Ruins

“That still doesn’t explain why you gave all the stones to us,” said Param.

  “Because you are the most powerful,” said Mouse-Breeder, with a shrug. “Though truth to tell, we didn’t understand about your ability, Param. We figured that Rigg would be able to attach to the past and go through before the Wall existed.”

  “But then we never would have acquired the language ability,” said Umbo.

  “Truth is, if Umbo hadn’t pulled us back to the present when we were still short of the edge of the Wall, Loaf and Rigg and I wouldn’t have had any effect from the Wall,” said Olivenko.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” said Umbo.

  “They were about to kill us!” said Param.

  “I know that,” said Olivenko, sounding annoyed.

  Param couldn’t believe she had spoken so sharply to Olivenko. But it really had sounded as if he was criticizing Umbo, and he had no right—he wasn’t there. Yes, he experienced the agony of the Wall because of it—twice, because he and Loaf heroically went back to rescue Rigg—but to phrase it as if it had been Umbo’s fault . . .

  “Nobody’s blaming anybody for anything,” said Rigg. “It’s obvious they’re not telling us the whole truth, but—”

  Rigg waved off the Odinfolders’ protests.

  “You can’t tell us everything at once,” said Rigg. “You also want us to pursue a particular course of action, so you’re framing the information you provide us in order to maximize the likelihood of our doing what you want. Since I would do exactly the same thing, I’m not criticizing you. I’m just waiting to find out what you’re planning for us. And I want to know just how much you’ve already bent our course without our knowledge.” He held up his hand. “Again, that’s not a criticism. Can we all stop being so sensitive? Short of leaving us notes, which we wouldn’t have understood or believed anyway, you couldn’t explain anything to us. And thanks for the stones. I don’t know why you have that kind of trust in us, but I hope to live up to your expectations wherever I agree with them.”

  Param listened to Rigg’s speech and was both proud of him and annoyed that he was so eloquent. He was so aware of how the others were taking the things he said. It was obvious that the Gardener—Ramex—had done a splendid job of training Rigg to be a leader, and Rigg himself was doing a splendid job of using that training wisely and well. She found herself thinking: He should be King-in-the-Tent. And then answering herself, I am the queen’s heir! And then answering, Mother has repudiated me, tried to kill me, and I am reduced to following my younger brother, whom I barely know, and pining over a scholar from the city guard like a moonstruck girl in a romance.

  “How have we changed your course of action?” said Swims-in-the-Air coldly. “You want the entire list right now?”

  “Yes,” said Param, without hesitation.

  “Tell it in the order that you planned,” said Rigg.

  “Tell it now,” said Umbo.

  The attitude of the Odinfolders had changed completely. The warmth was gone. “Everything depends on you,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The yahoo thing—that’s what we tried last time, and it failed.”

  “So you didn’t tell us the truth the first time around,” said Olivenko.

  “As Rigg already guessed,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Here’s what we did. We learned how to transfer very, very tiny things to very, very precise times and locations. Specifically, we learned how to pick up the genetic material from a fertilized egg before it implanted itself in the uterine wall, alter it as we desired, and reimplant it a microsecond later.”

  Param’s mind was reeling. “Whom did you do that to?”

  “We did it to your father, Knosso, in his mother’s womb,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Then we made just a couple of tweaks to ensure that it was Knosso your mother married, producing the two of you.”

  “What changes did you make in Father’s genes?” asked Rigg.

  “We knew both his parents had very strong gifts in time manipulation. So we added our ability to his genes, and hoped the recombination would be interesting and productive. It was—it gave us a timesplitter and a pathfinder.”

  Param looked at Rigg, trying to see if he was as devastated as she was. But he showed nothing. “How dare you,” she said softly to Swims-in-the-Air.

  “My name includes the title Saves-the-World,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “How do you think I earned it?”

  “What other changes did you make?” asked Rigg.

  “A certain knife,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Which we placed very early, so it had a history, and then moved to the hip of a man whom you encountered the first time you and Umbo did time-shifting together.”

  “The knife,” said Umbo, touching his waist, where it was sheathed under his shirt. “But why?”

  “You’ve already noticed that the hilt contains duplicates of all the jewels of control,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  Param hadn’t known anything about that; but then, she hadn’t had many opportunities to see either the knife or the jewels.

  “That’s not all,” said Rigg. “You can’t tell me that you left anything to chance. What about Loaf?”

  “Loaf was chance,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And Olivenko. But you chose your companions well. You could hardly have done better.”

  Loaf showed no reaction, but Olivenko turned his face. To show disgust, but Param guessed that he was also flattered, and wanted to conceal the fact.

  “But yes, Rigg,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “we didn’t just hope you’d run into someone who could help you use your pathfinding to get into the past. It might have taken years of training, and we didn’t have years. So we gave you Umbo.”

  “Gave me Umbo?” asked Rigg.

  Param saw that Umbo’s face was red. Anger? Embarrassment?

  “What am I?” asked Umbo. “Another genetic experiment?”

  “Not like Knosso,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Your mother was extraordinarily gifted, but your father was nothing.”

  Umbo nodded.

  “So we preempted all of his sperm, when you were conceived,” said Mouse-Breeder, “and gave you sperm from our most gifted displacer.”

  To Param’s surprise, tears spilled out of Umbo’s eyes and down his cheeks.

  “He’s not my father,” said Umbo.

  “You have nothing of him in you,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “And your best displacer—who is he?”

  “Dead,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We went back to get his sperm, too.”

  “So I’m half . . . half Odinfolder,” said Umbo.

  “Yes,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Your father was from the time after we bred ourselves to be small, but before we made ourselves into yahoos.”

  Umbo bent over till his face was touching his knees, almost hiding him in the grass, and wept. Loaf sat down beside him, put his arm across his shoulders, and Umbo leaned into his embrace.

  “So Umbo’s the smartest of us,” said Rigg.

  “Umbo has all the potential of an Odinfolder,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But you and Param carry our intellectual potential as well.”

  “We made the decision not to try to solve the problem ourselves,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “because in nine tries, we failed every time. Instead, we chose genetic threads in the other most promising wallfold, and combined our own best traits to produce you. And it is in your hands we will place the solution to the problem.”

  “The problem of getting the Visitors not to go back to Earth and make a report that results in the destruction of Garden,” said Rigg. “Just to make sure I understand what the goal is here.”

  “You have understood it perfectly,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “How much time do we have?” asked Rigg. “Because we’re not ready.”

  “You have all the time you need,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “I thought you said the coming of the Visitors was only two years away,” said Rigg.

  “It is. But look at who you are,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Let the Visitors come—we
’ll hide you from them so you can continue your education. Your preparation. Then you just go back in time—something we could never do—and continue your education in another village, so you aren’t constantly running into yourselves. You can do that as often as you need.”

  “Though there is some thought,” said Mouse-Breeder, “that the more iterations of you there are, the harder it will be to conceal you from the Visitors. From the Future Books, we get the idea they’re quite intrusive and clever, and they get a lot of information from the expendables.”

  “That’s why we have made sure that Odinex doesn’t see all that we do. He agrees—we’re not lying to him about it. But what he doesn’t know can’t be learned from him. So he’s not going to meet you. He’s not even going to know you’re here.”

  “But Father knows about us,” said Rigg.

  “He knows about you up to the moment of his death,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “After that, he’s seen nothing of you, heard nothing about you. He doesn’t know how any of his plans came out.”

  “Not true,” said Rigg. “He was prompting the starship in Vadeshfold when I first took control.”

  Swims-in-the-Air made a dismissive gesture. “So he was called on when he was needed. That can’t be helped.”

  “Our advantage,” said Mouse-Breeder, “is that we absolutely know that the Visitors have no knowledge of time travel. In fact, all their theories say that it’s impossible, that your alterations of the past are self-destructive loops that can’t happen. But they can, and that gives us a chance. As long as you don’t actually get yourselves killed, you can meet the Visitors again and again, trying to get it right.”

  “As you did,” said Olivenko.

  “Not as we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We were limited to sending messages. You can personally do things over and over. As Loaf and Umbo proved in their efforts to retrieve the Ramfold jewel from the bank in Aressa Sessamo.”

  “We just made things worse,” said Loaf softly. “Until it became completely impossible.”

  “So now you know the danger,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You won’t keep trying the same thing over and over.”

  Rigg sighed. “How much of this did Vadesh know?”

  Swims-in-the-Air laughed. “Nothing. He saw what he saw, of course, but he doesn’t know your real origin. He doesn’t know that by bringing you here he was, in effect, taking you home.”

  “How do you keep it from him?” asked Rigg.

  “Our expendable lies to him,” said Mouse-Breeder. “All the expendables lie to him.”

  “He’s a complete failure, you see,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “All his humans died.”

  “Not a complete failure,” said Loaf, indicating the facemask he wore.

  “Yes,” said Mouse-Breeder. “One look at you, and the Visitors will absolutely want to make sure no harm comes to Garden.”

  “Are you saying I shouldn’t be part of our . . . whatever-we’re-doing?” asked Loaf.

  “I’m saying nothing at all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We didn’t call you into being in order to do our bidding. If we had a plan, we’d do it ourselves. We needed you to come up with a plan and carry it out. We’re here to serve you and prepare you in whatever way you think you need to be prepared.”

  “We have only one suggestion,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “Your suggestion, not mine,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “All right, I have only one suggestion,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Don’t delay too long. Don’t go back and try new things for too many cycles. You might pass through the same two years a dozen times—but you’ll age two dozen years in the process. And I think you need to do whatever you do while you’re still young.”

  “Why?” asked Loaf. “Because it’s too late for me and Olivenko. ‘Young’ is already history.”

  “Rigg and Param and Umbo look like adolescents. Not threatening at all. Not dangerous. And if you and Olivenko are obviously obeying them, then perhaps it will buy you some time, maybe even a little trust. Some compassion. Something. I hope. I think. What I’m saying is, you can’t learn everything and you definitely can’t anticipate everything. Take the year or so before they come and learn all you can; then see what they do and learn from that. Maybe there’ll be a different outcome—we have no way of predicting—and so you won’t even have to do the mission. But if the Destroyers come yet a tenth time, go back and learn more, this time based on your own observations and experiences. You see? Just don’t do it too often; don’t age too many years. Take your action, whatever it is, while you’re still young.”

  “Very eloquently put, my dear,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And pointless. They’ll decide for themselves.”

  “Yes, but I’ve put the thought in their minds and there it is,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Now, do you want to see the library?”

  CHAPTER 13

  In the Library

  The library was deep underground, down many stairways, yet the air felt fresh, and there was a light breeze in the corridors. The walls were covered with paintings and murals, with sculptures in many corners and sometimes filling entire rooms. Tables here and there were surrounded with comfortable-looking chairs, and always the light was bright enough to make reading easy.

  Yet there was not a book in sight.

  “How is this a library?” asked Rigg.

  “It contains every book ever written in the entire history of our wallfold, and every other,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “Not to mention every book from Earth that was brought to Garden with the colony ships,” added Mouse-Breeder. “And every work of art ever made, though we can’t display them all at once.”

  “But where are they?” asked Umbo.

  Mouse-Breeder smiled modestly, and Swims-in-the-Air laughed. “Now is when Mouse-Breeder shows you his babies.”

  “Come, children,” said Mouse-Breeder softly.

  At once small arched doorways appeared in the baseboards of the room. Dozens of mice, white, brown, black, tan, yellow, red, swarmed out onto the floor, and many of them came up onto the tables.

  “Can you show us sculptures from the Greeks of Earth?” asked Mouse-Breeder.

  Rigg wasn’t sure which mice made the change, but suddenly the sculptures in the four corners of the room changed to brightly painted, lifelike, life-sized stone sculptures. Yet when Rigg put his hand out to touch one, his fingers passed within the “stone.”

  “Illusion,” said Olivenko.

  “Trickery,” said Param.

  Loaf only chuckled.

  “You knew,” said Rigg.

  “The mask was not deceived,” said Loaf, “and so I saw the difference between the dancing light of the illusion and the solidity of the walls.”

  “But you still see the beauty of the art?” asked Swims-in-the-Air.

  “As much as I ever could have without the mask,” said Loaf. “It adds nothing to my appreciation of artificial beauty.”

  “So art does not speak to you?” asked Mouse-Breeder.

  “Your art with the mice speaks to me very clearly,” said Loaf. “The mice only understand your language, am I right?”

  “They’ll learn yours quickly enough,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “But when the Visitors come, they won’t be able to get access to any of the books that are invisibly stored in this place.”

  Mouse-Breeder nodded, his smile even slighter, if that were possible. “Only with the help of the mice can anyone find any book or diagram or map or work of art in all of Odinfold.”

  “So if someone killed the mice?” asked Umbo. “You’d lose your whole library?”

  “You must have another way,” said Olivenko. “Another key to the library.”

  “Something mechanical,” said Loaf.

  “No,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Back doors can be found. Machines can be discovered. No, it’s mice and mice alone.”

  “But we’re mindful of the chance of loss,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “He’s too modest to tell
you himself,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “These mice are actually a genetic hodgepodge of astonishing variety. More than three thousand species, and no two in this room are genetically close. A disease that wiped out all the mice of any one species, or even all the closely related species, would still leave most of the mice untouched.”

  “If you have three thousand species,” said Olivenko, “how many individuals are there of each?”

  “We can’t count them all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “They reproduce like mice, you see, and then they teach their children how to manipulate the electronics, so nothing is lost. The great prairies of Odinfold have thousands of different kinds of grass, and the mice thrive on all the seeds. There are hundreds of billions of mice.”

  “So where three billion humans once lived . . .” began Olivenko.

  “A hundred times as many mice. And also the owls and foxes, ferrets and cats that feed on them, and the hawks and eagles and wolves that feed on them,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And grazing animals to keep any one grass from crowding out all others, and the great cats that feed on the grazing animals, and the hyenas and other scavengers that gather at their kills. Our great wallfold is a garden of life, dotted with the ruins of our ancient civilization, and only tree-dwelling yahoos to show that humans once lived here.”

  “An elegant disguise,” said Rigg.

  “Which failed,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And so we bring you to our library, in hopes that you can find a better way.”

  “I take it the mice will bring us books,” said Olivenko.

  “Just say what you want to study—the topic, the source, a specific title, an author, or even a question. Sit at the table, or lean against a wall, or ask while you’re walking, and the mice will cause the book you want to appear before you.”

  “Mouse-Breeder is our best librarian,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “She means the best one living,” said Mouse-Breeder, “because our ancestors designed and built and collected so well and thoroughly that there was hardly anything left to do when I came along.”

  “So using intelligent mice for access is just a bit of decoration?” asked Olivenko wryly.

  “I want to see a book,” said Rigg.