Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

  “It’s actually very sensible,” said the overseer. “Women put their lives at risk with every baby they have. Each one weakens them. But a man puts nothing at risk. It’s good to have a father to help with the little ones, good to have a marriage where people care for each other. But when a woman wants to stop, any time after three, he lets them move out right away. Just like that.”

  “Divorce at the wife’s option,” said Rigg.

  “Most women that love their husband, they stay out the six,” said the overseer. “But some die, just as the master fears. His policy is a wise one.”

  “So if you complain to him about the snoring, he’ll assume that you want a divorce.”

  “He won’t care what I want, sir,” said the overseer. “Why should he?”

  Rigg curbed his anger at this foolish system. “Why doesn’t her snoring keep the children awake?”

  “The doors are good and solid, sir,” said the overseer. “And they sleep like babies, because they are. They had that snoring the whole time they were in the womb, sir.”

  “And you don’t really want to sleep in a separate room because of the times she stops breathing.”

  “I don’t want her to die, sir,” and he burst into tears again.

  “My first decision,” said Rigg, “is that you must go immediately into the room where that spinner is waiting.”

  “But she’ll see me like this,” he said.

  “I want her to,” said Rigg. “Don’t you see that she’ll think I must have rebuked you severely, to reduce you to tears? That may satisfy her completely, don’t you think? Don’t show her your tears. Try to conceal them. She’ll see. Now go.”

  The man got up at once and went through the door that led to the room where the woman was waiting.

  “So you start with the illusion of having punished him,” said Ram Odin.

  “I don’t have any idea what to do.”

  “One thing you’ve done is quite remarkable,” said Ram Odin. “You got to the heart of the matter. The woman is going to feel remorseful for having made the overseer weep. It’s obvious she only complained about his rudeness because the factory is falling apart and she only has a right to complain about how he treats her.”

  “I know that,” said Rigg. “This is a terrible system, you know?”

  “Because in Ramfold, free workers and free managers are never in a situation where the employees are terrified to complain to the owner about how the manager is doing his job?”

  Rigg rolled his eyes. “That’s different.”

  “It’s the same,” said Ram Odin, “under different names. They are both owned by the same master. In Ramfold, they would both work for the same employer. But both would be terrified of losing their position.”

  “In Ramfold, the owner of the factory can’t divorce a man from his wife because he complains about her snoring.”

  “But in Ramfold,” Ram Odin said mildly, “the owner would demand that he explain why he’s sleeping during the hours he’s paying him to work. If he doesn’t fire him out of hand, he’ll demand that the manager find a way to sleep or quit his job. So the manager is right where this overseer is—does he act to protect his wife from her apnea? What good will it do her if he loses his position and can’t get a good recommendation? They’ll lose everything. Out on the street. Disaster. In all likelihood, reduced to poverty and—”

  “I get the point. But it still doesn’t help me figure out what to do.”

  “I think you should let me sit with the wife tonight. Let him sleep in my quarters. I’ll have the ship listen to her breathing and evaluate her medically and tell me whether the apnea is life-threatening.”

  Rigg looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Apnea. Stopping breathing from time to time. It affects a lot of people but very, very few die of it. If we can tell him that she’s not going to die, he can go sleep in the children’s room.”

  “Oh,” said Rigg.

  “And if she really is in danger, then we tell the owner that the overseer is torn between protecting his property—the wife—and managing the factory.”

  “The owner will still make them divorce,” said Rigg.

  “Not if you forbid him to do that,” said Ram Odin. “Remember, the owner is also a slave, and his owner is owned by someone who is owned by the Lord of Walls.”

  “I really hate Gathuurifold.”

  “No, you’re just barely coming to understand it, that’s all. You’ll find that people are still people and find a way to carve out a life for themselves within whatever rules their culture imposes on them. This master’s rules about marriage are actually derived from his religion—the ship was telling me this while you were listening to the overseer. It’s a very practical religion, not a lot of ritual but plenty of rules of life and most of them make sense. But as with all rule sets, there are unintended consequences. Like the women who have six babies so they don’t have to leave their husbands.”

  “You’re saying that the whole wallfold doesn’t have that rule.”

  “Most people who practice the religion don’t actually follow that rule. My guess is that rather than obey you about not forcing a divorce on them, the owner will sell the factory to someone else.”

  “Come on,” said Rigg. “Sell a factory because your overseer’s wife snores and the Wallman said you couldn’t split them up?”

  “Remember that the factory’s in a bit of a mess. Broken equipment. Badly managed.”

  “So the new owner will get rid of the overseer.”

  “Probably sell him,” said Ram Odin. “He shouldn’t be in this line of work anyway. He’s a terrible manager.”

  “Only because he doesn’t sleep at night!”

  “Oh, Rigg, please. It would take him ten minutes to listen to the woman’s complaint and send for the repairman. He hates his job. Probably never asked for it. So yes, he’s desperate for sleep, but he’s also desperate not to do his job.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Rigg.

  “Experience, my lad,” said Ram Odin. “I’ve known plenty of managers like that. They hate their job, they hate their lives. If I owned the man, I’d make some effort to find out what he actually likes to do, and then find a way to let him earn his keep by doing it. But then, I’m probably too soft to be a really effective slaveowner.”

  “You? Soft?” Rigg shook his head. “I know you better than that.”

  Ram Odin didn’t argue. “Do you agree that I should offer to sit up with the wife tonight and listen to her breathe?”

  “Don’t you need your sleep?” asked Rigg. “If you fall asleep during tomorrow’s conversations, I’ll have to sell you to somebody else.”

  “Did you notice something else?” asked Ram Odin. “Something personal about their response to you?”

  “Yes,” said Rigg. “Nobody looks away from my face. I’m apparently much prettier here.”

  “You’re a Wallman,” said Ram Odin. “Power and authority make any man handsome.”

  “I liked being a Finder of Lost Things much better.”

  Rigg went ahead and held the next conversation. He put in a full day and was exhausted by suppertime. He and Ram Odin ate a pretty good meal, considering that slaves normally didn’t have much choice about what they ate, so the culinary arts had no financial incentive to improve.

  At breakfast, Ram Odin looked perfectly well rested. “She’s not in danger at all,” said Ram Odin. “Half an hour in, the ship gave me a full prognosis, and I went in to where the poor fellow was busily trying to sleep in the room with his two boys. I took him into the hall, told him the good news. Of course, I had to phrase it as your decision based on my medical expertise—that’s part of the reason you bring me along. Just in case anyone asks.”

  “Now you’re a doctor.”

  “I have been a doctor, more or less, when
I started up the colony in Odinfold. Of course, with the ship’s equipment, anybody could be a doctor.”

  “He believed you?”

  “I didn’t leave till he was really asleep in the boys’ room.”

  “Now if the wife dies of a heart attack . . .”

  “He can’t complain,” said Ram Odin. “He’s a slave. And we did nothing wrong, because we had the best available medical advice. Did you have a better plan?”

  “I had no plan at all,” said Rigg.

  “So what are you thinking? How you ought to shut down the Wall and bring the rampaging Sessamoto legions to do away with this whole repulsive system?”

  “Bad as this system is,” said Rigg, “I know enough about ­history—and about the Sessamids—to be skeptical about bringing about any actual improvement. As you pointed out, the system is no worse than the people running it, which is you.”

  “Indirectly,” said Ram Odin.

  “And there’s a serious danger of the Sessamids liking the idea of universal slavery and importing it to Ramfold.”

  Ram Odin chuckled. “I hadn’t thought of that. They’d fail, but they’d be envious of the idea of owning everybody.”

  “I think what matters here is that they’ve accommodated slavery to human proportions. They’ve adapted it so people can bear to live with it.”

  Ram Odin gestured for him to go on.

  “Slaves owning property, including other slaves. That means that nobody’s a pure owner—they’re all accountable to somebody above them. With the Lord of Walls and the Wallmen as a court of last appeal. It’s a check on the power of ownership.”

  “But it’s still ownership,” said Ram Odin.

  “Yes. People have surrendered a huge amount of personal choice. But not economic choice. They still decide what to spend their money on.”

  “That’s why there’s still an economy,” said Ram Odin. “Very good.”

  “Economic freedom means that relative prosperity is still ­possible—even for the slaves at the bottom of the ownership heap. They can aspire. And slavery itself appeals to people who don’t want the risks of freedom. If their lives go bad, there’s always someone else to blame. They don’t have to think and decide and bear the consequences of their own choices.”

  “Very good,” said Ram Odin. “I think of slavery in Gathuurifold as a kind of climax feudalism. As feudalism was supposed to work but never did. And this system did not work well when there was a small ownership class and bribery was rampant. Corruption sapped all prosperity out of the system and the owners did what they wanted, spreading misery and havoc.”

  “But that would have led to revolution, eventually,” said Rigg. “A revolution that you eliminated by instituting this benign Lord of Walls.”

  “That’s true,” said Ram Odin. “And I would be duly ashamed of myself except that near-universal slavery persisted for centuries, corrupt and oppressive in the extreme, and there was no revolution. And then we were getting close enough to the end of the world that I decided that instead of letting millions die in a social upheaval that would not only mean bloody war but also economic dislocations that would lead to poverty and starvation and misery on a large scale, I would simply tidy things up and let all these ­people have what happiness was possible within this strange, oppressive system, until the Destroyers come and wipe them all out.”

  “I don’t know if that was a good decision,” said Rigg. “You could just as easily have decided that since they were going to die anyway, you might as well let them die fighting for freedom as passively waiting like cattle in the slaughterhouse.”

  “I’ll admit that I’m getting old,” said Ram Odin. “Struggling for a cause looks like a much better idea to the young than to the old.”

  “Because you’re getting tired?”

  “Because I’ve seen that reforms are never as transformative as the reformers imagine that they’ll be. Nothing works as planned. What I did definitely made a bad system better.”

  “But if Noxon succeeds, and the Destroyers don’t come . . .”

  “You want me to make the Lord of Walls go on a long vacation.”

  “I think it’s time for you and the expendable Gathuuriex to have the Lord of Walls take a long vacation and let the former Wallmen fight it out among them until the people revolt and make whatever progress toward freedom they can.”

  “Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!”

  “It sounds like you’re making a speech.”

  “Echoing one. So you’re thinking the Walls won’t come down?”

  “I’m seeing reasons why they shouldn’t all come down.”

  “You’ll see more reasons as we continue these tours.”

  “I want to continue as a Wallman for a few more days.”

  “Better than being an itinerant Finder of Lost Things?”

  “It’s the same job,” said Rigg. “I go back into the past and find out what actually happened. Then I do something about it.”

  “Ah, but what do you do.”

  “Any complaints?”

  “So far so good.”

  “I get the idea,” said Rigg, “that while I’m judging the wallfolds, you’re judging me.”

  “I already know the wallfolds. You I’m just starting to get acquainted with.”

  CHAPTER 11

  In Reverse

  Noxon had all the time in the world, and so he walked to Ramfold. Having spent almost every waking moment with Param for the past few months, it was a relief to be alone. Nothing against his sister. He had come to love her, and perhaps even understand her as well as one person can understand another. But he needed to be alone for a while, and this was that while.

  Well, not alone. Mice all over him, but they weren’t chatty and that was fine with him. They were sulking because of the rules he had laid out for them. Once they got to Ramfold, they were not free to go off and start trying to populate the place with their species. Because of the facemask, they knew that even when he slept, Noxon was keeping a continuous count, and if he needed to, he could catch them. Well, not so much catch as crush. But that was the deal they made in order to be able to accompany him on the voyage.

  It’s not that he really had all the time in the world—he had more. The world had only a finite number of years. Noxon could have more years than that, if he wanted. He could just keep going back to other times, and live on until he died of old age. People who couldn’t shift time were stuck with the life they had. If somebody came and burned all life from the surface of the world, well, that was too bad; they were cheated out of all their potential life after that.

  But how was that different from the way the world worked all the time? You could get sick, you could take a fall, someone could kill you, there might be a flood, a drought, starvation. So many ways to die without living out your normal span. Everybody died of something, didn’t they? The only thing that made the end of Garden so tragic was that everybody met up with the same death at the same time.

  No. That wasn’t the only thing. It wasn’t even the main thing. What made the end of the world so terrible, so vile, so urgent to prevent, were two things.

  First, nobody would be there to remember. Everything would be lost. You couldn’t leave anyone or anything to continue work you had just begun. Any other death would at least leave a memory of what had once been. But not this one.

  Second, and worse, was that somebody did it on purpose. It wasn’t an act of nature, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of chance. It was the murder of a world. Nineteen worlds, nineteen collections of human history and culture.

  But during his walk, Noxon didn’t just think deep philosophical thoughts about why it was worth risking his life to try to prevent the end of the world. He also replayed old arguments w
ith Father, pondered questions he had never had a chance to answer, thought about what Rigg might do, if Noxon succeeded in his mission—how he might finish out their shared life. If he might marry and have children, and if so, what wallfold he would choose to do it in, since by then he would know them all.

  We are no longer the same person now, Rigg and I, thought Noxon. He is getting to know this world; I am leaving it. He has a future on Garden; I will never come back.

  Even if he succeeded in changing Earth’s future so that the Destroyers did not come, that did not even hint at a possibility that the new future would have room in a starship for Noxon to return to Garden. If by some miracle he managed to arrive on Earth, it would be at the time when Ram Odin’s voyage—the first interstellar flight in human history—was just about to launch. He could not tell them he was a native of this world, because at that point Garden had not yet been settled, let alone named. Who would believe him if he tried to explain that by some bizarre stroke of fate, Ram Odin’s ship was replicated into nineteen forward copies and one backward one, and that they were thrown back in time 11,191 years? From what Rigg had read in Odinfold, most nations on Earth would treat him kindly; few would lock him up as a madman. But certainly no one would believe him, and he would spend a lot of time conversing with doctors whose compassionate purpose would be to bring him back from this delusion of his. He certainly couldn’t talk anyone into sending him home to Garden.

  Nor could he slice time in order to be invisible and stow away on Ram Odin’s original voyage. It would not do for him to run the risk of being noticed by the ship’s computers on the outbound voyage, because they would then inform Ram Odin of everything that was going to happen.

  Or would they? Did they lie to him, too? Or withhold information that he wouldn’t think of asking for? Did all the expendables know from the start what would happen?

  No. They would have acted, deliberately or inadvertently, in such a way as to change the future. Or would they?

  Was this present time precisely the future that the ship’s computers already knew would be reached, because the jewels he carried provided them with knowledge of every single action the computers and expendables would ever take?