“Couldn’t they have kept duplicating till they outnumbered them all?”
“Could have,” said Rigg, “but to what end?”
“To stay alive!”
“I was staying alive long enough to get information about what that creature was. Its biology. How it could be killed. How its weapons worked. What was inside that aircraft. And to keep it from killing you. And to live long enough to pass all of that on to Umbo and stop us, the real us, the earlier us, from getting trapped in that pit.”
“What will they do? The earlier us, when they get the warning?”
“Well, you’re the Queen-in-the-Tent,” said Rigg. “What would you order?”
“I’d ask for advice.”
“Nobody has any,” said Rigg.
Param thought for a moment. “Just get away?”
“Not a bad plan,” said Rigg. “But that leaves Mother and Haddamander to proclaim that we refused their surrender.”
“Bring an army and trap them in their own firepit,” said Param.
“More satisfying, but then we’re the ones who betrayed and assassinated them.”
“What, then!” Param demanded.
“As I said, I have no idea. No advice. So… aren’t you glad that you and I don’t have any such decision to make?”
“Because we’re just going to go into the future and die!”
“The simplest thing would be to let the Destroyers strike while we’re right out in the open. Let the blast take us the way it did the archers.”
“Was it painless for them?” asked Param.
“I doubt it, but I bet it was quick.”
“Why don’t we just disappear?”
“Should we go back and leave another note saying that when a timestream is changed, we don’t disappear, we’re still around trying to figure out how to stay out of the way?”
Param sighed. “What would that accomplish?”
“We don’t even know if it’s true,” said Rigg. “Maybe Umbo hasn’t found the note and the knife yet. Or hasn’t given warning to our earlier selves.”
“What does ‘yet’ even mean?” said Param. “When are we? In the past or the future from that moment?”
Rigg laughed. “I wish I’d thought to bring a book to read.”
“That’s how we’re going to face the end of the world? Reading a book?”
“What’s your plan? To quarrel right up to the last moment?”
“Yes,” said Param. “That’s what I command.”
“Let’s go for it, then,” said Rigg. He took her hand and they jumped into the future.
The woods around them had changed. The path that had been near them was overgrown now.
“So how long till the fire?” asked Param.
“I’m not Umbo. I can’t jump into the future with any kind of precision.”
“Well, I certainly picked the wrong person to die with, didn’t I.”
“Sorry,” said Rigg. “If it’s any consolation, the you that survives will have Umbo to console her.”
“I hate her,” said Param. “The selfish, privileged, ungrateful idiot.”
“Well, I love her,” said Rigg. “I admire her. I think she did amazingly well with everything life dealt her. And I’m reasonably sure she’ll go on making good decisions, even when they don’t work out as hoped.”
“If they don’t work out, they weren’t good.”
“Yes they were,” said Rigg. “Always good, because you’re good.” He touched a finger to her forehead. “In here.” Then he kissed her forehead and hugged her. “Slice time, by Silbom’s left elbow! Slice us up to the moment of the flash and then we can face it like…”
“Men?”
“Like extra copies of good men and women,” said Rigg. “Like expendables.”
Chapter 29
Visiting
With perfect mathematical predictability, Ram Odin’s starship passed through the fold nineteen times, arriving 11,191 years earlier, the ships just far enough apart to give them maneuvering room. Collision-avoidance systems automatically made the ships drift apart in different directions.
In the cockpit of each ship, Noxon said, “Nobody kills anybody, please. That includes the expendables.”
“We can’t be killed,” said the expendable.
“You know the history I’m trying not to repeat,” said Noxon.
“I wasn’t going to give that order,” said Ram Odin.
“Since history repeated itself in so many other ways,” said Noxon, “I was merely urging that we not follow the same script.”
“Agreed,” said Wheaton.
“I detect no attempt by the aliens to communicate or interfere with our computer systems,” said the expendable.
“Did we arrive before they achieved high technology?” asked Wheaton.
“Radio waves, broadcast not focused,” said the expendable. “Use of electric power. Illumination on the nightside.”
“So,” said Wheaton. “Not a minute too early.”
“Not if they follow the trajectory we followed on Earth,” said Ram. “Only a few decades between widespread electricity with radio and the development of space flight.”
“It may be even narrower because they have such a strong incentive to get into space,” said the expendable.
“What incentive is that?” asked Ram.
“Their binary,” said the expendable. “It is also inhabited.” The expendable seemed about to say more, but it froze for a moment. “A twentieth ship has appeared.”
“He did it,” said Noxon.
“Who did what?” asked Wheaton.
“Well, I did it,” said Noxon. “I was watching carefully during the jump through the fold. If we divided, I was going to try to snag the backward-moving ship and bring it back into the forward timeflow.”
“The ship reports that you failed,” said the expendable. “The backward-moving ship in fact moved backward, not making the jump through the fold. But the mice on that ship were able to reprogram the computers to avoid the twenty-fold duplication and then jumped the fold going backward, in order to separate the backward-moving ship from the outbound ship that was us just before our jump.”
“My head hurts,” said Wheaton.
“It does not,” said the expendable. “But your lie is apparently intended to express humorously exaggerated confusion which you do not, in fact, feel.”
“Exactly,” said Wheaton. “It’s nice to have someone get my jokes, even though you have to explain them aloud.”
“I wanted to confirm that I had understood,” said the expendable.
“If they jumped the fold backward,” said Ram, “how are they here?”
“Noxon was able to reverse timeflow and rejoin our spacetime,” said the expendable. “Very good work.”
“Thanks,” said Noxon. “But it wasn’t me.”
“It was you-ish,” said the expendable. “It’s within your capabilities.”
“And then what?” asked Noxon. “He jumped forward to our time?”
“The backward-moving ship had not made the 11,191-year pastward leap that these nineteen ships made. So it arrived in this space in the future, relative to our current timeplace.”
“What did they see there?” asked Ram.
“Not very much,” said the expendable. “The aliens immediately attempted to seize control of the ship’s computers, remotely. The mice were able to resist their reprogramming, which was feeble and unsophisticated compared to the one they will use near Earth several hundred thousand years from now. Then the Noxon of that ship attached to our paths and jumped back to our time, when the aliens are not able to project their computing prowess this far into space.”
“Narrow escape,” said Wheaton.