Ruins

by Orson Scott Card

  Rigg sat in the chair, and it moved wherever it needed to be, depending on what Rigg said he wanted to do. First things first.

  “What do I do with the jewels?”

  “Which ship do you wish to control?” asked the ship’s voice.

  “This one.”

  At the ship’s instruction, Rigg placed the pale yellow jewel on a circular pad at one side of the field controls. At once the jewel rose into the air and began to glow, rotating rapidly.

  “You are accepted as the commander of this vessel,” said the voice.

  “Wasn’t I already?”

  “Provisionally,” said the ship. “Now you can control the ship wherever you are.”

  “What if someone comes along with a set of jewels from another wallfold?” asked Rigg.

  “Only one jewel per starship was needed, so only one was made.”

  Rigg nodded. Another lie from Vadesh.

  “How did all the jewels from all the ships get into Ramfold?”

  “The expendable called Ram asked for them, and all the expendables conveyed their jewels to him.”

  Even Vadesh, thought Rigg. “Why would they go along with that?” asked Rigg.

  “Because you existed,” said the ship.

  “But I didn’t even know how to shift time then. Umbo learned to do it on his own before I did.”

  “You were trained,” said the ship.

  “Not to command a starship.”

  “You were trained to lead the people of Garden in their first contact with the people of Earth.”

  Rigg shuddered, as if it had suddenly become cold. “Are they coming, then?”

  “It is assumed.”

  “Has there been any evidence that they’re coming? Have you seen any sign?”

  “They are many lightyears away. We will not see any signs of what they are doing now until far in the future.”

  “Have you seen a starship approaching?”

  “It is assumed that they will solve the mistakes they made in designing this starship. Therefore they will be able to jump as this ship jumped, only without creating duplicates. To them, it has been eleven years since this ship left Earth’s solar system. We do not know how long it will take them to solve the problems, build a ship, and come here, but we can only assume that after eleven years, they might arrive here at any moment.”

  “What will they do when they get here?”

  “They will find out that humans have been on Garden, at a high level of civilization, longer than the history of civilization on Earth.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “They will see that Ram Odin caused the nineteen copies of the original ship to divide the world into nineteen separate developmental regions, in which the evolution of the human race was accelerated in whatever direction seemed most promising to the expendable placed as guardian.”

  “So in Ramfold,” said Rigg, “my father was directing our evolution toward the creation of time-shifters.”

  “It seemed most promising,” said the ship. “Ram Odin himself seemed to have such ability in a latent, uncontrollable form. That is why, instead of the ship being obliterated by the fractional time differences between the nineteen computers calculating the jump, the contradictions were resolved by thrusting the ship backward in time by eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years. Ram Odin mated and reproduced, and those who carried the time-shift genes have been carefully crossbred to result in a combination of high intelligence, strong commitment to civilization, and the ability to control time-shifting.”

  “Commitment to civilization?”

  “You get along well with others.”

  Rigg thought back over the past year. He and Umbo could have been rivals. So could he and Param. Instead, they had cooperated—and earned the trust and help of Loaf and Olivenko, too. Father had taught him that civilization only worked when people were willing to sacrifice some of their immediate self-interest for the good of the whole, and only those willing to sacrifice the most were fit to lead, because only they could earn and keep the trust of others.

  “I’m not the one who should be doing this,” said Rigg.

  “Expendable Ram believes you are.”

  “In ten thousand years, I’m the best he could get?”

  “In the collective opinion of the ships’ computers and the expendables, you are the first-choice option. We do not have control over the timing of the arrival of the first ship from Earth. It is possible, though unlikely, that no ship will come here for generations. You are now in place, in case they come soon.”

  “What will I do if they come?”

  “That is for you to decide.”

  “But you computers and expendables know far more than I do.”

  “Our knowledge is at your disposal.”

  “Vadesh’s wasn’t,” said Rigg.

  “Vadesh offered you the best of his wallfold.”

  “A facemask on my friend?”

  “It is the result of ten thousand years of careful breeding on his part. All the expendables are meticulous workers.”

  “But he lied to me again and again!”

  “He created circumstances in which you could be taught what you needed to learn.”

  “I learned that expendables lie.”

  “You already knew that,” said the ship’s voice. “What you did not know was how Vadesh’s improvements to the facemask would enhance the symbiosis between native and human life.”

  “So you approve of what Vadesh did?”

  “Vadesh fulfilled his assignment from Ram Odin. Now he is fully subject to your commands.”

  “I can’t trust him! I don’t even know if I can trust you.”

  “And yet you are trusting me, and Vadesh will obey you.”

  “I’m not going to let this stand,” said Rigg. “You know that I’m going to go back in time and warn myself not to come in here.”

  “Then you will not get control of this ship,” said the ship.

  “I don’t want control! I just want to get out of Vadeshfold without a facemask on anybody.”

  “That is possible,” said the voice.

  “Then that’s what will happen.”

  “And yet you have not done it,” said the ship.

  “I haven’t done it yet.”

  “You came through this entire process and no warning from yourself came to stop you.”

  “Because this is the first time I’ve done it,” said Rigg. “There has to be a first time, when everything goes wrong, so that we’ll know what to warn ourselves about.”

  “This is not the first time,” said the ship’s computer.

  “How would you know? Only the time-shifter knows.”

  “Because Umbo warned himself not to accompany you into the ship.”

  “Umbo had a warning, and he didn’t tell me?” Rigg had known Umbo was unhappy with Rigg’s leadership, but he didn’t know it would extend to such disloyalty.

  “The fact that Umbo came back and warned everyone except you and Loaf suggests that on some previous time path, something very bad resulted from a different combination of events.”

  “Yes, the bad thing was that Umbo’s resentment of me got completely out of control,” said Rigg. “He wanted this to be a disaster.”

  “Would Umbo do anything that might lead to causing harm to Loaf?” asked the voice.

  “He didn’t know that Loaf would . . .” But Rigg didn’t need to finish the thought. Rigg couldn’t know exactly what future-Umbo knew, but he had to assume that he knew more than Rigg knew now. “Are you saying that I’m supposed to let that thing stay in control of Loaf’s mind?”

  “I don’t know what Umbo intended when he gave himself warning.”

  “Neither do I! Neither does anybody. I don’t even know for myself that Umbo gave a warning.”

  “When you go back outside, you can ask him.”

  “Why am I even in here? I’m supposed to turn off the Wall so we can leave here without having to go back t
o a time before the Wall existed. But the main reason for doing it was so Loaf could go home to Leaky. I can’t send him home like this.”

  The ship’s computer said nothing.

  “Come on, give me some help here.”

  “That is a dilemma that is beyond my competence. We can provide you with information, but the decisions are yours.”

  “So inform me!”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know enough to know what questions I need to ask you!”

  “That is true,” said the ship’s computer.

  “So tell me what I need to know?”

  “I don’t know what information you need,” said the voice.

  Rigg saw the circularity of the situation but he saw no solution for it. “Tell me what’s within my power to do. Can I turn off all the Walls?”

  “If you take control of all the ships.”

  Rigg pulled the bag of jewels from his waist. “I can control them all at once?”

  “You can try,” said the ship’s computer. “I can see only a few reasons why any of the ships would reject the protocol.”

  “What are those reasons?”

  “You have no idea what the consequences would be,” said the ship. “Bringing down the Wall may destroy the careful work of eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years of directed evolution, because a rapacious, expansive group of humans would have access to weaker or less violent or less technologically developed wallfolds.”

  “General Citizen might go a-conquering.”

  “Ramfold is not the most technologically advanced wallfold,” said the voice. “But your assessment is correct insofar as the attempt is concerned.”

  “General Citizen would try, and he would fail.”

  “The likelihood of bloody slaughter is very high.”

  “So I shouldn’t take control of the ships,” said Rigg.

  “That is one choice.”

  “What are the other choices?” asked Rigg.

  “The expendable Ram suggests that I not answer your question.”

  “What!” This was the first reliable confirmation Rigg had received that Father was not dead after all.

  “The expendable Ram suggests that I not—”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Why does Father think you shouldn’t answer my question?”

  “Because you already know the answers.”

  Rigg felt a wave of fury wash over him. “I’m not in the woods with him now! He’s not my father, and I finally know he’s not my father, and I don’t have to submit to his endless quizzing.”

  “That is all correct.”

  “So answer me. What are my choices?”

  “The expendable Ram suggests that I not answer your—”

  “I know my choices!” Rigg shouted. “I just want to know if I’ve left any out.”

  “If you list the choices you know about, I will be happy to supplement your list.”

  Rigg swallowed his anger and complied. “I can take control of the ships but still not bring down the Wall.”

  The voice said nothing.

  “I don’t know how this works,” said Rigg. “Once I leave this room, am I still in control of the ship?”

  “You are the ship’s commander,” said the ship.

  “How will I communicate with you?”

  “By asking me, as you’re doing now.”

  “You can talk to me after I leave here?”

  “Only while you’re on the ship,” said the voice.

  “So how can I get information from you after leaving the ship? How do I get information from the other ships?”

  “Through the expendable.”

  “But expendables lie to me!”

  “Expendables provide information that will lead you to good choices.”

  “Good choices as defined by them.”

  “You are hardly in a position to define them, since you know almost nothing.”

  Rigg recognized Father’s voice. “The expendable Ram is telling you what to say.”

  “He knows you better than we do,” said the voice. “We are accepting his counsel during this conversation.”

  “So you tell me I’m in command, but I’m not in command.”

  “You are more in command than any other entity, human or otherwise.”

  “What does that even mean? ‘More in command.’ Who am I sharing command with?”

  “There is a constant process of negotiation and compromise,” said the voice.

  “Only I’m not part of that process,” said Rigg.

  “You are the most important part of it,” said the voice.

  “But I don’t know what you’re thinking, I only know what you say!”

  “We have the same dilemma,” said the ship.

  “I tell you what I’m thinking.”

  “You tell us what you want us to know, as a subset of what you do know, which is not very much.”

  Rigg closed his eyes. “I still live in a world where my understanding is shaped by information you give me, and you still decide, without asking me, which things I should know. Therefore I can only make choices as you direct me to.”

  “We know many quintillions of bits of information,” said the ship’s computer. “Your brain cannot contain all that we know.”

  “I understand that you have to select which information is relevant, but you can surely be more helpful than you’ve been up to now.”

  “We’ve been very helpful,” said the ship’s computers. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Loaf is wearing a facemask!”

  “He is alive, your whole group is alive, and you are in control of this ship.”

  Am I? wondered Rigg. “I order you to tell me how much control I will have over the Wall after I leave here.”

  “If you place all the jewels into the control field, and all the ships accept your command, and if you then take the jewels with you and keep them on your person, you will be able to command that any Wall go up or down as you choose.”

  “Even if the consequences might be dangerous?”

  “If you’re accepted as commander of a ship, it’s your decision.”

  Rigg thought for a while. “Can I change the nature of the Wall?”

  “The Wall cannot be anything other than what it is.”

  Wrongly worded question or final answer? Rigg couldn’t be sure without probing more. “The Wall creates a very intense field. Can I change its intensity?”

  “Yes,” said the voice.

  “The Wall has different effects. It gives us languages, for instance.”

  “There is a stimulant field coterminous with the Wall that prepares your brain to accept and produce all the phonemes, morphemes, and memes of all the languages ever spoken within a given wallfold.”

  “So the languages are contained in the Wall.”

  “Languages can only exist in the human mind.”

  Rigg sighed. “This stimulant field that is coterminous with the Wall has enough information about languages spoken within the wallfold that it can prepare any human brain to understand and produce the language as if it were the person’s native language.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there any limit to the number of languages a person can know?”

  “No.”

  “But humans can’t learn that many languages.”

  “True,” said the voice.

  Rigg wanted to demand the answer to the contradiction, but then he remembered that Father was listening, and he knew that Father would make him figure out a resolution to the contradiction by himself. “So learning a language is harder than knowing one.”

  “There is no limit to the number of ways of making language that a human brain can know, but since language acquisition takes time, even for young children, there is a definite limit to the number of languages that can be learned.”

  “What about vocabulary? How did I know the words to use when I talked
to those ancient people who were watching the battle outside the city?”

  “They were supplied to you by the stimulant field as you needed them, according to the meaning you were attempting to express.”

  “This field can read my mind?”

  “It evaluates the conversation and makes available to you the full range of vocabulary needed to achieve communication between you and the other person, with words made more available according to their likelihood of being needed for the topic at hand.”

  Rigg was fascinated by the idea that an invisible field could anticipate the words he would need. But he must not let himself be distracted by his intense curiosity about these phenomenal machines. Instead, he forced himself to get back to the subject at hand. Whatever that was, or should be—he didn’t even know what it was important for him to think about.

  “The humans from Earth. They built this ship, so all these machines and fields and all, they created them.”

  “Yes.”

  “So how can I guess what they’ve gone on and created in the eleven thousand years since—”

  “Ram says to tell you that you’re being stupid.”

  “Eleven years, not eleven thousand,” said Rigg, catching his error at once. “This ship arrived here eleven thousand years ago, but it left Earth only eleven years ago. So their technology won’t have advanced all that much over what you have here.”

  “That might lead you to false assumptions. They did not supply this ship with all the technology they knew. They equipped us only with the technology that they believed we’d need.”

  “So they have machines that you don’t have.”

  “Including weapons,” said the voice.

  “But why would they think they need weapons if they think we only arrived here eleven years ago?”

  “We don’t know whether they were able to detect the temporal displacement,” said the voice. “They might think they’re coming to face a version of humanity that has had more than eleven thousand years of technological development since the two branches diverged.”