Orson Card - Ruins

Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.

Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn’t any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their faces faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.

Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.

Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.

“It’s a field,” said Vadesh. “A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn’t affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen.”

Oxygen. “So we can breathe.”

“Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we’d suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well.”

He didn’t teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.

“The Wall is a field, too, you said,” Rigg answered.

“Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away.”

“That’s not how it felt to me,” said Rigg.

“Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling,” said Vadesh. “But you’re right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find reasons for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action.”

“But we went through it,” said Loaf.

“You went through it before it was there,” said Vadesh. “Cheating.”

“We went back to get Rigg,” said Loaf. “We brought him out.”

“Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well.”

“So there are different kinds of fields?” asked Rigg.

“Many of them, my young pupil. I can’t believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn’t even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields.”

“I don’t even wish I knew what you’re talking about,” said Loaf. “I just want this thing to stop moving.”

“When we get there. Not much farther.”

“You crashed into this world,” said Rigg.

“There was no moon,” said Vadesh. “And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive.”

“And you worked all this out?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, not me,” said Vadesh. “That’s not what expendables are for. We don’t have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require.”

“So who did?”

“It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they’re made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The field collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode.”

Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. “Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway,” said Rigg.

“Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys,” said Vadesh. “The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why.”

Vadesh didn’t seem to understand that increasing Rigg’s mistrust of his father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that expendables lie. As if he needed more proof of that.

The wagon began to slow.

“I can feel us slowing down,” said Rigg.

“Thank Silbom’s right ear,” said Loaf.

“There’s no reason to install and maintain an inertial bubble field on a mere wagon—it never moves fast enough to need it,” said Vadesh. “Really, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you’re required to do it. Not worth the time or energy.”

The wagon came to a halt.

So did the tunnel. It simply ended. The walls on every side were of smooth stone. There was no door, no sign, not even a loading dock.

Vadesh bounded from the wagon. “Come along, lads,” he said.

“Lads?” said Loaf.

“He thinks he’s making friends with us,” said Rigg.

“He’s a bit of a clown, isn’t he?”

“He wants us to think so,” said Rigg. “Or else he wants us to think that he wants us to think so. I’m not sure how complicated it gets.”

Vadesh—who could hear everything they were saying, Rigg never allowed himself to forget that—was standing on the ground near the end of the tunnel. “Come along, the door only opens for a few moments and I’d hate to have either of you get caught in it when it slides shut.”

As they got off the wagon, it immediately whisked away back down the tunnel.

“No return trip?” asked Loaf.

“I can always call it back,” said Vadesh. “And there are many other ways to make the same journey.” Vadesh turned to face the wall. He said nothing, made no gesture—but he did face the wall. Why, Rigg wondered. Was he communicating some other way?

Apparently so, because the end of the tunnel was suddenly gone. What had seemed to be smooth stone was now a continuation of the tunnel. The wagon could have kept going. Only now, beyond where the tunnel had ended, there was an obvious station, with loading dock, stairway, and other doors, not disguised at all.

Here, though, the stairway went farther down rather than returning toward the surface. They had come down to get to the tunnel at the other end, and had traveled steadily downward since then, if Rigg’s directional sense was at all reliable in a place like this and at such a speed. And yet their destination was lower still.

But they did not take the stairs. “Down,” said Vadesh, and a set of doors opened to reveal a smallish room. Vadesh walked in. Loaf and Rigg followed, and then the doors closed. Rigg could not understand why they would enter such a room, which had no doorway other than the one they had come through.

“It’s an elevator,” said Loaf. “It’s on pulleys. The whole room goes up and down, with counterweights to balance us. Some of the taller buildings in O have them, and a bank in Aressa Sessamo had one, too.”