There were no spaceships in any of the futures, nor technologies that allowed communication between wallfolds, except by way of the expendables. The natives had evolved sentience in all four native wallfolds, though whether they were the same as they would have been without human interference, it was impossible to say. In each wallfold shared with mice, the natives and the mice were at peace, and the Scuttles and their mice had evolved a system of shared cities, with some dominated by the Scuttles and some by the mice. The Tripods were less cooperative—with the mice and with each other. They were torn by warfare, but so were most of the human wallfolds, so that was hardly a reason to make any changes.

The visiting Noxons all reached the conclusion that their original mission—to keep these aliens from destroying the human race—had been achieved, and it had been done without depriving the proto-sentients of a chance to achieve their evolutionary potential.

Then the Noxons of each world met with each other in one of the grounded spaceships and conferred about the only important decision remaining to them.

“There’s a lid on development of technology,” said the first speaker in each conference, “but we represent something far more dangerous than any weapon or tech. The ability to go into the past and wipe out whole timestreams. We had to use that ability when the future of humanity was at stake. But now, will Treble and Bass be better off if these timeshaping genes are part of the mix, or if we allow our abilities to be extinguished by not reproducing?”

And in both conferences, another Noxon pointed out the obvious. “There are timeshapers on Garden, no matter what we do here. And Ram Odin has already married and had children in every human wallfold. He was the source of these genes in the first place.”

And another said, “The mice knew how to send objects through time and space when they got here. They knew how to manipulate human genes to create the original Rigg and Param and Umbo. We’d be fools to think they’ve forgotten that knowledge. For all we know, they all have the ability to manipulate time. Should we let the mice have such power, while we give up our only possible remedy?”

“So we keep the ability in the gene pool? So that we aren’t at the mercy of the mice? Or the humans from Garden, if they ever come here?”

“This ability exists in the universe. We’d be fools to throw it away, when we might need it someday. It saved us once.”

“But only because people of extraordinary decency and wisdom wielded it.” And while they all laughed at such ironic self-deprecation, they also knew that it was true.