“Tell me the things you haven’t told me, that I need to know.”
“How can I predict the things you need to know?”
“The truth, that’s what I need.”
“Truth!” said Vadesh derisively.
“Yes, there’s such a thing!” said Rigg. “Things as they are, things as they were, things as they will be.”
“You of all people should know that there’s no such truth,” said Vadesh. “Just the way things were and are and will be . . . for now. Till some shifter comes along and changes it.”
“This world will be destroyed.”
“Yes,” said Vadesh, “and if I knew why, or how to prevent it, I would tell you, because ever since we learned of it, I have done nothing but try to prevent it. Why do you think that facemask exists? Did you think I kept breeding those even after all my humans killed each other? No, I had nothing to do, I put myself in standby mode and did nothing at all until the message came about the Future Books, and the ship’s computer woke me. Then I woke Ram Odin, and we decided I should make a facemask that could do the things it does.”
“And what are those things?” asked Rigg.
“Don’t you know by your experience with it?”
“I know what it does for me because I ask it to. But what can it do that I don’t know enough to ask?”
“I’ve never been a human. I’ve never worn the mask. You know infinitely more about it than I ever will. Tell me what you learn—I’d love to know.”
Rigg realized that he would never get a full answer from Vadesh. But one thing was certain: Vadesh knew things that he had never told, and Vadesh lied despite his protests that he was programmed not to lie.
Without so much as a good-bye—for why bid farewell to a being who would cease to exist the moment you changed the past, and so would never remember what you said?—Rigg pushed into the past, into the moment when Ram Odin began to draw the earlier Rigg’s attention to the display. The moment when Ram Odin began reaching for the knife.
“Stop,” Rigg said. “Both of you. Neither one of you can afford to die today, or to kill, either.”
They turned to him surprised, taken out of their plans for a moment. But in an instant, Ram’s hand resumed its movement toward his knife, and Rigg began to reach for the jeweled weapon at his belt, and again Rigg said, “I will not let either of you commit a murder here today, and you both know I can stop you if I want.”
“How?” said the early Rigg—the Rigg who had not yet killed a man. “I’m a match for you.”
“You’re a dolt,” said Rigg. “Ram Odin isn’t the source of the Destroyers. You killed him here—no, I killed him—and still the Destroyers came.”
“He killed me?” Ram Odin asked.
“I have a facemask, you poor sad murderous old fool. I took the knife away from you and then popped half an hour into the past and stabbed you through the heart with it. At this moment, I just left a version of the future with your dried blood all over the console. So both of you, forget your plans. Whatever you were thinking, you were wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough, and it’s time for us to work together to figure all this out.”
The early Rigg stared at Rigg and then touched his forehead—or meant to touch it, and touched the facemask there instead. “The three of us,” he said. “You changed my path. I never make the jumps you made. We both exist.”
“Twins who never were identical,” said Rigg.
“How are we different? We even have the mask,” said the earlier Rigg.
“We’re different because Ram Odin’s blood was on my hands.”
“It isn’t now,” said Ram Odin.
“I remember pushing in the knife,” said Rigg, “and how it felt to triumph over you, and stop you from slaughtering the world.”
“I made this world!” said Ram Odin. “How could you imagine I would ever kill it?”
“You killed a world before,” said Rigg.
“But that was the plan I came with. Those were my orders. The machines would have done it even if I’d been in stasis,” said Ram Odin.
It was a thought that would never have occurred to Rigg. “The program was originally to wipe out the life of Garden?”