How can machines lie? Were they lying when they said they had to obey him? If so, how did they get programmed to be able to tell that lie? In other words, who had ordered them to be capable of disobeying orders?

Ram Odin had ordered the killing of all the other Ram Odins so that the computers and expendables would not be forced to deal with contradictory orders. Yet one of the Ram Odins had lived, and the computers and expendables all knew it, because there existed both Ramfold and Odinfold, named for the founder of the colony.

The kind of lying that was going on—what if it wasn’t lying at all? What if everything that every single expendable and computer ever said to Rigg was true. No, not true, but honest—that is, they were conveying exactly the information they had been ordered to give him.

When they told him he was in command of everything, it was true. But what if shortly afterward it stopped being true, and they were ordered not to tell him that?

Or they were ordered to tell him that he was in control when in fact he was not, so they were lying, but not by their own choice.

Who could possibly give such orders? Rigg was in possession of the jewels, the ships’ logs, and by all rights he should be in command.

But only if the previous commander was gone. Dead.

What if the previous commander was unavailable, so Rigg took command; but then the previous commander became available, and so Rigg was not in command anymore. Or he was in command, but in a subordinate way, the way Umbo was in command in Odinfold because he had the copies of the ships’ logs that were on the knife—but he still served under Rigg and could not countermand an order of Rigg’s.

What if Rigg was also subordinate to another human commander, and the expendables had been ordered not to tell him?

Then it all made sense. All the lying by machines stopped being lies and started being a systematic plan of deception by a commander who didn’t want his existence to be known.

This is the way Father had taught Rigg to think. If things don’t make sense, then question your assumptions. When your assumptions all seem to be wrong, then think of ways that they might be right after all. Find new possibilities.

Here was the possibility that nobody ever talked about, yet it seemed obvious once it occurred to Rigg.

Ram Odin was still alive.

Eleven thousand years later, still alive?

Every starship had that room where sleeping colonists were revived and awakened from stasis. That’s where Vadesh had brought Rigg and Loaf, pretending it was the control room, but really intending to slap a facemask on one of them. Rigg had always assumed he meant to do it to him, not Loaf at all. But now he wondered: Vadesh had put the facemask on one of the two men in their group who had no power over time.

That was when Rigg realized that if he had the enhancements to his senses that Loaf had received, he might be able to use his power far more effectively. Wouldn’t the facemask also enhance his ability to see paths, the way it had enhanced Loaf’s sight and hearing and smell, his quickness, his memory, his mental acuity?

There in Vadesh’s revival chamber, Rigg had all the answers in front of him if he had only known the right questions. This was a room that was still in use. Not for the facemask—Vadesh didn’t have to bring him there to put the facemask on someone, he could have done that in any room in the starship.

So why did Vadesh choose that room? Because then Rigg would know what it was. What it was for. That it existed.

Vadesh was trying to tell him the truth even though he had been forbidden to tell it. Someone is still being kept in stasis. Someone who gets revived from time to time, then goes back to sleep. Someone who has slept his way through eleven thousand years of human history on Garden, only waking up for a few days here and there to give orders, to make tweaks in human history.

Ram Odin. Only he was not in Ramfold, where he had founded a colony and left his seed behind. He was in Vadeshfold, where Vadesh had tried to create a symbiosis of humans and native organisms.

“We all lie to Vadesh”—that was their code, their desperate attempt to signal Rigg, against all of Ram Odin’s orders, that there was something in Vadesh’s starship that they all were trying to resist as best they could.

This was the conclusion Rigg had reached when he heard the story of the mantles of the Larfolders, the tale of how they went under the sea. The contradictions had become too great, the web of lies too complicated. So he thought and thought until he made the leap that brought him to this conclusion: Ram Odin is alive, and Ram Odin is manipulating everything.

Then he made one more leap: It is not the Visitors who trigger the destruction of Garden. It is Ram Odin.

In the Future Books, the dying Odinfolders spoke of Destroyers from Earth, but did they know this was true, or had they been told this by the ships’ computers, by the expendables? Here was the key point: the Destroyers worked through the orbiters—the satellites from the original nineteen starships that circled Garden in stationary orbits.

The satellites obeyed their programming by threatening to destroy any wallfold that developed dangerous weapons. But those dangerous weapons were actually thwarted by the expendables, who forestalled any experimentation along those lines. What weapons were considered too dangerous to allow?

Any weapons that could threaten the starships’ control of this planet.

There were terrible slaughters in the wallfolds. The humans of Vadeshfold had made themselves extinct. There was apparently some kind of terrible plague that affected all the wallfolds early on. Many horrible wars and massacres and famines and genocides had happened, but it never triggered any reaction from the orbiters.

But then the Visitors come and a year later the Destroyers activate the orbiters to destroy every single wallfold.

Nine times the Odinfolders had tried various ways to placate these vengeful, terrible gods, remaking themselves, unbuilding their society, leaving everything, even their own bodies, in ruins; devolving all their powers and knowledge upon sentient mice; even contemplating the slaughter of the human race on Earth in order to prevent the destruction of Garden.

What if it wasn’t the humans from Earth who did this?

What if it was Ram Odin?

The Visitors came. They got complete access to all the ships’ logs. Then they went away.

What if they studied those logs and realized what had happened. The whole system was under the control of the man whose first act upon discovering the accidental nineteen-copy, eleven-thousand-year time-shift event was to order the murder of all other copies of himself, and then the destruction of almost all life on Garden to make room for his colonies. The man who used Garden as a means of creating people with his own strange time-shifting powers, only enhanced, clarified.

Now this same Ram Odin saw the people of Earth returning. Maybe they even got near enough to send an order to the ships’ computers, taking command away from Ram Odin.

Only Ram Odin had already programmed in an automatic response to this move. The result of any order that took command away from Ram Odin was the immediate destruction of all life on Garden.

If Ram could not rule, he would destroy.

The humans from Earth had tried to save Garden from its secret god, and the god had wrecked all rather than let his own power be curtailed.

Now it all made sense. No matter how many times the Odinfolders tried to make a better impression on the Visitors, nothing would ever work because the Visitors had always gotten a good impression and had never turned against the people of Garden.

All the lies were part of Ram Odin’s mad or evil plan to keep control over Garden while creating a race of time-shifters who were subservient to him without ever knowing it was him whom they served.