“I’m very impressed with us,” said the old soldier dryly.

“But the thing to keep in mind is, it’s irrevocable,” said Rigg. “Now that I’m here in the past with the rest of you, I can only see the paths that existed as of this moment. I can’t see Param and me walking through the tunnel, or where I handed her off to you. Those things haven’t happened yet.”

“Wasn’t that the idea?” asked the boy.

The old soldier glanced around. “Are we sure nobody’s going to recognize the two of you?” he asked Rigg and Param.

“Nobody knows what they look like,” said Olivenko. “Except a chosen few, and they won’t be looking for them here on the streets. Not today.”

“What I’m saying,” said Rigg, continuing the discussion of time travel, “is that I couldn’t go back into the future if I wanted to. I can only see paths in the past. Which means that if we ever do this again, only we don’t want to stay in the past, then we can’t let go of our link with the future. Which may not be me at all. It may be Umbo, or both of us together. As long as he and I are still existing in both places at the same time, and not tied to a living creature in the past, then we can return to the future. What do you think?”

“I think that either you’re right,” said Param, “or you’re not. What I don’t see is why it matters.”

“Because this is how we’re going to get through the Wall,” said Rigg. “We’re going to cross through it at a time before it existed. But on the other side, we’re going to want to come back to our time.”

“There was a time when the Wall didn’t exist?” asked the boy—Umbo? Yes, that was his ridiculous name.

“Twelve thousand years ago,” said Rigg. “And when the Wall didn’t exist, there were no humans here. If we get stuck that long ago, then we’ll be the only people in the world.”

“That’s how you’re going to do it?” asked Olivenko.

“I think it’ll work,” said Rigg, “better than knocking ourselves unconscious and floating through the Wall on a boat.”

“At least there won’t be anybody waiting to kill us on the other side,” said Olivenko.

“What are you talking about?” asked the old soldier.

So, as they walked along the busy streets of Aressa Sessamo, Rigg and Olivenko told the story of Knosso, Rigg’s real father, and how he crossed through the Wall, only to be murdered on the other side.

“And you want to take us through the Wall, knowing that somebody wants to kill us on the other side?” asked Loaf.

“The creatures that killed Father Knosso,” said Rigg, “lived in the water. We won’t cross through where there’s water.”

“But there might be other things that want us dead,” said Param.

“There might be. But one thing we can be certain of—there are people in this wallfold who want us dead, and they’re very good at killing people.”

“Well, then,” said Loaf, “Let’s give it a try and see if we live through it.”

“One thing,” said Rigg. “You don’t have to come, Loaf.”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.”

“I’m thinking of Leaky,” said Rigg. “She expects you to come home. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to come back, once we cross over.”

“Leaky is like my heart or my brain,” said Loaf. “I can’t imagine living without her. But she also knows me. Knows that whenever I leave home there’s a chance I won’t come back. She knew it when she sent me with you. So if I go with you, and I get killed or for some other reason can’t get back, then she’ll grieve, and she’ll wonder what happened to me, but she’ll go on. She’ll make a life for herself in that town that’s named for her. One of us is going to die before the other—that’s how life goes. You see what I mean?”

Olivenko understood what he was saying, but could hardly believe that a man could mean it. It wasn’t like he didn’t care—Loaf was clearly more than a little emotional as he made that speech. He simply wasn’t going to let his feelings for the woman he loved stop him from following through with what he had committed to do.

Like a true soldier.

Like me, thought Olivenko.

“I’m with you, too,” said Olivenko.

“No, truly,” said Rigg. “All we need is your help out of town.”

“In about a half hour, I’m going to be absent without permission,” said Olivenko. “By the time you’re safely out of town, I’d better be with you and never come back, because I’ll be a deserter. They hang deserters.”

“Then you can’t come with us,” said Rigg. “It was selfish of me to ask. Just give us some ideas about how—”

“Are you joking?” said Olivenko. “I watched your father pass through the Wall and die, young Rigg. And ever since then, I’ve only wished one thing—that I could have gone with him. Maybe I could have saved him.”

“You were a child then, an apprentice scholar,” said Rigg. “What could you have done?”

“Why do you think I became a soldier?” said Olivenko. “So that if there was ever such a need again, I’d be fit to do it.”

“I never thought much of deserters,” said the old soldier.

“Well, you can smear that opinion on your elbow and lick it off,” said Olivenko. “Because I’m not deserting. They’ll only think that I am.”

“What are you doing, then?” asked Param.

“I’m following the prince and princess of the royal house into exile,” said Olivenko.

“Oh,” said Loaf. “That’s all right then.”

CHAPTER 23

Carriage

Three years after the stasis pod sealed itself over Ram’s inert body, the preservation of a wide and deep sampling of the native DNA of Garden’s life forms was complete. So also was the collection and stasis of the Garden flora and fauna that would be restored to the ocean and to the isolated small continents after the extinction event.

The expendables did not speak to each other; their analog communication devices were solely for use with conscious humans. Instead, they were in constant conversation at a digital level, sharing experiences and conclusions as if all were inside each other’s minds.

The ship’s computers were not disgruntled—or gruntled, for that matter—that Ram’s last instruction had been to obey the expendables. The ship’s computers did not care who gave them their orders. For that matter, neither did the expendables. But the expendables’ deepest programming gave them a mission that even Ram could not have contradicted, and in order to protect that mission, they could not be subject to the mechanical reasoning of the ships’ computers.

There was no ego. None of the mechanical devices called computers or expendables had any interest in “getting their way.” They had no “way.” They only had programming, data, and their own conclusions based on them.

The nineteen ships left their near-Garden orbits and rose nearly half an Astronomical Unit, until they were in optimal position. Then they configured their collision fields to the right level of absorption, dissipation, rigidity, and storage and began to accelerate toward Garden.

They did not impact with the planet simultaneously. Instead, they hit at carefully calibrated intervals and angles, so that when the series of collisions ended, Garden had a tilt sufficient to create seasonal variations and a rotation rate slowed to just over 23 hours.

Unlike meteors, which are themselves largely or entirely vaporized when striking a planet, the ships themselves were not affected in any way by the collisions, except that they came to a sudden stop. Even that was mitigated by internal fields in each ship that absorbed the energy of inertia loss and passed it beyond Garden’s magnetic field.

The large chunks of debris thrown up by the impacts soon returned to the surface—except that none penetrated the fields that rose columnlike directly above each ship. The result was that when the new surface of Garden took shape, there were nineteen smooth-sided shafts leading from each ship to the open sky, which pointed, not straight out from Garden’s center, but rather at such an angle as to remain in constant line-of-sight with satellites in geosynchronous orbit.