Orson Card - Ruins

The natural land is beautiful, and it is beautiful again when it reclaims the ruins of humans who are gone. But when humans are there, that is the beauty I love the most, because it’s a web I’m part of, it’s the fabric that my own life, my own path, is helping to create. What humans make is not less beautiful than what comes into being out of wildness alone.

“We’re wild, too,” said Rigg aloud, because he needed to hear the words, and so he had to say them.

Olivenko was the only one near enough to him in the flyer to look up at the sound of his voice.

“We’re wild,” said Rigg. “We humans. We shape nature, but our shapes are also natural. We shouldn’t say that because humans shaped a place, it’s therefore unnatural.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t say it,” said Olivenko, “but I think that if you look at the meanings of the words, whatever humans do is unnatural.”

“But that’s the mistake, for us to think that humans aren’t also a part of nature.”

Olivenko looked out of the flyer at the ground they were passing over, the high thick cushion of leaves only beginning to turn color in preparation for winter. “Not a particularly prominent part of it here ,” he said.

“No. We’ve never touched this place.” Then he laughed with a little bitterness. “Except, of course, when the starships crashed so hard they blew rocks into the sky to make the Ring, and raised great circling cliffs like Upsheer, and killed almost all the natural life of Garden, and replaced it with the plants and animals of Earth. Except for that, which means that all of Garden is so vastly shaped by human hands that nothing we’re seeing here is ‘natural.’ ”

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” said Olivenko. “Except to say that when humans leave it alone, nature comes back and closes the gaps the way the sea fills in behind each passing fish. What we’re seeing down there is natural now, even if it was once reshaped by human action.”

“But now it’ll be reshaped by mice,” said Rigg.

“Humans masquerading as mice,” said Olivenko. “But I don’t think they’ll be cutting down the trees.”

“If they wanted to cut them down,” said Rigg, “they’d find a way. That’s what humans do.”

“And if they wanted to build them up?”

“They’d plant them like an orchard.”

“Or slaughter each other as they did in Vadeshfold,” said Olivenko, “and let the trees come back and plant themselves.”

“I really hate philosophy,” murmured Loaf. “You talk and talk, and in the end, you don’t know any more than you did.”

“Maybe less,” said Rigg, “because I thought I had an idea, and now Olivenko makes me wonder whether I did or not.”

“One idea is as worthless as another,” said Loaf. “Until you actually do something about it, and then it’s the action, not the word, that matters.”

“Who’s philosophizing now?” asked Olivenko. “We take action because of the words we believe in, the stories that we think are true, or intend to make true.”

“I don’t think so,” said Loaf. “I think we do what we do because we desire it. And then we make up stories about why the thing we did was right, and the thing that other people did was wrong.”

“Or both,” said Rigg. “It works both ways, all the time. We act because of our stories; we make up stories to explain or excuse the way we acted.”

But the trees don’t do that, or the squirrels, thought Rigg. They just do what they do. And they can’t change what they do, because they don’t have any of this philosophy.

“Our destination is the shore where humans are most often seen,” said the flyer. “Far in the north.”

“When we get closer,” said Rigg, “skim the coast. I’ll tell you then where to set this flyer down.”

“What will you look for, to decide?” asked Olivenko.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wherever the paths are thickest and most recent, so we have the best chance of meeting people.”

“Of getting killed in our sleep on the first night there,” said Olivenko.

“We didn’t come here to avoid the people,” said Rigg.

“Can’t save ’em if we can’t see ’em,” said Loaf.

Probably can’t save them even if we do see them. “If it turns out I picked a bad spot, we can go back and pick another,” said Rigg.

“But you can’t appear to us here in this flyer,” said Olivenko. “Right? Unless you took the flyer up to exactly the same path and matched the flight perfectly, because the path remains behind us in the air.”

Rigg turned and saw their paths stretch back along the route they had just flown. “That’s right.”

“I wonder how far you have to go upward,” said Olivenko, “until our paths stop being part of the sky of Garden, and remain inside a ship.”

“Every starship when it crashed here had human beings aboard,” said Rigg. “I should have looked for the paths, the incoming trajectories.”

“You should have looked to see if their paths during the voyage stayed with the ship,” said Umbo, who was finally joining in the conversation.

“I will the next time we’re at a starship,” said Rigg. “I should have done it before, but I had other things on my mind.”

“That’s right,” said Umbo, “blame it on me for being so clumsy as to leave corpses lying around to distract you.”

“You may not have killed them,” said Rigg, “but you made them. Didn’t your mother teach you to clean up your own messes?”

They had to traverse the whole of Larfold, from the south to the northern shore. The wallfold continued far out to sea—Rigg remembered that from the maps in the library, but most clearly from the huge map inside the Tower of O; despite the many other maps he’d seen, that one remained the true map to Rigg, the way he pictured the world. A globe with wallfolds delineated on its face, the Walls stretching out over land and sea alike.

“I wonder why they went underwater here,” said Param. “Why not build boats and live on the shore, and sail where they wanted? Why go into the sea?”

“Better climate?” suggested Olivenko.

“I think it has to do with how they managed to handle the breathing problem,” said Umbo.

“There wasn’t a breathing problem until they went under the sea,” said Param. Rigg hated the scorn in her voice, especially when she talked to Umbo.

But Umbo answered her scorn for scorn. “You don’t start living underwater unless you already have a way of surviving there.”

“They didn’t suddenly start having babies with gills,” said Param, “and then decide to go swimming.”

“But they did start swimming fulltime within a few hundred years of the start of the colony,” said Umbo. “Why would they do that unless they already had a way to breathe?”

Loaf said, “Why are you two arguing about it when we’ll be there in a very little while, and then we can go into the past if we have to and see what we find out. See if they’re even human anymore. From what Olivenko said about the death of the king, these are monsters that dragged Knosso out of a boat and drowned him. Maybe they’ve turned into sharks with hands.”

When they reached the coast, Rigg had the flyer soar above the northern beaches, which is the general region where the Odinfolders’ books said the Larfolders had established their one long-abandoned colony. Here along the coast there were many paths, and recent ones. But they all led out of the water and then back into it, like the tracks of turtles returning to shore to spawn. Rigg wondered if they would still count as human if the Larfolders had started laying eggs like turtles.

He tried to trace the paths out into the water. He could easily follow the paths when they ran just under the waves, but the deeper they were, the harder it was for Rigg to sense them. And they seemed to meander randomly. And why not? Underwater, the Larfolders could swim anywhere. There were no roads they had to stay on. Mostly they stayed away from the shore, out in deeper water, behind the breakers that gleamed in shifting white ribbons, and deep, where Rigg could barely sense them.