Orson Card - Ruins

Param laughed at his joke. “Yes, that’s what the People’s Revolutionary Council taught us—whoever controls the history gets to be the hero!”

“Param, I honor your office as daughter of the Queen-in-the-Tent, I can’t help that, it’s my whole upbringing. And I like you because you’re charming and when you’re not feeling sorry for yourself you’re even funny and happy and smart. But I respect you because you have had the hardest life of any of us, a life so lonely it breaks my heart to imagine it, and you lived it. Your mother was your whole world and she betrayed you—Rigg had only known her for a few months, he hardly knew her. But you thought you did.”

“Oh, I knew her,” said Param. “I wasn’t as surprised as you seem to think.”

“Not surprised, but still betrayed,” said Olivenko.

“I’m glad you respect me,” said Param. “And I’m glad you took the time to talk to me. Because I do see your point. I spoke so harshly to Umbo, not because he deserved it, but because by putting him down as a peasant, I could cling to the only value I thought I had—my royal blood. But thanks to you, I now see how worthless that is.”

“I wasn’t saying that it—”

“ ‘Worthless’ was my word, not yours,” said Param, putting her hand on his wrist so they both stopped walking. “But it’s the right word. And I see your point. I am who I am. Even though my time-slicing is a pretty pathetic talent, since it makes me so vulnerable to anybody who knows how it works, and it makes me so slow , I’m a shifter. And I’m trying to learn how to be somewhat useful, and you respect me for my efforts, and I appreciate it. That’s what I’m saying. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, my lady,” said Olivenko. Then he bowed over her hand like a courtier, and kissed it.

It was a gesture that had always been done by people who were only trying to suck up to Mother. But because Olivenko actually meant it for her, and because he was a good and wise man, and because she was, in fact, still desperately in love with him, Param was overwhelmed by it, and she burst into tears.

They walked the rest of the way through the Wall with his arm around her.

“Took you long enough,” said Rigg when they finally reached him.

“So take us back in time so we don’t waste a moment of this precious experience of Larfold,” said Olivenko. “Though as far as I can see, it looks suspiciously similar to Odinfold. Complete with the mice.”

“They’re dispersing,” said Rigg.

Umbo was striding down the slope toward them. Apparently he had had time to crest the rise and see what lay on the other side.

“Pristine wilderness as far as I can see,” Umbo reported, when he was near enough for anyone but Loaf to hear him. “But you’ll tell us if there are any human paths.” Clearly Umbo was talking only to Rigg, though Param and Olivenko stood beside him.

“No paths,” said Rigg. “Not even in the early days of the colony.”

“They took to the sea right away,” said Param. “And then they stopped talking to Larex, and we have no more of their history.”

Umbo didn’t exactly ignore her. He waited for her to finish talking, and he was listening. But he didn’t look at her once. And when she was done, he said, “There’s one thing we should be seeing, and we’re not.”

For a moment Param didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he pulled out his jeweled knife, and she realized. “No expendable to greet us.”

“There wasn’t one in Odinfold, either,” said Umbo. “But the way I see it, Larex has been without a job for eleven thousand years. He’s too busy to come chat us up when we come into his wallfold?”

“The ways of expendables are inscrutable,” said Rigg.

“Scrute them,” said Umbo. “If you think it’s a good idea, I’m going to call for the flyer. Do you want me to ask Larex to come with it?”

“Maybe later,” said Rigg. “At some point we might want to see what the local mechanical man has to say for himself. At least his people aren’t all dead, like Vadesh’s.”

“We assume,” said Umbo.

“If we can still call them people,” said Param.

Loaf spoke up. “Oh, my definition of ‘people’ is definitely broader than it used to be. The mice have decided to take my advice and not accompany us. We’re weird-looking enough, what with this thing on my face and Olivenko being so butt-ugly by nature, without tipping off the locals about this smirky-smarty mouse invasion.”

“In other words, they want time to get established before the Larfolders find out they’re here,” said Olivenko.

“They’re already mating their little brains out,” said Loaf. “They won’t want to meet any Larfolders until their babies are having babies.”

“Which should be in about an hour and a half,” said Rigg.

“Gestation’s a little longer than that,” said Loaf.

“So?” asked Umbo, holding up the knife.

“Call for the flyer,” said Rigg. “I’m trying to figure out how I used to get around. I vaguely remembered that I used my legs somehow.”

“Yes, legs,” said Umbo. “I try never to use mine.”

Param chuckled. But the banter between the boys stung her. Olivenko was right. By blood, she was Rigg’s sister. But by love and loyalty, Rigg’s only sibling was Umbo. That was why Rigg had been so angry with her. He didn’t want to have to choose between them. But if push came to shove, quite literally, he would choose Umbo. Had chosen him.

And he was right, thought Param. I haven’t earned my place with them yet. Damsel in distress, even a talented disappearing damsel who’s also your closest living kin, isn’t automatically a dear and trusted friend. That will take time. And more strength and courage and self-control than I’ve shown up to now.

The flyer carried them over pristine landscape, but because Rigg saw with the eyes of a pathfinder, he was struck by how empty it was. Like Vadeshfold, only even more devoid of paths. Though Odinfold had billions of paths, they were all faded by the thousands of years that had passed, and in recent years the paths had been few, and clustered up against the Wall.

How different they all were from Ramfold, full of life, the webs of paths still weaving themselves afresh with every day’s activity.

Odinfold was carpeted with ruins; Vadeshfold had its one empty city; but Larfold had nothing at all in this vast sweep of forested land, the hills and cliffs and mountains. Only the wispy trails of the colonists from eleven thousand years before, heading northward to the sea, and then nothing on land that was more than a few hundred meters from the shore.

Yet this land was similar in climate and terrain to the land the Sessamids had come from, the barbarian forests that had spawned invasions of the great valley of the Stashik River again and again through history. The land was the same, but untorn by slash-and-burn farming, unscarred by roads, ungraced by bridges and buildings.

It was not more beautiful than lands that human beings had shaped, thought Rigg. He remembered the ruins of the old arches that had once spanned the Stashi Falls, broken in ancient storms or earthquakes. He remembered the stairs cut into stone that led up in a breath-robbing highway to the crest of the falls; he remembered running up those stairs, and also staggering down them carrying bundles of pelts. Was the mountain somehow ruined because humans had cut away stone to make a stairway for themselves? Or was it made more beautiful as well as more useful?

What comes into being naturally is pleasing to the eye, yes, Rigg thought. There is a beauty to the wildness of it. But there was also beauty in the Great North Road that wound along beside the Stashik River, and beauty in the patchwork of farms, and in the rough raw buildings of Leaky’s Landing, which was such a new place, and in the ancient buildings of O, so many of them built of stone barged down the river, as if humans had moved a mountain to make O. There was beauty in Aressa Sessamo, too, by nature a shifting swampland, but made by humans into a huge island of raised earth on which a city ablaze with life had been raised, a forest of wooden buildings where an empire was governed and people lived their lives of joy and misery, of boredom and excitement, leaving paths behind them in a tangle that to Rigg seemed the very tapestry of life.