Orson Card - Pathfinder

“And so you’re going to go ask for it back?”

“No,” said Umbo. “We’re going to find out where it is, go to that place, then go back into the past to the point when they’re putting it there, and snatch it away and then just vanish.”

“Vanish? You can do that now?”

“It’s how it’ll look to them!”

“But if they saw you steal it, then they’ll remember that when we show up to try to get to the spot where they’re keeping the jewel, and they’ll arrest us.”

“They won’t remember us because when we go there we won’t yet have gone back to grab it.”

Loaf pretended to pound his head into the palm of his hand. “You don’t know how this thing works. If you did, you wouldn’t have got us back here before we even arrived.”

“Why do we have to spend the night here?” asked Umbo.

“We don’t,” said Loaf. “We can just leave our stuff. It’s not much—just food and a change of clothes and my razor—something you’ll never need, I think, unless you want to slit your throat in the future and then come back and warn yourself not to do it.”

“And our blankets,” said Umbo. “I suppose we might as well wait here another day. Unless we go steal our own stuff while we’re taking a bath.”

“And then hope we don’t notice it? Is that your plan? Because if somebody had stolen our stuff last night we would have noticed.”

“But we didn’t!”

“Because we didn’t come in and steal our stuff while we were bathing. Umbo! Think!”

Umbo did try to think it through, but as far as he could tell it might go either way. It was hard to get a grasp on the rules of this time traveling thing.

They ended up sleeping in a much more expensive place closer in to the city. The room was smaller, the bed was smaller, the fleas were more numerous, and the food was worse. The next morning they returned to the boardinghouse only an hour after they left. The landlady was incredulous.

“The lines were too long,” said Loaf.

“But you came all this way! And where’s your lunch?”

“We ate it,” said Umbo.

“But you just ate a huge breakfast. Huge!”

It had been huge. And delicious.

“We have to go on to Aressa Sessamo,” said Loaf. “We don’t have a day to waste in line just to see the inside of a big building.”

Umbo smiled his sweetest smile. “Would you fix us another lunch? For us to eat for supper on the road?”

“You’ll just eat it the minute you get out of here,” she said.

“Maybe,” said Loaf, “but we’ll pay for it, too.”

She agreed, but huffed her whole way through making it, and as they left her house they could hear her muttering—because she meant them to hear—“greedy, gluttonous people eat everything and save nothing for the future.”

Don’t tell us about the future, ma’am, thought Umbo. If we’re in the future and want something we don’t have, we can just go back into the past and get it. Of course, then we can’t get all the way back to the present, so we’ll have to do everything twice.

“We have a plan for dividing the new world—which you still have not named—into nineteen cells,” said the expendable.

Ram looked at the holographic globe, rotated it several times, and said, “So you exclude the three smaller continents.”

“We thought those could remain as preserves for the original biota of this unnamed planet.”

“Call the planet ‘Garden,’ since you want a name. Though who’ll ever use it but us, I have no idea.”

“The colonists will say ‘back on Earth’ and ‘here on Garden,’” said the expendable. “You may be interested to know that not one of the expendables or the ships’ computers predicted your choice of ‘Garden.’ The front-runner was ‘Ram,’ but some of us thought you were too modest for that.”

“It’s not a matter of modesty. I intend to live with these people—or at least one ship’s worth of them—and it would lead to ridicule and loss of face for me to try to make them call the world by my name.”

“That was my reasoning. But I now have the advantage of continued association with you, which the others lack.”

“I never imagined the expendables were given to wagering.”

“There are no stakes. It’s merely a matter of testing our predictive algorithms.”

“The divisions of the two larger continents look fine to me. I assume they all contain adequate resources.”

“Adequate for what?”

“For . . . human life.”

“Breathable air, potable water, arable soil, and survivable weather seemed to us to be all that was needed.”

“I was thinking of iron, coal . . .”

“This planet has no fossil fuels. Lacking a moon to create serious tides, Garden was much slower in developing life. Right now it is in the lush phase of plant growth, and its atmosphere has three times the carbon dioxide of Earth. In a few hundred million years, it would have had fossil fuels—except that of course we’ll put an end to that.”

“Why?”

“Because humans probably cannot digest the local flora and fauna. The chance of all the proteins being left-handed like those of Earth is probably fifty-fifty, and the chance of finding all the essential amino acids within the correct handedness is quite small. We need to establish Earth flora and fauna so that humans can flourish here.”

“Are you seriously proposing to wipe out all the existing flora and fauna on the two continents we’re using?”

“We intend to arrive on the planet in such a way as to wipe out all surface life, or as much of it as we can. That was the plan from the beginning, whether it was explained to you or not.”

“So the three small continents—”

“We will re-seed them with Garden’s native life forms after the extinction event. Here are the main steps of the plan: First, we visit the surface of Garden to make as complete a collection as possible of native life forms. Then we crash the ships into the planet at an angle and speed calculated to make the necessary changes, including mass extinction. Then we wait for the atmosphere to return to a breathable state, and re-seed the planet. Sometime before two hundred years are up, the human colonists, including you, will be wakened from stasis and brought out onto the surface of Garden to begin colonization.”

“Extinction event. Our coming is meant to be a disaster?”

“Those are the instructions we were given. It will be much easier to engineer the whole thing with nineteen ships to work with instead of one.”

“What are the other ‘necessary changes’?”

“As you can see, Garden has no moon. It must have captured a sizeable asteroid, but it was inside the Roche limit, which is why there is a ring. This provides noticeable and continuous illumination at night, so nocturnal fauna will thrive, but the only tides are solar.”

“We’re going to make a moon?”

“I thought you disliked being ridiculous.”

“Then what are you getting at?”

“Without a substantial moon to slow down Garden’s rate of rotation, days are only 17.335 hours long. This is below the tolerance limits of the human biological clock. The rotation of the planet must be slowed to allow days of no less than twenty hours, preferably 22 to 26. The original plan called for bombarding the planet with asteroids at the right speed and angle, but with nineteen ships, we can achieve the desired slowing of Garden’s rotation rate by bringing in all the ships at the same time, at the correct angle against the direction of spin, and at enough speed to compensate for the smaller mass.”

“You’re going to crash the ships into the surface.”