Ruins
Page 43
I have only my own need now—to unmake my crime and see if that will clean my soul.
Near the starship, Rigg sliced his way in great leaps forward into the future, to the time only a week after he had killed Ram Odin. Now he made himself obvious, walking into the empty ruins of the city, inviting Vadesh to come for him.
Vadesh did not pretend to be happy to see him. This was a Vadesh who knew of the murder but did not know of the end of it all, with the Destroyers once again burning Garden’s life away. This Vadesh only knew that Rigg had gone away, leaving Vadesh to dispose of Ram Odin’s corpse.
“What business do we have now?” Vadesh asked him.
“I was right about many things, but wrong about Ram Odin,” said Rigg.
“I told you that, and you refused to undo it.”
“I’m here to undo it now, and then you’ll never remember that I did it, because I won’t have done it.”
Vadesh gave a little bent smile—the smile that Father used when Rigg got an answer half right, or said something smart-alecky. “You passed through the Wall, Rigg. The ship’s log will remember that version of history. And you’ll remember, won’t you.”
“That’s right, Vadesh. I’ll remember. Thanks for making sure I know how unredeemable I am.”
Vadesh took him down and once again they rode the highspeed tram through the tunnel to the starship; once again they crossed the bridge. Vadesh went with Rigg into the control room, where Ram Odin’s blood still stained the console.
“You didn’t clean it up?” asked Rigg.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” said Vadesh.
“I’ll clean it now, by making sure this blood was never spilled,” said Rigg.
Rigg looked at the paths, his own and Ram Odin’s, to make sure he was positioned in the right place before he went back in time to fix this thing. But first, he turned to Vadesh. “You could save a lot of trouble, you know, by simply telling me the truth.”
“I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”
“Tell me the things you haven’t told me, that I need to know.”
“How can I predict the things you need to know?”
“The truth, that’s what I need.”
“Truth!” said Vadesh derisively.
“Yes, there’s such a thing!” said Rigg. “Things as they are, things as they were, things as they will be.”
“You of all people should know that there’s no such truth,” said Vadesh. “Just the way things were and are and will be . . . for now. Till some shifter comes along and changes it.”
“This world will be destroyed.”
“Yes,” said Vadesh, “and if I knew why, or how to prevent it, I would tell you, because ever since we learned of it, I have done nothing but try to prevent it. Why do you think that facemask exists? Did you think I kept breeding those even after all my humans killed each other? No, I had nothing to do, I put myself in standby mode and did nothing at all until the message came about the Future Books, and the ship’s computer woke me. Then I woke Ram Odin, and we decided I should make a facemask that could do the things it does.”
“And what are those things?” asked Rigg.
“Don’t you know by your experience with it?”
“I know what it does for me because I ask it to. But what can it do that I don’t know enough to ask?”
“I’ve never been a human. I’ve never worn the mask. You know infinitely more about it than I ever will. Tell me what you learn—I’d love to know.”
Rigg realized that he would never get a full answer from Vadesh. But one thing was certain: Vadesh knew things that he had never told, and Vadesh lied despite his protests that he was programmed not to lie.
Without so much as a good-bye—for why bid farewell to a being who would cease to exist the moment you changed the past, and so would never remember what you said?—Rigg pushed into the past, into the moment when Ram Odin began to draw the earlier Rigg’s attention to the display. The moment when Ram Odin began reaching for the knife.
“Stop,” Rigg said. “Both of you. Neither one of you can afford to die today, or to kill, either.”
They turned to him surprised, taken out of their plans for a moment. But in an instant, Ram’s hand resumed its movement toward his knife, and Rigg began to reach for the jeweled weapon at his belt, and again Rigg said, “I will not let either of you commit a murder here today, and you both know I can stop you if I want.”
“How?” said the early Rigg—the Rigg who had not yet killed a man. “I’m a match for you.”
“You’re a dolt,” said Rigg. “Ram Odin isn’t the source of the Destroyers. You killed him here—no, I killed him—and still the Destroyers came.”
“He killed me?” Ram Odin asked.
“I have a facemask, you poor sad murderous old fool. I took the knife away from you and then popped half an hour into the past and stabbed you through the heart with it. At this moment, I just left a version of the future with your dried blood all over the console. So both of you, forget your plans. Whatever you were thinking, you were wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough, and it’s time for us to work together to figure all this out.”
The early Rigg stared at Rigg and then touched his forehead—or meant to touch it, and touched the facemask there instead. “The three of us,” he said. “You changed my path. I never make the jumps you made. We both exist.”
“Twins who never were identical,” said Rigg.
“How are we different? We even have the mask,” said the earlier Rigg.
“We’re different because Ram Odin’s blood was on my hands.”
“It isn’t now,” said Ram Odin.
“I remember pushing in the knife,” said Rigg, “and how it felt to triumph over you, and stop you from slaughtering the world.”
“I made this world!” said Ram Odin. “How could you imagine I would ever kill it?”
“You killed a world before,” said Rigg.
“But that was the plan I came with. Those were my orders. The machines would have done it even if I’d been in stasis,” said Ram Odin.
It was a thought that would never have occurred to Rigg. “The program was originally to wipe out the life of Garden?”
“We didn’t even know if there would be life, when the voyage set out,” said Ram. “But we were desperate to make a world where we could establish the human race. If this were truly a world within the zone of life, then this ship—these ships now, but I started out with only one—would have to reshape everything as quickly as I could, so other ships could follow after me.”
“And the Destroyers—what are they?”
“I don’t know. The world had been remade. The proteins growing here are mostly edible by humans, and the world is empty enough to make a place for them. I don’t want them here; our civilizations have more history than Earth, and so my plan was to persuade them not to come at all. I don’t know why they burn it all. I only know that I haven’t yet figured out a way to prevent its happening.”
“There are two of us forever,” said the early Rigg, the one who hadn’t killed.
“I’m the one who spawned you,” said Rigg, “by preventing you from killing Ram. So I get to keep the name. You pick another.”
“No, you pick one.”
“I called it first,” said Rigg, drawing upon the memory of childhood games and childhood quarrels.
The other Rigg smiled. “I know,” he said. “I’ll call myself Kyokay. Because however you might brag about your murderings, Ram Odin wasn’t the first to die under my hand.”
“I didn’t kill Kyokay,” said Rigg.
“I failed to save him. But now I have a facemask. Now I think I can.”
“And undo everything that’s happened up to now?” asked Rigg.
“No, you fool. Did you ever realize quite how stupid you are?”
“The more you talk, the clearer it becomes,” said Rigg.
“I’ll save him after the fact. I’ll take him int
o the future. I’ll restore him to his brother now. But no, I won’t take his name—he’ll be alive, he’ll be using it. I’ll take the surname Noxon, after Nox, the woman I once thought was my mother, the woman Father entrusted with the jewels.”
“Call yourself what you want, and do whatever you think you must,” said Rigg. “If we prevented every death, the world would soon fill up, and what would we have accomplished? Kyokay would have got himself killed eventually the way he killed himself by accident that day. It’s not our responsibility.”
“It’s all my responsibility,” said Rigg Noxon. “And you know that as well as anyone.”
“What have I created here?” said Ram Odin, looking back and forth between them.
“You’ve created nothing,” said Rigg. “We are who we are, and you didn’t make us, even if we have some seed of you and at some point along the way you intervened.”
“Whatever we are,” said Rigg Noxon, “we’re what we made ourselves, by our own choices, by what we did with the opportunities that came along. Just like you. We’re not machines.”
“But I am,” said Vadesh, who was standing in the door. He looked at each of them in turn, and laughed. “Two for the price of one. You really need to be more careful what you do, Rigg A and Rigg B. Or you’ll run out of souls to populate these bodies that you accidentally make.”
“Shut up, Vadesh,” said Ram Odin.
Vadesh fell silent.
The machines obey Ram Odin. But they also obey me, thought Rigg.
And then, because both Riggs were, in fact, Rigg, they proved that in this case, at least, they still thought alike, for both of them drew out the bag of jewels. Two complete sets now. And Rigg Noxon still had the knife—the one that Rigg had given back to Umbo on the beach in Larfold.
“See?” said Vadesh. “See how you clutter up the world?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Richland, Washington, in 1951, Orson Scott Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church and received degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. The author of numerous books in several genres, Card is best known for Ender’s Game and his online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.oscIGMS.com). He teaches writing and literature at Southern Virginia University and lives with his family in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Also by Orson Scott Card
PATHFINDER
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,
or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents
are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition October 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Orson Scott Card
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Designed by Mike Rosamilia
Jacket design and illustration by Sammy Yuen Jr
Author photograph copyright © by Bob Henderson, Henderson Photography, Inc.
The text of this book was set in Cochin.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Card, Orson Scott.
Ruins / by Orson Scott Card.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Pathfinder.
Summary: To prevent the destruction of his planet, teenaged Rigg Sessamekesh,
who can manipulate time, must assume more responsibility when he and others
travel back 11,000 years to the arrival of human starships.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9177-9
[1. Science fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction.
4. Space colonies—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C1897Ru 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011052745
ISBN 978-1-4424-1428-0 (eBook)