“I’ll go alone,” said Umbo, wishing that someone, anyone—Loaf, Olivenko—would insist on coming along, if only to look out for him, cover his back.
But of course none of them was so paranoid as to suspect the Odinfolders of being untrustworthy. And so they said nothing, except for Olivenko, who only said, “I wonder if they’ll actually take you there.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Umbo, nonchalantly. It was as close as they’d come to openly discussing the possibility that the Odinfolders were holding them more as prisoners or spies than as compatriots in the common cause.
“It’s a long walk, that’s all I’m thinking. I wonder if they’ll let you use their flyer, the way Loaf did.”
And that was that. The conversation moved on to other things.
That evening, Umbo deliberately avoided running into Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. He knew right where they’d be, because they were as predictable as day and night. So he made sure not to pass near them.
Instead he went out among the housetrees and walked straight up to a tree where he knew several other Odinfolders lived. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”
Eventually a head and shoulders emerged from the center of the tree. “What?” asked the woman tentatively.
“I’m Umbo. One of the Ramfolders.”
“I know who you are,” she said.
“I’m studying the way starships from Earth are designed, and I need to get into the Odinfold starship. How do I call the flyer?”
“You don’t,” said the woman, and then she was gone, having dropped back down into the tree.
So there it was, out in the open. He wasn’t allowed to summon the flyer.
And, just as predictably, within a few minutes Swims-in-the-Air came to find him, a bemused expression on her face. “Why didn’t you ask me or Mouse-Breeder to help you get to the starship?”
“I didn’t run into you inside and came looking for you out here, and then I thought, why not ask one of the others?”
“You’ve been here nearly a year,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Has any of them shown the slightest interest in meeting you?”
“No, and I’ve wondered about that.”
“Why should you wonder?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “You’re a symbol of our failure, after nine tries, to save the world. Here you are, this ragtag group of five, and you’re supposed to succeed where the finest minds of Odinfold have failed again and again and again? What do you think they feel.”
I thought they were forbidden to speak to us. I still think that. But of course he kept such thoughts to himself.
“I’m sorry I intruded on them,” said Umbo. “Fortunately, I think the woman I talked to will recover from the injury I caused her.”
“It was more injury than you think,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “You don’t understand us, what we go through.”
“Go through! This is a utopia, everybody’s happy and everything’s perfect.”
“If I thought you believed that,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “I’d worry about your sanity. But we still have our sense of irony, my young friend. Ours is a bleak and dreadful life here in the borderland, and you’d do well to remember that most of us value our solitude. In fact, all of us do, but Mouse-Breeder and I decided
to make ourselves available to you. Somebody had to do it.”
“What do you mean, a bleak and dreadful life?”
“In the shadow of the Wall.”
“So move! Move away from the Wall, take back a few scraps of that vast game preserve.”
Swims-in-the-Air shook her head. “How can you not understand? We have to live near the Wall. We need the Wall.”
“Need it? How can you use the Wall?”
“Why, by walking into it, of course.”