“No, of course she’ll die. But she might never be raped.”
“Do you plan to undo all the rapes and murders that ever happened in Singhfold?”
“If that’s your argument, then—”
“That’s groundwork. Listen up. You don’t know if saving her from this admittedly terrible death will prolong her life for a week or ninety years. You don’t know if the life you’re giving her will be happy or sad.”
“I don’t even care about that,” said Rigg. “All I care about is that she have the right to choose her own life.”
“Because the life she chooses to live, that’s who she is, yes? She’ll decide whether to be joyful or sad within the events and years of her life, yes?”
“That’s what life is.”
“That’s what life is, unless a timeshaper comes along,” said Ram Odin.
“Oh, come on,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to make her do anything.”
“You’re going to make this murderer die without having raped or murdered anybody,” said Ram Odin. “So what happens to this man’s eventual wife and children?”
“She marries somebody else.”
“So those children never exist.”
Rigg had no answer that sounded right in his own mind. But he said one of them, anyway. “Never existing is not the same thing as murdering somebody.”
“But you’ll be taking away all those choices in life. Those children will never exist so they’ll never have those experiences, they’ll never become anybody at all. At least Onishtu had years enough to win the hearts of a village, to live on in their memory, to color the way the whole valley looks at the world outside. But now they’ll never become who they are.”
“Suspicious and resentful and sad,” said Rigg.
“Have they gone to war over it? Made a revenge raid on another village? Killed one girl in each of the other valleys in order to retaliate?”
“They suffer.”
“They have a wistful memory of an extraordinary child whom they all loved and whose disappearance shattered them. But they’ve turned it into something rather ennobling and fine, even if it looks like a shadow to you. They all share this grief. It helps unite them.”
“Including the man who actually did it.”
“Maybe it tortures him,” said Ram Odin. “Maybe he doesn’t care. What difference does that make to the other people? That girl’s life changed them all, and her death changed them all. People see the world differently because she’s gone. I don’t know how that changed their behavior, their decisions, and neither do you. But maybe there are marriages that didn’t happen, jobs that were done differently, or not done at all, because of the shadow of Onishtu’s life and disappearance. You don’t know how their lives and choices would be different. But you arrogantly assume that because her death was awful, that gives you the right to take away all the lives that have been lived in this valley since she was buried under that window.”
Rigg sat very still, thinking, thinking. “It’s what the Odinfolders did—sent back messages that wiped out billions of lives.”
“Their lives! Their own lives. And they chose to send back the Future Book in order to save the world. A knowing sacrifice. Who is getting a choice if you save this one girl from her murderer?”
“She is.”
“And nobody else. Give one girl a few more years, and obliterate all the other lives that have been lived after her death—including the children of her murderer and his wife. Do they deserve to die for a crime their father committed before they were born?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. You can lie to yourself but don’t lie to me. Because remember, you think of me as a murderer even though I never killed you—but you did kill me. Noxon didn’t, because you came back and prevented him. So tell me, Rigg. Are you and Noxon both killers? I won’t say murderers, because according to your story you acted in self-defense—and I believe you, I know I was thinking about it, I had decided to do it, but this man talking to you right now, Rigg, this me never made the final decision to take your life. But you are the very one who deliberately, calculatedly went back in time and killed me first, before I could kill you. And then you regretted it.”
“I killed you because I believed that it was you, alone, who triggered the destruction of Garden. Not just because you tried to kill me. I could have dodged you forever, to keep myself alive. I killed you to save the world.”
“But it turns out you were wrong and I didn’t blow up Garden and obliterate the life that I had been tending for eleven thousand years! What a shock! How could you have guessed!”
“I undid the killing,” said Rigg, quieting himself. The last thing they needed to do was let their shouting in the cold night air bring curious people to the barn. “I was wrong, and I undid it, and I believe you are not dead, sir.”
“And this murderer—I wonder if, after a while, he came to wish he hadn’t done it. I wonder if he might not have chosen to go back in time and stop himself from killing her—even at the risk of causing two copies of himself to exist.”