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“He can’t. Nobody can. Just me and Noxon and Umbo. And the mice, in their own way. Everybody else is stuck with whatever choices they made. I know.”
“So you think because you can undo a terrible mistake like killing an innocent man—me, because I never killed anybody and I did not destroy the world—because you can undo it, you’re not a murderer. You’re an ex-killer, a former killer, but you unkilled me so—”
“I get your point. Two points. One, that I don’t have the right to wipe out all the things this village has done in response to Onishtu’s death. Two, that I don’t have the right to kill him before he has killed. You think people have the right to be vile before they get punished for their vileness. By that reckoning, do we have to let the Destroyers wipe out all life on Garden before we take action to prevent them?”
“If you can’t see the difference . . .”
“I can see lots of differences. I can see differences between all your comparisons.”
“Think, Rigg. When Umbo and Param prevented those plague-infected mice from boarding the Visitors’ ship, they made the decision that saving human life on Garden was not worth wiping out human life on Earth. There’s actually a limit to what they would allow the mice to do in order to save our world.”
“Noxon’s going to take mice with him.”
“Not plague mice, Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m telling you that yes, you can prevent the destruction of Garden and yes, in the process there may be people you have to kill or cause not to exist in order to prevent the death of a world. But you try to make as little change as possible. You don’t just decide that to save this one girl, you can wipe out innocent children and make it so their lives never happen.”
Rigg just sat there, not really thinking, because he knew that he wasn’t going to prevent Onishtu’s death after all, but he hated himself for listening to Ram Odin, and he now felt as ashamed as if he had stood at the door and watched the murder and had done nothing to prevent it. Because that was pretty much how things stood. He had the power to stop the rape and murder, and he wasn’t going to stop it, and it hurt.
“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “I’m only urging you to follow the course you and Umbo have followed all along. Minimal change. All the things you did affected mostly yourselves, and nobody else’s life was going to be all that changed by it. And you were contained within Ramfold, so nothing you did could possibly transform any of the other wallfolds. Noxon and Param went off by themselves to practice chronomancy, so they wouldn’t go back in time where it might change the course of the Larfolders’ lives. And in Yinfold, you didn’t prevent the adulterous pair and you didn’t even tell on them. In fact, you covered up their betrayal so that greater evil wouldn’t come from it.”
“Adultery is not the rape and murder of a child.”
“I know that,” said Ram Odin. “And so do you. I’m talking about the principle of minimal change.”
“To be able to stop it, and choose not to, that makes me complicit.”
“No!” said Ram Odin sharply. “You have this godlike power to force other people not to do evil, but to choose not to use it doesn’t make you evil. It says that you respect other people’s freedom enough to allow them to choose to do terrible things. To reveal who they are by the choices they actually make, the things they actually do. If you didn’t have this godlike power, if you had lived in this village and realized what the murderer was going to do, and you came and saw what he was doing and decided to let it happen, then you’d be complicit. But you have a godlike power to compel people to be better—or at least less awful—than they wish to be. How many people can you keep from being moral monsters? You children are going to try to stop the destruction of a world—but even then, there are limits to how you’ll go about doing it. There are limits! The only reason you can be trusted with this power is that there are limits.”
“So you stopping me from doing something, that’s all right, but I—”
“I’m not stopping you, foolish boy. I’m trying to persuade you. But I know perfectly well that at any second you could leap back in time, go prevent the murder, and come back here to rejoin this conversation right where we left off.”
“I actually can’t. I’d have to slice my way back.”
“You’d get back here. If you wanted. You could also leave me behind whenever you want. But you don’t do those things.”
“Maybe I should.”
“But you haven’t and I think you won’t. You sat here and listened to my arguments for one reason and one reason only.”
“I know.”
“Tell me the reason.”
“You’re not my father. You don’t have the right to quiz me.”
“You listened to me because you know I’m right. No, more than that. You already knew I was right, and you let me talk you out of it because you already mistrusted your decision to save the girl. You just needed me to help you do the right thing.”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “You nai
led it. And now I’m going to sleep.”
He lay down in the hay, his coat under his head to keep bits of straw out of his nostrils while he slept. But he did not sleep until he had exhausted himself with weeping. For the beautiful dead girl whose path was still present even when he shut his eyes, whose face was always before him because he could not stop himself from examining her path.
In the morning, Rigg went to work with the other men—sausage-making today, because it was beginning to snow, and it might turn into a real storm, and nobody should be caught out in the woods when the world went invisible and white.
“I had a dream last night,” said Rigg. “After imagining that poor girl’s path through the world. I dreamed that I saw her dead.”
One of the other men grunted. Nobody said anything.
