Ruins

CHAPTER 16 Temporary Death

For Param, the months in the Odinfolder library were the happiest time of her life. Her childhood had been spent as the target of symbolic rejection of the Sessamid monarchy. Whatever was done to her, was done to the royal family, so the People’s government never tired of “accidentally” allowing her to be humiliated. Only the discovery of her ability to vanish from their sight, to let the world pass rapidly by while she observed in perfect silence, had protected her.

During her childhood, her education had been limited. It consisted of whatever her mother told her, the Gardener’s few lessons in controlling her time-slicing, and whatever she learned from the occasional host who took some interest in her. She learned to read and write, and enjoyed reading, but she had no idea what to read. Any book she knew enough to ask for was obtained for her, but without books to browse, she could make no discoveries.

In her solitude she had thought much about what little she had read, but now, with the histories of all the wallfolds opened up before her, she could replace her empty childhood with the memories of kingdoms and republics, of nations nomadic or sedentary, marauding or peaceful.

Let Rigg and Umbo, Loaf and Olivenko study whatever they wanted—the human race on Earth, the functioning of starships, military techniques and technology, the deep science of the Odinfolders—none of it interested Param. She was discovering the world of her birth, the world that she had only seen as it came to visit within the walls of her dwellingplaces, then raced past her whenever she felt the need to hide in the invisibility of her time-slicing. She was finding out who she would have been, if she had been free; or, if not free, then shaped within her destiny as the royal child.

Accustomed as she was to contemplation, meditation, reflection, and the fantasies of a lonely child, Param saw herself in every history, and found lessons for herself as well. In this nation, this wallfold, this event, here is what she would be, that is what she would do. She would not have committed her people to fruitless attempts to conquer the mountain fastness of Gorogo; she would have sheltered the trading people of Inkik instead of persecuting them and driving them out; she would have married for love where another ruler married for reasons of state, and vice versa.

I would have been a great queen, she concluded on many days.

I would have been happiest as a commoner, for powerful people are more miserable and lonely than simple ones, she concluded on other days.

But every day saw her horizons widening, her vicarious memory deepening. There were worlds now blossoming inside her imagination. The others might think her solitary and withdrawn, but for Param, compared to her life before, she was gregarious and enthusiastic. She was broadening, reaching out, filled with curiosity and wonder.

She knew that the others usually talked around her and seemed surprised whenever she spoke; often, too, she could see that they thought that what she spoke of was not to the point of their conversation. But what of that? Their conversations were rarely on a point she cared about, and when their words made her think of something she did care about, she said it, boldly speaking up at the moment of her thought, in a way she never had before.

Umbo thought that he loved her? He hardly listened to her, since she had nothing to say of spaceships and he cared nothing about the intense spiritual lives of the people of Adamfold, or the strange chaos of the child-ruled forest dwellers of Mamom, who allowed certain children to choose the site of their next village by seeing where they wandered, and what they were curious about.

And Olivenko, who once had seemed so wise to her, was surprisingly ignorant of history and uninterested in learning more about it. Instead he was all physics and metaphysics, wondering about how time travel worked and how it was related to gravity. Why should they care? It was not as if Param or her fellow émigrés from Ramfold could change how the world worked; they obeyed the laws of physics, whatever they were, and had whatever talents they had. Did Olivenko think that by studying these things, he would acquire some talent for time travel that he never had before? Or was he hoping to discover a machine like the Odinfolders’ time-sender? What good is it to study things too big to move?

Loaf, on the other hand, seemed to understand the world much as Param did. He listened to her accounts of strange customs and histories as if he were interested in what she was saying, and not just in the fact that the only woman in their group was saying them. He might bend everything to his own understanding, but Param didn’t mind that: It only mattered that he received what she offered to them all from her research, and treated it as having value.

And then there was her brother, Rigg, so desperate to be a good man that he would never be a truly effective leader. Real leadership required authority and ruthlessness, she well understood. That’s why she didn’t want it. But Rigg did want to lead, yet thought he could do it by persuasion, by meekly taking suggestions, by genuinely loving the members of their little band.

Didn’t he know that gentleness didn’t just seem weak, it was weak? Yet she found it endearing that he tried so earnestly, and so she treated him with a kind of respect that he didn’t really deserve, since only strength mattered, in the end. She saw in Rigg the person she might have been, if she, too, had wandered in the wild with the Gardener, the Golden Man. With only wild animals and a manlike machine for company, what could Rigg ever understand about the ravening appetites of human beings? We are the wildest animals, Rigg, she wanted to say. And then he would say, Who was talking about animals?

We are all talking about animals. More to the point, we are talking as animals. We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.

The only thing that keeps me from being a truly extraordinary ruler, as I was born to be, is that I have no access to the people whom it would have been my right to rule, and no idea what to do with them if I ever won my place.

My place? There is no such place. I’m a queen-in-training when I ought to be studying horticulture and growing flowers, beautiful and useless.

Such were her thoughts during these glorious months of exploration and imagination. She lived a thousand different lives, conquered, ruled, lost, loved. The others understood nothing of what went on inside her heart.

Then came the day when they left her.

Umbo had gone first, making an expedition to visit the buried starship of Odinfold in order to test and expand what he had learned in his absurdly focused study of a single thing.

Then Swims-in-the-Air had said something to Rigg that alarmed him, and he had taken Loaf and Olivenko to follow Umbo. Nobody even looked for her, or asked her what she thought. Swims-in-the-Air mentioned they were gone, and when Param asked why they hadn’t told her where they were going, Swims-in-the-Air had only laughed lightly and said, “I don’t think they needed you, my dear.”

Param had simply gone back to her studies.

Until she noticed that her room was filling up with mice.

They swarmed around the floor and up onto the table. Their constant motion was distracting. “Why do you all have to be here?” she asked, not expecting them to understand or respond.

But they did respond—by ceasing their movement, by all turning to her at once and gazing at her.

They’re only mice, she told herself.

But the intensity of their gaze was disconcerting, and when it continued, it became alarming.

She got up from her place, intending to leave the overcrowded room. But when she stepped, there was a mouse under her foot. It squealed in agony and when she moved her foot to release it, she saw that blood had spurted out of its throat. Worse, she had stepped on yet another mouse, and this one made no sound at all when it died; she only felt the sickening crunch under her foot.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There are too many of you in here, there’s no room to walk. Please go away.”

Please! Was she a beggar now, she who should have been Queen-in-the-Tent? Was she reduced to pleading with mice?

In answer to her words—or to the deaths of the mice she had stepped on—more mice came into the room, until the floor and table were as solidly covered as if they were carpeted. No, as if they had grown a pelt and now had muscles that throbbed and surged under the many-colored fur.

She didn’t want to kill any more of them, and besides, they were frightening her. It was a sign of how much she had changed that she had not gone invisible the moment she noticed there were too many mice in the room. But even if she no longer sliced time by reflex, she could certainly do it as a matter of good sense. There was no reason to stay in this place, trampling mice and snuffing out their annoying little lives.

She went invisible, and began to walk out of the room.

But something was very wrong.

In one sense, everything worked perfectly normally. She could now walk right through the mice without crushing them.

On the other hand, the mice did not speed up or scurry around madly the way people did when Param slowed herself down. Usually they sped up and scampered like mice; but these mice did nothing of the kind. In fact, for a moment Param wondered if she had somehow acquired the opposite talent, and had frozen them in time, for they did not move at all. They stayed in place, noses pointing toward her.

But they were moving. Tiny movements, yes, but it made the carpet of mouse fur undulate and shift constantly. And those shifts were as rapid as she would have expected—she was indeed slicing time and skipping forward in tiny increments, walking as she did.

As she made her slow progress along the floor toward the door, she realized that the mice were not staring at the place where she had been. They were staring at where she was now.

They could see her.

It was impossible! When she sliced time, she never remained in the same place long enough to be visible to humans, whose brains couldn’t register an object that was passing through each location for only a split second at a time.

But mice were not human. Their metabolisms were faster. Did this mean that they also perceived more rapidly? Did it mean that they could see and register her presence for the tiny moment she spent in any one place?

Then something else. The mice were moving a thick cylinder of steel through the room, bringing it closer to her.

How could they lift it?

They weren’t lifting it at all. It was jumping from place to place. Near the door; halfway across the room; at the base of the table; up onto the table. It stayed in each place for what might have been five or ten minutes, though to Param it seemed only seconds.

They were shifting it in time and space. Or no, the mice weren’t doing it—how could they? The Odinfolders must be using their time-sender to move the thick cylinder from place to place.

A thick cylinder of solid metal that could be placed anywhere in space and time.

She thought of Mother ordering her soldiers to sweep the air with swords and metal rods, in the effort to pass metal through her body and kill her. It was not hard to imagine that the Odinfolders controlling this cylinder had something similar in mind.

Now she could see that each time the cylinder moved, the mice moved out of its way first. It damaged none of them. In fact, it might well be that the cylinder could not move until the mice had cleared enough space for it; that might be the reason for its staying in each place for minutes at a time, waiting for the mice, their noses and paws and tails, to get out of the way.

She thought of Olivenko and his discussion of rules of physics. Two objects unable to occupy the same space at the same time. That was the principle that made Param slightly sick when she moved through soft things, like people and organic walls and doors—wooden things. Since most of any object was the empty space between and within atoms, there were surprisingly few collisions when she jumped ahead in time. When Rigg and Umbo shifted back in time, they never ended up inside a tree or a rock. They could move into a volume of air without causing the annihilation of more than a few particles.

Was that what this cylinder was doing? They could move it in time and space, but they couldn’t move it into a location occupied by something as substantial as a mouse. The mice had to move first.

But that was the second most frightening thing: The mice were moving. Whoever was controlling the movement of the cylinder was also controlling the mice.

The most frightening thing was the way the mice continued to stare at her, seeing exactly where she was. They could see her; she was not invisible. Their eyes were pointing to her. Whoever was controlling the cylinder could therefore put it into the space occupied by her heart or her brain during one of the gaps between her time-slicing jumps, and when she reappeared in that spot a fraction of a second later, that organ of her body would be annihilated.

Nor could she easily stop her time-slicing and reenter the normal timeflow. For then her feet would occupy the same space as the mice underfoot. It would not kill her, but she would be crippled. In agony. Her feet would be unable to hold her. It might take weeks for her feet to heal. And the mice themselves would be quite dead.

Why should she care if mice died? Someone was using them to try to kill her!

And they would succeed. Any moment they wanted to, they could put the cylinder into her body space and, when she came back into momentary existence, it would be sliding downward through her body, drawn by gravity while she was not there, then suddenly stopped and cradled by the skin and bones of her body when she did reappear with the cylinder inside her.

I’m going to die, she thought, and her stomach went sick and her head felt light and she was filled with more terror than she had felt before, more than the fear she had felt when she and Umbo leapt from the high rock and slowly fell downward toward the metal being waved around by Mother’s men.

The difference was that then she had Umbo with her—Umbo, who could jump backward in time and take her with him.

Who would save her now? Even if Rigg or Umbo showed up, they couldn’t see her; Rigg could see her path, but even he could not reach into the slices of time and take hold of her.

Why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t they go back to an earlier time and give me one of Umbo’s trademarked visions of his future self, saying, Get out of this room! Or simply taking her by the hand and moving her to another time or place.

Maybe they can’t get back into the library. Maybe when they found out I was dead, the Odinfolders kept them from coming here, where they could intercept me and prevent this terrible moment and save my life.

But then, they could always go back to a time before we came to the library. Back when we first came to Odinfold, but before the Odinfolders knew that we were here. Why didn’t they?

She knew the answer. If they went back and warned the whole group that Param would be murdered here, nearly a year after they arrived, then they would turn aside and would not learn all the things that they had learned. They wouldn’t know about the Visitors and the Destroyers. Nor would they know about the high technology of the Odinfolders and the billions of people who lived in these vast ruins when they were still mighty cities.

They had to choose between what they had learned in Odinfold, and saving my life at the cost of never learning it. And they chose correctly. What was her death, compared to the need to know about the end of the world and save it?

I am like a soldier who dies in battle. Regrettable, but an unavoidable loss.

Unless . . .

They didn’t have to warn her. They could come back and simply take her. A warning would make them all turn away, change the past, annihilate the months they had just lived through. But if they came back to the moment of their first arrival, they could take her away and drag her into some other time, earlier or later. She would be prevented from learning anything she had learned, but they would keep the knowledge that they had, because they would still have lived through all these months and would keep their memories when they shifted in time.

But they didn’t do it.

No, no. They didn’t do it in this timeflow, because they couldn’t possibly know to do it unless they found out that I was killed. It is my death that provokes them into going back to change time and save me. So I have to go through this whole process, I have to see my death coming and then, most terribly, die.

Only then can they travel back in time and interfere with the forward flow of it, snatching me out of time before I can be murdered in this way. That version of myself will never live through these terrible minutes. Because in that version of time, I didn’t die.

But in this one, I will die. I won’t remember it, in that other timeflow, but it has to happen in order for them to save me, so my death will still be real, because it will still have its residual effects, even though a version of myself, a copy, will move forward into the future without this death.

To that version of me, this death will seem unreal, temporary; it will seem to have been avoided.

But it will not be avoided. I will live through it. I will die, and I will stay dead, I will; this version of me will be extinguished and I don’t want to die.

The cylinder disappeared again, and almost immediately Param felt a searing agony in her throat, the heat of billions of molecules being torn apart, some of them becoming radioactive as atoms collided and tore each other apart and then reassembled. She lived just long enough to feel the heat pulse through her entire body, every nerve screaming with the pain of burning to death in a searing moment.

Param noticed the room was full of mice. They were scrambling up onto the table, swarming all over the floor. Annoyed and a little frightened, Param was proud of herself for not time-slicing by simple reflex. No, she would get up and leave the room.

But before she could even push back her chair, Rigg appeared in the air above the table, his feet a few inches above its surface. He dropped to the table, crushing mice under his feet. He reached out his hand to her.

Something terrible must be about to happen, Param realized. Rigg is coming back to save me.

She held out her hand and clasped his.

And suddenly the mice were gone.

Rigg pulled her to her feet, then jumped off the table. “Come on,” he said. There were several mice in the room.

“They can see us,” said Param.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Rigg. “We have to get outside, to the flyer.” He took her hand again and began drawing her after him, out into a corridor. “We should never have let ourselves spend so much time in these underground rooms. It’s devilishly hard getting in and out.”

They turned a corner and there was Mouse-Breeder, coming down a flight of stairs.

Rigg squeezed her hand and she saw him give her a warning glance.

“Mouse-Breeder!” Rigg called out. “I hope there isn’t a rule against running in the library!”

“None that I know of,” he said cheerfully. “Where are you headed?”

“Up for sunlight!” said Rigg. “I had a sudden need for air, and my sister decided to join me.”

“Have fun,” said Mouse-Breeder.

They ran past him up the stairs.

“He doesn’t know.”

“It’s six months ago,” said Rigg. “But the moment he runs into one of us in this time, he’ll realize that he saw us running because we came from the future.”

“What does it matter?” said Param. “Wherever we go, whatever we do, they can use their time machine to send something to kill us—a sword in the heart, poison into our bodies, we’ll never be safe.”

“Stop talking and run again,” said Rigg. “And don’t worry, they won’t do it.”

“How do you know?” asked Param.

“Because there is no machine,” said Rigg.

“But . . .”

“Run,” said Rigg.

She was utterly out of breath, her lungs on fire and her legs leaden with exhaustion when they reached the surface and came out into sunlight.

There was Umbo, watching intently. And suddenly a flyer appeared behind him, and Loaf and Olivenko stood beside it.

They must have transported Rigg back in time the way they used to do it, when they worked together. Rigg must have found a path that would take him to the exact time he wanted to reach. Then Umbo must have slowed time down so he could take hold of that path. Umbo waited here so that he could bring them back into the present when Rigg returned to the out-of-doors with Param in tow.

By the time Rigg and Param reached the flyer, Olivenko and Loaf were already inside it. Umbo waited till they arrived. Then he reached out and took, not her hand, but Rigg’s, and drew them up the ramp into the flyer.

“Good work,” said Loaf.

“Rigg and Umbo just saved you from a terrible death,” said Olivenko.

The flyer took off.

“What, the mice were going to attack me?” asked Param, incredulous.

“Not by nibbling you to death, no,” said Olivenko.

“A cylinder of metal in the throat,” said Rigg. He demonstrated the size of it with his hands. “They slipped it into place during one of the gaps in your time-slicing. It tore your head off your body and burned you up.”

Param felt ill. “Why? What did I do?”

“I think they wanted to show us how easily we could be killed,” said Olivenko.

“I think they wanted to force us to use our powers and get out of here,” said Loaf.

“Why?” asked Param. “All they had to do was ask us to leave!”

“The people who wanted us to go may have been in the minority,” said Loaf. “We only ever met Swims-in-the-Air and Mouse-Breeder. It gave us an impression of perfect unity among the Odinfolders. But there may well have been a powerful faction that wanted us gone.”

“By killing me?”

“They knew we wouldn’t leave you dead,” said Rigg. “And they knew that we wouldn’t stay.”

“But what about meeting the Visitors?” asked Param. “I thought we were supposed to figure out a way to convince them not to wipe out Garden.”

“I don’t think so,” said Umbo. “I don’t think that was ever the plan.”

“They’ve been lying to us?”

“Of course they have,” said Loaf. “They’re only human.”

“Why did we believe them?” said Rigg, shaking his head. He imitated Swims-in-the-Air’s melodious voice. “ ‘We want you to figure things out yourselves. We want you to find your own way to convince the Visitors that we’re worth saving.’ Silbom’s right heel!”

“What did they want?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Loaf.

“I have a theory,” said Umbo.

“Which is?” asked Rigg.

“You’ll think it’s stupid,” said Umbo.

“Probably,” said Rigg. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t be right.”

“Or lead us to a right answer,” said Loaf.

“I think they’ve given up completely on changing the Visitors’ minds,” said Umbo. “I think they only wanted us to get on the Visitors’ starship long enough to smuggle a weapon aboard. A weapon that they’d carry back to Earth and wipe out the human race there before they can possibly send the Destroyers to kill all the people of Garden.”

“A weapon?” asked Param. “I thought we couldn’t build weapons.”

“Not literally a weapon,” said Umbo. “They can’t make a weapon. They haven’t made a weapon. Not mechanical, not biological, no such thing.”

“Then what is it that they’re supposedly going to smuggle back to Earth?” asked Rigg.

In reply, Umbo gestured toward Loaf.

Only now did Param notice that a couple of mice were perched on Loaf’s shoulders.

“Mice?” she asked.

“I told you there was no machine,” said Rigg. “But they think there is one. They think they’ve seen it, they think they know how it works. Instead, what they’ve seen is a very solid-seeming hologram. And when things get sent back in time and over to some distant location, they think the machine is doing it.”

Param realized what he was leading up to. “But it’s the mice doing it.”

“Mouse-Breeder’s mice,” said Umbo. “They have human genes in them. Including the genes of time manipulation. Only in these mice, the genes are expressed by time-displacement of inanimate objects. They can put anything anywhere.”

“So when they put a cylinder in my throat—”

“It’s what some Odinfolder humans told them to do,” said Umbo. “And they obeyed, because they knew that we could retrieve you.”

“Though it was harder than they thought,” said Rigg. “Because we didn’t want to retrieve you from a point before you learned all that you could learn here.”

“Whatever it is you learned,” said Olivenko. Was there a bit of scorn in his voice?

“We’ve spent nearly a year here, all told—a whole year since we left Ramfold and went to Vadeshfold. Which of the things that happened in that time should be erased?” asked Loaf. “We wanted to save your life, of course, but we didn’t want to kill a year of it in the process.”

Param felt uneasy, thinking of a version of the future in which her burnt-up body had no head left on it. “What will we do now?”

“Go to the border with Larfold,” said Rigg. “The wallfold to the north. Where Father Knosso was murdered.”

“We’re going to go back earlier and save him?” asked Param.

“We don’t dare,” said Umbo. “Not yet, anyway. We can’t go back before the time when Rigg took control of the Wall.”

“The flyer won’t pass through the Wall,” said Umbo. “We have to walk through. I’d rather not do it while experiencing the agony of the Wall.”

“We’ll go through the Wall at almost exactly the time Rigg took control,” said Loaf. “While we were still hiking around in Vadeshfold. Before we ever appeared here.”

“But they’ll see us,” said Param.

“Who?” asked Rigg.

“The Odinfolders.”

“Oh, well—they probably will,” said Rigg, “since they seem to cluster around the Wall. But they won’t know to stop us.”

“Unless the mice send them another Future Book,” said Umbo, laughing.

“Is that who’s been writing the Books of the Future?” asked Param.

“No, no,” said Olivenko. “This is the only timestream in which these mice existed. All the other Future Books were sent using the original crude displacement machine, before time-shifting was turned over to the mice and became precise.”

“And did the Odinfolders—the mice, I suppose—really alter Father’s genes? And create Umbo outright?”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “But this is the first timestream in which we existed. Ramex was carefully breeding for time-shifting power, but he hadn’t reached us yet, not until the mice intervened. And he would never have reached our level in his breeding program, because Garden would have been destroyed first.”

They explained to Param all that they had learned in the starship. And Param could see that something else had happened, too—Umbo and Rigg were still a little wary around each other, but Umbo was actually cooperating with Rigg and not arguing with every little thing he said. Something happened on that starship, and Param asked what it was.

“I died a couple of times,” said Umbo.

“Really?”

“Copies of me,” said Umbo. He explained how that worked, and Param nodded. “The way there must have been two versions of me back in the library, when we were running away a minute ago. Six months ago.”

“Only because your earlier self didn’t see your later self, and so you didn’t turn away from the path in which you time-shifted, you didn’t cause yourself to split,” said Olivenko.

“But I still died,” said Param.

“Only it’s all right,” said Umbo, “because we don’t remember dying.”

“It’s not all right,” said Rigg.

Param and Umbo both looked at him, waiting for an explanation, and Param was surprised to see how upset Rigg looked.

“It’s not all right, because I saw you both dead.” He looked away. “I never want to see that again.”

“Really gruesome?” asked Umbo.

“There was a version of both of you,” said Rigg, “that felt all the pain and terror of death. You don’t remember it, but it happened.”

“And by the Odinfolders’ account, the whole world has gone through that many times over,” said Olivenko.

“Which brings us back to Umbo’s idea,” said Param. “How do you figure the Odinfolders are going to destroy the human race on Earth, if they haven’t made a weapon or even planned what such a weapon might be?”

“The mice,” said Umbo, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“What can they do?” asked Param.

“If a breeding pair can make it back to Earth,” said Umbo, “they’ll have maybe a dozen children after three weeks. If only five of them are females, and they reach sexual maturity in six weeks, and they have the same number of female children, five in a generation, how many will they have before that Destroyer fleet is scheduled to take off?”

Loaf raised a hand. “These mice reach sexual maturity in four weeks. It’s one of the first changes Mouse-Breeder made.”

“Even without any notion of weaponry when they arrive,” said Umbo, “they’ll have several generations to learn all about it on Earth. And plenty of time in which to carry out the war. They won’t even need to learn about mechanical weapons, anyway. They’re experts on genes. Look what they did to us.”

Param was in awe. “You think a pair of mice could destroy the human race in a year?”

“That’s if only one breeding pair makes it through,” said Umbo. “And I’m betting more than that will make it.”

“Mice are vermin, in the eyes of Earth people,” said Olivenko. “They’ll exterminate them.”

“They won’t even know the mice are there,” said Umbo. “It won’t be like the library, where they’re out in the open. Mice are good at hiding. And the voyage doesn’t take long.”

“How will they get off the ship?” asked Param.

“They’re collectively even smarter than we are,” said Rigg. “They’ll find a way.”

“And then the Destroyers won’t come,” said Param. “So Garden will be saved.”

No one answered her. Umbo looked away. Rigg blushed. Was he ashamed of her?

“That’s true,” said Loaf. “But how is it better to trade the destruction of human life on one planet for another?”

Param shook her head. “It isn’t, except for one point. This way, the planet that survives is ours. And I count that as very much better than the other way around. Does that make me a monster?”

“We’re all monsters,” said Loaf, “because we all thought of that. We’re just ashamed of ourselves for thinking it.”

“I’m not,” said Param.

And then it occurred to her that that was why Rigg had blushed. Because he was ashamed of her for not being ashamed.

Which was why Rigg could never have been King-in-the-Tent.