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“It’s not all right, because I saw you both dead.” He looked away. “I never want to see that again.”
“Really gruesome?” asked Umbo.
“There was a version of both of you,” said Rigg, “that felt all the pain and terror of death. You don’t remember it, but it happened.”
“And by the Odinfolders’ account, the whole world has gone through that many times over,” said Olivenko.
“Which brings us back to Umbo’s idea,” said Param. “How do you figure the Odinfolders are going to destroy the human race on Earth, if they haven’t made a weapon or even planned what such a weapon might be?”
“The mice,” said Umbo, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“What can they do?” asked Param.
“If a breeding pair can make it back to Earth,” said Umbo, “they’ll have maybe a dozen children after three weeks. If only five of them are females, and they reach sexual maturity in six weeks, and they have the same number of female children, five in a generation, how many will they have before that Destroyer fleet is scheduled to take off?”
Loaf raised a hand. “These mice reach sexual maturity in four weeks. It’s one of the first changes Mouse-Breeder made.”
“Even without any notion of weaponry when they arrive,” said Umbo, “they’ll have several generations to learn all about it on Earth. And plenty of time in which to carry out the war. They won’t even need to learn about mechanical weapons, anyway. They’re experts on genes. Look what they did to us.”
Param was in awe. “You think a pair of mice could destroy the human race in a year?”
“That’s if only one breeding pair makes it through,” said Umbo. “And I’m betting more than that will make it.”
“Mice are vermin, in the eyes of Earth people,” said Olivenko. “They’ll exterminate them.”
“They won’t even know the mice are there,” said Umbo. “It won’t be like the library, where they’re out in the open. Mice are good at hiding. And the voyage doesn’t take long.”
“How will they get off the ship?” asked Param.
“They’re collectively even smarter than we are,” said Rigg. “They’ll find a way.”
“And then the Destroyers won’t come,” said Param. “So Garden will be saved.”
No one answered her. Umbo looked away. Rigg blushed. Was he ashamed of her?
“That’s true,” said Loaf. “But how is it better to trade the destruction of human life on one planet for another?”
Param shook her head. “It isn’t, except for one point. This way, the planet that survives is ours. And I count that as very much better than the other way around. Does that make me a monster?”
“We’re all monsters,” said Loaf, “because we all thought of that. We’re just ashamed of ourselves for thinking it.”
“I’m not,” said Param.
And then it occurred to her that that was why Rigg had blushed. Because he was ashamed of her for not being ashamed.
Which was why Rigg could never have been King-in-the-Tent.
CHAPTER 17
Trust
The whole way to the Wall, Rigg sat in the flyer, looking out the window at the prairies that passed under them, and then the tree-covered hills as they came into the north, where autumn was in full swing again. It made Rigg feel a moment’s nostalgia for his life in the high forests of the Stashi Mountains.
But then he remembered that those high mountains had a starship under them, and the cliffs that loomed over Fall Ford had been raised by the collision that wiped out most of the native life of Garden. The man who had walked with him and taught him and called him “son” was a machine, and a liar, and when he died he didn’t die at all, but he left Rigg to feel the grief of the loss, and then to puzzle things out without help.
Now Rigg’s sense of who he was in the world had been torn away again. Son of the royal family, that had been hard enough; target of assassination, he could take that in stride. But now to learn that his real father, Knosso, had been genetically altered to enhance his mental abilities, and those abilities had been passed along to him and Param, and that this genetic alteration had been carried out by semi-humanized mice—it was just too bizarre.
Is there anything in my life that was not someone else’s plan?
