Orson Card - Ruins

After only a moment of display, the eyes and gills and mouth dissolved into the skin again, the mantle unclung and rose back over the head and then slacked down the back.

Rigg was fascinated and horrified. What a perfect adaptation to the sea, yet how inhuman.

“The creature must have evolved to fit a very different creature, native to Garden,” said Rigg, “and it was only making do with animals from Earth. The people who arrived to colonize were merely the next in line.”

“They thought it was dangerous at first, I imagine,” said Loaf.

“Let others tell it!” cried Knosso. “I know the story, but it belongs to those whose ancestors lived it, not to me. Mother Mock,” he said, addressing the leader of the women they had first met, “you and the Aunts should tell the tale.”

“And we will,” said Mother Mock. “But with so many ashore, what will we eat? And these are freshwater drinkers, without their mantles—the river is hardly fit to drink here, with all the upland silt it carries, and saltwater backwash.”

“I am Auntie Esh,” said one of the other women, “and this is Auntie Wind. She’s the talker, Auntie Wind, and she’ll tell the tale.”

“I will,” said Wind, “to any who wish to hear it. Bend your bodies to the land, my fingerlings! For you’ll be long ashore before this tale is told!”

Rigg sat down when he saw the Larfolders doing so; Knosso sat beside him on one side, and pulled Param down on the other side. She clung to her father, looking very young and vulnerable, and for the first time Rigg truly understood that she was, in fact, at least as young as he was. Not since their mother had tried to have her killed had she taken such a daughterly pose, and even then she had been trying to display toughness, independence, strength. Now, in the presence of her father, she had no toughness in her. It was as if all the fear and anxiety of the past year had been gathered up and now, by clinging to Knosso, she was finally able to let it slip away from her.

“We came as men and women to this shore,” said Auntie Wind, “borne like dust through space until we settled as river silt into these waters. In those days we did not know our Companions-in-the-waves, except as jellyfish floating on the water. We thought they were from Earth, and dangerous because of their sting. But they had no sting, and were not from Earth. Instead they waited to cling to the noses of animals that came to the river to drink, and turn them into waterbeasts. The Companions would live on their blood, and give birth into their skin; they filled them with a love of the sea, so they would never stray from Grandmother Sea.”

In their language, “grandmother” and “sea” began with the same sound; it was a lovely name.

“At first, when Companions clung to the faces of our ancestors, we panicked and tore them off, which damaged the humans deep inside, for Companions embed themselves deeply in an instant. For a long time, the humans were wary of the Companions, and tried to poison them or drive them away.

“Then came time for a great feast, of landbeasts and waterbeasts, cooked over fires, and Vadesh came for the first time, visiting from his land to the south. The Landsman and Vadesh talked then face to face, for Vadesh wanted to show the people that the Companions were not perilous to us. ‘It is too evolved into its niche for what I want,’ said Vadesh, ‘but here by the shore you have a need for it. Why not divide your people into two, those who take them as Companions and those who don’t? That’s what I have done,’ he said to the Landsman.

“The Landsman said, ‘I forbid no one; I have neither the will nor the power to do so. Neither will I command them, though, or force them. Let them wear the Companion if they wish, and see whether they wish to live the life it makes available to them.”

From that day, there were only two who chose to wear the Companion, and it frightened the others and they shunned them. Lonely and frightened, they turned only to each other and the life under the water, where they soon mated. Do not return to land to spawn, the Companions said to them. Give birth in this place, where we can also give your children a Companion all his life.

“So the child was born, and all the humans discovered that even birth could happen underwater, and the child’s lifelong Companion peeled away from its parent and gave him gills for his first breath there in the river’s mouth. The child could swim from birth, and breathe in the water like a fish; but as he lengthened and aged, he was brought into the land of air and song and standing up, where he learned to walk, as we teach all our children to walk.

“But because of the Companions, they learn quickly, standing upright on the first attempt, walking within the hour, and letting speech pour from their mouths with perfect understanding. Underwater we speak into the drum of the flesh-over-the-mouth, and in the kiss of speech we understand each other. But here on land, one can speak to all at the same time, the way I speak to you today.”

The audience murmured its ascent.

“After five years, another couple went into the water and took upon themselves Companions, and three years, and then one, and then another, and there were ten couples and their new children living under the sea.

“Then came the slimeworm, the disease that made the flesh rot on the body and slough away and leave only bone and agony and death. Who could live when the slimeworm crawled through his body? Only those who went beneath the waves—there the slimeworm died, and the Companion healed the flesh.

“All who were alive and could crawl or be carried came into the water, and the Companions took them all, and saved them from the slimeworm. So beautiful was the Companionable life that no longer did we call the slimeworm terrible, or think of its coming as a plague. Instead it was the slimeworm that pushed us into the water, and so the slimeworm was our friend. Only in wallfolds lacking in Companions was the slimeworm a disaster and a tragedy.”

Rigg had never heard of such a plague, and yet she spoke as if it were something that had spread in more than one wallfold. Why would Auntie Wind believe such a thing, if the expendables didn’t tell them about it? So did that mean that it was true—that it was a plague that could pass through the Wall? Or was it yet another lie of the expendables? Why was there no memory of it in Ramfold?

And then Rigg remembered the tales of the White Death and the Walking Death. They were more parable or allegory than true history, or so he had always thought. Could it be the same thing that Auntie Wind was speaking of? If so, then it must have come much earlier in history than Rigg had believed. He wondered if Param had run across these stories in every wallfold. But she was on the other side of Knosso, so Rigg could not ask quietly enough not to be overheard. He did not wish to interrupt the tale.

“In the water we lived for many generations, losing track of days in the trackless sea. We battled great sea monsters in those days, some brought from Earth and others native to this world, restored after the cataclysm. We tried and failed to swim through the Wall. We spread along the whole of our coast, and made our colonies far out in the sea and up the deep rivers. Always we returned to the land to speak and sing and dance from time to time.

“On one such time, the Landsman came to us and brought Vadesh to us yet again. Vadesh spoke of how many of the people of Vadeshfold had rejected the Companions he had made for them, even though the Companions also saved them from the slimeworm. The solitary people slew the men and women who accepted the Companions, and so the Companionable slew to defend themselves, until no humans of any kind were left alive in his land.