“That would be insane.”
“Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “It fills us with terror and despair, and yet we walk inside the Wall every day, some of us for miles, deep inside, where it’s all we can do to keep from killing ourselves, or going mad with fear.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Why do you think we have no children?” asked Swims-in-the-Air. “How do you think we keep ourselves from bonding into families? The Wall is the antidote for our humanity. It keeps us insane enough to reduce our population from six billion to a mere ten thousand. Children come along once a decade.”
“Though even at that rate, we never see them.”
“Him, you mean. Him, the one child who was born shortly before you got here. He lives on the far side of Odinfold. The previously born child is older than you. And that’s it, out of our entire wallfold. Two children.”
“Yours, then?” asked Umbo, thinking of that part of her name.
“My children are only thirty or forty years younger than me,” she answered. “They’re not children anymore, and I don’t keep track of their movements.”
“But you keep track of mine.”
“There are dangers here. But yes, Umbo, since you ask so sweetly, I’ll take you to our starship.”
Umbo almost blurted, “You will?” But that would have revealed that he hadn’t expected them to take him. And if they realized that, they would be bound to understand that he didn’t trust them, that he thought they were withholding things from him.
“When can we go?”
“The flyer can be here in an hour or so, if we summon it right now. I wish you wouldn’t, though.”
Ah, here it comes. “Why not?”
“Because there’s no way to call the flyer without Odinex knowing, no way to visit the starship without Odinex being there.”
“Can’t he go somewhere else while I’m there?” asked Umbo. “And really, what harm will it do?”
“If he sees you, if he converses with you, you’ll show up in the ships’ memory as a person instead of as a series of activities and dialogues. The Visitors will have everything from the ships’ computers before they ever reach the surface of Garden. They’ll know about you.”
“Let them,” said Umbo. “If it wrecks everything this time for me to visit the starship and meet your expendable, it’ll make no difference in the long run, because I won’t visit the starship on our next go-round, and so there’ll be nothing to report next time.”
“All right,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Who’s going with you?”
“Nobody,” said Umbo.
“Because you’re afraid they’d stop you if they knew you were going?”
“Do you think they would? My only thought was that it wasn’t worth disturbing them. I’m the only one who cares so much about the starships.”
“I think you should tell them,” said Swims-in-the-Air.
“You know what?” said Umbo. “I don’t think so. I think I’ll just go as soon as the flyer gets here.”
Swims-in-the-Air shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Umbo felt a slight chill. Her reaction had told him all that he needed to know. She had tried to manipulate him, to play on his uncertainties and self-doubt, to delay or forestall this visit to the starship. The Odinfolders were not quite so open-minded as they had seemed. They had a plan, and intended to shape events so that the Ramfolders would carry it out.
It was only when he was in the air, sitting in the flyer, that it occurred to him that perhaps the manipulation had been on the opposite tack—perhaps she had suggested he wait for one of the others to join him precisely because she knew he would stubbornly refuse, leaving him completely alone, as she had wanted all along.
It was impossible to know what other people were thinking. Not for the first time, Umbo wondered if it wasn’t better to be straightforward like Loaf, saying what he thought and letting events fall in place however they would. Loaf didn’t try to outguess people. He just looked at what they did, judged the likely results, and reacted accordingly. While Umbo, by trying to be clever, left himself open to being even more easily deceived.
Or maybe nobody was being clever at all, and Umbo was simply outsmarting himself because of his suspicions.
The flyer skimmed over the surface of a rolling grassland, cut here and there by rivers and streams. But then there came a familiar sight: a steep row of cliffs extending for kilometers in either direction. It was Upsheer Cliff all over again, rock thrust upward in a huge circle around the point where a starship crashed into Garden eleven thousand years before.