The natural land is beautiful, and it is beautiful again when it reclaims the ruins of humans who are gone. But when humans are there, that is the beauty I love the most, because it’s a web I’m part of, it’s the fabric that my own life, my own path, is helping to create. What humans make is not less beautiful than what comes into being out of wildness alone.
“We’re wild, too,” said Rigg aloud, because he needed to hear the words, and so he had to say them.
Olivenko was the only one near enough to him in the flyer to look up at the sound of his voice.
“We’re wild,” said Rigg. “We humans. We shape nature, but our shapes are also natural. We shouldn’t say that because humans shaped a place, it’s therefore unnatural.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t say it,” said Olivenko, “but I think that if you look at the meanings of the words, whatever humans do is unnatural.”
“But that’s the mistake, for us to think that humans aren’t also a part of nature.”
Olivenko looked out of the flyer at the ground they were passing over, the high thick cushion of leaves only beginning to turn color in preparation for winter. “Not a particularly prominent part of it here,” he said.
“No. We’ve never touched this place.” Then he laughed with a little bitterness. “Except, of course, when the starships crashed so hard they blew rocks into the sky to make the Ring, and raised great circling cliffs like Upsheer, and killed almost all the natural life of Garden, and replaced it with the plants and animals of Earth. Except for that, which means that all of Garden is so vastly shaped by human hands that nothing we’re seeing here is ‘natural.’”
“Well, I can’t argue with that,” said Olivenko. “Except to say that when humans leave it alone, nature comes back and closes the gaps the way the sea fills in behind each passing fish. What we’re seeing down there is natural now, even if it was once reshaped by human action.”
“But now it’ll be reshaped by mice,” said Rigg.
“Humans masquerading as mice,” said Olivenko. “But I don’t think they’ll be cutting down the trees.”
“If they wanted to cut them down,” said Rigg, “they’d find a way. That’s what humans do.”
“And if they wanted to build them up?”
“They’d plant them like an orchard.”
“Or slaughter each other as they did in Vadeshfold,” said Olivenko, “and let the trees come back and plant themselves.”
“I really hate philosophy,” murmured Loaf. “You talk and talk, and in the end, you don’t know any more than you did.”
“Maybe less,” said Rigg, “because I thought I had an idea, and now Olivenko makes me wonder whether I did or not.”
“One idea is as worthless as another,” said Loaf. “Until you actually do something about it, and then it’s the action, not the word, that matters.”
“Who’s philosophizing now?” asked Olivenko. “We take action because of the words we believe in, the stories that we think are true, or intend to make true.”
“I don’t think so,” said Loaf. “I think we do what we do because we desire it. And then we make up stories about why the thing we did was right, and the thing that other people did was wrong.”
“Or both,” said Rigg. “It works both ways, all the time. We act because of our stories; we make up stories to explain or excuse the way we acted.”
But the trees don’t do that, or the squirrels, thought Rigg. They just do what they do. And they can’t change what they do, because they don’t have any of this philosophy.
“Our destination is the shore where humans are most often seen,” said the flyer. “Far in the north.”
“When we get closer,” said Rigg, “skim the coast. I’ll tell you then where to set this flyer down.”
“What will you look for, to decide?” asked Olivenko.
“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wherever the paths are thickest and most recent, so we have the best chance of meeting people.”
“Of getting killed in our sleep on the first night there,” said Olivenko.
“We didn’t come here to avoid the people,” said Rigg.
“Can’t save ’em if we can’t see ’em,” said Loaf.
Probably can’t save them even if we do see them. “If it turns out I picked a bad spot, we can go back and pick another,” said Rigg.
“But you can’t appear to us here in this flyer,” said Olivenko. “Right? Unless you took the flyer up to exactly the same path and matched the flight perfectly, because the path remains behind us in the air.”
Rigg turned and saw their paths stretch back along the route they had just flown. “That’s right.”
“I wonder how far you have to go upward,” said Olivenko, “until our paths stop being part of the sky of Garden, and remain inside a ship.”
“Every starship when it crashed here had human beings aboard,” said Rigg. “I should have looked for the paths, the incoming trajectories.”
“You should have looked to see if their paths during the voyage stayed with the ship,” said Umbo, who was finally joining in the conversation.
“I will the next time we’re at a starship,” said Rigg. “I should have done it before, but I had other things on my mind.”
“That’s right,” said Umbo, “blame it on me for being so clumsy as to leave corpses lying around to distract you.”
“You may not have killed them,” said Rigg, “but you made them. Didn’t your mother teach you to clean up your own messes?”
They had to traverse the whole of Larfold, from the south to the northern shore. The wallfold continued far out to sea—Rigg remembered that from the maps in the library, but most clearly from the huge map inside the Tower of O; despite the many other maps he’d seen, that one remained the true map to Rigg, the way he pictured the world. A globe with wallfolds delineated on its face, the Walls stretching out over land and sea alike.
“I wonder why they went underwater here,” said Param. “Why not build boats and live on the shore, and sail where they wanted? Why go into the sea?”
“Better climate?” suggested Olivenko.
“I think it has to do with how they managed to handle the breathing problem,” said Umbo.
“There wasn’t a breathing problem until they went under the sea,” said Param. Rigg hated the scorn in her voice, especially when she talked to Umbo.
But Umbo answered her scorn for scorn. “You don’t start living underwater unless you already have a way of surviving there.”
“They didn’t suddenly start having babies with gills,” said Param, “and then decide to go swimming.”
“But they did start swimming fulltime within a few hundred years of the start of the colony,” said Umbo. “Why would they do that unless they already had a way to breathe?”
Loaf said, “Why are you two arguing about it when we’ll be there in a very little while, and then we can go into the past if we have to and see what we find out. See if they’re even human anymore. From what Olivenko said about the death of the king, these are monsters that dragged Knosso out of a boat and drowned him. Maybe they’ve turned into sharks with hands.”
When they reached the coast, Rigg had the flyer soar above the northern beaches, which is the general region where the Odinfolders’ books said the Larfolders had established their one long-abandoned colony. Here along the coast there were many paths, and recent ones. But they all led out of the water and then back into it, like the tracks of turtles returning to shore to spawn. Rigg wondered if they would still count as human if the Larfolders had started laying eggs like turtles.
He tried to trace the paths out into the water. He could easily follow the paths when they ran just under the waves, but the deeper they were, the harder it was for Rigg to sense them. And they seemed to meander randomly. And why not? Underwater, the Larfolders could swim anywhere. There were no roads they had to stay on. Mostly they stayed away from the shore, out in deeper water, behind the breakers that gleamed in shift
ing white ribbons, and deep, where Rigg could barely sense them.
Returning to gaze at the paths that led onto land, Rigg tried to find some meaning, some pattern in the tracks. He failed. “When they come to shore,” said Rigg, “it isn’t for fresh water to drink.”
“If they solved the breathing problem, the drinking problem couldn’t have been too hard,” said Param. She had saved a little scorn for Rigg, too.
“I bet the peeing problem was even easier,” said Umbo.
“But cooked food,” said Rigg. “That’s the challenge. Human teeth need cooked food. We don’t have the massive jaws and molars of chimps or australopithecines.”
“How did they ever find a recipe for underwater bread?” said Umbo.
“I think they specialize in seaweed salad,” said Rigg.
“What do they come ashore for?” asked Loaf, a little impatiently.
“We’ll find out soon enough, once we land,” said Rigg.
“They come to the beach for human sacrifice,” said Param. “There’s hardly a wallfold that hasn’t invented it at one time or another.”
“I wonder what it says about human beings that we keep inventing that particular excuse for murder,” said Olivenko.
“It’s an easy way to dispose of excess prisoners of war without offending a taboo against killing those who surrendered,” said Param.
“Was that one of the theories you read?” asked Loaf.
“Yes,” said Param, sounding quite prepared to take on any challenges.
“In my experience,” said Loaf, “soldiers don’t have a taboo against killing helpless prisoners. It’s hard to get them not to.”
Suddenly the paths below changed from individual forays onto land into a huge array of interlocking paths. Thousands and thousands of them, ranging from ten thousand years ago to the past few days. “Set down here,” said Rigg to the flyer.
The flyer swerved to shore and gently settled to the ground about fifteen meters above the highwater line. “This is where they hold their annual beach party and sports tournament,” said Rigg.
“Really?” asked Param, sounding skeptical.
“I have no idea,” said Rigg. “But hundreds of them at a time come to shore here, and they’ve been doing it for a long, long time. From the beginning—their first colony was only a few kilometers farther inland.”
“Maybe all those solitary shore visits you saw were women giving birth,” said Param. “Maybe they have to come to land for that.”
“Or men who got thrown out of the house by untrusting wives,” said Umbo.
In answer, Rigg got out of the flyer and strode toward the water. There were no humans on the beach, but since he knew they often returned, he figured he’d meet them soon enough.
Rigg had never felt large quantities of sand beneath his feet before. It was hard to walk in sand; it kept sliding and he kept slipping.
Sure enough, in sand higher above the water, there were tracks—normal human footprints. “They don’t have webbed feet,” said Rigg.
“Or maybe they clip the webs between their toes, as we do with our toenails,” said Param.
Loaf was looking at the tracks. “There might be toe-webs after all. That slight dusting of sand right . . . here.”
Rigg saw what he was indicating, thin lines between the foremost toes on only a couple of the footprints. But Rigg had seen other such artifacts in the tracks of animals and men in the forests of Ramfold throughout his childhood. “Is that real, or just wind-blow?” asked Rigg.
“Could be either,” said Loaf. “How long do we wait?”
“Well,” said Rigg, “now that we’ve passed through the Wall, I don’t see why we can’t go back into the past to the most recent gathering of just a few of them. We’ll go to them, since we can’t signal them to come to us.”
“We’re using the Larfold flyer,” said Umbo, “and yet the expendable hasn’t come to us and the ship hasn’t tried to talk to us beyond acknowledging the command to send the flyer.”
“We’re not looking for the expendable anyway,” said Param. “I’m glad it’s not here.”
“The expendables are too powerful to ignore them,” said Rigg. “Umbo’s question is a good one, but Param’s point is also good.”
“We can’t both be right,” said Param.
“Yes you can,” said Rigg, “and you are. We don’t have to search for the expendable right now, but we also have to be sharply aware that whatever he’s doing right now, it’s not nothing, and might be dangerous to us.”
“Very delicately done,” said Olivenko.
“What a dance between your rival siblings,” said Loaf.
“And how completely unhelpful for you to call attention to it,” said Rigg.
“We’re not at war and we’re not rivals,” said Param. “Or siblings.”
“How can a peasant boy be a rival to a queen?” asked Umbo.
“What about my idea of going back in time to meet them?” asked Rigg.
“Why not go all the way back, and watch them go into the water?” asked Olivenko.
“If we could be sure we could watch undetected, I’d agree,” said Rigg. “But why not meet them now?”
“I’d rather meet them back when they were human,” said Olivenko.
“But are we even human?” asked Rigg. “And for all we know, they’re as human as we are right now.”
“We can’t make any decisions until we know more,” said Param, “and we can’t know more until we make those decisions.”
“Why not have one of us go back and look?” asked Umbo. “I send you back, and snap you home to us if something goes wrong?”
Rigg nodded, but it was the nodding of thought, not a decision. “That’s good. Safer in some ways. But then I’m the one seeing them. And what if I change something back then that affects us now?”
“You don’t want to face them alone,” said Loaf.
“I don’t know if I’ll understand enough of what I’m seeing,” said Rigg. “And I don’t know how seriously they’ll take me if I’m alone. I’m just a kid.”
“Not so young as you used to be,” said Olivenko. “And never just a kid even then.”
“I’m an experienced old soldier,” said Loaf. “Experienced enough to know that when somebody is cautious about his own ability to judge, it means he’s much better prepared to judge a situation than people who don’t doubt their ability to judge.”
“I’d like to be able to quote you on that,” said Param, “but I’m not sure I know what you said.”
“I said Rigg isn’t as young as he thinks, but he’s also right. We should all go together.”
“Back to a time when we have no control over the flyer?” said Umbo.
“Who’s being cautious now?” asked Param.
“We didn’t have control over the flyer until the very end of our time in Vadeshfold,” said Rigg. “We can handle a few weeks without it now.” Rigg rose to his feet and held out his hands. “A few weeks ago, there was a group of three people—and their paths look as human as anybody’s, if that helps. They came ashore here, then walked up near the river. Maybe they were harvesting river mussels or something, but they could have done that from the water.”
“They still walk,” said Umbo. “That’s something. They haven’t turned into seals or dolphins or some other aquatic mammal.”
“Otters,” said Rigg.
“Sharks with hands,” said Olivenko, and the reminder of Knosso’s fate stilled the nervous merriment that Rigg and Umbo had started.
They joined hands.
“Any mice with us?” asked Olivenko.
“Three,” said Loaf.
“Eight,” said Rigg at the same moment.
“Stealthy little bastards,” said Loaf.
“No secrets anyway,” said Rigg. “They know they can’t hide from me, and we have no need to conceal what we do from them.”
“Do you have the path we’re jumping to?” asked Umbo.
“I do,
” said Rigg. “Take us back.”
“You can do it yourself,” Umbo reminded him.
“I’m not sure I can take all of us at once,” said Rigg. “And you’re stronger and better practiced. I’ll aim, you loose the bow.”
So Umbo did.
There were three women near the river, their backs to the group of Ramfolders. Standing over them was an expendable. Larex.
“I guess this means that the expendable knows more about the Larfolders than the other expendables thought,” murmured Umbo.
“Or they held back the knowledge from the mice,” said Param.
“Or the mice held it back from us,” said Olivenko.
The expendable looked at them and waved. The women turned around to look.
“I think he heard us,” said Rigg.
“They do have good hearing,” said Param.
Rigg strode forward, and the expendable came rapidly to meet him. The women stayed where they were.
Rigg tried to keep his attention on Larex, who looked so much like Father that Rigg couldn’t help being glad to see him, and so much like Vadesh and Odinex that he couldn’t help but mistrust him. Still, his eyes strayed to the women, who looked clothed and naked at the same time. They certainly had some kind of garment that concealed their womanly shape, but the garment was absolutely the color of skin, so that they seemed also to be nude.
Were they even women, or did he think that only because their hair was so long?
Was that really hair, or something else? It seemed not to hang quite right.