Ruins

by Orson Scott Card

  Instantly there was a book lying on the table. And then another, and another, two or three appearing, another disappearing, as if the books were works of sculpture being displayed in rapid succession.

  “This one,” Olivenko said, putting his finger into one. At once it rose into the air, exactly the right distance from his eyes for comfortable reading. It opened. “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World,” said Rigg. “By Jonathan Swift.”

  “Commonly known as Gulliver’s Travels,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Part four, chapter one, in which Gulliver meets the Yahoos.”

  “You can’t expect us to believe that he happened to choose that title by chance,” said Loaf.

  Mouse-Breeder looked pained. “Of course not. No matter what book he chose, it was going to contain Gulliver’s Travels.”

  “Is that what we’re required to read first?” asked Param.

  “You’re not required to do anything at all,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “The only way this will work is if you freely choose for yourselves, follow up on whatever interests you. Of course, we expect your most important results will come from studying the culture of the society that launched the colony ships—to us, eleven thousand years ago, but to the Visitors, only half a generation.”

  “But I can study the history of Ramfold if I want?” asked Param.

  “If you wish,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “And I can study the wallfold where Knosso was killed?” asked Olivenko.

  “Unfortunately, they have no writing,” said Mouse-Breeder ruefully. “We can’t collect oral histories from other wallfolds, because our machines can’t pick up sounds. Only things that persist in time.”

  “What if I want to roam through Odinfold,” asked Loaf. “To see this place for myself?”

  “Go where you want,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “But you should be careful. The predators have no fear of humans, which means they have no respect for us, either. We look like meat to the larger ones, and we carry no weapons.”

  “I do,” said Loaf.

  “And how effective will they be against a pack of wolves? A pride of lions? A troop of hyenas?” Mouse-Breeder shook his head. “Of course, if you’re killed, your friends can go back in time to rescue you, but it seems a waste of time.”

  “I’m not going hunting,” said Loaf. “I want to see the prairie you describe.”

  “It’s interesting for about a day,” said Mouse-Breeder. “But be our guest. There are no restrictions. Whatever you think you need to know before you meet the Visitors. Or whatever you simply want to know to satisfy your own curiosity. All our plans have come to nothing. We have no plans for you, beyond providing you with access to all the information we have.”

  “Then I want to learn how the starships work,” said Umbo. “And all about the machines that govern them.”

  “It’s a lifetime’s study,” said Swims-in-the-Air.

  “And your lifetimes are shorter than ours,” said Mouse-Breeder.

  “I don’t have to learn how to build one,” said Umbo. “But I assume that the design of whatever the Visitors use to come here will be based on the same principles. They rely on machines, as you do. More than you do. Right?”

  Rigg was surprised that Umbo had thought of such a project, and seemed determined to pursue it. Umbo had no particular education in science and technology. He would be duplicating the kind of education that Father had given Rigg as they wandered the forests. Rigg well knew what effort it had taken him with the best teacher in the world.

  And then Rigg realized that he was assuming Umbo was less capable of learning than Rigg himself was. But that wasn’t so. Umbo was half Odinfolder, while Rigg and Param were only one-quarter. If they really had bred for superior intelligence, Umbo might be even smarter than the two royal children were.

  How quickly I bought into the class biases of the Sessamids, thought Rigg. Thinking I was Father’s son, I assumed I was as smart as he was—he knew everything, I thought. Turns out he was a machine, and I was the son of the Queen- and King-in-the-Tent. So I turned all my sense of superiority toward the royal family, and once again, I was wrong.

  Wrong and wrong again, and again, and probably now as well. Let Umbo study what he wants. He’ll learn as quickly as I will, or more quickly.

  Soon they all had books, except Loaf, who pleasantly insisted on going out into the world. He asked for a flyer, and they produced one—a duplicate of the one they had ridden in when Vadesh brought them to the Wall. Within three days he was back, saying little about what he saw, and then settled into the same life they were leading: Hours on end sitting or standing or walking about in the library, reading whatever the mice made appear at their request, then discarding what they were done with, which promptly vanished, yet reappeared again upon request, open to the very page they had been on when they closed it.

  But it wasn’t all reading. There were meals, and at the meals they talked, and sometimes in between. Umbo and Olivenko were the sort of student who has to talk about or show whatever excites them. Rigg understood the principle, but Father had curbed it in him, if only because whatever Rigg had learned, he had learned from Father—from Ramex—and in the deep forest there was no one to tell but him, and what was the point of that?

  Rigg was annoyed sometimes at the interruptions from Umbo and Olivenko, but then he changed his mind when he realized that it was good for him to know the extent of what they learned, as well as their questions and conclusions about it. It’s not that Rigg actually knew everything they knew, but he knew what they had said about what they knew, and didn’t forget it, so that he would be able to ask them questions and have some idea of whether they’d know the answer.

  Param, on the other hand, talked about nothing she was learning, and showed her annoyance if anyone asked. For a few hours once he asked the mice to show him what Param had been reading, and he skimmed through the books, finding that she was, indeed, reading histories of the Sessamids. But very quickly he found that she was beyond—before—the royal family, backtracking through the entire history of Ramfold. It was a world she had never really seen, he realized, and by studying the whole history and geography of it, she was, in a way, seeing what she had been kept from seeing her entire life.

  Olivenko immersed himself in the culture of Earth, but not the modern history that would be familiar to the Visitors who would come to Garden only a year or so from now. Instead, he was discovering all he could about the evolution of the human race and then about the earliest histories, the movement of ancient tribes, the formation of nations. “I have to know why humans are the way they are,” said Olivenko.

  Rigg took note of how Olivenko spoke of humans as “they,” though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The Odinfolders looked rather simian, with their shorter legs and semi-grasping feet. It was easy to see that they would not register as fully human. But as far as the Visitors would be able to see, Rigg and his company were fully human. Except for Loaf, and that was only because of the parasite he bore on his face. And Olivenko had no share in the inborn time-centered powers that were the unique achievement of Ramfold. In what sense should he think of humans as other than himself, or of himself as other than human?

  To Rigg, there was no doubt that he was human, and the others as well—including the yahoo-bodied Odinfolders. It took a little getting used to, the way their strides were shorter, their running slower, but their reach longer, their strength much greater than any of the Ramfolders but Loaf. Still, they spoke human languages, thought human thoughts, ate human food, and had the same tribal and personal instincts as any human. Self-preservation, yet the willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community; personal pride and ambition, and yet a willingness to be modest in order to retain their acceptance by others. Rigg could see no particular difference in the way they thought and acted, the social rules that governed them.

  The only real difference was that the Odinfolders were so self-controlled. They might feel the same imperatives as the pe
ople Rigg had known in Ramfold, but they knew what was happening to them as they felt these things, and chose rationally whether to act on those feelings or not. He could see in their faces as the decisions were made, the momentary hesitation, and instinctive move that they held in check. But it seemed to cause no stress. Reining in their passions was as natural to them as eating and drinking and talking. So perhaps they had evolved to a higher level, another stage. Once they started getting the Future Books, they had transformed themselves again and again, remaking their history from that moment forward, over and over, and learning from each failure, only to fail again. Perhaps that process had bred in them a calm acceptance of defeat, or a readiness to take the long view of things.

  There came a time when Rigg realized he had to read the Future Books in order to try to make guesses about what might have struck the Visitors as so terrifying or disgusting about the people of Garden that they came back to destroy the world. No matter how much Rigg read from the histories, biographies, and literature of Earth, it made no sense to him. The stories all seemed to champion tolerance, acceptance of the strange, the need to change in order to adapt, survive, grow.

  Indeed, the whole colonizing project was born of a fear that Earth was too crowded, too polluted, too endangered after years of botched development. An outlet was needed precisely so that humans had a chance of becoming something different. And so Ram Odin had been sent out in command of a starship that would use the new technology of jumping through space to reach another habitable planet as quickly as possible; but if the jump hadn’t worked, the ship could have continued at a much slower speed, with passengers and pilot in stasis until they reached the planet that Ram named Garden. The idea was to succeed in establishing the human race on another world. And in this the colony project had succeeded astonishingly well.

  It was hardly the fault of the people of Garden that there had been a time anomaly in the first jump, and they had been thrust back in time by eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years. Nor was it their fault that another anomaly caused the ship to make the passage nineteen times, so that nineteen complete copies of the colony ship, including all the people on it, reached Garden at the same time. What could possibly have caused the Visitors to ignore their own ethos, the innocence of the people of Garden, and a human history longer than that of recorded human history on Earth?

  When he started reading the Future Books, he asked the mice to show him which of his party had already read them. When the list appeared, he was surprised and rueful when he learned that he was the last, not the first, to read the Future Books. To his surprise, the first had been Loaf.

  For many months they had been leading the studious life that the Odinfolders had invited them to lead, preparing as best they could to learn useful things about the Visitors, about the people of Earth, and about their own world, in the effort to understand what would provoke genocide by the Destroyers. But when Rigg reached the end of his third detailed pass through the Future Books, and still understood nothing, he called a meeting that he realized was long overdue.

  He brought them out of the library, out of the ruined city, to the brow of a hill overlooking a wide reach of prairie. It happened that a herd of elephants was busy destroying a copse of trees in the distance, and Loaf amused them for a while by describing in detail the way a young elephant was trying to push down a tree until an older female finally shoved him out of the way and took it down with a single surge. With the vastly superior eyes given him by the facemask, Loaf had no need of telescopes or other tools to see things that were a tiny blur to the others. And that gave Rigg the question with which he began the meeting.

  “Loaf’s eyes are better than ours, because he’s been partially merged with a highly altered life form from Garden,” said Rigg. “But that can’t be why the Visitors rejected Garden, can it?”

  There was a brief digression as Param pointed out that since the Visitors had never seen Loaf wearing a facemask on any of the previous passages through this period of time, it couldn’t possibly have any influence.

  “Not Loaf in particular,” said Olivenko. “For all we know there are other wallfolds that have been transformed just as radically, and the Odinfolders just don’t know about it. That isn’t what Rigg is asking.”

  If they failed, Rigg knew he would have to return to his original plan of visiting every wallfold himself. This time, though, he was spending his time studying the most vital world of all, the one the Visitors would come from.

  “The whole literature of Earth is full of condemnation of people who hate others just for being strange and different,” said Rigg. “Their histories are full of self-congratulation about how they’ve left such base impulses behind them. The worst thing their biographers and historians can say about a person is that he judges people on the basis of differences in their physical attributes, their languages, their cultures. How can they possibly come here and violate everything they believe?”

  Loaf only laughed. “Rigg, you’re still so young. What would your father have said?” When Olivenko started to bring up Knosso, Loaf held up a hand. “I mean Ramex, the expendable who raised him.”

  Rigg sighed. “Yes, I know. The very fact that they condemn xenophobia so harshly is proof that they hadn’t overcome it at all.”

  “An aspirational virtue, not an achievement,” said Olivenko.

  “Whatever that means,” said Umbo.

  “Oh, drop the pose of youthful ignorance,” said Param impatiently. “I’ve seen what you’re reading. By now you could probably build a starship yourself.”

  “I only understand a fraction of what I’m reading,” said Umbo. “I don’t know how anything works, I just know what the machines are supposed to do and where you can find them in each ship. And since the Visitors’ starship design is probably completely different, I doubt anything I’ve learned is useful.”

  “So you’ve wasted your time here,” said Param. “But don’t pretend that you don’t know what ‘aspirational virtue’ means.”

  “A virtue that you admire but don’t actually have,” said Umbo, “yes, I understand it. I just think it sounds absurd for us to talk like philosophers when we’re just us.”

  “Sorry,” said Rigg. “But the fact that the people of Earth recognize that they still have a serious problem with xenophobia makes it seem all the more absurd that they could come here, see how strange we are—but also how much the different wallfolds have accomplished in eleven thousand years—and then decide that they hate us and fear us so much we have to be wiped out.”

  “We don’t know that’s what the Visitors decided,” said Olivenko.

  “You think the Future Books are lying about the Destroyers?” asked Rigg.

  “I think there’s no shortage of lying here in Odinfold, but no, I think the Future Books are telling the truth. But the very fact that they call one group from Earth the Visitors, and the second group by a different name, Destroyers, should be a clue to a real possibility—that the humans who came to destroy Garden are not the same group that first came to visit.”

  “Two separate groups with starship technology?” asked Umbo doubtfully.

  “No,” said Olivenko. “But how do we know that there wasn’t a political revolution, a coup, a war during the gap between the Visitors’ return and the Destroyers’ departure? Maybe the Visitors came back with a brilliantly glowing report, but a group of xenophobes took over the government. And maybe they didn’t last long in power—just long enough to send the Destroyers. We have no way of knowing whether by the time the Destroyers returned to Earth, there wasn’t a new government in place that deeply regretted the destruction of Garden.”

  “I suppose nobody has ever been there to receive their apology,” said Param.

  “Exactly,” said Olivenko. “Maybe no matter what the Visitors see, the Destroyers come, for reasons having to do with the politics of Earth. Aren’t there powerful groups that still espouse xenophobia?”

  Rigg nodded. “They aren
’t the people with the high technology, but yes, there are widespread cultures that believe in killing everyone who doesn’t comply with their cultural practices. But they’ve been kept in check for centuries by the superior technology of the more enlightened cultures.”

  “Enlightened?” asked Loaf. “Who’s judging now?”

  “I’m judging,” said Rigg, “and I’m using the only standard that matters to us: Enlightened people are the ones who don’t want to destroy Garden, and the Destroyers are ignorant monsters. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, don’t you?”

  They agreed readily enough.

  “We’re ignorant monsters,” said Param. “Look how Mother and General Citizen treated us. How Vadesh treated us—and how we judged him and the facemask people. Humans judge each other and we kill each other when we decide the other people are too bad to allow them to live.”

  “But not everybody,” said Rigg.

  “Everybody,” said Param. “No exceptions.”

  “Not me,” said Rigg. “Not you.”

  “You wouldn’t kill somebody who was trying to kill you?” asked Param.

  “That’s self-defense,” said Rigg.

  “But Jesus and Gandhi and a lot of others say that you have no right of self-defense,” said Param.

  “I’m not sure that’s what they said,” said Rigg, “but I’m glad to know you’ve been reading Earth literature, too.”

  “I skimmed it a little,” said Param. “Look, human nature hasn’t changed. What does it matter if the Visitors liked Garden and the Destroyers are a different group? Garden ends up just as dead.”

  “What I’m saying,” said Rigg, “is that maybe we need to be prepared to go back to Earth with the Visitors.”

  “Where they’d kill us,” said Param. “And then we’d be so far from here that we couldn’t go back in time and get here, we’d only travel back in time on Earth. That’s a deeply terrible idea.”

  “It might be the only way,” said Rigg, refusing to take her negativism as a final answer. “Go back with them to Earth, with the chance that we die there, but with a chance that maybe we can change the outcome.”