“I’ll admit that I’m getting old,” said Ram Odin. “Struggling for a cause looks like a much better idea to the young than to the old.”
“Because you’re getting tired?”
“Because I’ve seen that reforms are never as transformative as the reformers imagine that they’ll be. Nothing works as planned. What I did definitely made a bad system better.”
“But if Noxon succeeds, and the Destroyers don’t come . . .”
“You want me to make the Lord of Walls go on a long vacation.”
“I think it’s time for you and the expendable Gathuuriex to have the Lord of Walls take a long vacation and let the former Wallmen fight it out among them until the people revolt and make whatever progress toward freedom they can.”
“Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!”
“It sounds like you’re making a speech.”
“Echoing one. So you’re thinking the Walls won’t come down?”
“I’m seeing reasons why they shouldn’t all come down.”
“You’ll see more reasons as we continue these tours.”
“I want to continue as a Wallman for a few more days.”
“Better than being an itinerant Finder of Lost Things?”
“It’s the same job,” said Rigg. “I go back into the past and find out what actually happened. Then I do something about it.”
“Ah, but what do you do.”
“Any complaints?”
“So far so good.”
“I get the idea,” said Rigg, “that while I’m judging the wallfolds, you’re judging me.”
“I already know the wallfolds. You I’m just starting to get acquainted with.”
CHAPTER 11
In Reverse
Noxon had all the time in the world, and so he walked to Ramfold. Having spent almost every waking moment with Param for the past few months, it was a relief to be alone. Nothing against his sister. He had come to love her, and perhaps even understand her as well as one person can understand another. But he needed to be alone for a while, and this was that while.
Well, not alone. Mice all over him, but they weren’t chatty and that was fine with him. They were sulking because of the rules he had laid out for them. Once they got to Ramfold, they were not free to go off and start trying to populate the place with their species. Because of the facemask, they knew that even when he slept, Noxon was keeping a continuous count, and if he needed to, he could catch them. Well, not so much catch as crush. But that was the deal they made in order to be able to accompany him on the voyage.
It’s not that he really had all the time in the world—he had more. The world had only a finite number of years. Noxon could have more years than that, if he wanted. He could just keep going back to other times, and live on until he died of old age. People who couldn’t shift time were stuck with the life they had. If somebody came and burned all life from the surface of the world, well, that was too bad; they were cheated out of all their potential life after that.
But how was that different from the way the world worked all the time? You could get sick, you could take a fall, someone could kill you, there might be a flood, a drought, starvation. So many ways to die without living out your normal span. Everybody died of something, didn’t they? The only thing that made the end of Garden so tragic was that everybody met up with the same death at the same time.
No. That wasn’t the only thing. It wasn’t even the main thing. What made the end of the world so terrible, so vile, so urgent to prevent, were two things.
First, nobody would be there to remember. Everything would be lost. You couldn’t leave anyone or anything to continue work you had just begun. Any other death would at least leave a memory of what had once been. But not this one.
Second, and worse, was that somebody did it on purpose. It wasn’t an act of nature, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of chance. It was the murder of a world. Nineteen worlds, nineteen collections of human history and culture.
But during his walk, Noxon didn’t just think deep philosophical thoughts about why it was worth risking his life to try to prevent the end of the world. He also replayed old arguments w
ith Father, pondered questions he had never had a chance to answer, thought about what Rigg might do, if Noxon succeeded in his mission—how he might finish out their shared life. If he might marry and have children, and if so, what wallfold he would choose to do it in, since by then he would know them all.