Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (12 page)

Where was the lie? More to the point, where was the truth hidden within the lie?

Meanwhile, the wagon began to move so fast that Rigg had no concept of their speed. He didn’t know how to measure it. He knew that he could normally walk a league in about an hour; he could run much faster, but in short bursts. This wagon was going so fast that even the fastest horse couldn’t keep up with it. So as the minutes wore on, the tunnel gradually taking them lower and lower, moving in a nearly straight line, Rigg couldn’t begin to guess how far they had traveled, how many leagues beyond the factory where they had boarded the thing.

Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.

Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn’t any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their faces faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.

Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.

Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.

“It’s a field,” said Vadesh. “A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn’t affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen.”

Oxygen. “So we can breathe.”

“Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we’d suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well.”

He didn’t teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.

“The Wall is a field, too, you said,” Rigg answered.

“Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away.”

“That’s not how it felt to me,” said Rigg.

“Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling,” said Vadesh. “But you’re right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find
reasons
for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action.”

“But we went through it,” said Loaf.

“You went through it before it was there,” said Vadesh. “Cheating.”

“We went back to get Rigg,” said Loaf. “We brought him out.”

“Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well.”

“So there are different kinds of fields?” asked Rigg.

“Many of them, my young pupil. I can’t believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn’t even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields.”

“I don’t even
wish
I knew what you’re talking about,” said Loaf. “I just want this thing to stop moving.”

“When we get there. Not much farther.”

“You crashed into this world,” said Rigg.

“There was no moon,” said Vadesh. “And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we
were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive.”

“And you worked all this out?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, not me,” said Vadesh. “That’s not what expendables are for. We don’t have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require.”

“So who did?”

“It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they’re made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The
field
collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode.”

Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. “Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway,” said Rigg.

“Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys,” said Vadesh. “The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why.”

Vadesh didn’t seem to understand that increasing Rigg’s mistrust of his father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that expendables lie. As if he needed more proof of that.

The wagon began to slow.

“I can feel us slowing down,” said Rigg.

“Thank Silbom’s right ear,” said Loaf.

“There’s no reason to install and maintain an inertial bubble field on a mere wagon—it never moves fast enough to need it,” said Vadesh. “Really, just because you
can
do something doesn’t mean you’re
required
to do it. Not worth the time or energy.”

The wagon came to a halt.

So did the tunnel. It simply ended. The walls on every side were of smooth stone. There was no door, no sign, not even a loading dock.

Vadesh bounded from the wagon. “Come along, lads,” he said.

“Lads?” said Loaf.

“He thinks he’s making friends with us,” said Rigg.

“He’s a bit of a clown, isn’t he?”

“He wants us to think so,” said Rigg. “Or else he wants us to think that he wants us to think so. I’m not sure how complicated it gets.”

Vadesh—who could hear everything they were saying, Rigg never allowed himself to forget that—was standing on the ground near the end of the tunnel. “Come along, the door only opens for a few moments and I’d hate to have either of you get caught in it when it slides shut.”

As they got off the wagon, it immediately whisked away back down the tunnel.

“No return trip?” asked Loaf.

“I can always call it back,” said Vadesh. “And there are many other ways to make the same journey.” Vadesh turned to face the wall. He said nothing, made no gesture—but he did face the wall. Why, Rigg wondered. Was he communicating some other way?

Apparently so, because the end of the tunnel was suddenly gone. What had seemed to be smooth stone was now a continuation of the tunnel. The wagon could have kept going. Only now, beyond where the tunnel had ended, there was an obvious station, with loading dock, stairway, and other doors, not disguised at all.

Here, though, the stairway went farther down rather than returning toward the surface. They had come down to get to the tunnel at the other end, and had traveled steadily downward since then, if Rigg’s directional sense was at all reliable in a place like this and at such a speed. And yet their destination was lower still.

But they did not take the stairs. “Down,” said Vadesh, and a set of doors opened to reveal a smallish room. Vadesh walked in. Loaf and Rigg followed, and then the doors closed. Rigg could not understand why they would enter such a room, which had no doorway other than the one they had come through.

“It’s an elevator,” said Loaf. “It’s on pulleys. The whole room goes up and down, with counterweights to balance us. Some of the taller buildings in O have them, and a bank in Aressa Sessamo had one, too.”

“Very good,” said Vadesh. “Only there’s no counterweight.”

They plummeted.

“Exhilarating, isn’t it?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg and Loaf were both clutching at the wall, filled with panic.

“Oh, sorry,” said Vadesh. “I forget how sensitive humans can be.”

Suddenly the sensation of falling went away. “
Now
we have a mild inertial field. You have to understand that humans knew about this sort of thing when we first built the colony. They used to enjoy riding the elevator down without the field. They enjoyed the thrill.”

“Then they weren’t human,” said Loaf.

“Oh, people get used to so many things,” said Vadesh, “if they only give themselves the chance.”

The doors opened. There was a bridge in front of them, spanning a gap of about six meters. On the other side was a smooth, convex surface of fieldsteel, exactly like the surface of the Tower of O.

As they stepped onto the bridge, Rigg looked to left and right, up and down. “It’s the Tower of O, lying on its side,” he said.

“Let’s say that the Tower of O, as you describe it, was probably intended to be a monument to a starship. Not the real thing. Come along. Ship, open!” said Vadesh.

A gap appeared in the side of the ship, right where the bridge ended.

“Welcome to the starship that brought humanity to Garden,” said Vadesh.

“One of nineteen,” said Rigg.

“It began as a single ship,” said Vadesh. “We had an accident. The physics of it is beyond you, I promise you.”

“You never know how much Father taught me,” said Rigg.

“I know he didn’t teach you
that
, because even the ship’s computers don’t understand it. Nineteen computers brought one ship into the folds of space, but brought it out again in nineteen slightly different locations. Oops.”

“And where on this starship are you taking us?” asked Rigg.

“To the control room. To the place where all the decisions were made. Where Ram Odin plunged the human race toward its first successful colony on an earthlike planet.”

As they walked along narrow passages, Rigg got the distinct impression that something was helping them move—that each step took them farther than it should, that their bodies were somehow lighter here. Another field? Probably.

A door opened and they stepped into a spotlessly clean room, walls and floor and ceiling all the same light-brown color. Along one wall there was what seemed to be a track, rather like the passage that the wagon had run along, only much narrower. There were doors at both ends.

In the middle of the room was a table, about as long as Vadesh was tall. Dangling from the ceiling were three lights, surrounded by what looked like arms or tentacles. Vadesh raised his hand and the lights all moved toward it. Also, a seat emerged from under the table and slid into position in front of the table.

“This is where the ship was controlled?” asked Rigg.

“You see the track there—I know you noticed it, Rigg, you’re
such a clever boy. There are really three control centers—one for navigation through space, one for controlling all the systems internal to the ship, and one for field generation. Whichever one the pilot needs is brought in along that track and placed on the table here. Very quick and completely automatic. The pilot sits here and the controls come to him.”

Lies, Rigg was sure of it. The system seemed unwieldy. Why would controls be hidden away? It made no engineering sense.

The table was about the size of a human body—just long enough, just wide enough. Rigg looked up at the arms surrounding the lights. Vadesh was controlling the movements of those arms right now. What was on the ends of the arms? Tools of some kind. Hard to guess their purpose.

“Have a seat,” said Vadesh to Loaf.

“Don’t,” said Rigg.

“Now, Rigg,” said Vadesh. “I thought you said you weren’t in charge of the expedition anymore.”

“It’s not what he’s telling us,” said Rigg.

“How would you know?” asked Loaf. “You’ve never seen a starship. How do you know anything?”

“It makes no sense,” said Rigg.

“Nothing has made any sense since I met you,” said Loaf. “But if this is the way to take down the Wall and get home, then I’m going to sit down.” Loaf sat.

At once the chair moved—but only a little, to take Loaf’s height and weight into account. Then it held still.

“You see?” said Vadesh. “It adjusts to the pilot. Which it
thinks you are, since you have a jewel for this starship.”

Rigg wanted to ask Loaf for the jewels, but he didn’t want to test Loaf’s friendship. Nor did he want to find out just how determined Vadesh was to keep them out of Rigg’s possession.

“Shall we bring in the controls for the field generators?” asked Vadesh.

“If that’s what will let me bring down the Walls and get home,” said Loaf.

“You have to hold up the jewels—just hold them up, palm open—and command the starship to bring in the controls.”

“What do I say?” asked Loaf.

“Try, ‘Bring in the field controls, ship,’” answered Vadesh.

At that moment Rigg made a connection. Vadesh was telling Loaf to speak to the ship and give it an order. Father had taught Rigg a special command language. He had said it was a way to rule the stars. It wasn’t a real language at all, of course. Just a series of numbers and letters, which Rigg had had to memorize and repeat every few days, then weeks, then years. Father wouldn’t tell him how they might rule the stars, and no matter how many times Rigg repeated the sequences that Father called “words” in this command language, the stars never did anything. Rigg had called him on this once, and Father had looked at him as if he were a child—which he was—and said, pityingly, “It doesn’t work
here
,” as if Rigg should have known that.

Now Rigg was inside a starship. And an expendable just like Father was telling a human to issue commands.