Orson Card - Ruins

Let Rigg and Umbo, Loaf and Olivenko study whatever they wanted—the human race on Earth, the functioning of starships, military techniques and technology, the deep science of the Odinfolders—none of it interested Param. She was discovering the world of her birth, the world that she had only seen as it came to visit within the walls of her dwellingplaces, then raced past her whenever she felt the need to hide in the invisibility of her time-slicing. She was finding out who she would have been, if she had been free; or, if not free, then shaped within her destiny as the royal child.

Accustomed as she was to contemplation, meditation, reflection, and the fantasies of a lonely child, Param saw herself in every history, and found lessons for herself as well. In this nation, this wallfold, this event, here is what she would be, that is what she would do. She would not have committed her people to fruitless attempts to conquer the mountain fastness of Gorogo; she would have sheltered the trading people of Inkik instead of persecuting them and driving them out; she would have married for love where another ruler married for reasons of state, and vice versa.

I would have been a great queen, she concluded on many days.

I would have been happiest as a commoner, for powerful people are more miserable and lonely than simple ones, she concluded on other days.

But every day saw her horizons widening, her vicarious memory deepening. There were worlds now blossoming inside her imagination. The others might think her solitary and withdrawn, but for Param, compared to her life before, she was gregarious and enthusiastic. She was broadening, reaching out, filled with curiosity and wonder.

She knew that the others usually talked around her and seemed surprised whenever she spoke; often, too, she could see that they thought that what she spoke of was not to the point of their conversation. But what of that? Their conversations were rarely on a point she cared about, and when their words made her think of something she did care about, she said it, boldly speaking up at the moment of her thought, in a way she never had before.

Umbo thought that he loved her? He hardly listened to her, since she had nothing to say of spaceships and he cared nothing about the intense spiritual lives of the people of Adamfold, or the strange chaos of the child-ruled forest dwellers of Mamom, who allowed certain children to choose the site of their next village by seeing where they wandered, and what they were curious about.

And Olivenko, who once had seemed so wise to her, was surprisingly ignorant of history and uninterested in learning more about it. Instead he was all physics and metaphysics, wondering about how time travel worked and how it was related to gravity. Why should they care? It was not as if Param or her fellow émigrés from Ramfold could change how the world worked; they obeyed the laws of physics, whatever they were, and had whatever talents they had. Did Olivenko think that by studying these things, he would acquire some talent for time travel that he never had before? Or was he hoping to discover a machine like the Odinfolders’ time-sender? What good is it to study things too big to move?

Loaf, on the other hand, seemed to understand the world much as Param did. He listened to her accounts of strange customs and histories as if he were interested in what she was saying, and not just in the fact that the only woman in their group was saying them. He might bend everything to his own understanding, but Param didn’t mind that: It only mattered that he received what she offered to them all from her research, and treated it as having value.

And then there was her brother, Rigg, so desperate to be a good man that he would never be a truly effective leader. Real leadership required authority and ruthlessness, she well understood. That’s why she didn’t want it. But Rigg did want to lead, yet thought he could do it by persuasion, by meekly taking suggestions, by genuinely loving the members of their little band.

Didn’t he know that gentleness didn’t just seem weak, it was weak? Yet she found it endearing that he tried so earnestly, and so she treated him with a kind of respect that he didn’t really deserve, since only strength mattered, in the end. She saw in Rigg the person she might have been, if she, too, had wandered in the wild with the Gardener, the Golden Man. With only wild animals and a manlike machine for company, what could Rigg ever understand about the ravening appetites of human beings? We are the wildest animals, Rigg, she wanted to say. And then he would say, Who was talking about animals?

We are all talking about animals. More to the point, we are talking as animals. We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.

The only thing that keeps me from being a truly extraordinary ruler, as I was born to be, is that I have no access to the people whom it would have been my right to rule, and no idea what to do with them if I ever won my place.

My place? There is no such place. I’m a queen-in-training when I ought to be studying horticulture and growing flowers, beautiful and useless.

Such were her thoughts during these glorious months of exploration and imagination. She lived a thousand different lives, conquered, ruled, lost, loved. The others understood nothing of what went on inside her heart.

Then came the day when they left her.

Umbo had gone first, making an expedition to visit the buried starship of Odinfold in order to test and expand what he had learned in his absurdly focused study of a single thing.

Then Swims-in-the-Air had said something to Rigg that alarmed him, and he had taken Loaf and Olivenko to follow Umbo. Nobody even looked for her, or asked her what she thought. Swims-in-the-Air mentioned they were gone, and when Param asked why they hadn’t told her where they were going, Swims-in-the-Air had only laughed lightly and said, “I don’t think they needed you, my dear.”

Param had simply gone back to her studies.

Until she noticed that her room was filling up with mice.

They swarmed around the floor and up onto the table. Their constant motion was distracting. “Why do you all have to be here?” she asked, not expecting them to understand or respond.

But they did respond—by ceasing their movement, by all turning to her at once and gazing at her.

They’re only mice, she told herself.

But the intensity of their gaze was disconcerting, and when it continued, it became alarming.

She got up from her place, intending to leave the overcrowded room. But when she stepped, there was a mouse under her foot. It squealed in agony and when she moved her foot to release it, she saw that blood had spurted out of its throat. Worse, she had stepped on yet another mouse, and this one made no sound at all when it died; she only felt the sickening crunch under her foot.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There are too many of you in here, there’s no room to walk. Please go away.”

Please! Was she a beggar now, she who should have been Queen-in-the-Tent? Was she reduced to pleading with mice?

In answer to her words—or to the deaths of the mice she had stepped on—more mice came into the room, until the floor and table were as solidly covered as if they were carpeted. No, as if they had grown a pelt and now had muscles that throbbed and surged under the many-colored fur.

She didn’t want to kill any more of them, and besides, they were frightening her. It was a sign of how much she had changed that she had not gone invisible the moment she noticed there were too many mice in the room. But even if she no longer sliced time by reflex, she could certainly do it as a matter of good sense. There was no reason to stay in this place, trampling mice and snuffing out their annoying little lives.