Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“So the mice that were boarding the Visitors’ ship, the ones that Umbo and Param warned the Visitors about—they could have gotten their diseases from Janefold.”

“You don’t know if a disease is virulent unless you test it,” said Ram Odin. “Janefold is by far the best disease laboratory in the world.”

Rigg chuckled at himself. “I wasn’t sure if Umbo and Param were right about the mice being sent to Earth to wipe out the human race. Where would they get such a disease? And I didn’t believe you, though I didn’t disbelieve you, either. About Janefold.”

“But combine the two doubts, and . . . certainty?” asked Ram Odin.

“Not certainty. But a major shift in my view, yes.”

“So you’ll stay away from Janefold. For real this time, not just an empty promise to placate me?”

“The mice got their species-wrecking plague from somewhere.”

“Oh, you might go farther,” said Ram Odin. “They probably enhanced it, and tested it in some of the villages.”

Rigg took that in for a moment.

“You did understand that the mice are not human. They have no more qualms about testing a disease on human subjects than we would have testing it on mice.”

“They got their sentience from us,” said Rigg.

“And for how many generations should that make them grateful and subservient? But I don’t know they did this. I’m only guessing from what I know about them. They did kill Param, though.”

“That was the Odinfolders’ idea, wasn’t it?”

“It might have been,” said Ram Odin. “But for a long time now, all Odinfolder decisions are based on data that is supplied to them . . .”

“By the mice,” said Rigg.

“So whether the mice decided for themselves, or provided shaped data to the Odinfolders so they reached the desired ­conclusion—”

“Nothing much happens in Odinfold unless it’s what the mice want,” said Rigg.

“I think that’s a fair way of summing it up.”

“So this business of the Odinfolders reshaping their own bodies into stumpy dung-throwers, into yahoos—”

“They began that before they began mouse-breeding.”

“Oh. It just seemed like deliberate humiliation, as if the mice were getting even.”

“For what?” asked Ram Odin.

“For making them mice,” said Rigg. “They, who have the genes to be human, to have hands, to stand tall. I’d say there’s grounds for resentment.”

“Irrational grounds.”

“Resentment is irrational,” said Rigg.

“Not always,” said Ram Odin. “Like Umbo’s resentment of you.”

“How is that rational!”

“Now, now, Rigg. Leave out how it makes you feel. Umbo doesn’t have his feelings in order to annoy or hurt you. Umbo has good reason for thinking of himself as perhaps the more talented timeshaper. Yet because of the way you were educated, because you’re the son of the king—however empty that title might be—everyone defers to you, and nobody defers to him.”

“I do,” said Rigg.

“But he thinks of that as condescension.”