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  He met Leaky coming back. She gave him a curt, preoccupied nod, but he didn’t read anything into that because her idea of manners included the idea that a man was supposed to pretend that he didn’t know that women pee and poop. So obviously they had to pretend they hadn’t seen each other.

  It wasn’t till breakfast—with the roadhouse still closed—that Loaf said, “That worked pretty well. Whatever you said.”

  “He was bratty and bossy and rude,” said Leaky.

  “You stick with that,” said Loaf to Umbo. “You have a talent for it.”

  “I didn’t hear any yelling or anything breaking so I guess you two hit it off like newlyweds?”

  “On the contrary, our wedding night was full of yelling and breaking,” said Loaf.

  “Your five trips to visit me were time well spent,” said Leaky. “Though Loaf was acting like a man who was five years celibate, while I hadn’t even had time to notice he was away.”

  “Meaning she hadn’t even had a chance to stuff a lover in a cupboard,” said Loaf.

  “But we’re going to leave at once. Today. Close down the roadhouse. I just need time to get some friends to look in on the place so it doesn’t get taken over by squatters till we come back.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Umbo.

  “To Vadeshfold,” said Loaf. “Apparently having a facemask made me so virile and vigorous that Leaky wants one, too.”

  Umbo was stunned. “Are you serious?”

  Leaky leaned in close. “Look at my pretty pretty face. You think I’m afraid a facemask might be too much improvement?”

  “But why?” asked Umbo.

  “She’s afraid she can’t keep up with me,” said Loaf. They laughed like conspirators in a particularly fiendish crime.

  Umbo realized it so suddenly that he blurted it out. “You don’t want to wait to see if you can have children now just by rejuvenating Loaf.”

  “We don’t want it to be anyone’s fault that we took so long conceiving,” said Loaf. “So she wants a facemask to heal everything that’s wrong with both our bodies.”

  “I just want to be as athletic as he is,” said Leaky.

  “She just wants to be able to chop wood with exquisite accuracy,” said Umbo. “But it might take more than a facemask to confer a talent like that on her.”

  “I need you to come with us so we can get through the Wall,” said Loaf. “But you don’t have to stay with us.”

  “Where exactly would I go?” asked Umbo. “I have no reason to come back here without you.”

  Hardly were the words out of his mouth than he realized that there was something he needed very badly to do. But it could wait until they got back. That was the nice thing about the past—it stayed right where you put it until you needed to pick it up again.

  CHAPTER 5

  Burning House

  Rigg had planned to make his tour of the wallfolds by himself. He didn’t want to make conversation with anybody, and he didn’t want to have to worry about protecting someone else. Truth to tell, he would have welcomed Umbo. But not the Umbo of today—what he wished for was the Umbo he had set out with years before. Before the rivalry. Though perhaps there was never a time before rivalry—just a time before Rigg knew about it.

  What Rigg certainly did not want was to travel with any of the expendables. Even if he thought they could be trusted, he couldn’t get past the fact that they all looked like Father. They all were Father. He had spent his childhood traveling with an expendable. Learning everything from him. It. Subservient to it. Until it pretended to die and thrust him onto this path which was leading . . . somewhere.

  Yet if there was anyone Rigg wanted to travel with less than the expendables, it was Ram Odin. And not just because he had such clear memories of Ram trying to kill him, and even clearer ones of killing Ram Odin himself. It was because Ram Odin already knew far more about the wallfolds than Rigg could possibly learn in a few weeks or even years of wandering. Rigg wanted to come up with his own information. Make up his own mind.

  So of course, when the flyer arrived to take him to Yinfold, the farthest of the wallfolds, there was Ram Odin, waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

  “You don’t look happy to see me,” said Ram Odin.

  “I’m never happy to see you,” said Rigg. “Though I feel safer when I can see you than when I can’t.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Ram Odin.

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Are you sure the flyer will go if I don’t approve it?” said Ram Odin.

  “Then I won’t use the flyer,” said Rigg, feeling tired already. “Or I’ll just go back in time and use it yesterday. Or last month.”

  “Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “Be reasonable. Your goal is to judge all the wallfolds. I’ve been watching them for ten thousand years, off and on. The expendables have been watching continuously.”

  “So a fresh pair of eyes might be helpful.”

  “I agree,” said Ram Odin. “But don’t throw away our knowledge. We can help make your visits more efficient and effective.”

  “You can make sure I see only the things that will support the conclusions you’ve already reached.”

  “That’s always a danger, even if I try not to. But you bring your own biases, too. You’re a child of Ramfold. How long before you stop seeing everything through the lens of your experiences there?”

  “I’ll never stop seeing things that way. You’re a child of Earth. How long before—”

  “Exactly my point. I see things from the perspective of having known another world, where there was no Wall. But do you think because I grew up on Earth, I know Earth?”

  “Better than I do.”

  “I grew up where I grew up. I knew my neighborhood, my schools. My college, but even then I only knew the other kids I hung out with, the professors I studied with. I visited a few other countries. Studied in them. Learned a foreign language—which is no joke, when you don’t have the Wall to impose all languages into your brain. By the standards of Earth I was widely read and widely traveled. And I have no idea what it’s like to grow up in China or India or Africa or Brazil. Even if I grew up in one of those countries, I’d only know my village, my schools, my friends.”

  “Then I’d better stop talking with you and get busy exploring,” said Rigg.

  “You traveled down the Stashik River. First without money, trapping animals for meat as long as open country held out. Then with Loaf to guide you and shape your experience on the river and in O. Then as a prisoner so all you saw were your invisible paths. Then closed up in Flacommo’s house and in the library. You had how many hours on the loose in Aressa Sessamo before you made your escape, and then you were in that carriage heading for the Wall. Rigg, how well do you know Ramfold?”

  “I know what I know,” said Rigg stubbornly. “I know the things that everybody knows, and I know some things that only I know. You may know the whole history, you may have seen it through all its history while I only know the last fifteen minutes of it, but you didn’t grow up in Ramfold, so you don’t really know it, either.”

  “You don’t know Ramfold, Rigg. You know Fall Ford and the forests above Upsheer, and then a quick tour of the river. What do you know about the vast lands on either side? That’s where most of the millions of people of Ramfold live. Village after village. Places where they’ve never heard the language of Aressa Sessamo. Places where even the tax collectors don’t go.”

  Rigg sat on the edge of the ramp and put his head in his hands. “And I’ll know even less about the other wallfolds. I get it. But I have to do something.”

  “Then do it with me. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut, all right? I’ll try not to shape your perceptions. Yes, I think I know what you’ll learn. But I’ll let you learn it.”

  “The best way to do that is not to go with me,” sai
d Rigg.

  “I know how dangerous it is,” said Ram Odin, “and you don’t.”

  “I’ve dealt with danger before. I think I can get out of ­trouble more easily than anybody in the world, except Umbo. And Noxon.”

  “You won’t learn much if you’re always getting out of trouble. And think of what you’ll do by ‘getting out of trouble.’ Suddenly disappear. You think they won’t notice? Word won’t spread? You think that won’t change what people believe about the world?”

  “I did a lot of that in Ramfold, and I didn’t change everything.”

  “Of course you changed everything! Just because you can’t see what it would have been without all your disappearing and reappearing—that’s all you and Umbo did, over and over, was change things!”

  Rigg had to concede the point. “And having you with me will accomplish exactly what?”

  “It will keep you from getting thrown out of every village in every wallfold. Are you forgetting that you’re wearing that twitching fungus on your face?”

  “I never forget it,” said Rigg. “I’ve seen Noxon.”

  “So how do you propose to get past the phase where they stone you and drive you out as a freak?”

  “You make it sound like all I’ll find in every wallfold is terrified privicks.”

  “All you’ll find is humans responding to a very strange stranger.”

  “At least I’ll speak the language like a native.”

  “That will make them even crazier, Rigg! In every wallfold except Odinfold and Larfold, people are sharply aware that the only people who speak their language like a native are the people they know. Along comes a stranger with a misshapen face and eyes not quite back into alignment, and he speaks as if he grew up among them—obviously a sorcerer, a witch, a devil!”

  “So you’ll be my normal-human companion,” said Rigg.

  “Your grandfather,” said Ram Odin.

  “It’s not even a lie,” said Rigg, “give or take five hundred generations.”

  “If we go into the city, then you suffer from some weird ­country disease. But I don’t think you want to go to the cities—in the few wallfolds that have any real cities.”

  “Come on,” said Rigg. “People always form into cities.”

  “They do when they can,” said Ram Odin, “but no larger than the economy and the transportation systems can support. In some places, five thousand people is a city. In other places, it doesn’t feel like a city till fifty thousand. Odinfold once had ­cities of twenty million, but we’ve erased those paths through time. At the moment, with about a quarter of a million people Aressa Sessamo is one of the four largest cities on the whole planet of Garden. Most wallfolds have a largest city of no more than fifty thousand.”

  “And you think I don’t want to go into them.”

  “Because you’ve seen O and you’ve seen Aressa Sessamo. When humans live together in large numbers, they make the same accommodations. They develop the same rules, because only a few rules work. But in hamlets of ten families, villages of fifty households, towns of two hundred households—there’s where really interesting, peculiar customs can grow up because what evolves is exactly what suits the people in that place.”

  “You’re already trying to shape my way of looking at other wallfolds,” said Rigg.

  “I’m telling you that cities converge on the same kind of system of dealing with anonymity and crowding. But villages diverge and there’s where the really interesting things pop up.”

  “Nothing interesting ever ‘popped up’ in Fall Ford.”

  “You and Umbo popped up there.”

  “You know we were poked into Fall Ford, me as a baby, Umbo as a genetic alteration.”

  “But Nox wasn’t. She just grew there. Do you think every village has a Nox?”

  Rigg thought about the woman he once believed, or at least hoped, was his mother. She kept a boardinghouse that took in the rare traveler. She cooked meals that people in Fall Ford praised and envied. She was kind and protective.

  And she had the ability to create a mental field around her in which she could calm people down. It didn’t reach far, but it certainly was effective. You couldn’t be very angry or very afraid around Nox.

  “She’s the mayor of Fall Ford,” said Rigg, realizing it for the first time. “Nobody knows it, but everybody knows it. It wasn’t just when they were coming after me. They always go to Nox.”

  “She’s like a drug,” said Ram Odin. “When things made them upset, they’d go to Nox and she helped them feel better. When they were calmed down, they made better decisions. They all knew it, even if they didn’t know it.”

  “You don’t know Nox.”

  “But Ramex did. And he told me. She’s not the only one. She’s the other direction that human evolution took in Ramfold. We needed timeshapers so we paid more attention to you. But I had Ramex take you to a village that had Nox. A soother. Because you and Umbo were very likely to cause some crazy things to happen. And with Nox around, things couldn’t go too wrong.”

  “And the other wallfolds—did they develop people like Nox?”

  “I thought you wanted to form your own opinions.”

  Rigg rolled his eyes. “So you’ll be my grandfather. That doesn’t explain my face.”

  “It puts you under an old man’s protection. Instead of coming in as a lone monster, you come in as an old man’s strange grandson. That solves one problem, but not the big one.”

  “That we’ll still be strangers wherever we go.” Rigg heard himself saying “we” and he knew in that moment that he had already decided to bring Ram Odin along. Because it really would be impossible to do this on his own. Oh, he could visit wallfolds alone, and observe people from a distance, but what would he really know about them without hearing them talk? Without seeing how they live? And with this mask on his head, he couldn’t get close enough. He hadn’t thought that through, and Ram Odin had, and so Ram Odin was going to get his way because his way was better.

  “We have to have a reason for traveling,” said Ram Odin. “Or they’ll think we’re criminals, or escapees, or wild men, or refugees, or whatever else sets people to wandering. Where did you want to go first?”

  “Yinfold,” said Rigg.

  “Go to the farthest and work your way back. Makes sense.”

  “When we’re traveling in Yinfold, what’s our story?”

  “Depends on where in Yinfold. It’s a big place. There are only nineteen wallfolds on two very large continents. Each one is as big as—well, you don’t know Earth, so the comparison—”

  “I studied maps and globes of Earth when we were in Odinfold,” said Rigg. “We all did.”

  “Each of our wallfolds here is the size of Europe from Poland on westward. The size of India. Han China. I once divided the land masses of Earth into nineteen roughly equal parts and in some of those parts, there was an amazing amount of history. Great empires rising and falling.”

  “But not in all.”

  “Well, some of them were desert wastelands. Either very cold deserts, or very hot ones. But we have no great deserts in Garden. Only little ones.”

  “So all the wallfolds are habitable.”

  “When I plotted out where each starship should make landfall, I made sure that every one of them included plenty of well-watered arable land.”

  “I get it. Each wallfold is huge and there’s a lot of variation within them.”

  “More than you know. And also less. But no, I’ll let you find out.”

  Rigg shook his head. “If you’re already dropping hints . . .”

  “Do you have any idea how long it’s been, with no other human to talk to?”

  “You have the expendables. I know from experience that they can be lively conversationalists.”

  “Walking, talking databanks,” said Ram Odin. “Not
people.”

  “So in Yinfold, what’s our reason for wandering?”

  “They have a lot of traveling healers and soothsayers. People who tell fortunes and then move on before anyone can tell whether their prophecies come true.”

  “You’re not going to have me time-shift and come back with true answers, are you?”

  “It wouldn’t even work, because foreknowledge would change their behavior so it wouldn’t come true after all, likely as not,” said Ram Odin. “But I’m thinking we make up a whole new category. Something that will actually work, but something they’ve never seen before.”

  Even though Yinfold was settled everywhere, there was no trouble finding an uninhabited place to set down the flyer, even quite near to what passed for a city there. Rigg thought of Aressa Sessamo, built up out of a swamp in a river delta. Nearly empty watery land all around it, and yet what land there was, incredibly fertile with the silt of millennia of river floods. Water to carry boats and therefore cargos for trade. A huge natural moat for defense. But it still hadn’t kept out the horse warriors of the Sessamoto.

  “This is good land,” said Rigg. “Why is it empty?”

  “Good land, bad land,” said Ram Odin. “People gather where other people are, so they can mate readily. That leaves lots of empty places where people can go when they can’t stand the place they’re in, or something goes wrong and they have to leave. A place is settled for five thousand years, and then for the next five thousand years, nobody goes near the place, and yet it’s the same place.”

  “There used to be a lot of settlement above Upsheer,” said Rigg. “That’s why they kept building bridges over the falls. But nobody lives there now.”

  “They’ll go there again,” said Ram Odin. “Ship, where we’ve just parked the flyer—has this ever been settled land?”

  “Three different villages,” said the computer voice in the flyer. “And farmland for twenty percent of the time. Usually, though, it’s lightly wooded, sharply cut terrain, because of the ravines.”