“The facemask part of you wasn’t our idea at all,” said the alpha mouse.
“Your saying that makes me pretty sure that it was,” said Noxon.
“Really,” said the mouse. “All Vadesh. Well, him and Ram Odin. It’s in the ship’s log.”
“Which you can rewrite at will,” said Noxon.
“Only sometimes,” said the alpha mouse. “And we don’t do it, because we count on the log to tell us what happened in erased timestreams. You have to keep some things sacred.”
“Here’s the deal,” said Noxon. “The survival of both our species is at stake. If we don’t stop these aliens, they wipe out us and you. When we get to the alien world, I will do whatever it takes to prevent them from invading and destroying us. I will take no risk of their removing from me the ability to destroy them. Which means that I’m not going to try to negotiate with the very civilization that sent these invaders to wipe us out of existence. That civilization is already dead, period. I’m not going to leave even the slightest chance of its ever coming into being.”
“Very wise choice,” said the alpha mouse.
“You do understand that I can do the same thing with you,” said Noxon. “I can go back to Garden, jump back in time, and prevent you from ever having been bred.”
“The expendables will never let you,” said the alpha mouse.
“I only have to show them the logs that record your absolute unreliability, and your ability to manipulate them, and they’ll cooperate with me fully. You know it’s true.”
He let the mice think about that for a few seconds.
“There are several things we don’t know and can’t know till we get there. We don’t know if our ship will jump the fold in twenty copies or not. If it does, we’ll have twenty chances to establish viable colonies on their world, divided into wallfolds, just as on Garden.”
“Nineteen,” said Ram Odin. “I thought it was nineteen.”
“Every ship will contain a Ram Odin and a Noxon,” said Noxon. “And a couple of dozen mice. So if there’s a backward-moving ship, it will have me there to turn it around, and it’ll have the mice to see if they can detach it from the original outbound ship without the ship having to come all the way back to Earth.”
“Makes sense,” said Ram Odin.
“Only to the insane,” said Wheaton.
“Maybe we can preserve the native biota to a greater degree than it was preserved on Garden,” said Noxon. “Maybe we can preserve the ancestors of these monster aliens, and help to shape their evolution so it doesn’t get so dangerous. We know the ship’s computers can be programmed to prevent the development of high technology because they did it on Garden.”
“Or we can wipe out all the native life and make a new Earth,” said the alpha mouse.
“Whether or not we have nineteen or twenty ships,” said Noxon, “we can create as many wallfield generators as we want, and the expendables to tend them, right?”
“Yes,” said the alpha mouse.
“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “Very interesting. Wallfolds no matter what.”
“So the deal I offer is this. All the wallfolds have the same technology cap as on Garden. Every wallfold has an expendable or two. But we create enough wallfolds that besides having enough for several—or twenty—human colonies, we also have one or two wallfolds which have only mice as their sentient occupants.”
“How generous,” said the alpha mouse.
“Irony is still a lie,” said Noxon. “Hear me out. We also have a couple of human colonies that are shared with mice. Joint colonies. To see what happens. To see if we and you can grow and develop together, cooperatively or at least without slaughtering each other.”
“Unlikely,” said the alpha mouse.
“Why not?” said Ram Odin.
“I think it’s very likely,” said Noxon. “Especially because the ship’s computers will be programmed to wipe out any wallfold where either the humans or the mice find a way to exterminate the other species.”
“Maybe we can interbreed,” said the alpha mouse.
“I hope not,” said Noxon. “And we also have two or three wallfolds where the aliens are allowed to continue their evolutionary development—but with the same technology cap. At least one of those will also have mice.”
“The aliens should all have mice,” said the alpha mouse.
“They will have expendables. If possible, expendables redesigned to look like them. If not, then the same ones we have. They’ll all be supervised.”
“And that’s the plan?” said the alpha mouse. “You thought of this all by yourself?”
“It’s the obvious way to proceed,” said Noxon. “Everybody gets a home.”
“A reservation,” said the alpha mouse.
“A place to develop independent of the others.”
“But with a cap on what we can achieve,” said the alpha mouse.
“Not really,” said Noxon. “Because you’ll still have the ability you have right now—to move objects and manipulate things as tiny as genes, in both space and time.”
“They can do that?” asked Deborah.
“They’re very talented,” said Ram Odin.
“So everybody is completely at their mercy,” said Wheaton.
“That’s why we’re making this deal now, while there are still only twenty of them,” said Noxon.
“But they’ll lie,” said Ram Odin.
“I think they won’t,” said Noxon. “Because they can see that this is the best long-term protection for their descendants as well as ours.”
“Why?” said Ram. “How? We can’t develop our tech past a certain point, while theirs is invisible and already far beyond anything we can do.”
“Because every human colony will start with a Ram Odin and a Noxon,” said Noxon. “And that means that we’ll have the power to go back in time and undo whatever the mice do wrong. Or even undo the original placement of the mice into the colonies. Because part of the deal is this: The mice go into stasis during the colony founding, and they don’t get colonies of their own until at least three hundred years. And the release of the mice into each wallfold they’re allowed to enter will take place in public, and under circumstances that will make it easy for future human timeshapers to come back and prevent it.”
“That’s not foolproof,” said Wheaton. “I can think of—”
“So can the mice,” said Noxon. “But whatever they think of, we can probably think of a way to get around them and undo it. If we choose to spend our futures in stupid competition with each other. But maybe we won’t. Maybe the mice will see that keeping promises works out better for them than going to war with timeshaping humans.”
“I see it already,” said the alpha mouse. “And so will all my descendants.”
“Come on,” said Noxon. “The reason your testes aren’t visible is because you’ve been castrated. You won’t have any descendants.”
“Not me personally,” said the alpha mouse. “I think of all the babies in their uteruses to be my children, so to speak.”
“Well, Father of Great Nations, answer me: Will you accept this plan and abide by whatever decision I make when we reach the alien world?”
“I accept the plan and I promise to abide by your decision,” said the alpha mouse.
“How is that different from what you would say if you were already determined to break every promise and take over the world and the ship and everything?” asked Noxon.
“It isn’t different,” said the alpha mouse. “But I mean it. And you’ll see that I mean it because I will no longer seize every opportunity to subvert you.”
“So our alliance is set?” asked Noxon.