Orson Card - Ruins

“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”

Vadesh stood in silence.

“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.

“Then don’t,” said Param.

“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.

“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”

“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.

Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.

“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.

Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”

“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”

The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”

Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”

Rigg immediately remembered the crushing despair, the utter terror, the agony of his minutes—his decades, it had seemed—inside the Wall.

“This time we wouldn’t have General Citizen trying to kill us,” Param said helpfully.

“And now you know how to go back in time and then return without my help,” said Umbo.

“Maybe someday we’ll need to do that—go back in time to put off our confrontation with the people of Earth,” said Rigg. “But right now, since nineteen days ago, any two of us can simply walk through the Wall.”

“So let’s go back nineteen days to dodge the crowd,” said Olivenko.

“I can’t calibrate it like that,” said Umbo.

“Neither can I,” said Rigg. “It’s not like the paths have calendars attached.” But even as he said it, Rigg realized that he could do it well enough. He remembered that when he first discovered that the paths were actually people in motion through time, he had been standing on a clifftop with Umbo, unbeknownst to him, slowing time so that he could see the people instead of the paths. Couldn’t they simply go back a day at a time? Or count back? By picking one animal’s path, and then another’s, Rigg could work his way back to the exact time, then attach to that animal and bring the others with him.

“You’ve thought of a way?” asked Olivenko.

“Yes,” said Rigg. “Take my hands.”

“No,” said Vadesh. “Get inside the flyer, so I can go back, too, and still have the flyer with me.”

Rigg looked at him coldly. “We won’t need you,” said Rigg. “And I don’t want to send you back in time, knowing what you know now.”

“What do I know that’s so dangerous?”

“I don’t want you knowing, nineteen days ago, that our party broke up, that we came here and found people waiting on the other side. That Loaf started talking again.”

“What harm do you think would come from that?” asked Vadesh.

“The more you argue for being sent back in time,” said Rigg, “the more determined I am never to let you do so. Because you wouldn’t want it so much if you didn’t have some plan for exploiting your present knowledge in the past.”

To that, Vadesh had nothing to say.

Olivenko laughed. “Let’s go, then.”

“Nineteen days,” said Rigg.

“Eighteen,” said Loaf.

Again they looked at him.

“It’s been eighteen days since I got the mask,” said Loaf. “That’s when you got control over the Walls, isn’t it? That’s what I remember.”

They all looked at Vadesh.

“He’s confused,” said Vadesh.

“You lied to us,” said Rigg. “You said nineteen days. You counted on us to trust your accuracy. So we’d take you back to the day before I took control of the ship. So you could do something to prevent it.”

Vadesh said nothing.

“Expendables,” said Olivenko. “Can’t trust them, can’t kill them.”

“Get in the flyer and go back to the ship,” said Rigg.

Vadesh immediately started toward the ship. Then he stopped and said, “Rigg, if you only—”

“Go without stopping, without speaking. Go.”

Vadesh got back into the flyer. In moments it rose into the air and flew away.

“Maybe that was a mistake,” said Umbo.

Of course he’d say that, thought Rigg. Of course I was wrong. “Why?” asked Rigg, trying to keep impatience and resentment out of his voice.

“Because we could never get him to tell us how he knew we needed a ride,” said Umbo.

“That’s a problem,” said Olivenko. “We figured you’d ask him when we got back together.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know?”

“It didn’t come up,” said Param.

“It’s our mistake,” said Umbo, “not yours.”

“He had some kind of foreknowledge, then,” said Rigg.

“So does that mean that in some version of the past, you actually did take him with you into the past?” asked Olivenko.

“We know there were multiple versions,” said Umbo, “because I came back and warned myself not to go into the tunnel with you.”

“But you could only have done that while you were still there,” said Rigg, trying to think through what those other futures, the lost futures, might have contained.

“Right,” said Umbo. “I think what happened was, the mask got put on you . And then we couldn’t go anywhere, because . . .”

Because Rigg was the only one who knew how to keep them alive on a long journey. Because until Rigg was able to take control of the ship’s computers, they had no way to turn off the Wall. They had nowhere to go, and no way to get there if they did.

“So you didn’t go back from here,” said Param. “The future you avoided with your warning—”

“I think that in that future, we waited until Rigg got control of his facemask and could tell us what to do,” said Olivenko.

“No,” said Rigg. “I think I never got control of it, or at least you didn’t wait long enough to find out. I think Loaf told you to go back and change who went into the starship. I think he knew that if he and I were the only ones who went in, Vadesh would have to put the facemask on him first, because if he went for me, Loaf would have been in a position to stop him.”

“Sounds like Loaf,” said Umbo.

“So Loaf chose to be like this?” asked Param doubtfully.

“Good plan,” said Loaf.

“Terrible plan,” said Umbo.

“Excellent plan,” said Loaf. “Because I see clearly now. I have this gift.”

“I wish we could leave the facemask behind the way we got rid of Vadesh,” said Rigg.

“If you knew how to detach it,” said Loaf, “then I’d stay away from you so you couldn’t. I never want to go back to how it was before. It would be like blinding me, deafening me.”

“Says the facemask,” murmured Umbo.

“Says the man who has been awakened to his full potential,” said Loaf.

“ ‘Man,’ he calls himself,” murmured Param.

“Let’s be careful about suggesting somebody isn’t quite human anymore,” said Rigg. “Someone might say the same thing about a woman who slices up time, Param. Or someone who sees paths, or someone who can go into the past.”

“Can we just go back eighteen days?” said Olivenko.

“Seventeen to be safe,” said Umbo.