Orson Card - Ruins

“No need,” said Loaf. “The mice have already put programs into the ships’ computers that erase all references to their abilities within thirty minutes. It allows the expendables to talk to them for a while and carry on an intelligent conversation, but then the memory clears and it’s as if it never happened. The mice don’t need the computers to help them remember.”

“But the mice are so tiny,” said Rigg.

“Their cooperation is perfect,” said Loaf. “Each mouse is about as smart as an ordinary human child—not an Odinfolder child, not like you two—but it’s still quite a bit of intellect. Mouse-Breeder did a superb job of putting an overcapacity brain into a very tiny space. But what the mice have done for themselves is specialize and cooperate perfectly .”

“They each store portions of the library,” said Rigg.

“That’s why there are dozens of mice in every room we visit,” said Loaf. “They’re in constant communication with the vast hordes outside. Each one processing whatever his particular job is, trusting the others to do what they’re supposed to do. Together, any four of them are a match for any Odinfolder. But dozens of them? The human race has never matched such intelligence.”

“Except with computers,” said Olivenko.

“Computers are imitation intelligence,” said Loaf. “Memory and speed, but no brains. Just programs.”

“Aren’t human brains a kind of computer running programs?” asked Rigg. Certainly the literature from Earth said so.

“Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines. This allows them to believe that their creation, the computer, is as brilliant as their own minds. But it’s a ridiculous self-deception. Computers aren’t even in the same league.”

“The man who called himself my father,” said Rigg, “was a computer, and I can tell you he was far smarter than me.”

“He was very good at pretending to be smarter. He could give you data, teach you how to perform operations. But he was never your equal when it came to actual thought . That’s what the mice quickly came to understand. They could think rings around the expendables. They were the equals of any humans.”

“I thought you said that dozens of them were more intelligent than humans,” said Umbo.

“More capable of feats of memory and calculation,” said Loaf. “But a mind is a mind. Thought is thought. The Odinfolders’ improvements have increased brain capacity, given better tools, but the mind is not identical with the organic machinery it inhabits.”

“Now the philosopher comes out,” said Olivenko. “You’ve discovered the soul.”

“Rigg did,” said Loaf. “And Umbo.”

“When?” Umbo demanded.

“Not me,” said Rigg.

“The paths, Rigg,” said Loaf. “The part of you that sees into the past. Where is that in the genome?”

“The Odinfolders said that they had clipped the genes that had those powers and . . .” Then Rigg fell silent. They had left him with that impression, but no, they hadn’t actually said so.

“If they could find the genes that produced time-shifting,” said Loaf, “what would they need you for?”

“They’re searching for those genes,” said Olivenko.

“They’ve spent all these months studying every genetic trace you’ve left behind,” said Loaf. “They have the mice gather them up. They have the mice study them.”

“And have the mice found nothing?”

“There’s nothing to find,” said Loaf. “It’s not in the genes. The part of us that lays down paths through time, tied to the gravity of a planet—it’s not in the brain.”

“Animals leave paths, too,” said Rigg. “Even plants, in their fashion.”

“ Life is the soul,” said Loaf. “Living things have souls, have minds, have thought. Living individuals have their own relationship to the planet they dwell on. Their past is dragged along with their world through space and time. But it persists. Long after the organism dies, its path remains, and all that it was can be recovered, every moment it lived through can be seen, can be revisited.”

Rigg blushed with embarrassment before he could even speak aloud the thought he had just had. “I should have seen it all along.”

“Should have, but didn’t,” said Loaf.

“Seen what!” demanded Umbo.

“That the paths of the mice in Odinfold aren’t mousepaths,” said Loaf.

“You read minds now?” asked Olivenko.

“I knew what he had to be thinking about,” said Loaf. “And when he realized, and blushed—”

“Their paths are small,” said Rigg, “but they’re bright. And they have the same—it’s not color, but it’s like color—they have the same feel as human paths. It’s right there in front of me, and I didn’t even realize it, because—”

“Because you have a human mind,” said Loaf. “The brain sees all, but the mind has focus. That’s our great power, the ability to home in on something and understand it to its roots—the brain can’t do that. But that same focus shuts out things that the brain is constantly aware of. So we don’t notice what we can plainly see; and yet we understand things that we can’t see.”

“And all living things can do this?” said Umbo.

“At some level or other,” said Loaf. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. Because the facemask lets me see like a beast, even though I think about what I see the way a man does. I can see a range of detail that is impossible to an ordinary human. But the facemask, which perceives it all, can’t do anything with it, because its mind is at such a primitive level. When mice were bred with human genes inside them, it was as if humans were born in tiny bodies. They have human souls, or close to it.”

“What are they, where do they come from?” demanded Olivenko.

“They’re life ,” said Loaf. “I can’t explain it better than that because it’s all I’ve figured out. All that the mice have figured out, either. Living things have this thing in them, this connection with the planet, with each other. And humans have more of it than any other living thing, just as animals all have more of it than plants. And that’s what Rigg sees: the life, the soul, the mind, whatever you call it, persisting eternally through time, linked to the gravity well of the world.”

Rigg thought of the paths of humans who had crossed the various bridges at Stashi Falls; as the falls eroded, lowering and backing away, the paths remained exactly where they had been, never shifting relative to the center of the planet Garden.

“So what happens when we go into space?” asked Rigg. “Do we lose our souls?”

“Of course not,” said Loaf. “Or the colonists would all have arrived here lifeless.”

Rigg looked at the oldest paths that had passed through this room. The colonists as they were revived, the paths faded with the passage of eleven thousand years, but still present, still accessible.

And one path in particular. The one who had walked through the ship long before the others were revived. The path of Ram Odin.

“Should I look at him?” asked Rigg aloud. “Should I talk to him?”

“And say what?” asked Loaf.

“Talk to whom?” said Olivenko.

“Ram Odin,” said Umbo.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Ask him . . . what he was thinking. What he had in mind.”

“And what does that matter now?” asked Loaf. “What will you learn from him? His desires don’t matter to us right now—what matters to us is what the Odinfolders are planning. What the Visitors will conclude when they come. Why the Destroyers came a year later. What the ships and the expendables will do.”