Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy)

by Orson Scott Card

  “It hadn’t been two hundred years since humans first went into space, you see,” said Mouse-Breeder. “So the colonists in Odinfold expected to be able to continue making progress at the same pace, though they recognized that with a much smaller population and the need to deal with subsistence issues, there would be a slowdown for a few generations.”

  “Oh, we had babies then!” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Babies and babies and babies, because we needed our population to reach a point where we could specialize, where the smartest of us could live the life of the mind.”

  “But let’s go down to the river and cross into the city,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The vista from here is only interesting for a while, and then you want to go inside to get a sense of scale, don’t you think?”

  They thought so, too, so they walked together down the slope toward the river, while the Odinfolders continued their story.

  It wasn’t enough to have lots of babies, they explained. Wasn’t one of the goals of Garden to promote the isolated evolution of new human species? And since Odinfold retained its memory of the science of genetics, they could keep conscious control of the human species.

  “Not just selective breeding,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The way I do with mice, where I select for traits I want and allow only those mice that have such traits to reproduce. No, we went into the genes themselves, the seeds within the human body that decide what each new generation will look like.”

  They found long-lost traits that they wanted to restore, rare ones they wanted to make common, and then nearly everybody gave birth only to babies that had been enhanced in some way. Improving the species directly.

  “What traits?” asked Rigg.

  “Short legs,” said Umbo.

  “Oh, no,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The short legs came later, when we were tailoring ourselves to look like yahoos.”

  “We made ourselves tall and slender at first,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We metabolized food very efficiently, so we required less of it per person.”

  “And we rebuilt ourselves to concentrate on the brain,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Each increase in brain size required more blood for the brain, less for the rest of the body. So the leaner we were, the better. Any organs we could eliminate or shrink saved blood.”

  “Larger brains?” asked Param. Their heads were disproportionately large for their small bodies, but not larger than normal adults’ heads.

  “The human brain folds quite elaborately, increasing the surface area,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Ours fold more. Also, our skulls are much thinner. Less bone here, more brain inside. It makes us fragile, but we don’t face the same sorts of enemies that our ancestors had to deal with. And when we’re doing something risky, we wear helmets.”

  “Throwing dung at Loaf is risky,” said Umbo.

  “But thrown dung is not going to break skulls,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “As weapons go, it’s more annoying than damaging.”

  The Odinfolders also tried, in the early days, to bring out what they called “savant” abilities—perfect visual and auditory memory, the ability to count and solve equations with astonishing rapidity, vast expansion of available vocabulary. “We never quite succeeded. It seems that for true savant capability, you have to pay the savant price—a loss of social function, the inability to do the fuzzy thinking that leads to creativity. Once we realized that the price was too high, we worked to strike a balance. Creativity and better memory, better ability to notice things, better abstract and spatial reasoning.”

  They did so well at shaping their own brains that any one of them might be trained as thoroughly in three or five or ten disciplines as ordinary humans were in one or two.

  By five hundred years into life on Garden, they had built machines that could intercept and decode all the messages between expendables and starships, so that no secrets could be kept from them. By a thousand years, they were able to alter the programs that operated the Walls, so that the fields not only triggered powerful emotions in the human mind, but also wakened the latent language abilities present in all humans.

  “It’s the grammar of grammars, the key to all vocabulary,” explained Mouse-Breeder. “It’s as if we sing you to sleep in all languages, when you pass through the Wall.”

  “But nobody passes through it,” said Param. “Except us.”

  “‘Through the Wall’ means in at one place and out at another,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You were the first to transverse the Wall, but many thousands have gone in and out; some have ventured well inside it, and for longer than you might have thought possible.”

  “But what’s the point?” asked Param. “If you can never leave your wallfold, then what does it matter whether you learn languages you’ll never speak.”

  “You’re not listening well enough, Param,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “These concepts are well within your reach.”

  Param thought a moment more and then blushed. “You don’t give us languages. You changed the Wall so that it gives us Language.”

  “Yes!” cried Swims-in-the-Air happily.

  “I have no idea what that means,” said Loaf.

  “The deep language of the human mind,” said Rigg. “The instinctive grammar of meaning that’s born into every human mind, on which we build our particular languages. Father told me that there was such a thing, but no one in the world had ever found the key to it.”

  “In our world, we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Barely a thousand years into our history, we found it, and then embedded the key to it in the Walls, so that it was potentially available to any people who could bear the torment of the Wall long enough for it to take root.”

  “And now let’s cross the river,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We can’t have bridges, you know, since we’re supposed to be yahoos, so we arranged stones to allow passage. Your feet get a bit wet, but it’s not that unpleasant, and you’ll dry off quickly enough in the grass on the other side.”

  She and Mouse-Breeder led the way, taking off their shoes and walking easily across on stones just under or just breaking the surface. Rigg followed next, being used to such traverses from his life in the wild, and Umbo and Loaf went next, almost as easily. Only Olivenko bothered to stay behind to help Param across, for Param had never had to learn the art of delicate balance, and she was more afraid of falling and injuring herself than the others were. With Olivenko’s hand gripping hers, however, she was at no risk of falling, and she could cross in no more than twice the time it took the others.

  Once across the ford, the walls began to rise on either side, and it was plain that the grass they walked on overlay smooth and level roads.

  Also, other Odinfolders began to emerge from the large trees near the river. They waved, they smiled, but none of them made a move to join them; none tried to speak. Apparently Mouse and Swim had been delegated to be the only Odinfolders that their party would be allowed to meet. Param wondered why.

  Meanwhile, as they ascended into the ruined city, the Odinfolders continued their story.

  The Odinfold colonists had maximized their population over the years, growing food efficiently, living in splendid high towers so they used up the least possible surface area with mere habitation. As a result, they had enormous numbers of extremely brilliant people working on every scientific and technological problem they could think of—along with art, literature, history, and philosophy.

  But in the midst of this vast civilizational florescence, something astonishing happened: A message reached them from their own future.

  It consisted of a stack of thin sheets of noncorroding metal, inscribed with fine writing, laying out the key events of the history of the next five thousand years.

  This Book of the Future appeared out of nowhere, in the midst of a meeting of scientists who were working on the problem of movement through time. One speaker was leaving the lectern, another rising from his seat at the table to take his place. And there, where the first one had been sitting before, the Future Book appeared, shiny, new.
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  By demand of the audience, the book was immediately read aloud. It was written in a slightly awkward version of their present language, and it was specifically written to the scientists at that gathering.

  First, it confirmed to them that five of their number had already completed the theoretical work that laid the foundation of the ability to move objects through time. The Messengers who wrote the book chose this date for the book to arrive precisely because the science was already in place, and the book would be confirmation of what they already knew.

  Second, it told them a rough outline of the history of Odinfold up to the year zero, and the nearly fourteen years beyond.

  Third, it told of the coming of the first humans from Earth. To these Visitors, it had been only fourteen years since Ram Odin’s colony ship made the first Jump. So they were stunned to find six billion people living in such a limited area as Odinfold.

  They were even more surprised to learn that the colony ship had replicated itself to make nineteen complete copies, all of which had become the source of colonies separated by Walls.

  Almost their first act was to turn off all the Walls, something that no one on Garden had yet been able to do. Then they did what Odinfolders had never been able to do. They visited every wallfold and saw what had become of the human race within it.

  Then they went home.

  Eleven months later, in the year fifteen, nineteen starships arrived at once. These were not Visitors, but Destroyers. Without warning or discussion, they activated the destruct systems on the orbiters that had been circling Garden ever since the starships plunged into the planet’s surface more than eleven thousand years before. These burned the surface of the planet, destroying almost all plant and animal life.

  Then the Destroyers sent flyers to the surface, where they systematically rendered all water undrinkable and the atmosphere unbreathable, with machines that would make the effects continue for at least two centuries.

  The Messengers who wrote the Future Book were hidden away in a deep mining operation, where they had air enough to continue to live for the week in which, as a group, they composed and then used a machine to etch the book. They also had a displacer with them, and used it to project the finished book through time and space to precisely the moment when the earliest scientists equipped to understand the situation were gathered.

  By the time Mouse-Breeder’s and Swims-in-the-Air’s story was finished, they were in the center of the city, where there were still walls and windows, instead of bare skeletons. Soil and dust had built up, mostly against east-facing walls, and so grass had softened the bottom edges of the buildings, and trees had taken root here and there. But it was still a city, however empty of inhabitants it might be, and Param could not help but be awed, not so much by the size of it, but by the way these people had lived.

  “All stores and businesses on ground level, of course,” Mouse-Breeder explained. “And everybody walked—transportation was underground. Parks everywhere—the streets were of a very durable grass. Not this high grass, but a low grass that you could walk on and it wouldn’t die.”

  “Then I’m surprised it ever went away,” said Olivenko.

  “It had to be misted with water every day,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And this prairie grass blew in as seeds, then became so tall, and thrived so well in dry seasons, that it blocked the old paving grass from any access to sunlight. It only took a few years.”

  “Why are we talking about grass?” asked Param. “I want to know about the people.”

  “They lived in these buildings, and worked in them, and went to school in them,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “There are still some of the bridges connecting them, do you see? You’ve never lived in such crowds, I know—but you’ve come closer than we who live in Odinfold today ever have. It seems so anonymous, to speak of a million people. But they all had lives, and families, and hopes, and disappointments. Every life was its own story, its own thread in the network of life.”

  “Why did this Future Book kill them?” asked Param.

  “No, no, you don’t understand at all. It simply changed their purpose.” Swims-in-the-Air corrected herself. “Our purpose. We still worked to advance science, but now we were in the business of saving the world. Because it was our fault, don’t you see? Whatever the Visitors saw in us, they went back and made such a report that the people of Earth resolved to destroy us.”

  “So you spent five thousand years preparing for war,” said Loaf.

  “No!” said Mouse-Breeder with horror. “First, it wouldn’t work. If we had defeated that fleet, they would have sent a larger one. If we had developed better weapons, they would have returned with weapons better still. The only hope of victory would have been to go back and destroy Earth itself. And we were not prepared to do that. Ever.”

  “Not that there weren’t factions who wanted to try it,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “But we had long since learned that we couldn’t defeat the programming in the ships. The expendables monitored us, you see, and they were very good at it. In most wallfolds, the expendables were there to nurture beneficial changes, to enhance human survival. But in our wallfold—and a few others, over the millennia—they were watching out to keep us from developing technologies that could defeat the protections on the programs.”

  “And weapons,” said Mouse-Breeder. “If anyone started to work on weapons systems that might eventually reach beyond the Wall or up into space, the expendable simply came and killed him. No trial, no questions, he was dead.”

  “I thought you said you broke into the programs,” said Umbo.

  “We read them,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And we found that there were some we could change—like the programs controlling the Wall. But we couldn’t defeat any of them. And we found code that clearly warned us that any attempt to defeat or change anything significant would cause the destruct system on the orbiter to burn out the entire wallfold.”

  “So you couldn’t defend yourselves,” said Loaf.

  “These systems weren’t designed to defend us from the human race. From Earth,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “But the expendables said that their whole purpose was helping us to get in place to protect Garden,” said Rigg.

  “It is now,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But they’re limited by the same programming that blocks us. We had to find a way to get the Visitors to reach a different conclusion about the people of Garden.”

  At first, the Odinfolders feared that the Visitors had been frightened by Odinfold’s magnificent achievements. So they began reducing their population and concealing their technological achievements. But within a dozen years of their first efforts along these lines, they got another book.

  This time the book was only a single sheet, and it was on gold instead of a complicated alloy. The message was also simpler. It outlined what had been attempted, and reported on its complete failure. The outcome was the same as before.

  More plans were made. More drastic cutbacks in population. A deliberate reduction in technological change. And yet there came another Future Book.

  So they tried again. Instead of cutting back on technology and science, they pushed it forward, trying to offer dazzling brilliance as an incentive—something to sell, something that might earn their survival.

  Another Future Book showed that as a dead end.

  “Nine books in all,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The last one came only three thousand years ago. That was when we decided on the yahoo strategy. We got the idea from a book from Earth, Gulliver’s Travels. It ended with the traveler visiting a land where the sentient residents had evolved from horses, and the creatures that looked like humans were tree-dwelling beasts that grunted and threw their dung at strangers. We bred ourselves for that, in a flurry of new generations, and then sat back and waited.”

  “That was when we gave ourselves shorter legs and semi-grasping feet. Learning from the primate ancestors of humans on Earth,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “And when there were about ten thousand of us,
long-lived, intelligent, but able to pass for beasts, our beautiful ancestors allowed themselves to die out, so that only we were left.”

  “What good is it?” said Param. “How do you even know it was your wallfold that convinced the Visitors that Garden had to be destroyed?”

  “Ours was the only one we could change,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “Be accurate,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “I should have said,” Swims-in-the-Air replied, “that ours was the only wallfold we could change as drastically as this. We didn’t have the right to interfere in the others at anything like this level. But we did fiddle here and there.”

  “How?” asked Param.

  “You mean, what changes did we make? Or how did we manage to make changes?” Mouse-Breeder said. “You know that we can send things back in time to any place on Garden, the way we did with the jewel. Well, we also assembled all the jewels—originally, each wallfold contained only its own control jewel. We put them together, and we gave them to Ramex.”

  “Ramex,” said Rigg. “The expendable who raised me?”

  “In this language,” said Mouse-Breeder, “we name each expendable with the name of the founder of the wallfold, plus ‘ex’ for expendable. So we speak of Vadeshex, Ramex, Odinex.”

  “Where is your expendable?” asked Olivenko.

  “Off doing whatever he does,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Vadeshex met you in Vadeshfold because it has no other sentient inhabitants. But if a stranger came to Ramfold, do you think Ramex would be there to greet him?”

  Param was impatient with such digressions. “Why did you assemble the stones? And when you did, why didn’t you use them yourselves?”

  “Because we can’t,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You have to pass completely through a Wall without using the stones before you gain the ability to control a ship and pass freely through the Wall.”

  “So if we had only had the one stone,” said Param.

  “You would have had to present your stone at that starship and gain the right to control the Wall surrounding only your own wallfold.”