Orson Card - Ruins

“Is it survival, if we’re ruled over by mice?” asked Olivenko.

“An excellent question,” said Rigg. “That’s certainly a topic for discussion when we get there.”

“Let’s just go back in time and leave them here,” said Umbo. “I mean, after the flyer lands.”

Param and Olivenko murmured their assent.

“Then we have an enemy,” said Loaf.

“They aren’t already the enemy?” asked Olivenko.

“The enemy,” said Loaf, “are the Destroyers.”

“But we can’t trust them,” said Param. “Even if they save Garden from the Destroyers, who will save Garden from the mice?”

“Who will save the mice from us ?” asked Loaf. “Who ever saves anybody from anybody?”

“Humans make war,” said Rigg. “Loaf is right. If we separate ourselves from the mice right now, then we’ll just be acting out the main theme of human history—people going to war precisely at the times when they should be most united.”

“How can we unite with them?” asked Umbo.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Rigg. “Up to now, we’ve been united with them without knowing it—acting out their purposes, obeying their plans for us, and we had no idea who they were. Picking up jewels, using a knife they made for us, we’ve been their puppets.”

“Cut the strings,” said Olivenko.

“The only strings we can cut,” said Loaf, “are the ones that we can see.”

“Our very existence is one of the strings,” said Rigg. “And let’s remember. They can’t time-shift, but what if they change their minds about giving us the missing jewel? What they gave us, they can go back in time and take away.”

That gave them pause.

“Why haven’t they done that already?” asked Umbo. “Since we’re not doing what they told us to do.”

“We haven’t not done it,” said Rigg. “We’re still talking.”

“They need to get what they want,” said Loaf. “And that’s survival. To them, that means getting out of the wallfold, spreading through the world. The worlds .”

“And stopping the people of Earth from sending the Destroyers,” said Param.

“What do we want?” asked Rigg.

“For them to stop manipulating us,” said Umbo.

“We can’t even stop manipulating each other,” said Rigg. “It’s what humans do. We influence each other.”

“What, then?” asked Umbo. “We want to stop the Destroyers, too.”

“What’s our plan?” asked Rigg.

“We don’t have one,” said Olivenko.

“And why don’t we have one?” asked Rigg.

“Because we aren’t a trillion mice,” said Param.

“We don’t have a plan because we don’t know anything yet,” said Rigg. “All we have are the Future Books. And they don’t tell us the only thing that matters.”

“ Why the Destroyers come,” said Loaf.

“Until we know what causes their action—their motive, how they see the world—we can’t possibly have a plan,” said Rigg.

“But the mice don’t know either!” said Param. “It’s just stupid.”

“Exactly,” said Rigg. “Yes, that’s it, Param. They have a plan, but it’s a plan to do exactly what the Destroyers are doing—wipe out the problem so you don’t have to deal with these strangers anymore.”

“Well, that’s a plan,” said Umbo. “Not a great one, but a plan.”

“What we need,” said Rigg, “is to get the mice to agree that their plan is the wrong one.”

“We don’t know it’s the wrong one,” said Param.

“Not the wrong one, then,” said Rigg. “Premature, how’s that?”

They murmured their assent.

“We need to get them to agree to wait through one more cycle,” said Rigg.

“Why would they do that?” said Olivenko. “There have already been nine cycles. This is the first one that included mice—they want to see what they can do.”

“But in the other cycles, all the Odinfolders ever knew was whatever message was sent back by the people of the future,” said Rigg. “This time, we have us . We can see for ourselves. Meet the Visitors. See the Destroyers. Then we shift back to now, or to . . . sometime. We go back, and then we can do something together, we and the mice, because we’ll know a lot more than the scant information in a Future Book.”

“It’ll be the first time that ever happened,” said Olivenko.

“It means taking the mice into the past with us,” said Umbo. “Both times—right now, and then at the end, when the Destroyers come.”

“We’ll have all their memories to pool with ours,” said Param.

“It makes sense to us ,” said Loaf. “Will it make sense to them?”

“Yes,” said the ship’s voice.

“Yes what?” asked Rigg.

“They agree that your plan is a good one,” said the ship’s voice. “They agree to wait through a cycle, as long as you promise to bring back as many of them as you can.”

So the mice had understood them after all. How? “You translated for them,” said Rigg.

“I didn’t have to,” said the ship. “Where did you learn the language of Imperial O?”

“From Ramex,” said Rigg, feeling stupid.

“Ramex knew it, so all the computers and expendables knew it,” said the ship’s voice. “Therefore it was known among the mice.”

“Why would they bother to learn a dead language from another wallfold?” asked Olivenko.

“You’re a scholar,” said Rigg. “You learn all kinds of useless things.”

“Just because some of the billions of mice know something doesn’t mean they all know it,” said Olivenko.

“They made sure that the mice that flew with us included speakers of every language that any of us knew,” said Rigg. “The expendables knew which languages Ramex had taught me, so the mice knew which languages were needed.”

“They tricked us into thinking they couldn’t understand us,” said Param.

“We tricked ourselves,” said Rigg, “because I assumed they wouldn’t know.”

“And now they trust you,” said the ship’s voice. “Because they know what you say when you think they can’t understand.”

“It’s exactly what we were going to say to their faces,” said Rigg.

“Yes,” said the ship’s voice.

“I guess that’s how trust is built,” said Loaf.

“By spying on us when we think they can’t hear?” asked Umbo.

“By learning something about us that they couldn’t find out any other way,” said Loaf. “By hearing what we sound like when we tell the truth.”

“Unless we knew it all along,” said Param.

“They knew none of us was lying,” said Loaf. “They can see body signs the same way I can. If we had been pretending to believe they couldn’t understand us, we couldn’t have concealed the pretense from them.”

“May I land now?” asked the ship’s voice.

“Are we there?” asked Rigg.

“I’ve been circling the landing site for some time now.”

“Yes, land,” said Rigg. “Do we ever know anything about what’s going on?”

“No,” said Olivenko. “All we can ever do is guess based on the information we have.”

“And our guesses—are they ever right?” asked Rigg.

“Often enough that we don’t all give up trying,” said Olivenko. “The trouble is, sometimes when we think we’re right, we’re right for all the wrong reasons, and sometimes when we think we were wrong, we were actually right.”

“We never know anything,” said Param. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying we have to make our best guess and then see how things turn out,” said Olivenko.

“So do we all agree that this is our best guess?” asked Rigg. “Wait till the Visitors come, learn what we can, then wait for the Destroyers, learn what we can about them, and then go back and make a new plan about what we think actually happened, and what we can do about it?”