Ruins

by Orson Scott Card

  “Don’t bother,” said a voice from the tree. He spoke a language Umbo had never heard spoken, but thanks to the Wall, he understood it at once. “This is the language you want. Yahootalk is mostly grunts and clicks and farts and belches.”

  “So . . . I’ve been speaking it my whole life,” said Umbo.

  Param chuckled, but Umbo couldn’t be sure if she was appreciating his humor, or taking his irony at face value.

  “Who are you?” asked Loaf, “and why are you throwing doo-doo at us?”

  “Are you really from Ramfold?” asked the timorous voice.

  “You already know who we are,” said Rigg. “Stop pretending and come down here and talk to us.”

  A long moment of silence.

  “Would you mind terribly if we put on clothes before coming down out of the tree?”

  “We’d prefer it,” said Loaf. “Take all the time you need. Empty your bowels and wash your hands. Put yourselves out.”

  “How did you decide they were pretending?” asked Umbo.

  “Humans are never going to lose language. There’s no reason for it,” said Rigg. “Whether they’re working hard or not, they’ll talk because that’s what humans do. So this nonsense of grunting is obviously false.”

  “Obvious to you,” said Umbo.

  “It’s obvious to you, too,” said Rigg, “or you’d be arguing with me.”

  Everybody thinks they know everybody’s inner life, thought Umbo. But we’ve only known Loaf since Rigg and I stopped by their inn on the way to Aressa Sessamo. None of us really knows anything at all about each other’s motives and what’s going on in our unconscious minds. Nobody ever does.

  Two fully clothed, diminutive people leapt lightly down from the tree. They bowed deeply. “Sorry for using you as a trial run for our social experiment,” said the woman, in fluent whatever-the-language-was. “We don’t get a lot of traffic through the Wall.”

  “I’m betting we’re the first ever,” said Umbo.

  “We have a solvent that will get the stain out of your shirt,” said the man.

  “How about not throwing turds in the first place?” said Umbo.

  The man sighed. The woman laughed. “I don’t think our disguise is really all that effective,” she said.

  “Oh, it made me want to scrub my own skin off,” said Umbo. “If that was your goal—”

  “You got here sooner than we expected,” said the woman. “So we weren’t sure it was you.”

  “Who do you think we are?” asked Loaf.

  The man handed Umbo a clean shirt that seemed to fit well enough. The fabric was smooth and comfortable; the shirt was light in weight, yet very warm.

  “You’re Loaf, a soldier-turned-innkeeper-turned-bodyguard,” said the woman. “And you’re wearing one of Vadesh’s nasty little parasites. One of the boys is Rigg and the other is Umbo. The girl is Param, who should be heir to the Queen-in-the-Tent. And, not least, King Knosso’s right-hand boy, the scholar Olivenko.”

  The dung had been irritating. This was frightening. “How can you possibly know so much about what’s going on in other wallfolds?” asked Umbo.

  “We learned how to intercept and decode all the communications of the expendables, the orbiters, and the ships within a few hundred years of the founding of this colony,” said the man.

  “You’re the biggest news in ten thousand years,” added the woman. “Ever since humans went extinct in Vadeshfold.”

  “A tragedy,” said the man.

  “I’m surprised Vadesh let you leave,” said the woman.

  “He’s not equipped to stop us,” said Rigg.

  “Oh, he has all the equipment he needs,” said the woman. “But since one of you is carrying his baby”—she indicated the facemask on Loaf—“I suppose he didn’t want to damage any of you.”

  Umbo wasn’t sure if she was being literal or figurative. “You don’t mean that that thing is going to give birth,” said Umbo.

  “Oh, goodness no,” said the woman. “I forgot you don’t have sufficient knowledge yet to understand irony or analogy in this context.”

  “What was your disguise for?” asked Param. “Naked-in-trees doesn’t seem very subtle to me.”

  “Primitivity,” said the man.

  “Decay and devolution,” said the woman.

  “But you didn’t believe it, and so it probably won’t work on them, either,” said the man. “Which is why, ultimately, all our hopes are pinned on you.”

  “All your hopes of what? Who are you people?” demanded Rigg.

  “Don’t worry,” said the man. “We’ll explain everything. But it’s going to take some time.”

  “What it comes down to is this,” said the woman. “We have a little over two years before the humans from Earth arrive for the first time since the terraforming of Garden.”

  “And a year after that before they come back and wipe out all life on Garden,” added the man.

  “You can see the future?” asked Rigg.

  “No,” said the man. “But people of Odinfold, from a different version of our future, wrote an account of the end of the world and sent it back to us five thousand years ago, just before they died.”

  “You can travel in time,” said Rigg.

  “Not at all,” said the woman. “But we have machines that can send things to any past time and to any place on Garden.”

  “And retrieve things,” said the man. “We can also bring things back from the past. Like that jewel they took from you and put in that bank in your capital city.”

  “Our displacers got it out and left it for Umbo to find in Vadeshfold,” said the woman.

  “We’ve been helping you as much as possible since we first found out about you,” said the man.

  It made Umbo feel strange. Somebody had been looking out for them. Or manipulating them. It made Umbo feel vaguely like a pet. But was it really all that different from what the expendables had been doing to them? “Do you have names?” asked Umbo. “What do we call you?”

  They looked at each other and laughed. “Names. I suppose we have names, though none of us ever uses them.”

  “There are only about ten thousand of us in the whole wallfold now,” said the woman. “So we know each other, know each other’s history, and the compressed version of that history is what we use for names now, if names are needed at all. I’m usually called Woman-Gave-Birth-to-Boy-and-Girl, Swims-in-the-Air, Saves-the-World.”

  “There’s a lot more to her name,” said the man, “but that short version is usually enough to distinguish her from everybody else.”

  “I’m a little bit famous,” she said apologetically.

  “You’re ashamed of being famous,” said Umbo, “but proud of going fecal.”

  “Hoping to save the world,” she said with a shrug. “Not everybody thought the yahoo act was worth trying.”

  “You intercept the communications among the ships?” asked Olivenko.

  The man rolled his eyes. “We said it, didn’t we?”

  “What’s your name?” Param asked him.

  “Mouse-Breeder, Old-Song-Singer, Lived-in-the-Ruins, Mates-for-Life.”

  “What should we call you?” asked Param.

  “Is your memory so bad you can’t hold on to such simplified versions of our names?” asked Swims-in-the-Air.

  “How did you get the air-swimming part of your name?” Rigg asked her.

  “I went through a phase where I jumped out of flyers and off cliffs. With wings I designed myself.”

  “Can we see you do that?” asked Olivenko.

  “Oh, I gave that up five hundred years ago,” she said, laughing. “A pleasure for children. I’m a grownup now.”

  “How old are you?” asked Umbo.

  “We’re going to tell you everything in due time,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We can even show you vids of her flights, if you want. And you can meet some of my mice.”

  “Those were the short names,” said Loaf, “and yet you know the long
names of every one of the ten thousand people in the wallfold?”

  “Ten thousand is easy. I don’t think that even we could have known the names of all the people who lived here before we learned about the end of the world. There were three billion people then.” He laughed, shaking his head.

  “Three billion?” asked Umbo. “Where could they fit?”

  “We didn’t live in trees then,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “But come, let’s walk through the ruins, and we’ll tell you a few important things.”

  “About why Loaf thought of you as yahoos?” asked Umbo.

  “Well, that’s part of it, though when we wear clothing, we think of ourselves as Odinfolders. Mostly we need to tell you about you.”

  “What do you know about us, that we don’t already know?” asked Param.

  “Why you were born,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “Why you have the abilities you have,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “And what you have to do in order to save the world,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  The two Odinfolders led them over another rise, and there before them lay the ruins of a great city.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ruined Cities

  Param’s idea of a city was a fantasy born of literature, with little experience to change things. She had never strayed from whatever house they imprisoned her mother in, so the only cities she saw were illustrations in books or art on the walls. When she fled Flacommo’s house with Rigg, she saw only a few streets of Aressa Sessamo, and then she was in fear every moment.

  Besides, Aressa Sessamo was so flat and low that unless you climbed one of the few high towers, it was impossible to get any idea of the size of it. From Umbo and Rigg she had learned something of O, which, according to them, was a real city.

  And then there was the empty city in Vadeshfold. But, once again, they had ventured only into the outskirts, had never climbed a tower, had plunged underground almost at once.

  So she was not prepared for what she saw when they crested the second rise beyond the Wall. Since the Odinfolders lived in trees, there had been nothing that looked like a house or a shack or a shed or even a tent. But now they stood on the brow of a hill looking down into the valley of a swift-flowing river.

  On the hither side of the river, there were only a few hundred hummocks with occasional walls, posts, and roofs rising out of them. Dust blowing primarily out of the east had drifted and turned everything into mounds of earth, covered in grass. Yet enough of the artifacts of human habitation still stood that it would have been an impressive, if bleak, sight.

  But on the other side of the river, rising up to a flat mesa, the lower walls gave way to high towers. Most of them were skeletons now, with beams that marked the structure like bones, but many of them rose quite high, and because they had lost their façades, Param could see through each to the building behind, and the one behind that, and on and on up the slope.

  On the flat of the butte, the great towers made way for somewhat lower, narrower buildings; but these, perhaps because they had sheltered each other from wind, still had much of their facing. They were ornately decorated and many still showed faded traces of once-bright colors. And the windows: a thousand eyes peered from every building.

  Param was above two hundred when she gave up counting the towers.

  “Ten thousand people must have lived here,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “This was a town of a million or so. And just down the river, you can see a city almost as big.”

  It was true—though distance and bends in the valley made it so that nearby trees somewhat blocked the view, it was plain that about as many skeleton towers rose just as high, though starting on lower ground. The only thing missing was the patch of buildings with walls still in place.

  “A million,” breathed Param. She knew the number as a theory, but had no idea what it would mean in practice. Aressa Sessamo was famous for having two hundred thousand inhabitants. Here, that would have been nothing. “How did they eat?”

  “Food was easy,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We know how to make soil yield hundreds of times more than the primitive farms in Ramfold. It was energy and sewage that were a constant problem.”

  “A million people would make it a pretty fecal city,” said Rigg. Umbo laughed.

  Boys could be so crude. Param wondered how long it would be before they finally stopped finding ways to use “fecal” in every sentence. Olivenko didn’t think references to poo and pee were an inexhaustible source of mirth, the way Rigg and Umbo did.

  “Where did they all go?” asked Param.

  “Well, they died, of course,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “Plague? War?” asked Param. “If food was easy, it wasn’t famine.” She had read enough history to know these were the ways that cities turned to ruins.

  “No, not at all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “We weren’t so long-lived then. Only a hundred years, on average—once you’d seen your century, you expected your body’s functions to decay enough that living wasn’t a pleasure anymore. You lost interest. Or so I’m told.”

  “We just hadn’t solved the problems of aging yet,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “A hundred years is very, very old in Ramfold,” said Rigg.

  “Yes, we’re so sorry, dear,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “But that doesn’t explain anything,” said Param, a little impatient. “Just because people lived ‘only’ a hundred years doesn’t explain why the city emptied out like this.”

  “The first time through our history,” said Mouse-Breeder, “our population reached six billion by the time the humans came.”

  “You say that as if we weren’t human ourselves,” said Olivenko.

  Swims-in-the-Air only smiled. “We do, don’t we,” she said.

  “Again,” said Param, “I don’t see why the cities—”

  “This one likes quick answers,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “Or easy ones,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “So here’s the quick and easy answer. We got a letter from the future, telling us how the world ends. So we set about trying to make it end differently. Each attempt meant cutting our population more sharply, until you see us as we are today, about ten thousand people in the entire wallfold, and most of us clustered within walking distance of the Wall.”

  “Cutting your population?” asked Param. “How?”

  “Having fewer babies, of course. Most of us having none at all. That’s why my two children became part of my name.”

  “She’s such an optimist,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “Incurable,” said Swims-in-the-Air. But she sounded wistful and sad when she said it.

  “People just stopped wanting children?” asked Loaf.

  Param thought it was odd for him to sound so incredulous, considering that he and his wife Leaky had no children, or none that she had heard of.

  “It’s not about wanting,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The body still has its primate roots. The body wants to breed. But we owed a duty to the whole world of Garden.”

  “You see, the first time the humans came, they visited only Odinfold, because only our civilization was visible from space.”

  “From space,” said Umbo, “why would the high towers make a difference?”

  “Not the towers,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “The light. Every street had lamps on it. Every building had lights in the windows. There were lights everywhere at night, lights that could be seen from a million kilometers away. Our wallfold was the only patch of light on the whole planet, so they came to us. They thought we kept the rest of Garden as a nature preserve; they thought the name of the world confirmed that idea.”

  “But then they learned what this world really was,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “And what is it?” asked Rigg, a little defiant-sounding. “Really?”

  “Give just the tiniest thought to the question,” said Mouse-Breeder. “I know you know the answer.”

  “A place where the human race could develop
in nineteen completely different ways,” said Param.

  “And in Ramfold, we turned out to be time shapers,” said Umbo.

  “The three of you are,” said Olivenko.

  “But most people in Ramfold can’t do anything with time,” Umbo added.

  “You know that’s not true,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And it isn’t really time per se that you manipulate. You create fields with your minds, fields in which time can be altered because of the way you connect yourselves to the planet’s past.”

  “What do you do?” asked Umbo.

  “They move objects in time and space,” said Param. “They already told us.”

  “No, Param, we didn’t tell you that that’s what we do,” said Mouse-Breeder. “It’s merely one manifestation of what we do. You see, we were the only wallfold where the learning of the Earth we came from wasn’t sealed to us. We could study it all. We also knew that the hope of Ram Odin, when he commanded the expendables and the ships to divide the world into folds, was that the human species would find nineteen different ways to evolve and change, either physically or culturally.”

  “All of human history on Earth was scarcely twelve thousand years,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “and that’s with a most generous interpretation of the word ‘history.’ That’s how long it had been since the last ice age, as they called them—times when the Earth’s climate grew colder and much of the ocean’s water was locked up in ice caps.”

  “Real history—written records and all that—was about five thousand years,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And the biggest leaps in science and technology had taken place in only the last thousand years or so, with the most dramatic transformations in the last two centuries.”

  “The expendables were not even regarded as particularly remarkable when Ram Odin’s colony ship set out,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Indestructible materials, highly advanced language modules, things like that were only fifty years old. But the humans of Earth thought of fifty years as a long time, because they were used to such a fast rate of progress.”