Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (28 page)

“Well, there’s this,” said Olivenko. “Even if that happened, and we couldn’t save ourselves—or rather,
you
couldn’t save us with your time-shifting—the Odinfolders would send another book into the past and tell them—and us—that having us get on the Visitors’ ship was a very bad idea and we shouldn’t do it.”

Param laughed. “So the fact that they haven’t already received such a Future Book proves that we succeeded?”

“Or that we decided not to do it,” said Rigg.

“Or that we did it, and failed, but the Odinfolders decided not to show us the Future Book that resulted, and just went on to try something else.”

“Or they gave up,” said Param, “and just decided to die.”

“No matter how much we learn,” said Umbo, “we never know enough.”

“All we can do is what we’ve always done,” said Rigg. “Make a try at something, and then if it doesn’t work, go back and try again. But we can’t always go back.”

Umbo leapt to his feet, “Right, there are things that stay
terrible
. For instance, Rigg, that you’ve completely forgotten about going back to save my brother Kyokay’s life.”

It struck Rigg like a knife, that this was part of what Umbo still held against him. “We already decided that we can’t, because if we did, then we’d never have gotten together to learn how to manipulate time.”

“But now we know more, we have more control, we could figure out a way to catch him partway down maybe, or—”

“Maybe we can,” said Rigg. “Maybe we can put in a net to catch him, or train a giant bird to snatch him out of the air, or a huge puff of air to blow him out to sea. But we’ll do it later—go back and save one boy after we’ve figured out how to save the whole world.”

“So you’re saying Kyokay has to stay dead, so that we can do whatever useless stupidity we’ve done since we found out how to do this stuff?” said Umbo. “Well, you know what? Maybe the best thing would be to stop Kyokay from falling in the first place, so we
don’t
ever learn to do our little time tricks, and then all the rest of our miserable history doesn’t happen!”

“And then,” said Param bitterly, “you get to enjoy living with your brother in your happy home, under the authority of your
beloved father, while
I
get murdered by my mother and General Citizen because Rigg isn’t there to save me.”

“But if Citizen didn’t capture Rigg and realize who he was—” began Umbo.

“Whatever Citizen and Hagia Sessamin were plotting, it didn’t begin with Rigg’s capture,” said Olivenko scornfully. “Your father would probably have killed you by now, Umbo, and meanwhile Param would also have been murdered, and even if none of those things happened, the Visitors would come and then the Destroyers and kill us all, so what exactly are you saying here, that having a few more years with your brother—who would probably have found some other colorful way to get himself killed—
that
would be worth the destruction of the planet?”

Umbo buried his face in his hands. “I just want to stop all this. When did this become my job?”

“It’s not,” said Param. “It’s
my
job, and Rigg’s, because we were born with responsibility.”

“Stop it,” said Rigg. “Let’s just face the fact that we can’t fix every bad thing that ever happened, because every change we make brings about new bad things, because in the real world, bad things happen, period, that’s it. People die and we can’t always unkill them, that’s how it is. I’m sorry Kyokay died, Umbo, and I’m sorry we can’t fix it yet without making a whole bunch of terrible unpredictable changes. And I’m sorry that Param is such a provincial twit that she makes stupid arrogant remarks about how the royal family is born to responsibility—”

“We are!” cried Param, leaping to her feet.

“At least you got angry,” said Rigg, “instead of disappearing on us.”

“I really like the way you’re making peace here, Rigg,” said Loaf.

“Was that Loaf or the facemask talking?” asked Rigg. “Listen, we have plenty of reasons to be angry and resentful and suspicious and whatever else we’re feeling. Grief-stricken, terrified, whatever it is, it’s completely justified. And if we all
hate
each other what difference does it make? We have these abilities, which may be worthless, but we have them, and if there’s any chance we can use them to save the world, then let’s do it, and if we fail, well, we’re all dead so who cares, and if we succeed, then we’ll have plenty of time to feud and bicker like children, and no, I’m not saying I’m any better, I’m so lonely and angry all the time that I can hardly sleep, and I wish my father had really been my father and not some stupid machine, so don’t tell me what it’s like to lose somebody you loved, or to be disappointed in life, or whatever else is going wrong. Loaf misses Leaky. I miss my father. Param’s mother, the only person she trusted, tried to kill her. Olivenko’s mentor, Knosso, got dragged out of his boat and drowned. Have I given the complete list of Things We Haven’t Been Able To Change?”

“No,” said Loaf, “but it was a pretty good start.”

“We’ve been studying forever, and the Visitors are close to arriving, and while we might end up trying the idea of getting on the Visitors’ starship, if they’ll even let us, and going back to Earth, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s
not
what we should do first.”

“What
should
we do, then?” asked Olivenko.

“Not one thing,” said Rigg. “Nothing. The Visitors come, we watch from a distance, we see
for ourselves
what they are. Or maybe we even meet them and talk to them. But then they go, and we think about what we learned from them, and we go on studying everything we can, and then the Destroyers come, and we see what
that
looks like, and then we jump back in time to right after we got here, and
then
we decide what to do.”

They all sat there, looking at the ground, at the distant ruins, at the sky, at the elephants, at passing insects or the mice scurrying through the grass—anywhere but at each other, anywhere but at Rigg.

And finally Olivenko said, “That sounds like the best plan I’ve heard.”

“I think so, too,” said Param.

“Then unless Umbo’s an idiot,” said Loaf, “it’s unanimous.”

“I’m an idiot,” said Umbo, “but I still vote for it. Which should prove to all of you that it’s an absolutely stupid idea.”

“I agree,” said Rigg. “It’s cowardly and overly cautious and I wish somebody would think of a better plan. But for the meantime, it’s what we’re planning to do. Right?”

Right.

CHAPTER 14

The Knife

Umbo had always had mixed feelings about school. On the one hand, it got him away from home, and he didn’t have to work all that hard. On the other hand, he envied his friend Rigg for the way he only came to school now and then, and spent the rest of the year out in the deep forest with his father, trapping animals and bringing home the furs.

Then he learned that Rigg’s time in the forest was spent in a kind of schooling far more rigorous than the country school Umbo attended. And, after traveling with Rigg in varying degrees of wilderness, from the edges of civilization beside the Stashik River to the untouched wilderness of Vadeshfold, and seeing how hard Rigg had to work to find food and water for them all, and good campsites where they’d be safe from animals, Umbo had a new appreciation for the rigors of that supposedly free life that Rigg had lived.

Here in Odinfold, Umbo felt like he was back in school—and as a rather poor student, too. Knowing he could never catch up with Rigg’s sophisticated education, Olivenko’s deep scholarly training with King Knosso, and Param’s courtly training at her mother’s knee, Umbo set himself a much simpler, but very practical task—to learn everything he could about the starships from Earth.

He worked hard at this, and mastered it as well as could be expected. Now that he knew he had the heredity to be very bright, he enjoyed testing his own memory, wondering if he was a match for Rigg’s nearly perfect recall, or even Rigg’s superior.

But it was all a deception, because Umbo had a much more important purpose—one he could not speak of to anyone, not until he learned something useful.

There were deep holes in the things that the Odinfolders had told them, subjects they simply didn’t touch on. Moreover, the only Odinfolders who ever spoke to them were Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. They were affable, likeable, patient adults—but Umbo didn’t like the fact that apparently the rest of the people who lived here near the Wall were either forbidden to talk to the Ramfolders or uninterested in them, which seemed extravagantly unlikely.

Weren’t the Odinfolders supposed to be completely free? Weren’t they brilliant, creative people? Why, then, were they acting so incurious? Here were people who could manipulate the flow of time as if it were just another bodily function, and the Odinfolders didn’t want to meet them, talk to them, see a demonstration? No, there was a reason nobody talked to them, and
Umbo was pretty sure that it was to keep the Ramfolders from learning things that the Odinfolders didn’t want them to know.

They only had the Odinfolders’ word for it that any person that developed serious weapons would be killed, that they had broken into the programs that controlled the Wall but for some reason couldn’t break into the programs controlling the orbiters. It also seemed unbelievable to Umbo that the Odinfolders were really going to leave all the decisions up to the Ramfolders. That had to be illusory. They would
think
they were making the decisions, but in fact they were being shaped, forced into a certain path by the information the Odinfolders gave them, and the information they withheld.

Yet how could he discuss his doubts with any of his party? Down in the library, surrounded by mice that seemed to understand human speech, it seemed likely that everything they said was recorded for later study by the Odinfolders. And the mice were outdoors, too. A spy network covering the entire wallfold.

One question that bothered Umbo was the way the villages of the ten thousand remaining Odinfolders were all clustered near the Wall, according to their own maps, leaving the vast center of their country for the animals, which were reputedly wild but were quite possibly as domesticated as the mice.

Another question was why all the wallfolds were named for the colonist who played the dominant role in their earliest years. And yet this wallfold and Umbo’s home wallfold were both named for the same man, Ram Odin, the captain of the starship. Supposedly Ram Odin had only come to the surface of Garden in the one fold, Ramfold; why, then, was Odinfold also
named for him? And if the story was wrong, and there was a copy of Ram Odin in every wallfold, just as there was a copy of everyone else, why did he dominate in only two of the colonies? Why not all of them?

Yet these matters were not discussed in any of the books Umbo found. He deliberately asked for books that dealt with the earliest history of all the wallfolds, supposedly looking for references to the starships buried in each wallfold, but what he searched for was any reference to Ram Odin. Yet even in Ramfold and Odinfold, it was as if the man were legendary from the start, never actually living among the people.

How could he not live among them? He had descendants—the time-shifters of Ramfold were supposedly all descended from him. Were the time-shifting machines of the Odinfolders also using some ability that came from Ram Odin? Had he fathered children in
both
wallfolds? If so, then why not others?

Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air were so nice, so patient, so wise—but Umbo wondered how nice they’d be if he started asking these questions openly. They were such obvious matters that Umbo couldn’t believe he was the only one who thought of them—yet no one said anything or asked anything. It was as if they all knew that these subjects were forbidden even to think about.

But Umbo thought about them. Thought and studied and tried to get around the lack of information, but what the Odinfolders didn’t want him to find, he did not find.

After the meeting where they had decided to do nothing and merely observe the Visitors this time around, Umbo went
back to his lonely studies, just as the others did. Oh, they were sociable enough at mealtimes, sharing interesting tidbits from their research, joking with each other, offering theories about the people of Earth. But they never said anything personal or important, at least not in front of Umbo.

Is everyone silent with everyone else? Umbo wondered. Or is it just around me that they say nothing significant? Am I being frozen out, or are we all living in private worlds?

Human beings were not meant to lead such solitary lives.

And then one day it dawned on him that he might have a tool that would let him get answers in spite of the Odinfolders’ evasions, deceptions, and concealments. He had the knife.

The knife that the Odinfolders admitted to having made and then planted on the person Rigg stole it from, the first time they deliberately combined their talents in order to travel into the past. The knife that had replicas of the nineteen jewels embedded in the hilt.

How faithfully had the stones been replicated? Could they also control the ships? Control the Wall? Could the knife be used to communicate with the orbiters?

What had the Odinfolders made it for? Why had they given it to them? What did they make of the fact that it was Umbo who had been in control of it since Rigg was arrested in O, and even after his escape, when he could have taken it back?

Yet how could Umbo test the knife? What could he possibly do without being reported on to the Odinfolders?

And then it dawned on him: Why conceal it? Why not simply ask to go to the ship that was buried somewhere in the heart
of Odinfold? It was a natural culmination of his study of the starships.

“I need to go to the starship,” Umbo announced at dinner.

“Want company?” asked Rigg. “Or is this a solitary adventure?”

If Rigg went along, then it would be Rigg’s expedition, and if any good came from it, it would be Rigg’s achievement. Not because Rigg took credit. If anything, Rigg shunted praise away from himself. But that very fact would make it all the more likely that people would give him credit for anything Umbo found in the starship.