Orson Card - Visitors

What Rigg certainly did not want was to travel with any of the expendables. Even if he thought they could be trusted, he couldn’t get past the fact that they all looked like Father. They all were Father. He had spent his childhood traveling with an expendable. Learning everything from him. It. Subservient to it. Until it pretended to die and thrust him onto this path which was leading… somewhere.

Yet if there was anyone Rigg wanted to travel with less than the expendables, it was Ram Odin. And not just because he had such clear memories of Ram trying to kill him, and even clearer ones of killing Ram Odin himself. It was because Ram Odin already knew far more about the wallfolds than Rigg could possibly learn in a few weeks or even years of wandering. Rigg wanted to come up with his own information. Make up his own mind.

So of course, when the flyer arrived to take him to Yinfold, the farthest of the wallfolds, there was Ram Odin, waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

“You don’t look happy to see me,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m never happy to see you,” said Rigg. “Though I feel safer when I can see you than when I can’t.”

“I’m going with you,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Are you sure the flyer will go if I don’t approve it?” said Ram Odin.

“Then I won’t use the flyer,” said Rigg, feeling tired already. “Or I’ll just go back in time and use it yesterday. Or last month.”

“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “Be reasonable. Your goal is to judge all the wallfolds. I’ve been watching them for ten thousand years, off and on. The expendables have been watching continuously.”

“So a fresh pair of eyes might be helpful.”

“I agree,” said Ram Odin. “But don’t throw away our knowledge. We can help make your visits more efficient and effective.”

“You can make sure I see only the things that will support the conclusions you’ve already reached.”

“That’s always a danger, even if I try not to. But you bring your own biases, too. You’re a child of Ramfold. How long before you stop seeing everything through the lens of your experiences there?”

“I’ll never stop seeing things that way. You’re a child of Earth. How long before—”

“Exactly my point. I see things from the perspective of having known another world, where there was no Wall. But do you think because I grew up on Earth, I know Earth?”

“Better than I do.”

“I grew up where I grew up. I knew my neighborhood, my schools. My college, but even then I only knew the other kids I hung out with, the professors I studied with. I visited a few other countries. Studied in them. Learned a foreign language—which is no joke, when you don’t have the Wall to impose all languages into your brain. By the standards of Earth I was widely read and widely traveled. And I have no idea what it’s like to grow up in China or India or Africa or Brazil. Even if I grew up in one of those countries, I’d only know my village, my schools, my friends.”

“Then I’d better stop talking with you and get busy exploring,” said Rigg.

“You traveled down the Stashik River. First without money, trapping animals for meat as long as open country held out. Then with Loaf to guide you and shape your experience on the river and in O. Then as a prisoner so all you saw were your invisible paths. Then closed up in Flacommo’s house and in the library. You had how many hours on the loose in Aressa Sessamo before you made your escape, and then you were in that carriage heading for the Wall. Rigg, how well do you know Ramfold?”

“I know what I know,” said Rigg stubbornly. “I know the things that everybody knows, and I know some things that only I know. You may know the whole history, you may have seen it through all its history while I only know the last fifteen minutes of it, but you didn’t grow up in Ramfold, so you don’t really know it, either.”

“You don’t know Ramfold, Rigg. You know Fall Ford and the forests above Upsheer, and then a quick tour of the river. What do you know about the vast lands on either side? That’s where most of the millions of people of Ramfold live. Village after village. Places where they’ve never heard the language of Aressa Sessamo. Places where even the tax collectors don’t go.”

Rigg sat on the edge of the ramp and put his head in his hands. “And I’ll know even less about the other wallfolds. I get it. But I have to do something.”

“Then do it with me. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut, all right? I’ll try not to shape your perceptions. Yes, I think I know what you’ll learn. But I’ll let you learn it.”

“The best way to do that is not to go with me,” said Rigg.

“I know how dangerous it is,” said Ram Odin, “and you don’t.”

“I’ve dealt with danger before. I think I can get out of ­trouble more easily than anybody in the world, except Umbo. And Noxon.”

“You won’t learn much if you’re always getting out of trouble. And think of what you’ll do by ‘getting out of trouble.’ Suddenly disappear. You think they won’t notice? Word won’t spread? You think that won’t change what people believe about the world?”

“I did a lot of that in Ramfold, and I didn’t change everything.”

“Of course you changed everything! Just because you can’t see what it would have been without all your disappearing and reappearing—that’s all you and Umbo did, over and over, was change things!”

Rigg had to concede the point. “And having you with me will accomplish exactly what?”

“It will keep you from getting thrown out of every village in every wallfold. Are you forgetting that you’re wearing that twitching fungus on your face?”

“I never forget it,” said Rigg. “I’ve seen Noxon.”

“So how do you propose to get past the phase where they stone you and drive you out as a freak?”

“You make it sound like all I’ll find in every wallfold is terrified privicks.”

“All you’ll find is humans responding to a very strange stranger.”

“At least I’ll speak the language like a native.”

“That will make them even crazier, Rigg! In every wallfold except Odinfold and Larfold, people are sharply aware that the only people who speak their language like a native are the people they know . Along comes a stranger with a misshapen face and eyes not quite back into alignment, and he speaks as if he grew up among them—obviously a sorcerer, a witch, a devil!”

“So you’ll be my normal-human companion,” said Rigg.

“Your grandfather,” said Ram Odin.

“It’s not even a lie,” said Rigg, “give or take five hundred generations.”

“If we go into the city, then you suffer from some weird ­country disease. But I don’t think you want to go to the cities—in the few wallfolds that have any real cities.”

“Come on,” said Rigg. “People always form into cities.”

“They do when they can,” said Ram Odin, “but no larger than the economy and the transportation systems can support. In some places, five thousand people is a city. In other places, it doesn’t feel like a city till fifty thousand. Odinfold once had ­cities of twenty million, but we’ve erased those paths through time. At the moment, with about a quarter of a million people Aressa Sessamo is one of the four largest cities on the whole planet of Garden. Most wallfolds have a largest city of no more than fifty thousand.”

“And you think I don’t want to go into them.”

“Because you’ve seen O and you’ve seen Aressa Sessamo. When humans live together in large numbers, they make the same accommodations. They develop the same rules, because only a few rules work. But in hamlets of ten families, villages of fifty households, towns of two hundred households—there’s where really interesting, peculiar customs can grow up because what evolves is exactly what suits the people in that place.”