“It’s not easy to figure out exactly when it is on Earth right now,” said Ram Odin. “We’re before any kind of electronic signals, so we can’t mine a datastream and get time and date.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t bring us back to a pre-measured time,” said Noxon, “but I was jumping blind.”
“Nobody’s criticizing you,” said Ram Odin.
“We are,” said a mouse very near to Noxon’s ear. Maybe it was joking.
But no. The mice clinging to his body clamored, and the facemask sorted out the voices.
“Why waste time figuring out when we are right now?”
“We can’t stay in this time, whenever it is.”
“We’re a new star and somebody’s going to notice.”
“Just because they don’t have spaceships doesn’t mean they don’t see us.”
“Where are you going to hide the ship? That’s the question!”
Noxon had to silence them just to hear himself think. “Wait, stop,” he said.
“Talking to the mice?” asked Ram Odin.
The expendable explained. “The mice are very excitable.”
“They have a valid point,” said Noxon. “It doesn’t matter what time we’re in right now. What matters is that we need to figure out how we’re going to hide this ship and then get to the future and figure out why the human race decided to destroy Garden.”
“Hide the ship?” Ram Odin said. “If they don’t have telescopes . . .”
“We have to leave the ship somewhere while we travel into the future,” said Noxon. “We can’t leave it in orbit.”
“Agreed,” said the expendable. “Even if we station ourselves in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific, we become a fixed star to the Polynesians. And once the Europeans get there, we are the most intensely studied object in the sky.”
“Once humans get space travel,” said Ram Odin, “this ship is the first thing they’ll visit, long before they have the technology to build anything like it. Leaving the ship in space will change everything.”
“It may already have changed things,” said the expendable, “and every minute spent debating about it creates new folklore about this strange star in the sky.”
“At least we’re not geosynchronous over Bethlehem,” said Ram Odin.
“Palestine is too far north of the equator for that,” said the expendable. “And the ship now has a tentative date, based on settlement patterns and existing technology. No railroads, no significant canals. But Constantinople’s new buildings are Turkish and there are European settlements in the Americas. For all we know, Galileo is studying us on each orbital pass. We don’t want Copernicus to try to work us into his heliocentric model.”
“Take us farther back,” said Ram Odin.
“I still can’t find anybody’s path from this far out,” said Noxon.
“Just fling us back again,” said Ram Odin. “Only farther. A lot farther.”
Noxon gripped a handhold on the wall, and reached out to Ram Odin.
“Do we have to do that every time?” asked Ram Odin.
“I don’t know,” said Noxon. “What if we don’t do it, and it turns out we should have?”
Ram Odin took Noxon’s hand. “Are the mice all still attached to you?”
“Their little footprints are all over my body,” said Noxon. Then he sliced rapidly into the past.
Again, there was nothing to see—inside the starship, there were no observation windows. After a little while, though, the ship’s computers put up a display of the huge swath of Earth that was visible from their orbit about three hundred kilometers above the surface.