which was near enough to have been of use to the colony when it was new. Unlike the facemasks in Vadeshfold, the mantles in Larfold were larger and easy to avoid in the water.
Rested and a bit cleaner and emptier, Umbo mentioned that they should have thought of food, and Param said that she hardly thought of anything else, and then she sliced time again, days, weeks, until . . .
There was a flyer setting itself down a few hundred meters away.
Param and Umbo moved swiftly toward it. Of course, because they were in sliced time, the people around them moved even quicker.
They watched as the Visitors set up all kinds of equipment whose purpose Umbo couldn’t guess at. And very soon, mantled Larfolders began showing up to talk with the Visitors.
The Visitors looked like regular people. There were sharp differences between them—some with skin so light you might call it white, others so black it was blue. Far more variety than the rather uniform brown of the wallfolds they had visited so far.
Umbo decided this meant that on Earth, races that originated in one geographical area tended to marry within their tribe, while on Garden, everybody had intermarried so much within each wallfold that, because the colonies had been identical at startup, they all evolved into the same intermediate brown.
We won’t learn anything if we don’t talk to them, thought Umbo. That meant coming out of sliced time and taking things at a normal—and visible—pace.
Then there was a flurry of motion near the Visitors’ flyer, and Umbo realized what it was. Mice were scurrying up a bit of cable dangling from the ramp leading up to the flyer’s door.
Not all scurrying, though. Some of them moved downright sluggishly.
Why so slow?
Pregnant, he thought. More babies.
No. They wouldn’t want their babies to be born en route. It would be hard enough to conceal adults; younglings would be impossible to hide.
So why else might some mice be more sluggish than others in climbing the rope?
And then Umbo realized: They were sick.
Why would they send sick mice as their agents?
Because the sickness was the purpose of their stowing away.
The mice had created a disease of which they were themselves the vector. They would go to Earth and pass the disease to humans.
A crowd of Larfolders assembled. Umbo signaled a stop and Param slowed the movements of the people around them to a speed approaching normal.
One of the Visitors, a woman, was talking, and after a very short time, Umbo understood the language. She would speak a sentence, and then a Larfolder would translate for her. How does the interpreter know the Visitors’ language, he wondered. Then Umbo remembered that the Larfolders had held on to the ancient language with some stubbornness. And because they could ordinarily speak only on shore, they spoke more rarely, and so their language would evolve less. Maybe it was still very similar to whatever the Earth people spoke.
“I know what the mice are doing,” whispered Umbo.
“Sneaking on board the ship?
“With a disease,” said Umbo.
“I wonder which disease.”
“I don’t want to find out by catching it,” said Umbo.
“Poisoning them,” said Param. “The mice are going to murder the entire population of Earth.”
“Have you got her language?” asked Umbo.
“Yes,” said Param.
“You go to them invisible, then appear and warn them,” said Umbo. “I’ll take you back in time with me the moment you show me a fist.”
“What message?” asked Param.
Umbo thought for a moment. “A warning. Something about how the mice are smart and very dangerous and they can’t let a single one reach Earth.”
Param nodded and disappeared.
Umbo kept his eyes on the Visitors; he could not afford to be looking away at the moment Param appeared. They’d only have a few second before the mice would react. Perhaps by killing her again.
Param appeared. The Visitor who had been speaking stopped and inclined her head to look at Param, then said something to her.
Param held up her hand in a gesture of silence. Wait. And then she was blurting out something and suddenly her fist was extended. It was the signal. Umbo took hold of her and dragged both of them backward in time.
Param dropped in a heap to the ground. The flyer was gone, so her position on the ramp had become a point in midair.
But she was unhurt, and in this particular timeframe there wasn’t a soul here. Not even the mice.
“I think I may have brought us back a little earlier than I wanted,” said Umbo.
“Or later,” said Param. “I don’t know if it will matter.”
They walked back toward the camp in realtime.
Whatever doubts he might have had, Umbo found as they approached that it was the very night when they had left. There was Loaf, and there was Olivenko, exactly as they had been; and there were Umbo and Param, asleep.
“No,” whispered Umbo when Param seemed about to speak. “Say nothing if you can help it, not till our earlier selves are gone. We don’t want to let them see us. It complicates things sometimes.”
“I was going to say,” said Param softly, “that you got us here within half an hour of the time we left.”
“In the wrong direction,” said Umbo.
“Before is better than after,” said Param.
They waited in sliced time then, wordless until the sleeping version of themselves woke up, packed quickly, and set out, disappearing moments after they started walking.
Was that the same way it had been earlier? Or did Umbo remember that Param started splitting time before they walked away from camp. Was it possible that they had inadvertently changed something in the past? Might they have therefore bifurcated themselves, so that a complete duplicate set of themselves would be wandering around, thinking they were the real Umbo and Param?
Maybe they were.
Param and Umbo walked back into camp.
“What did you learn?” asked Loaf.
Umbo had forgotten that Loaf and Olivenko had been awake when they left. “The Visitors came but I didn’t have much chance to hear them.”
“We saw mice getting in their flyer,” said Param. “They moved sluggishly. As if they were sick.”
“We thought, what if the mice developed a disease to carry back to Earth?” said Umbo. “Something the humans of Earth can’t defend against.”
“So instead of learning the answer to your ‘what if,’ so you could decide whether to intervene,” said Loaf, “you intervened.”
When he put it that way, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.
“Did you know that any mice were sick?” asked Loaf.
“They looked sick,” said Param defiantly.
Umbo was grateful that she was backing him up on this; she could so easily have laid all the blame on him. In fact, he suspected that the blame was his. But then, to blame him would imply that she had been taking orders from him. Her pride could never let her do that.