Even if he succeeded in changing Earth’s future so that the Destroyers did not come, that did not even hint at a possibility that the new future would have room in a starship for Noxon to return to Garden. If by some miracle he managed to arrive on Earth, it would be at the time when Ram Odin’s voyage—the first interstellar flight in human history—was just about to launch. He could not tell them he was a native of this world, because at that point Garden had not yet been settled, let alone named. Who would believe him if he tried to explain that by some bizarre stroke of fate, Ram Odin’s ship was replicated into nineteen forward copies and one backward one, and that they were thrown back in time 11,191 years? From what Rigg had read in Odinfold, most nations on Earth would treat him kindly; few would lock him up as a madman. But certainly no one would believe him, and he would spend a lot of time conversing with doctors whose compassionate purpose would be to bring him back from this delusion of his. He certainly couldn’t talk anyone into sending him home to Garden.

Nor could he slice time in order to be invisible and stow away on Ram Odin’s original voyage. It would not do for him to run the risk of being noticed by the ship’s computers on the outbound voyage, because they would then inform Ram Odin of everything that was going to happen.

Or would they? Did they lie to him, too? Or withhold information that he wouldn’t think of asking for? Did all the expendables know from the start what would happen?

No. They would have acted, deliberately or inadvertently, in such a way as to change the future. Or would they?

Was this present time precisely the future that the ship’s computers already knew would be reached, because the jewels he carried provided them with knowledge of every single action the computers and expendables would ever take?

There was no answer to this, but it didn’t stop Noxon from thinking of possible ways that such things might work—or not work at all. It was a pleasure to be alone with his thoughts. Especially because he did not waste time thinking about the one vital thing: what he would find when he followed Ram Odin’s path backward to the moment of the anomaly that created all these copies and plunged them back more than eleven millennia in time.

Either he would be able to detect the paths across that 11,191-year gap, or he would not. Either he would be able to detect the timeflow of the one backward copy of the ship, or he would not. And if he detected that impossible ship, either he would be able to attach himself to it, or he would not.