Umbo laughed at that, and they clapped each other on the back and shoulders and then they were at the transport that would carry them back out to the flyer. They crowded onto it with the others, and then it took off and swept them down the tunnel, out of the belly of the mountain, to the empty city where Vadeshex had managed to let his humans destroy each other. Only now even that mistake was undone, because Square was going to bring his people back, and eventually this city would be full of humans again. Humans with facemasks, so they were partly from Earth and partly from Garden. Still alive, part of each other now. That was the greatest triumph in all of this, Rigg thought. Undoing the bad stuff, that was big, that was vital. But the good thing was giving the life that evolved on Garden a chance to express itself again, to be part of a civilization. To be part of us.
Maybe Rigg would come to Vadeshex, in the end. Maybe he’d pick some time a few hundred years from now, when Noxon and Deborah had already lived their lives and had their children and grandchildren. Then Rigg could come along, three or four or ten generations later, and see if there was somebody for him, and together they’d make a few facemask-wearing babies. Watch them grow. See who they became. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Those were the paths Rigg liked best.
No matter how twisted his own path might have been, weaving in and out of time, that was what he had always hoped for. Maybe his path could end up that way after all. Time would tell.