Orson Card - Ruins

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.”