Ruins

  “What makes you think the Visitors would let us go?” asked Loaf.

  “What makes you think they could stop us if we want to go?” asked Umbo.

  “Getting onto a human starship isn’t the same as going through the Wall,” said Rigg.

  “We can do things with time,” said Param, “but we can’t fly.”

  “Maybe we could use the Odinfolder technology to put something on board their ship,” said Umbo. “A plague, maybe. Something that kills them all. But we show the Visitors who are on Garden what happened to their ship, and then we take them back in time before we implanted the plague, so that they’ll understand that we could kill them but we chose not to.”

  “How would that make them not want to destroy us?” asked Loaf. “That’s the point I’m not getting. Because I think that’s a sure way to guarantee that they send the Destroyers.”

  Umbo shrugged and turned away, a little angry. Rigg was so tired of the way Umbo took offense at any slight, while he felt no compunction about slighting Rigg at every opportunity. The only thing that had kept them from open quarrels during these many months was the fact that they were able to avoid each other most of the time.

  “It’s not a stupid idea,” said Olivenko. “We just need to refine it.”

  “We can’t use any version of it,” said Rigg. “As soon as the expendables realize what we’ve done, the orbiters destroy our wallfold. We aren’t allowed to develop weapons.”

  “It’s a disease,” said Umbo, “not a weapon.”

  “If we send it to their ship in order to kill people, it’s a weapon, and we get blown to smithereens,” said Rigg.

  “You’re such an expert on how the ships’ computers think?” said Umbo.

  “No, you are,” said Rigg.

  Umbo’s lips tightened, but he didn’t argue with Rigg’s point. Umbo knew more than anyone about how the original starship worked, and in fact the computers would not be fooled by a sophistry like, It’s a disease, not a weapon.

  “Maybe we just need to study more,” said Param.

  “No,” said Umbo. “We have a deeper problem than the fact that if we went to Earth, we couldn’t travel back in time to when we were on Garden. We don’t even know if our time skills even work off the surface of Garden.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” asked Olivenko.

  “Think about it,” said Umbo. “We don’t understand anything about how we’re able to travel back in time—or how Param can make microjumps into the future, skipping the moments in between. But we do know some obvious things about the rules of time-shifting. It’s absolutely tied to the surface of the planet.”

  “It worked fine when we flew to the Wall with Vadesh,” said Param.

  “Really? Did you try any time-skipping in flight?” asked Umbo.

  Param bristled. “We jumped off a rock once, if you remember.”

  “We were never more than two meters from solid stone,” said Umbo.

  “It’s a good question,” said Rigg, “but the flyer isn’t a real test, anyway, because it’s still tied to the gravity well of Garden. The real problem is this: Garden is flying through space as it orbits our sun. The whole solar system is also moving rapidly through space. Say we travel back in time by six months. In that amount of time, Garden has moved completely around the sun to the opposite side. Yet we travel back, not to where we were in absolute space, which would kill us instantly, but to where we were in relation to the surface of Garden. Our time-shifting is tied to the planet. So Umbo’s asking, what happens if we leave the surface of Garden and go to another planet? Do we even have time-shifting ability there? Or is our time-shifting still relative to the surface of Garden? If we’re on Earth, in a certain position millions of kilometers away from Garden, and travel back in time, do we end up in exactly that position relative to Garden? Because Earth and Garden move so differently from each other, that we’d end up in cold deep airless space if we’re still tied to Garden.”

  Umbo glared at him. Rigg couldn’t imagine why. Hadn’t Rigg just defended Umbo’s argument? There was no figuring out what made anybody work. But now Rigg had a whole bunch of new stories to help him understand. Among the Mongols, Temujin and Jamuka had been blood brothers, but they became bitter enemies on the way to Temujin becoming Khan and taking the name Genghis, or Chinggis. It was part of human nature that best friends could easily become rivals and then deadly foes. Rigg would count himself successful if he could keep it at the level of rivalry without ever letting Umbo become his enemy.

  “I think it’s obvious,” said Olivenko, “that it’s tied to whatever planet you’re on.”

  “I don’t think anything’s obvious,” said Rigg. “Whatever we decide, we’re betting our lives on it. All the paths I can see are actually views into the past—I see the actual people and animals going through all the movements of their lives, and they’re tied to Garden. But they’re all people who were born here, who lived their whole lives here. And think of when we went downriver, Loaf, Umbo—when I was a prisoner in the cabin of that boat, I tried to catch on to the paths of previous travelers, and I couldn’t, because their paths hung in the air over open water, and I could only reach them for a moment or two as our boat passed under them. It might work that way no matter how far we get from Garden—paths just hanging there in space, long after the ship is gone.”

  “But the original pilot, Ram Odin,” said Umbo, “he had time gifts. That’s where all our abilities come from. And he did time stuff when he was in a ship in space.”

  “Yet the ship was displaced nineteen times,” said Rigg. “Doesn’t that tell you something? During the microseconds when the ship’s nineteen computers were separately calculating and activating the jump, the whole ship had moved far enough in space that Ram’s unconscious time-jump reached nineteen different places. We can’t go into space and use our time-shifting ability, or we’ll just create duplicate ships.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Olivenko.

  “But we don’t know it won’t happen. Or worse,” said Rigg. “Please remember that when I suggested going back to Earth with the Visitors, I wasn’t counting on the idea that we could keep ourselves out of trouble by using time-jumping. For all we know, that’ll be a sure ticket to our deaths. My idea was to go back, to make the attempt, and if they kill us, then they kill us.”

  “Well, there’s this,” said Olivenko. “Even if that happened, and we couldn’t save ourselves—or rather, you couldn’t save us with your time-shifting—the Odinfolders would send another book into the past and tell them—and us—that having us get on the Visitors’ ship was a very bad idea and we shouldn’t do it.”

  Param laughed. “So the fact that they haven’t already received such a Future Book proves that we succeeded?”

  “Or that we decided not to do it,” said Rigg.

  “Or that we did it, and failed, but the Odinfolders decided not to show us the Future Book that resulted, and just went on to try something else.”

  “Or they gave up,” said Param, “and just decided to die.”

  “No matter how much we learn,” said Umbo, “we never know enough.”

  “All we can do is what we’ve always done,” said Rigg. “Make a try at something, and then if it doesn’t work, go back and try again. But we can’t always go back.”

  Umbo leapt to his feet, “Right, there are things that stay terrible. For instance, Rigg, that you’ve completely forgotten about going back to save my brother Kyokay’s life.”

  It struck Rigg like a knife, that this was part of what Umbo still held against him. “We already decided that we can’t, because if we did, then we’d never have gotten together to learn how to manipulate time.”

  “But now we know more, we have more control, we could figure out a way to catch him partway down maybe, or—”

  “Maybe we can,” said Rigg. “Maybe we can put in a net to catch him, or train a giant bird to snatch him out of the air, or a huge puff of air to blow him out to sea. Bu
t we’ll do it later—go back and save one boy after we’ve figured out how to save the whole world.”

  “So you’re saying Kyokay has to stay dead, so that we can do whatever useless stupidity we’ve done since we found out how to do this stuff?” said Umbo. “Well, you know what? Maybe the best thing would be to stop Kyokay from falling in the first place, so we don’t ever learn to do our little time tricks, and then all the rest of our miserable history doesn’t happen!”

  “And then,” said Param bitterly, “you get to enjoy living with your brother in your happy home, under the authority of your beloved father, while I get murdered by my mother and General Citizen because Rigg isn’t there to save me.”

  “But if Citizen didn’t capture Rigg and realize who he was—” began Umbo.

  “Whatever Citizen and Hagia Sessamin were plotting, it didn’t begin with Rigg’s capture,” said Olivenko scornfully. “Your father would probably have killed you by now, Umbo, and meanwhile Param would also have been murdered, and even if none of those things happened, the Visitors would come and then the Destroyers and kill us all, so what exactly are you saying here, that having a few more years with your brother—who would probably have found some other colorful way to get himself killed—that would be worth the destruction of the planet?”

  Umbo buried his face in his hands. “I just want to stop all this. When did this become my job?”

  “It’s not,” said Param. “It’s my job, and Rigg’s, because we were born with responsibility.”

  “Stop it,” said Rigg. “Let’s just face the fact that we can’t fix every bad thing that ever happened, because every change we make brings about new bad things, because in the real world, bad things happen, period, that’s it. People die and we can’t always unkill them, that’s how it is. I’m sorry Kyokay died, Umbo, and I’m sorry we can’t fix it yet without making a whole bunch of terrible unpredictable changes. And I’m sorry that Param is such a provincial twit that she makes stupid arrogant remarks about how the royal family is born to responsibility—”

  “We are!” cried Param, leaping to her feet.

  “At least you got angry,” said Rigg, “instead of disappearing on us.”

  “I really like the way you’re making peace here, Rigg,” said Loaf.

  “Was that Loaf or the facemask talking?” asked Rigg. “Listen, we have plenty of reasons to be angry and resentful and suspicious and whatever else we’re feeling. Grief-stricken, terrified, whatever it is, it’s completely justified. And if we all hate each other what difference does it make? We have these abilities, which may be worthless, but we have them, and if there’s any chance we can use them to save the world, then let’s do it, and if we fail, well, we’re all dead so who cares, and if we succeed, then we’ll have plenty of time to feud and bicker like children, and no, I’m not saying I’m any better, I’m so lonely and angry all the time that I can hardly sleep, and I wish my father had really been my father and not some stupid machine, so don’t tell me what it’s like to lose somebody you loved, or to be disappointed in life, or whatever else is going wrong. Loaf misses Leaky. I miss my father. Param’s mother, the only person she trusted, tried to kill her. Olivenko’s mentor, Knosso, got dragged out of his boat and drowned. Have I given the complete list of Things We Haven’t Been Able To Change?”

  “No,” said Loaf, “but it was a pretty good start.”

  “We’ve been studying forever, and the Visitors are close to arriving, and while we might end up trying the idea of getting on the Visitors’ starship, if they’ll even let us, and going back to Earth, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not what we should do first.”

  “What should we do, then?” asked Olivenko.

  “Not one thing,” said Rigg. “Nothing. The Visitors come, we watch from a distance, we see for ourselves what they are. Or maybe we even meet them and talk to them. But then they go, and we think about what we learned from them, and we go on studying everything we can, and then the Destroyers come, and we see what that looks like, and then we jump back in time to right after we got here, and then we decide what to do.”

  They all sat there, looking at the ground, at the distant ruins, at the sky, at the elephants, at passing insects or the mice scurrying through the grass—anywhere but at each other, anywhere but at Rigg.

  And finally Olivenko said, “That sounds like the best plan I’ve heard.”

  “I think so, too,” said Param.

  “Then unless Umbo’s an idiot,” said Loaf, “it’s unanimous.”

  “I’m an idiot,” said Umbo, “but I still vote for it. Which should prove to all of you that it’s an absolutely stupid idea.”

  “I agree,” said Rigg. “It’s cowardly and overly cautious and I wish somebody would think of a better plan. But for the meantime, it’s what we’re planning to do. Right?”

  Right.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Knife

  Umbo had always had mixed feelings about school. On the one hand, it got him away from home, and he didn’t have to work all that hard. On the other hand, he envied his friend Rigg for the way he only came to school now and then, and spent the rest of the year out in the deep forest with his father, trapping animals and bringing home the furs.

  Then he learned that Rigg’s time in the forest was spent in a kind of schooling far more rigorous than the country school Umbo attended. And, after traveling with Rigg in varying degrees of wilderness, from the edges of civilization beside the Stashik River to the untouched wilderness of Vadeshfold, and seeing how hard Rigg had to work to find food and water for them all, and good campsites where they’d be safe from animals, Umbo had a new appreciation for the rigors of that supposedly free life that Rigg had lived.

  Here in Odinfold, Umbo felt like he was back in school—and as a rather poor student, too. Knowing he could never catch up with Rigg’s sophisticated education, Olivenko’s deep scholarly training with King Knosso, and Param’s courtly training at her mother’s knee, Umbo set himself a much simpler, but very practical task—to learn everything he could about the starships from Earth.

  He worked hard at this, and mastered it as well as could be expected. Now that he knew he had the heredity to be very bright, he enjoyed testing his own memory, wondering if he was a match for Rigg’s nearly perfect recall, or even Rigg’s superior.

  But it was all a deception, because Umbo had a much more important purpose—one he could not speak of to anyone, not until he learned something useful.

  There were deep holes in the things that the Odinfolders had told them, subjects they simply didn’t touch on. Moreover, the only Odinfolders who ever spoke to them were Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. They were affable, likeable, patient adults—but Umbo didn’t like the fact that apparently the rest of the people who lived here near the Wall were either forbidden to talk to the Ramfolders or uninterested in them, which seemed extravagantly unlikely.

  Weren’t the Odinfolders supposed to be completely free? Weren’t they brilliant, creative people? Why, then, were they acting so incurious? Here were people who could manipulate the flow of time as if it were just another bodily function, and the Odinfolders didn’t want to meet them, talk to them, see a demonstration? No, there was a reason nobody talked to them, and Umbo was pretty sure that it was to keep the Ramfolders from learning things that the Odinfolders didn’t want them to know.

  They only had the Odinfolders’ word for it that any person that developed serious weapons would be killed, that they had broken into the programs that controlled the Wall but for some reason couldn’t break into the programs controlling the orbiters. It also seemed unbelievable to Umbo that the Odinfolders were really going to leave all the decisions up to the Ramfolders. That had to be illusory. They would think they were making the decisions, but in fact they were being shaped, forced into a certain path by the information the Odinfolders gave them, and the information they withheld.

  Yet how could he discuss his doubts with any of his party? Down i
n the library, surrounded by mice that seemed to understand human speech, it seemed likely that everything they said was recorded for later study by the Odinfolders. And the mice were outdoors, too. A spy network covering the entire wallfold.

  One question that bothered Umbo was the way the villages of the ten thousand remaining Odinfolders were all clustered near the Wall, according to their own maps, leaving the vast center of their country for the animals, which were reputedly wild but were quite possibly as domesticated as the mice.

  Another question was why all the wallfolds were named for the colonist who played the dominant role in their earliest years. And yet this wallfold and Umbo’s home wallfold were both named for the same man, Ram Odin, the captain of the starship. Supposedly Ram Odin had only come to the surface of Garden in the one fold, Ramfold; why, then, was Odinfold also named for him? And if the story was wrong, and there was a copy of Ram Odin in every wallfold, just as there was a copy of everyone else, why did he dominate in only two of the colonies? Why not all of them?

  Yet these matters were not discussed in any of the books Umbo found. He deliberately asked for books that dealt with the earliest history of all the wallfolds, supposedly looking for references to the starships buried in each wallfold, but what he searched for was any reference to Ram Odin. Yet even in Ramfold and Odinfold, it was as if the man were legendary from the start, never actually living among the people.

  How could he not live among them? He had descendants—the time-shifters of Ramfold were supposedly all descended from him. Were the time-shifting machines of the Odinfolders also using some ability that came from Ram Odin? Had he fathered children in both wallfolds? If so, then why not others?

  Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air were so nice, so patient, so wise—but Umbo wondered how nice they’d be if he started asking these questions openly. They were such obvious matters that Umbo couldn’t believe he was the only one who thought of them—yet no one said anything or asked anything. It was as if they all knew that these subjects were forbidden even to think about.