Ruins

  “How can I!” cried Umbo. “He had his—father, Ramex, the Golden Man—he was trained for everything, and I was trained for nothing—”

  “Fool,” said Loaf. “But now you’re just being a baby instead of an alpha male, and I don’t slap babies. Ramex trained Rigg, yes, to prepare him for Aressa Sessamo, for life in court, and that’s why Rigg was able to thrive there. But Ramex didn’t prepare him for anything since then. He didn’t prepare him to get through the Wall without the jewels, he didn’t prepare him for Vadeshfold, he didn’t prepare him for Odinfold, because he didn’t know he was coming to these places. How do you think Rigg managed so well?”

  “I haven’t managed anything,” said Rigg. “You have. Olivenko has, but I don’t even—”

  “I don’t slap fools, either, but shut up,” said Loaf. “Listen to yourself, Rigg. You tell me that I was prepared for things, and I was. Olivenko, too. That’s what makes you the natural leader of this troop—you see the strengths in the other members and you use them, you rely on them, you don’t insist that everything has to be your idea, that you have to be boss of everything, make every decision alone. You don’t resent us for knowing things you don’t know and doing things you can’t do, you’re grateful we did them and then you go on.”

  Loaf tugged on Umbo’s wrist, pulling his hand away from his head, where he was still using his hands as if to shield himself. “It’s what you should have been doing, Umbo. Being glad that there were people who could do things you couldn’t do, that needed doing. And then being glad when you were able to contribute the things that only you could do. As an officer, I can tell you—a squad of men who think and act like Rigg, they’ll prevail in battle, they’ll survive to fight another day, and even if they die, they’ll take a terrible toll on the enemy, because they aren’t at war with each other, they’re acting as one, as something larger than a bunch of terrified, selfish alpha males trying to climb all over each other to stand on top.”

  “You should talk!” cried Umbo.

  “I am talking,” said Loaf.

  “He’s talking about you and Olivenko,” said Rigg. “Sniping at each other the whole way out of Aressa Sessamo.”

  “Yes,” said Loaf. “I thought of him as a toy soldier. I didn’t see his value. So what? Eventually I did. Before that, we weakened each other. But when we passed through the Wall together, when he went back into the Wall as quickly as I did, and ran as fast to rescue you, Rigg—then I knew his worth, and we were together then. Isn’t that right, Olivenko?”

  “We still sniped at each other,” said Olivenko. “We still do.”

  “But we trust each other,” said Loaf.

  “True,” said Olivenko.

  “Snipe at Rigg all you want, Umbo,” said Loaf. “He could use a little deflating now and then, when he puts on that lofty Sessamoto voice. But you have to let people deflate you, too, and not take such white-hot umbrage at everything, not want to kill anybody who does something better than you.”

  “I don’t want to kill anybody!”

  “No, you don’t want to want to kill us,” said Loaf. “But your body wants it. That alpha male brain, that unevolved, uncooperative human, that utterly selfish adolescent who hasn’t yet learned how to attach himself to a group and contribute to it instead of ruling over it. That’s who I’ve been slapping, to get him to shut up and let the human being in you come to the front and take charge of your life. Are you so stupid with rage that you can’t see how much we value you and need you? How much respect we all show you? Rigg especially, Rigg more than anybody.”

  “Nobody respects me,” said Umbo, and he cried again.

  “I’m just not getting through to him,” said Loaf. “This boy needs to have a hole drilled in his head so I can let the demons out.”

  “He’s hearing you,” said Rigg.

  “And your evidence is?”

  “He’s hearing you,” said Rigg, “because he knows you love him, and he loves you. He’s hearing you even though he’s still too proud to let you see it. So let’s stop talking about Umbo and get back to what we’re supposed to do now.”

  “Do?” said Olivenko. “What can we do?”

  “The Odinfolders have been lying to us, hiding things from us. I still don’t know what their plan is. I don’t know what they intend to do with us.”

  “You mean besides stealing our genes and trying to implant them in time-traveling mice?” asked Olivenko.

  “That’s it!” cried Rigg. “That’s what I don’t get. It’s been bothering me—if time-shifting is a thing that only the human mind can do, Loaf, then how did the Odinfolders develop a machine that can pick up objects and put them down anywhere in space and time?”

  “That’s an interesting question,” said Loaf.

  “Yes, that’s why I asked it,” said Rigg.

  “And now I have an answer for you,” said Loaf. “Because I asked the mice, and they already know.”

  “Know what?” asked Olivenko.

  “That there’s no such machine.”

  “But the jewel—they put it where I could find it,” said Umbo.

  “No, Umbo,” said Loaf. “The Odinfolders aren’t lying. They think there’s a machine. But there never was.”

  “What, then?” asked Umbo. “How could they think there’s a machine when—”

  “They’ve seen a machine,” said Loaf. And he started to laugh. “Who knew that mice could have such a penchant for theater? The Odinfolders have seen a very lovely machine that whirrs and flashes, just like the machines the Odinfolders used to build until Mouse-Breeder shifted their whole civilization over to humanized mice. But it’s not the machine that does the thing.”

  “It’s the mice,” breathed Olivenko.

  “They are also descendants of Ram Odin,” said Loaf. “They also have those genes. And they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of generations in which to breed them true. They can’t time-shift themselves. They can only move inanimate objects. When they try to move living things, they die. Many mice gave their lives in proving that. But they have precision we can only dream of. And they have to have hundreds of mice working together to do it. Rather the way Rigg and Umbo had to work together in order to time-shift, when they first figured out they could do it at all.”

  Yes, thought Rigg. Umbo and I began all this when we found out that we could do things as a team—a troop—working together, neither one more valuable than the other. And the trouble started when Umbo and I each learned how to do it on our own, and we didn’t need each other so much anymore.

  “So now I have to tell you something that happened almost as soon as we left the library to fly here,” said Loaf.

  “Something the mice told you?” asked Rigg.

  It was Umbo who leapt to the conclusion. “What happened to Param!” he demanded.

  “The Odinfolders ordered the mice to terrify Param into disappearing—into slicing time. Then, during one of the gaps where Param doesn’t exist, as she flashes forward, the mice were to insert a large block of metal into some vital place.”

  “That would kill her!” cried Rigg.

  “The mice can’t project an object into the space occupied by anything more solid than a gas,” said Loaf. “But they could insert metal where Param’s heart or brain will reappear.”

  “But you stopped them,” said Umbo.

  “Why would I do that?” asked Loaf.

  “Because she’s one of us!” cried Rigg, furious.

  “Are you both complete idiots?” asked Loaf. “Who are you? Can you remember? There are two dead Umbos out there, and yet Umbo is alive, right?”

  Rigg relaxed. “We’re going to go back in time and save Param.”

  “Oh, we’re going to do more than that,” said Loaf. “We’re going to go back in time and get Param, and then we’re going to go even farther back and leave Odinfold before we even got here.”

  “You mean stop ourselves from coming here?” asked Olivenko.

  “If we did that,” sai
d Loaf, “we wouldn’t ever find out the things we learned here. We’ll grab Param just before the mice kill her, and then we all disappear. The Odinfolders will see that the mice tried to obey, but you two were able to prevent it. They won’t realize the mice are no longer obedient to them.”

  “Are they obedient to you?” asked Olivenko.

  “They aren’t obedient to anybody,” said Loaf. “They’re people. They’re a whole civilization that has existed for hundreds of generations, building on the ruins of another, older one. They aren’t going to obey an old soldier like me who can’t even shift time.”

  “They aren’t obeying you now?” asked Rigg.

  “They’re telling me the truth, and doing what they think they should,” said Loaf. “I told them that it was all right to kill Param, because we could go back and save her. Was I wrong?”

  “No,” said Rigg doubtfully.

  “We hope you weren’t wrong,” said Umbo. “Because I can see some problems with saving Param. At least saving her without showing the Odinfolders that the mice are on our side. Or . . . not on their side, anyway.”

  “We can work it out as we fly back,” said Loaf. “We’ll want to hold on to the flyer and bring it back in time with us. Save us the effort of walking to some remote spot along the Wall so we can pass through it into another wallfold.”

  “So right now,” said Umbo, “Param is dead.”

  “It’s all right, Umbo,” said Loaf. “You two get to save her—you push Rigg back into the time before she dies, and when he has her, you snatch them back.”

  “Besides,” said Rigg, “you’re twice as dead yourself.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Temporary Death

  For Param, the months in the Odinfolder library were the happiest time of her life. Her childhood had been spent as the target of symbolic rejection of the Sessamid monarchy. Whatever was done to her, was done to the royal family, so the People’s government never tired of “accidentally” allowing her to be humiliated. Only the discovery of her ability to vanish from their sight, to let the world pass rapidly by while she observed in perfect silence, had protected her.

  During her childhood, her education had been limited. It consisted of whatever her mother told her, the Gardener’s few lessons in controlling her time-slicing, and whatever she learned from the occasional host who took some interest in her. She learned to read and write, and enjoyed reading, but she had no idea what to read. Any book she knew enough to ask for was obtained for her, but without books to browse, she could make no discoveries.

  In her solitude she had thought much about what little she had read, but now, with the histories of all the wallfolds opened up before her, she could replace her empty childhood with the memories of kingdoms and republics, of nations nomadic or sedentary, marauding or peaceful.

  Let Rigg and Umbo, Loaf and Olivenko study whatever they wanted—the human race on Earth, the functioning of starships, military techniques and technology, the deep science of the Odinfolders—none of it interested Param. She was discovering the world of her birth, the world that she had only seen as it came to visit within the walls of her dwellingplaces, then raced past her whenever she felt the need to hide in the invisibility of her time-slicing. She was finding out who she would have been, if she had been free; or, if not free, then shaped within her destiny as the royal child.

  Accustomed as she was to contemplation, meditation, reflection, and the fantasies of a lonely child, Param saw herself in every history, and found lessons for herself as well. In this nation, this wallfold, this event, here is what she would be, that is what she would do. She would not have committed her people to fruitless attempts to conquer the mountain fastness of Gorogo; she would have sheltered the trading people of Inkik instead of persecuting them and driving them out; she would have married for love where another ruler married for reasons of state, and vice versa.

  I would have been a great queen, she concluded on many days.

  I would have been happiest as a commoner, for powerful people are more miserable and lonely than simple ones, she concluded on other days.

  But every day saw her horizons widening, her vicarious memory deepening. There were worlds now blossoming inside her imagination. The others might think her solitary and withdrawn, but for Param, compared to her life before, she was gregarious and enthusiastic. She was broadening, reaching out, filled with curiosity and wonder.

  She knew that the others usually talked around her and seemed surprised whenever she spoke; often, too, she could see that they thought that what she spoke of was not to the point of their conversation. But what of that? Their conversations were rarely on a point she cared about, and when their words made her think of something she did care about, she said it, boldly speaking up at the moment of her thought, in a way she never had before.

  Umbo thought that he loved her? He hardly listened to her, since she had nothing to say of spaceships and he cared nothing about the intense spiritual lives of the people of Adamfold, or the strange chaos of the child-ruled forest dwellers of Mamom, who allowed certain children to choose the site of their next village by seeing where they wandered, and what they were curious about.

  And Olivenko, who once had seemed so wise to her, was surprisingly ignorant of history and uninterested in learning more about it. Instead he was all physics and metaphysics, wondering about how time travel worked and how it was related to gravity. Why should they care? It was not as if Param or her fellow émigrés from Ramfold could change how the world worked; they obeyed the laws of physics, whatever they were, and had whatever talents they had. Did Olivenko think that by studying these things, he would acquire some talent for time travel that he never had before? Or was he hoping to discover a machine like the Odinfolders’ time-sender? What good is it to study things too big to move?

  Loaf, on the other hand, seemed to understand the world much as Param did. He listened to her accounts of strange customs and histories as if he were interested in what she was saying, and not just in the fact that the only woman in their group was saying them. He might bend everything to his own understanding, but Param didn’t mind that: It only mattered that he received what she offered to them all from her research, and treated it as having value.

  And then there was her brother, Rigg, so desperate to be a good man that he would never be a truly effective leader. Real leadership required authority and ruthlessness, she well understood. That’s why she didn’t want it. But Rigg did want to lead, yet thought he could do it by persuasion, by meekly taking suggestions, by genuinely loving the members of their little band.

  Didn’t he know that gentleness didn’t just seem weak, it was weak? Yet she found it endearing that he tried so earnestly, and so she treated him with a kind of respect that he didn’t really deserve, since only strength mattered, in the end. She saw in Rigg the person she might have been, if she, too, had wandered in the wild with the Gardener, the Golden Man. With only wild animals and a manlike machine for company, what could Rigg ever understand about the ravening appetites of human beings? We are the wildest animals, Rigg, she wanted to say. And then he would say, Who was talking about animals?

  We are all talking about animals. More to the point, we are talking as animals. We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.

  The only thing that keeps me from being a truly extraordinary ruler, as I was born to be, is that I have no access to the people whom it would have been my right to rule, and no idea what to do with them if I ever won my place.

  My place? There is no such place. I’m a queen-in-training when I ought to be studying horticulture and growing flowers, beautiful and useless.

  Such were her thoughts during these glorious months of exploration and imagination. She lived a thousand different lives, conquered, ruled, lost, loved. The others understood nothing of what went on inside her heart.

&
nbsp; Then came the day when they left her.

  Umbo had gone first, making an expedition to visit the buried starship of Odinfold in order to test and expand what he had learned in his absurdly focused study of a single thing.

  Then Swims-in-the-Air had said something to Rigg that alarmed him, and he had taken Loaf and Olivenko to follow Umbo. Nobody even looked for her, or asked her what she thought. Swims-in-the-Air mentioned they were gone, and when Param asked why they hadn’t told her where they were going, Swims-in-the-Air had only laughed lightly and said, “I don’t think they needed you, my dear.”

  Param had simply gone back to her studies.

  Until she noticed that her room was filling up with mice.

  They swarmed around the floor and up onto the table. Their constant motion was distracting. “Why do you all have to be here?” she asked, not expecting them to understand or respond.

  But they did respond—by ceasing their movement, by all turning to her at once and gazing at her.

  They’re only mice, she told herself.

  But the intensity of their gaze was disconcerting, and when it continued, it became alarming.

  She got up from her place, intending to leave the overcrowded room. But when she stepped, there was a mouse under her foot. It squealed in agony and when she moved her foot to release it, she saw that blood had spurted out of its throat. Worse, she had stepped on yet another mouse, and this one made no sound at all when it died; she only felt the sickening crunch under her foot.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There are too many of you in here, there’s no room to walk. Please go away.”

  Please! Was she a beggar now, she who should have been Queen-in-the-Tent? Was she reduced to pleading with mice?