“It never came up in my studies,” said Noxon, “but I guess I couldn’t absorb all of Earth culture in a couple of years of spare-time reading.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ram Odin. “What matters to me is this: It took me seven years to get from launch to the jump site. I was afraid that if I went into stasis during the trip, the ship might not waken me in time to make the decisions. So I stayed awake the whole time. Now there’s no such worry because the ship can’t do anything about our predicament. Do we really have to spend all those endless days? You’re charming company, but we’ll start boring each other very quickly.”
“I know that we’re moving into your past,” said Noxon, “and that’s the direction I normally jump. But the direction we’re going in makes that the future to us.”
“I was actually proposing that we go into stasis here in the ship. Like the colonists. Then the ship wakes us up when we’re close to Earth.”
Noxon knew at once that he would never consent to this. It required too much trust of the ship and
the expendable. And it would leave the mice free to manipulate things as they wanted. But he didn’t want to discuss the danger of the mice to Ram Odin, because the man might decide to eradicate the whole problem and Noxon wasn’t sure how to stop him.
Still, instead of simply refusing to consider it, Noxon made a show of letting Ram Odin demonstrate the whole process of going into stasis and then reviving out of it.
“Is there any loss of function? After you wake up?” asked Noxon.
“I assume not,” said Ram Odin. “Didn’t you say that Old Ram did it all the time, in order to skim through the centuries so he’s still alive after eleven thousand years?”
“I can’t vouch for his not having lost mental function,” said Noxon.
“He’s old,” said Ram Odin. “There’s probably mental loss without any damage from the stasis and revival process. But you’re inside a field the whole time. And it’s designed to protect your memories and reimplant them as you revive. To restore anything that might have been lost. In experiments on Earth the subjects reported that they actually improved in their ability to access memories.”
“So it does alter function.” And Noxon thought: Maybe this is the same kind of field that inserts all human language into our minds when we pass into the Wall. Which made him think of all the other things the fields that made up the Wall could do to his mind.
Finally Ram Odin said, “You’re not going to do it, are you?”
“You can do what you want,” said Noxon. “I won’t interfere, and I’ll make sure you wake up on time.”
“You’d be alone with him for the next seven years,” said Ram Odin, indicating the expendable. “You’ll be bored out of your mind.”
“I wandered the forests of Upsheer with him for my whole childhood. I called him Father and he taught me and tested me constantly. It was hard and sometimes I wished it would stop, but it was never boring.”
“I really enjoyed those years,” said the expendable.
Ram Odin turned on him. “It wasn’t you, it was a copy of you.”
The expendable mildly agreed but added, “He brought a complete set of the ships’ logs. Nineteen of them, interlocking and verifying that everything he told you was true, within the limits of his knowledge and understanding. I have a complete memory of all the days, all the hours, all the minutes that the expendable named Ramex spent in the company of this young man.”
“But it wasn’t you.”
“It was me, because I perfectly remember it,” said the expendable. “We expendables don’t have the same kind of individual identity that biologicals have.”
“So it’ll be like old times for the two of you,” said Ram Odin, more than a little snidely.
It dawned on Noxon that Ram Odin was jealous. Here came Noxon out of nowhere with a far superior claim to intimacy with Ram Odin’s companion of the past seven years.
Even though he did not say this aloud, Ram Odin reacted as if he had. “I am not jealous of you!” Then he drummed on the console in front of him. “All right, I’m human. I couldn’t help bonding with this asinine machine and so yes, I was briefly and irrationally annoyed, but I’m over it.”
Everything about his tone and expression said that he was definitely not over it.
“You’re welcome to stay awake with us,” said Noxon.
“Seven years of aging,” said Ram Odin. “It’s not just the mind-numbing boredom.”
“I can promise that you age very well,” said Noxon.
“So if you won’t go into stasis and turn the ship over to the computers, why not try what your sister does? Slicing forward in time?”
“I sliced time when I first got here, hiding from the ship. But now I’m in the open. If I bring you with me, I risk bringing the ship as well. That would take us out of sync with the original ship.”