Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

To Param’s surprise, tears spilled out of Umbo’s eyes and down his cheeks.

“He’s not my father,” said Umbo.

“You have nothing of him in you,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“And your best displacer—who is he?”

“Dead,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We went back to get his sperm, too.”

“So I’m half . . . half Odinfolder,” said Umbo.

“Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Your father was from the time after we bred ourselves to be small, but before we made ourselves into yahoos.”

Umbo bent over till his face was touching his knees, almost hiding him in the grass, and wept. Loaf sat down beside him, put his arm across his shoulders, and Umbo leaned into his embrace.

“So Umbo’s the smartest of us,” said Rigg.

“Umbo has all the potential of an Odinfolder,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But you and Param carry our intellectual potential as well.”

“We made the decision not to try to solve the problem ourselves,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “because in nine tries, we failed every time. Instead, we chose genetic threads in the other most promising wallfold, and combined our own best traits to produce you. And it is in your hands we will place the solution to the problem.”

“The problem of getting the Visitors not to go back to Earth and make a report that results in the destruction of Garden,” said Rigg. “Just to make sure I understand what the goal is here.”

“You have understood it perfectly,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“How much time do we have?” asked Rigg. “Because we’re not ready.”

“You have all the time you need,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

“I thought you said the coming of the Visitors was only two years away,” said Rigg.

“It is. But look at who you are,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Let the Visitors come—we

’ll hide you from them so you can continue your education. Your preparation. Then you just go back in time—something we could never do—and continue your education in another village, so you aren’t constantly running into yourselves. You can do that as often as you need.”

“Though there is some thought,” said Mouse-Breeder, “that the more iterations of you there are, the harder it will be to conceal you from the Visitors. From the Future Books, we get the idea they’re quite intrusive and clever, and they get a lot of information from the expendables.”

“That’s why we have made sure that Odinex doesn’t see all that we do. He agrees—we’re not lying to him about it. But what he doesn’t know can’t be learned from him. So he’s not going to meet you. He’s not even going to know you’re here.”

“But Father knows about us,” said Rigg.

“He knows about you up to the moment of his death,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “After that, he’s seen nothing of you, heard nothing about you. He doesn’t know how any of his plans came out.”

“Not true,” said Rigg. “He was prompting the starship in Vadeshfold when I first took control.”

Swims-in-the-Air made a dismissive gesture. “So he was called on when he was needed. That can’t be helped.”

“Our advantage,” said Mouse-Breeder, “is that we absolutely know that the Visitors have no knowledge of time travel. In fact, all their theories say that it’s impossible, that your alterations of the past are self-destructive loops that can’t happen. But they can, and that gives us a chance. As long as you don’t actually get yourselves killed, you can meet the Visitors again and again, trying to get it right.”

“As you did,” said Olivenko.

“Not as we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We were limited to sending messages. You can personally do things over and over. As Loaf and Umbo proved in their efforts to retrieve the Ramfold jewel from the bank in Aressa Sessamo.”

“We just made things worse,” said Loaf softly. “Until it became completely impossible.”

“So now you know the danger,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You won’t keep trying the same thing over and over.”

Rigg sighed. “How much of this did Vadesh know?”