Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (8 page)

“But you can, when Umbo . . . you have to try.”

Rigg reached out his hand. “Here’s where Olivenko was when his path jumps away. But I don’t know how he was standing. Was his arm here? Here?”

Vadesh was hearing everything they said. No wonder, when they showed up in the far future, he knew all about their ability to move through time. “Vadesh is almost here,” Param said.

“I know, but this isn’t working.” He kept moving his hand, trying to make some kind of contact. “I’d rather not have a conversation with the traitor who got all the uninfected humans killed.”

“They aren’t dead,” said Vadesh, still calling from some distance away. Could he hear even the slightest whisper? “They fled the city as the natives entered it.”

“Don’t argue with him,” said Param.

“He calls them natives,” whispered Rigg angrily. “Because they have that native parasite.”

“At least he doesn’t think they’re human,” said Param.

“But they
are
, and better than human,” said Vadesh, who was now close enough to speak loudly instead of shouting. “Didn’t you see how quick and clever they were on the battlefield?”

“Native
and
human,” said Rigg. “Come on, Umbo, see us, take us.”

To Param it sounded as if Rigg was praying. “This isn’t working, he can’t see us, so try something else.”

“There
is
nothing else.”

“No,” said Param. Her mind was racing. “When the woman tried to stab you, it wasn’t
me
that made us jump forward in time to the middle of the night, and it wasn’t Umbo because he would have brought us back to the time we came from.”

Rigg was looking at her, listening. But clearly he didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand.

“It was you,” said Param. “The knife was coming at you, and you jumped away. But in time, not in space.”

“I can’t do that. It’s Umbo who does that.”

“No,
you
do it—you’re the one who finds the other time, who pulls us to it. Or at least you join him in doing it. Your body’s been learning how to do it even if your mind doesn’t understand it or control it yet. But you can do it.”

“I’ve tried. My whole voyage downriver I tried, and—”

She didn’t have time for his chat about despair. She remembered how the Gardener—the expendable named Ram—had helped her find her own timesense. “Stop talking and listen,” she said, using the voice Mother had always used to command instant attention. “You feel it in your nose, like the beginning of a sneeze or the start of wanting to weep. But then it draws down,
through your throat, down your breastbone, then down through your stomach to your groin. You draw it tight with your diaphragm, as if you were straining to lift something. Draw it
tight
. Only pull your nose down and your groin up with it.”

He looked baffled and confused as she talked. Clearly Ram hadn’t taught him this, maybe because with Rigg’s gift it wouldn’t work. But he had to do it—her gift wouldn’t get them away from Vadesh because he was a machine and he had heard everything they said, he’d know that if he just waited long enough he’d see them again. Rigg had to get them away, and so all she could do was try to help him get control of the power he had used to jump away from the knife.

She started to repeat the instructions and this time he tried to obey her. She could see tears starting in his eyes, just as they had in hers when she was first learning. A quivering in the muscles beside his nose, a twitching of the lower eyelids. And a clenching of his belly, a slight bend to his body.

His hand was still in midair, trembling, where he expected to find Olivenko.

Vadesh was nearly upon them, smiling, smiling, smiling.

“I can see him,” whispered Rigg. His hand moved.

And then Param could see that there was a sleeve in Rigg’s hand. No arm, just a sleeve. But then the arm was there, and in that instant it became Olivenko, turning now to face them, and there was Loaf, also turning, and the sounds of battle came back again, the stench of war, and Vadesh was gone.

Rigg didn’t hesitate, he turned his head back toward where Umbo had been. Rigg gave a vigorous nod, then cast his chin
high, then nodded forward again. Param realized: He’s not going to give the hand signal because that would require him to let go either of her or of Olivenko.

But what if their jaunt to the week after the battle had made them invisible to Umbo? What if they were lost to him no matter what they did?

“Give Umbo the signal!” Param shouted to Loaf, to Olivenko.

But before they could obey her, the stockade was gone, and the stink, and the noise. It was a quiet morning again. Umbo was right where he should be. The city had all its tallest towers again. And Param and Rigg were both there with the others.

“Ram’s left elbow,” exclaimed Rigg in his relief.

“No, it’s
my
left elbow you’ve got,” said Olivenko. “Where did you come from? I thought you were over talking to those women.”

“You disappeared,” said Loaf. “I thought Param had done whatever it is she does.”

“No,” said Param. “I almost did, but I stopped myself.”

“But I felt you slip out of my control,” said Umbo. “Like having a loose tooth pull away. I’d been holding you so tightly, it hurt when you vanished. I lost you.”

“I know,” said Rigg, and then he grinned foolishly. “Umbo, it was me. Param figured it out. I’ve been learning how to jump without even realizing it. I
felt
what you were doing, I think I was even helping, but I didn’t know how to
make
it happen only I did by reflex, when she tried to stab me.”

“Param?” asked Loaf, alarmed.

“No, the woman we were talking to, we scared her, she was
in the middle of a war, she was armed, so of course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do,
we
do—”

“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”

“I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became
real
and—”

“And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”

“Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.

Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her
weeks
and he got it with the first lesson.

Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods
with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught
him
nothing.

“They’re all lying snakes,” she said.

The others looked at her. “The men with those facemasks on them?” asked Loaf.

“How could they lie?” asked Rigg. “They can’t even talk.”

Umbo had understood her, though. “She means the expendables. Vadesh and Ram. Your father, Rigg.”

“All I gave you was the first fifteen seconds of the very first lesson your so-called father gave me when he first started teaching me to control my timesense,” said Param. “Why didn’t he give
you
those fifteen seconds?”

Rigg’s excitement gave way to realization. “He taught me everything he
wanted
me to know.”

“Just like Vadesh,” said Param. “They think they’re gods, they think they have the right to just
decide
, regardless of what we want or need—they think they know best about everything.”

“Maybe they do,” said Olivenko.

Param whirled on him. “Yes, just like Mother, she thought she knew best—she thought she had the right to kill me, the way Vadesh betrayed the people of the city—”

“He did what?” asked Loaf.

“He burned a gap in the stockade,” said Rigg. “He let the facemask people drive the uninfected ones out of the city. He chose one side over the other and it was the parasites he chose. He calls them ‘natives’ but he claims they’re still human.”

“Does it matter?” asked Olivenko. “They’re all dead now.”

“He picked,” said Param angrily, “and he chose the parasites over the human race.”

“We can’t trust him,” said Rigg.

“But we already didn’t trust him,” said Olivenko.

“Now we
know
he’s our enemy,” said Param.

“At least now Rigg can go into the past without me,” said Umbo. But it seemed to Param that he wasn’t entirely happy about it.

“I could never have gotten us back to the present,” said Rigg. “I can only go into the past where there are paths I can hook onto. How would I get back into the future without you to anchor us?”

Param realized what was going on. Umbo was feeling unneeded and Rigg was trying to reassure him. But the more Rigg said, the angrier Umbo seemed to be getting. Or maybe he wasn’t angry. Maybe he was just hurt. Maybe he hated having Rigg reassure him.

“We’re all talented and we still need each other,” said Param, trying to stop them.

“Not all of us,” said Olivenko. “Loaf and I are completely talent-free, when it comes to time.”

“Except that I’ve lived through a lot more of it than any of you,” said Loaf.

“Is everybody going to be offended or embarrassed because they don’t have everybody else’s ability?” demanded Param. “None of us knows what we’re doing. We’re all still learning, we all still need each other, and we’re up against this expendable who apparently likes monsters more than humans.”

“And here he comes,” said Olivenko. His glance made them all look in the same direction. Vadesh was crossing the lawn toward them, just as he had done ten thousand years in the past, the week after the battle.

“Careful,” said Param softly. “He can hear every word we say, even at this distance.”

“Then he’ll understand my contempt for him,” said Loaf.

“Oh, I do!” called Vadesh. “But now you know why I was so happy to see you cross through the Wall! I’ve been waiting ten thousand years for you! And Ram refused to tell me anything about you when I asked him. Of course, until you were born he might not have
known
anything. It just occurred to me—maybe my inquiries were the reason he started looking for people with the power to manipulate time. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully paradoxical? I met you, I asked Ram about you, and because of my questions, he started manipulating the bloodlines until you were born! I think perhaps I created you! Isn’t that amusing?”

“Ha ha,” said Loaf. “And you know what’s really funny?”

By now Vadesh was almost there with them. “Please tell me,” he said.

“You still don’t get it that maybe the reason Ram wouldn’t tell you anything is that you managed to get all the humans in your wallfold
killed
.”

Vadesh reached out and knocked Loaf down. Flicked him, or so it seemed, with a casual brush of his hand, and Loaf staggered backward and fell. When he got up he clutched his left shoulder, where Vadesh had hit him, and he was panting from the pain.

“It’s not broken,” said Vadesh. “I don’t damage human beings.
I don’t kill them. We expendables
can’t
kill people. Why do you think I only burned the grass between the armies?”

“But people died,” said Olivenko.

“People killed
each other
,” said Vadesh. “But I never did.”

“Just the way you didn’t damage
me
,” said Loaf savagely. “You were just telling me to shut up, is that it?”

“And yet you still didn’t get the message,” said Vadesh with a smile. “Why did the smart ones bother to bring you along?”

Loaf became even more furious, but he had felt the power of Vadesh’s blow—Param watched him restrain himself.

“Very good,” said Vadesh. “Slow, but he does learn.”

“You’ve made your point,” said Rigg. “You’re stronger than we are. You can knock us around. But we can get away from you whenever we want. So I suggest that you never hit any of us again, or we’re gone.”

Vadesh looked genuinely stricken—but what did any of his humanlike expressions mean? He was as false as Mother; yet, just as with Mother, Param couldn’t keep herself from responding to him as if he were a real person, with real feelings. When he looked so hurt at Rigg’s words, Param found herself wanting to reassure him.

“Just tell us what you want from us,” said Param. “Then we’ll decide if we want to give it to you.”

“And I’ll decide if I want to give you more water,” said Vadesh.

“And we’ll decide if we want to go back to a time before you and your kind ever got to this world, cross back through the Wall, and never let you anywhere near us again,” said Rigg.

Vadesh’s smile never wavered. “Stalemate,” he said. “Come back
into the city and you can have all the safe water you want. Then I’ll tell you what I need from you, and you can decide what you want to do about it. What could be more fair than that?”

“Coming from a genocidal traitor,” said Param, “I think that’s a generous offer.”

She half expected him to give her the same little flick of violence that Loaf had been subjected to. But he only winked at her. “You can’t hurt my feelings,” he said. “I don’t have any.”

But to Param it seemed that his violence against Loaf could only be explained by hurt feelings. Vadesh lashed out when Loaf taunted him for getting all the humans in his wallfold killed. Whatever Vadesh might be, he didn’t like being accused of . . . genocide? Or failure? Whatever it was that provoked him, it was clear that he
could
be provoked, and by words alone. He was dangerous, and they all knew it now.