“No,” said Noxon. “They attacked long before we ever showed up here.”
“We’re here now, and that’s hundreds of millennia before the attack,” said Wheaton.
“Prepare for your head to hurt again,” said the expendable.
“Let me guess,” said Wheaton. “‘Before’ doesn’t always mean ‘before.’”
“The calendar and the clock keep a single line of time,” said Noxon. “But with us, causality jumps all over the place. We’re here before the invasion, by the calendar, but we’re here after the invasion, by the causal chain. Their invasion is what caused us to come, so by cause-and-effect, the invasion was first.”
“I can’t even make my little joke,” said Wheaton, “because the expendable already said it.”
“I anticipated your humor?” asked the expendable.
“You stepped on my joke,” said Wheaton. “Clever, but not polite.”
“You’d already said the joke,” said Ram, “so it wasn’t going to be funny this time. Whereas the expendable stepping on it, that was funny.”
“Amusing, anyway,” said the alpha mouse.
“The mice don’t think any of this is all that funny,” Noxon reported.
“Oh, the women are laughing uproariously,” said the alpha. “I’m the one who isn’t hysterical about it.”
Noxon could see that the female mice were busy at various tasks throughout the ship, and not one of them showed any sign of paying much attention to what they were doing.
“What are you doing to the ship?” asked Noxon.
Noxon could see Ram stiffen a little—he must know Noxon was talking to the mice, and so he feared that the mice might be doing something dangerous and irrevocable.
“We’re making the same alterations to this ship that our counterparts made to the backward-moving ship,” said the alpha. “So we can jump the fold without making nineteen forward copies and one backward one.”
“Are we planning to jump again?” asked Noxon.
“I believe that when the expendable finishes explaining about the civilization on the binary planet, you’ll decide that ten of these twenty ships should jump to a spot much nearer the binary.”
“Will they still skip eleven millennia back in time?” asked Noxon.
“No. Curing the replications also cures the time skip.”
“Are you ready for me to explain about the binary planet?” asked the expendable.
“I am,” said Ram. “Unless the mice now command the ship.”
“They’ve fixed it so we don’t split into nineteen pieces every time we jump,” said Noxon.
“You asked them if we’re planning to jump again,” said Ram. “Why would we do that?”
“Let’s hear the expendable and find out,” said Noxon. “The mice apparently already know what he’s going to tell us.”
The expendable took a breath before proceeding. Such theatricality from a machine that doesn’t need to breathe, thought Noxon. “Earth’s Moon was important to the evolution of life, by causing tides and controlling other cycles,” said the expendable. “But this world is really two planets, nearly equal, as close as they can be without tearing each other apart with tidal forces.”
“So both have atmospheres,” said Ram.
“Both have life?” asked Noxon.
“Both have widespread electricity and radio communications,” said the expendable. “They each monitor the other’s radio broadcasts, and I believe the ability to interfere with and eventually control remote computer systems was developed by the nearer planet in order to use it against the farther one.”
“They have a million kilometers between them,” said Ram, “and they’re attacking each other?”