And, in the flyer, Loaf echoed the thought. “I hope she’s right.”
“If she isn’t,” said Umbo, “we’ll try something else.”
And then, because he thought of it, and because it was Loaf that he was with, he added, “Square is alive because strangers have cared for him when it was inconvenient. Dangerous. I think Garden wants this boy to live. And with a facemask, and the body you and Leaky made for him, he’ll be a force to reckon with.”
Loaf heard this in silence.
After a while, though, Loaf said, “If this works, I think I’ll seek out some adults and invite them to wear facemasks. You can go back and prevent the ones who fail. Then you can take a colony of successful facemaskers a few hundred years into the past and let them be the citizens of Vadeshfold. Let the colony grow. Far from the city where we first arrived there, but… a colony of facemaskers would be the true heirs of the wallfold, don’t you think?”
“No mice,” said Umbo.
“Wouldn’t matter,” said Loaf. “With facemasks, the Vadeshfolders could see all the mice, and catch them if they want. Use the mice to sing lullabies to their children. And squish their little mousy heads if they got out of line.”
“Once the mice get into the millions,” said Umbo, “it would be time-consuming to catch them all. Especially if they developed a disease that weakens facemaskers or slows them down. Or kills the facemask.”
“All right,” said Loaf. “No mice.”
“What about timeshapers?” asked Umbo.
“Rigg already has a facemask.”
“But maybe he should be the only one,” said Umbo. “Facemasks are one kind of power, timeshaping another. I’m thinking we should keep timeshaping out of the Vadeshfold gene pool.”
“Can’t be done,” said Loaf. “Timeshaping is already in the Ramfold gene pool, and we have no way to screen it out. It’s going to crop up eventually among the facemaskers.”
“What we timeshapers do is already so dangerous,” said Umbo. “Undoing vast swaths of history just because we decide to. With facemasks, there’d be no stopping us. We’ve got no guarantee that other timeshaping facemaskers would be as nice as Rigg.”
“Something to think about,” said Loaf. “But not for you and me to decide just between us. If we actually get a colony of facemaskers in Vadeshfold, they should have a voice on such a decision, too.”
Umbo shook his head. “It’s all right for us to call them into existence, but…”
“But once they exist,” said Loaf, “they have a right to be consulted about what genetic traits we do and don’t allow into their population.”
“So sometimes we get to decide for everybody, and sometimes we have to ask their consent.”
“That about sums it up,” said Loaf.
“And who decides which times are which?” asked Umbo.
“Me,” said Loaf. “Because you’re an idiot.”
Chapter 23
Erectids
They had learned a few things from their experience with the Neanderthals. Once Noxon identified which paths belonged to Erectids, he chose an apparent settlement site that was just over a low rise from a very comfortable hotel. The only thing separating them was a hundred meters and a million and a half years.
It was April at the hotel—the rainy season, so there were plenty of rooms available and not a lot of observers. It was a simple matter to leave the hotel, cross a little-used road, follow a walking path over a rise till they were in sight of the little river, and then, when they were out of sight from the hotel, link hands and jump back to the exact time they chose.
They chose to visit the Erectids during the dry season, so even if they arrived wet with rain, they were dry soon enough.
Erectids built no permanent structures, and because they still had a considerable amount of body hair, they did not particularly seek out shade. They knew better than to live right beside the stream—too many animals gathered there to drink, day and night, but especially at dawn and dusk. Better to be a little ways off.
The Erectids organized themselves for protection, and they needed it constantly. Hyenas, savage and relentless, arrived at different times and from different directions, but they did not miss a day. Their favorite prey was untended babies of any mammal species—enough meat to be worth catching, yet small enough to grab and carry off for later dining.
That meant that Wheaton got to observe them in defensive action all the time. When the men were in camp, they used stones and sharpened sticks—not stone-headed spears, not yet—to repel the hyena incursions. But when the young, strong hunters were gone, the adult women, the old folks, and the older children were fierce and savage in defense of the babies.
Noxon loved to watch the babies and toddlers. Walking was already a skill the little ones aspired to from a very early age; Wheaton said that it was a necessity because Erectid arms were already too short to walk on all fours the way chimps and gorillas did.
The little ones crawled and then walked as soon as they could, exploring farther and farther from their mothers—their sole source of food, when they were so young, so they never quite lost sight of her. No wonder the hyenas, watching from a distance, grew hopeful. The little ones weren’t exactly fearless, but what they had were monkey fears—spiders bothered them more than animals that were trying to eat them.
But the alertness of the adults and older children never flagged. The Erectids had somehow marked out just how far a child could be allowed to roam before someone swooped in to carry it back to safety, and by the time a child was walking, he or she knew just how far was considered safe. This didn’t mean that they never crossed over that invisible line—but as soon as they approached it, they would begin checking to see if any adult was watching them. For the surest way to get adult attention was to stray beyond the line. But the children themselves had no desire to cross the line and actually get away with it—that would be dangerous. They knew that they should only “go too far” when someone older would be sure to notice and rescue them.
The babies also tussled with each other, the males constantly practicing for later struggles—warfare with other tribes, contests with animals, but, most importantly, battles for supremacy within the tribe.
For this Erectid tribe was still divided between alpha and non-alpha populations. They were on the verge of the forest, where dry dead trees showed that the wooded land had once reached much farther out into the savannah. The dead trees provided the savannah-dwellers with fuel for their fires and sticks for their prodding weapons; yet it wasn’t so very far to walk into greener woods, where the leaf-eating branch of the tribe still lived with the alpha male and his harem of closely-watched females.
But it was the group that lived fulltime on the savannah, in the grassland, dealing with predators, walking upright all the time, hunting for their food, twisting grasses into twines and weaving them into baskets—they were the ones that Professor Wheaton insisted they must watch. “Because these are the ones heading toward becoming humans.”
“Not because they want to,” said Deborah. “It just happens when they aren’t paying attention.”
“Less than two million years till the tee shirt,” said Ram Odin. “And starflight.”
“But right now they don’t have the slightest interest in either,” said Deborah. “They just want to eat, pee, get laid, and keep the babies alive.”
“My little girl,” said Professor Wheaton. But he didn’t look at her. He only watched the vids they had taken of camp life.
They only visited the camp while slicing time—invisibility was essential. But they set up video cameras and changed out the memory cards several times a day.