Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (36 page)

“Good work,” said Loaf.

“Rigg and Umbo just saved you from a terrible death,” said Olivenko.

The flyer took off.

“What, the mice were going to attack me?” asked Param, incredulous.

“Not by nibbling you to death, no,” said Olivenko.

“A cylinder of metal in the throat,” said Rigg. He demonstrated the size of it with his hands. “They slipped it into place during one of the gaps in your time-slicing. It tore your head off your body and burned you up.”

Param felt ill. “Why? What did I do?”

“I think they wanted to show us how easily we could be killed,” said Olivenko.

“I think they wanted to force us to use our powers and get out of here,” said Loaf.

“Why?” asked Param. “All they had to do was ask us to leave!”

“The people who wanted us to go may have been in the minority,” said Loaf. “We only ever met Swims-in-the-Air and Mouse-Breeder. It gave us an impression of perfect unity among the Odinfolders. But there may well have been a powerful faction that wanted us gone.”

“By killing me?”

“They knew we wouldn’t leave you dead,” said Rigg. “And they knew that we wouldn’t stay.”

“But what about meeting the Visitors?” asked Param. “I thought we were supposed to figure out a way to convince them not to wipe out Garden.”

“I don’t think so,” said Umbo. “I don’t think that was ever the plan.”

“They’ve been lying to us?”

“Of course they have,” said Loaf. “They’re only human.”

“Why did we believe them?” said Rigg, shaking his head. He imitated Swims-in-the-Air’s melodious voice. “‘We want you to figure things out yourselves. We want you to find your own way to convince the Visitors that we’re worth saving.’ Silbom’s right heel!”

“What
did
they want?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Loaf.

“I have a theory,” said Umbo.

“Which is?” asked Rigg.

“You’ll think it’s stupid,” said Umbo.

“Probably,” said Rigg. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t be right.”

“Or lead us to a right answer,” said Loaf.

“I think they’ve given up completely on changing the Visitors’ minds,” said Umbo. “I think they only wanted us to get on the Visitors’ starship long enough to smuggle a weapon aboard. A weapon that they’d carry back to Earth and wipe out the human race there before they can possibly send the Destroyers to kill all the people of Garden.”

“A weapon?” asked Param. “I thought we couldn’t build weapons.”

“Not literally a weapon,” said Umbo. “They can’t make a weapon. They haven’t made a weapon. Not mechanical, not biological, no such thing.”

“Then what is it that they’re supposedly going to smuggle back to Earth?” asked Rigg.

In reply, Umbo gestured toward Loaf.

Only now did Param notice that a couple of mice were perched on Loaf’s shoulders.

“Mice?” she asked.

“I told you there was no machine,” said Rigg. “But they think there is one. They think they’ve seen it, they think they know how it works. Instead, what they’ve seen is a very solid-seeming hologram. And when things get sent back in time and over to some distant location, they think the machine is doing it.”

Param realized what he was leading up to. “But it’s the mice doing it.”

“Mouse-Breeder’s mice,” said Umbo. “They have human genes in them. Including the genes of time manipulation. Only in these mice, the genes are expressed by time-displacement of inanimate objects. They can put anything anywhere.”

“So when they put a cylinder in my throat—”

“It’s what some Odinfolder humans told them to do,” said Umbo. “And they obeyed, because they knew that we could retrieve you.”

“Though it was harder than they thought,” said Rigg. “Because we didn’t want to retrieve you from a point
before
you learned all that you could learn here.”

“Whatever it is you learned,” said Olivenko. Was there a bit of scorn in his voice?

“We’ve spent nearly a year here, all told—a whole year since we left Ramfold and went to Vadeshfold. Which of the things that happened in that time should be erased?” asked Loaf. “We wanted to save your life, of course, but we didn’t want to kill a year of it in the process.”

Param felt uneasy, thinking of a version of the future in which her burnt-up body had no head left on it. “What will we do now?”

“Go to the border with Larfold,” said Rigg. “The wallfold to the north. Where Father Knosso was murdered.”

“We’re going to go back earlier and save him?” asked Param.

“We don’t dare,” said Umbo. “Not yet, anyway. We can’t go back before the time when Rigg took control of the Wall.”

“The flyer won’t pass through the Wall,” said Umbo. “We have to walk through. I’d rather not do it while experiencing the agony of the Wall.”

“We’ll go through the Wall at almost exactly the time Rigg took control,” said Loaf. “While we were still hiking around in Vadeshfold. Before we ever appeared here.”

“But they’ll see us,” said Param.

“Who?” asked Rigg.

“The Odinfolders.”

“Oh, well—they probably will,” said Rigg, “since they seem to cluster around the Wall. But they won’t know to stop us.”

“Unless the mice send them another Future Book,” said Umbo, laughing.

“Is that who’s been writing the Books of the Future?” asked Param.

“No, no,” said Olivenko. “This is the only timestream in which these mice existed. All the other Future Books were sent using the original crude displacement machine, before time-shifting was turned over to the mice and became precise.”

“And did the Odinfolders—the
mice
, I suppose—really alter Father’s genes? And create Umbo outright?”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “But this is the first timestream in which we existed. Ramex was carefully breeding for time-shifting power, but he hadn’t reached
us
yet, not until the mice intervened. And he would never have reached our level in his breeding program, because Garden would have been destroyed first.”

They explained to Param all that they had learned in the starship. And Param could see that something else had happened, too—Umbo and Rigg were still a little wary around each other, but Umbo was actually cooperating with Rigg and not arguing with every little thing he said. Something happened on that starship, and Param asked what it was.

“I died a couple of times,” said Umbo.

“Really?”

“Copies of me,” said Umbo. He explained how that worked, and Param nodded. “The way there must have been two versions of me back in the library, when we were running away a minute ago. Six months ago.”

“Only because your earlier self didn’t see your later self, and so you didn’t turn away from the path in which you time-shifted, you didn’t cause yourself to split,” said Olivenko.

“But I still died,” said Param.

“Only it’s all right,” said Umbo, “because we don’t remember dying.”

“It’s not all right,” said Rigg.

Param and Umbo both looked at him, waiting for an explanation, and Param was surprised to see how upset Rigg looked.

“It’s not all right, because I saw you both dead.” He looked away. “I never want to see that again.”

“Really gruesome?” asked Umbo.

“There was a version of both of you,” said Rigg, “that felt all the pain and terror of death. You don’t remember it, but it happened.”

“And by the Odinfolders’ account, the whole world has gone through that many times over,” said Olivenko.

“Which brings us back to Umbo’s idea,” said Param. “How do you figure the Odinfolders are going to destroy the human race on Earth, if they haven’t made a weapon or even planned what such a weapon might be?”

“The mice,” said Umbo, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“What can they do?” asked Param.

“If a breeding pair can make it back to Earth,” said Umbo, “they’ll have maybe a dozen children after three weeks. If only five of them are females, and they reach sexual maturity in six weeks, and they have the same number of female children, five in a generation, how many will they have before that Destroyer fleet is scheduled to take off?”

Loaf raised a hand. “These mice reach sexual maturity in four weeks. It’s one of the first changes Mouse-Breeder made.”

“Even without any notion of weaponry when they arrive,” said Umbo, “they’ll have several generations to learn all about it on Earth. And plenty of time in which to carry out the war. They won’t even need to learn about mechanical weapons, anyway. They’re experts on genes. Look what they did to
us
.”

Param was in awe. “You think a pair of mice could destroy the human race in a year?”

“That’s if only one breeding pair makes it through,” said Umbo. “And I’m betting more than that will make it.”

“Mice are vermin, in the eyes of Earth people,” said Olivenko. “They’ll exterminate them.”

“They won’t even know the mice are there,” said Umbo. “It won’t be like the library, where they’re out in the open. Mice are good at hiding. And the voyage doesn’t take long.”

“How will they get off the ship?” asked Param.

“They’re collectively even smarter than we are,” said Rigg. “They’ll find a way.”

“And then the Destroyers won’t come,” said Param. “So Garden will be saved.”

No one answered her. Umbo looked away. Rigg blushed. Was he ashamed of her?

“That’s true,” said Loaf. “But how is it better to trade the destruction of human life on one planet for another?”

Param shook her head. “It isn’t, except for one point. This way, the planet that survives is
ours
. And I count that as very much better than the other way around. Does that make me a monster?”

“We’re all monsters,” said Loaf, “because we all thought of that. We’re just ashamed of ourselves for thinking it.”

“I’m not,” said Param.

And then it occurred to her that that was why Rigg had blushed. Because he was ashamed of
her
for not being ashamed.

Which was why Rigg could never have been King-in-the-Tent.

CHAPTER 17

Trust

The whole way to the Wall, Rigg sat in the flyer, looking out the window at the prairies that passed under them, and then the tree-covered hills as they came into the north, where autumn was in full swing again. It made Rigg feel a moment’s nostalgia for his life in the high forests of the Stashi Mountains.

But then he remembered that those high mountains had a starship under them, and the cliffs that loomed over Fall Ford had been raised by the collision that wiped out most of the native life of Garden. The man who had walked with him and taught him and called him “son” was a machine, and a liar, and when he died he didn’t die at all, but he left Rigg to feel the grief of the loss, and then to puzzle things out without help.

Now Rigg’s sense of who he was in the world had been torn away again. Son of the royal family, that had been hard enough;
target of assassination, he could take that in stride. But now to learn that his real father, Knosso, had been genetically altered to enhance his mental abilities, and those abilities had been passed along to him and Param, and that this genetic alteration had been carried out by semi-humanized mice—it was just too bizarre.

Is there anything in my life that was not someone else’s plan?

Even now, there were those two mice perched on Loaf’s shoulders, ostentatiously looking at everything that happened, with all that clever cuteness that mice always had. But Rigg could see the paths of the other mice in the flyer—the ones that had jumped up to hitch rides in everyone’s clothing as they walked to the flyer, the ones that had already climbed in unnoticed as the flyer stood open and waiting. They had at least a hundred mice on this vessel, and yet no one else seemed aware of it. Did Loaf know? Surely he could hear them.

Rigg should probably mention it. But how would the mice’s behavior change if he called everyone’s attention to their presence?

Was this just a trial run for the Visitors, to see if the mice could sneak aboard a vessel without humans noticing? Very clever. Humans who didn’t have Rigg’s particular pathfinding ability or Loaf’s facemask-enhanced perceptions wouldn’t have known.

Or was it an experiment at all? The mice had shown that they could and would kill—would kill
them
. Just as Odinex had shown that he could murder one of their number. And they had been afraid of Vadesh! By comparison, Vadesh was their best friend.

No, the mice probably weren’t planning any homicides during this voyage. What
were
they planning?

“I wonder how the ships’ computers will interpret my instructions concerning the Wall,” said Rigg.

Since he was looking at Loaf when he spoke, Loaf answered him. “Which instructions?”

“I told them that anybody who was with me could pass through the Wall when I did. But how do we define ‘anybody’?” Rigg glanced at the mice that Loaf was wearing like animated epaulets.

Loaf nodded thoughtfully. “You’re saying they can’t get through the Wall.”

“I’m saying that I don’t know.”

“So the philosophical question of personhood,” said Olivenko, “has practical consequences.”

“It always does,” said Param. “Those we would kill, we first turn into nonpersons.”

“Dangerous not to be a person,” said Umbo. “Or to be an extra copy of a person.”

“Individually, these mice are bright enough, but not really up to individual human standards, is that right?” said Rigg. “I’d like to know their own assessment.”

“They need each other,” said Loaf. “They specialize, and so they can’t really function at their highest level when they’re alone.”

“These two on your shoulders,” said Rigg. “They function like one human? Or less?”

“Less,” said Loaf. “Or so they tell me. They’re mostly here for data collection.”

“I’d like to collect a little data,” said Rigg. “Are they a breeding pair?”

The mice froze and stared at Rigg.

“How interesting,” said Loaf. “They’ve been chattering constantly until you asked that.”

“It’s what they plan to do with the Visitors, yes?” asked Rigg. “Get aboard their ship, go to Earth, and then breed their brains out.”