Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (27 page)

When he started reading the Future Books, he asked the mice to show him which of his party had already read them. When the list appeared, he was surprised and rueful when he learned that he was the last, not the first, to read the Future Books. To his surprise, the first had been Loaf.

For many months they had been leading the studious life that the Odinfolders had invited them to lead, preparing as best they could to learn useful things about the Visitors, about the people of Earth, and about their own world, in the effort to understand what would provoke genocide by the Destroyers. But when Rigg reached the end of his third detailed pass through the Future
Books, and still understood nothing, he called a meeting that he realized was long overdue.

He brought them out of the library, out of the ruined city, to the brow of a hill overlooking a wide reach of prairie. It happened that a herd of elephants was busy destroying a copse of trees in the distance, and Loaf amused them for a while by describing in detail the way a young elephant was trying to push down a tree until an older female finally shoved him out of the way and took it down with a single surge. With the vastly superior eyes given him by the facemask, Loaf had no need of telescopes or other tools to see things that were a tiny blur to the others. And that gave Rigg the question with which he began the meeting.

“Loaf’s eyes are better than ours, because he’s been partially merged with a highly altered life form from Garden,” said Rigg. “But that can’t be why the Visitors rejected Garden, can it?”

There was a brief digression as Param pointed out that since the Visitors had never seen Loaf wearing a facemask on any of the previous passages through this period of time, it couldn’t possibly have any influence.

“Not Loaf in particular,” said Olivenko. “For all we know there are other wallfolds that have been transformed just as radically, and the Odinfolders just don’t know about it. That isn’t what Rigg is asking.”

If they failed, Rigg knew he would have to return to his original plan of visiting every wallfold himself. This time, though, he was spending his time studying the most vital world of all, the one the Visitors would come from.

“The whole literature of Earth is full of condemnation of
people who hate others just for being strange and different,” said Rigg. “Their histories are full of self-congratulation about how they’ve left such base impulses behind them. The worst thing their biographers and historians can say about a person is that he judges people on the basis of differences in their physical attributes, their languages, their cultures. How can they possibly come here and violate everything they believe?”

Loaf only laughed. “Rigg, you’re still so young. What would your father have said?” When Olivenko started to bring up Knosso, Loaf held up a hand. “I mean Ramex, the expendable who raised him.”

Rigg sighed. “Yes, I know. The very fact that they condemn xenophobia so harshly is proof that they hadn’t overcome it at all.”

“An aspirational virtue, not an achievement,” said Olivenko.

“Whatever that means,” said Umbo.

“Oh, drop the pose of youthful ignorance,” said Param impatiently. “I’ve seen what you’re reading. By now you could probably build a starship yourself.”

“I only understand a fraction of what I’m reading,” said Umbo. “I don’t know how anything works, I just know what the machines are supposed to do and where you can find them in each ship. And since the Visitors’ starship design is probably completely different, I doubt anything I’ve learned is useful.”

“So you’ve wasted your time here,” said Param. “But don’t pretend that you don’t know what ‘aspirational virtue’ means.”

“A virtue that you admire but don’t actually have,” said Umbo, “yes, I understand it. I just think it sounds absurd for us to talk like philosophers when we’re just
us
.”

“Sorry,” said Rigg. “But the fact that the people of Earth recognize that they still have a serious problem with xenophobia makes it seem all the more absurd that they could come here, see how strange we are—but also how much the different wallfolds have accomplished in eleven thousand years—and then decide that they hate us and fear us so much we have to be wiped out.”

“We don’t know that’s what the Visitors decided,” said Olivenko.

“You think the Future Books are lying about the Destroyers?” asked Rigg.

“I think there’s no shortage of lying here in Odinfold, but no, I think the Future Books are telling the truth. But the very fact that they call one group from Earth the Visitors, and the second group by a different name, Destroyers, should be a clue to a real possibility—that the humans who came to destroy Garden are
not
the same group that first came to visit.”

“Two separate groups with starship technology?” asked Umbo doubtfully.

“No,” said Olivenko. “But how do we know that there wasn’t a political revolution, a coup, a war during the gap between the Visitors’ return and the Destroyers’ departure? Maybe the Visitors came back with a brilliantly glowing report, but a group of xenophobes took over the government. And maybe they didn’t last long in power—just long enough to send the Destroyers. We have no way of knowing whether by the time the Destroyers returned to Earth, there wasn’t a new government in place that deeply regretted the destruction of Garden.”

“I suppose nobody has ever been there to receive their apology,” said Param.

“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “Maybe no matter what the Visitors see, the Destroyers come, for reasons having to do with the politics of Earth. Aren’t there powerful groups that still espouse xenophobia?”

Rigg nodded. “They aren’t the people with the high technology, but yes, there are widespread cultures that believe in killing everyone who doesn’t comply with their cultural practices. But they’ve been kept in check for centuries by the superior technology of the more enlightened cultures.”

“Enlightened?” asked Loaf. “Who’s judging now?”

“
I’m
judging,” said Rigg, “and I’m using the only standard that matters to us: Enlightened people are the ones who don’t want to destroy Garden, and the Destroyers are ignorant monsters. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, don’t you?”

They agreed readily enough.

“
We’re
ignorant monsters,” said Param. “Look how Mother and General Citizen treated us. How Vadesh treated us—and how we judged him and the facemask people. Humans judge each other and we kill each other when we decide the other people are too bad to allow them to live.”

“But not everybody,” said Rigg.

“Everybody,” said Param. “No exceptions.”

“Not me,” said Rigg. “Not you.”

“You wouldn’t kill somebody who was trying to kill
you
?” asked Param.

“That’s self-defense,” said Rigg.

“But Jesus and Gandhi and a lot of others say that you have no right of self-defense,” said Param.

“I’m not sure that’s what they said,” said Rigg, “but I’m glad to know you’ve been reading Earth literature, too.”

“I skimmed it a little,” said Param. “Look, human nature hasn’t changed. What does it matter if the Visitors liked Garden and the Destroyers are a different group? Garden ends up just as dead.”

“What I’m saying,” said Rigg, “is that maybe we need to be prepared to go back to Earth with the Visitors.”

“Where they’d kill us,” said Param. “And then we’d be so far from here that we couldn’t go back in time and get
here
, we’d only travel back in time on
Earth
. That’s a deeply terrible idea.”

“It might be the only way,” said Rigg, refusing to take her negativism as a final answer. “Go back with them to Earth, with the chance that we die there, but with a chance that maybe we can change the outcome.”

“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.”