Ruins Read online

  What animals keep this grass so close-cropped? Why aren’t they all here now, with their faces covered by facemasks? Maybe Vadesh comes out and mows it himself. Or grazes it. Who knows what these machines can do, if they put their minds to it?

  Umbo circled the grove, which was quite a wide circuit, though the grove did not seem large or thick. He stayed well beyond its verge, which took him down a slope on the side beyond the city. Only when Umbo heard the gurgling of water did he realize how foolish he was to have strayed so far from camp. From here he couldn’t even see the sleepers, though he could see the tops of the trees under which they lay. But to go near the water—what if he stumbled in and got his own facemask?

  As if on cue, his left foot sloshed into a boggy spot in the grass. Umbo leapt back as if dodging a harvester’s scythe. But maybe there was no point in dodging. Maybe a larval facemask had already fastened itself to him.

  He scampered up the hill till he reached the edge of the copse and could see Loaf. Then Umbo sat down and ran his hands over his legs and feet. Nothing was attached, though he got a start when he found some wet leaves clinging to the top of his right foot and then to his hands when he tried to brush them away. There were no clouds tonight, so the ringlight was enough to show him that he had no parasite inching up his body. Unless the parasite was very small. Or it was creeping along under his skin.

  Umbo shuddered, then rose to his feet and walked again, continuing his circuit of the grove, though much closer to the edge of it now.

  Along the north side, he had to give up the plan. He couldn’t continue to circle the outside of the grove because it wasn’t a grove at all—it was a peninsula of a much larger forest that extended away to the north. It had only seemed like a grove from the city side because its link with the greater forest was hidden behind the brow of the hill.

  You think you know where you are, you think you know what’s what, and suddenly nothing is the way you thought, and it should have been obvious all along, and you feel stupid for having made assumptions, and you were stupid, but . . . Umbo could hear Wandering Man say, “It isn’t stupid when you assume things; that’s how the human brain is supposed to work. We assume things so we can act much more quickly than animals that only see what they see.”

  Act quickly, yes, but wrongly if you assume wrong, Umbo thought both then and now. But he had said nothing, because he was so awed to be spending a few moments with Rigg’s strange and wonderful father. The machine.

  Umbo moved across the narrow part of the wood, wading through leaves rather noisily, as if they were another kind of stream. Finally he got to lawn again, and now the city loomed on his left, farther away than the trees on his right, but much taller. Umbo stood looking at the buildings, wondering where the people went, and whether Vadesh stood in one of the towers, looking out and down at him.

  Umbo wondered if Vadesh wondered about anything. Neither Vadesh nor Ram ever seemed uncertain. Even when they said they were uncertain, they sounded certain about it. Umbo didn’t even know when he didn’t know what he needed to know.

  Vadesh had said that he couldn’t predict the future with any certainty. He had known a billion things that the humans from Earth might do when and if they arrived here on the planet Garden, but he did not know what they would do, he said. Well, didn’t that imply that he didn’t know what Umbo and the others would do, either? That was something for Vadesh to wonder about.

  We are unpredictable to him, thought Umbo. The thought made him vaguely happy. He is manipulating us, deceiving us, withholding information from us, precisely because he doesn’t know what we’ll do and he wants us to do some particular thing.

  That’s the key to this whole thing. He needs us, and so he has to manipulate us into doing a thing that is so important that it’s more important than telling us the truth. Why doesn’t he just tell us what he wants? Because he doesn’t know if we’ll do it knowingly. Or maybe he’s quite sure we won’t do it knowingly, and so he has to trick us or lead us into a situation where we have no choice but to do what he wants.

  The way Rigg got us right up against the Wall.

  Only Rigg is a good guy and didn’t think he was manipulating us to do his will.

  Or maybe he did manipulate us on purpose, and I don’t really know him at all.

  Umbo rocked his head forward and touched his fingers to his forehead. I keep coming back to not liking or trusting Rigg. Maybe that’s what Vadesh wants.

  He heard Param coming. He knew it was her from the lightness of her step. “It’s not your watch yet,” he said. “I only just started.”

  She kept coming. “You’ve been walking around for an hour or so,” she said. “If I’m any judge of time.”

  “In this group,” said Umbo, “who can trust time to be the same from minute to minute?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Param. And then, incredibly, she put her arm through Umbo’s and stood close to him. She was warm. Umbo shivered.

  “You’re cold,” she said.

  “Not now,” said Umbo. Then he realized that his words might sound like he was being flirty and so he corrected himself. “I mean, I was really cold a while ago when I stepped in a wet place down by the brook—”

  “You went down to the water?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Not on purpose,” said Umbo. “It was a boggy place—”

  “You could have—”

  “I wiped down my legs and feet and there was nothing.”

  “But he said they were really small in the water—”

  How could he argue with her? Why should he try? “If I stepped into a boggy spot and picked up a facemask parasite then it’s done, and I can tell you what it feels like.”

  “As it takes over your brain,” said Param.

  “Nobody’s been using it anyway,” said Umbo. He meant it to sound jocular. Instead it sounded self-pitying.

  But Param didn’t rush to reassure him, which would have made him seem even more pathetic to himself. “Maybe you and Barbfeather can talk to each other.”

  “Maybe we’ll look really pretty to each other,” said Umbo. “Just my luck to find a best chum who has four legs and can’t talk.”

  “Four-legged untalking people make the most reliable friends,” said Param. Was there bitterness in her voice?

  “I can see you’ve never tried to befriend a cat.”

  “I was forgetting cats.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I can understand why Rigg helped me, back in the capital. He’s my brother. But you—you sat there with me on that rock, holding the others back in that ancient time until Mother’s soldiers were almost on us. And Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko aren’t your kin or anything.”

  “Rigg is more my friend than any of my kin,” said Umbo.

  “If Rigg hadn’t signaled you to bring him back to the present . . .”

  “Then I would have kept him in the past until he did.”

  “You weren’t worried that they’d kill you?”

  “Of course I was. If they killed me, then I couldn’t have brought them back,” said Umbo.

  “What about me?” asked Param.

  Umbo shook his head. “See how gallant I’m not? I knew you could take care of yourself.”

  “I knew you were in danger. I kept wanting to grab you and make you disappear. But if I did, that might have been the same as killing the others.”

  “But you took me away the moment I brought them back to the present,” said Umbo.

  “All I could think was, get him off this rock,” she said.

  “You saved my life.”

  “I almost got us both killed,” she said, shuddering. “I let Mother and the soldiers see which way we jumped. They’d know we couldn’t change direction in midair. So if you hadn’t pushed us back a week—”

  “But I did.”

  “I jumped without thinking.”

  “You had no other choice. You kept us alive in that moment.”

  “And then you kept us alive in the next
.”

  “So on the whole, I think we saved each other,” said Umbo. Then, on a whim, he pulled away far enough that he could turn to face her and make a joke. “My hero,” he said.

  Only she must have had the same idea for the same joke, because at the exact same moment she said, “My hero.”

  But she wasn’t sarcastic. Or maybe her sarcasm was so thick that it sounded like sincerity.

  Well, either she was joking or not. All Umbo could do was react the way he would to either. “Don’t count on its happening again,” he said. “I’m not really the hero type.”

  She playfully slapped his face—just a tap with a few fingers. “Can’t let somebody thank you, is that it?”

  At the moment, all Umbo could think was—well, nothing, really, because he was beyond thinking. She had taken his arm and leaned close against him, she had bantered with him, thanked him, praised him. Called him her hero, even if it was kind of a joke. And now she was teasing him. He was in heaven. And yet he was also totally focused on everything she said and did so that he could respond.

  “Thank me all you want,” he said. “As long as I can thank you back.”

  “One of the best things about finding out I have a brother,” said Param, “is that I inherit all his friends.”

  Friends. That’s what they were. She was teasing him like a friend.

  “Which is a lot more than I’ll ever inherit from my mother,” said Param ruefully. She turned back to look at the city. “I think that place is so sad. So glorious, and yet they left it behind. All that work, all that marvel, and they walked away.”

  “Maybe they ran,” said Umbo. “Maybe they died.”

  “Well, they’re all dead by now,” said Param. “I remember being so distraught when Papa died. I wasn’t there to watch, the way Olivenko was, but I loved him more than anybody. And Mother took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Everybody dies, and since we don’t all die at once, somebody’s always left behind. Just be glad it wasn’t you who died.’ I should have realized then what Mother was. Or maybe I did. She was perfect—perfectly selfish. Well, no. Perfectly devoted to the Tent of Light. She had seemed so devoted to me. But I knew then that if I died she’d feel exactly what she felt about Father’s death.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Annoyed,” she said. “She was irritated that Father’s hobby had gotten him killed.”

  “Well, just think how irritated she is right now that you’re alive,” said Umbo.

  Param giggled. “She’s still there. Remember? As we were falling, all I could do was slow us down more and more, so a whole night passed, and the whole time those soldiers were there, swinging those heavy metal bars. They’re doing that right now.”

  “And we’re still falling toward them,” said Umbo. Instinctively he reached out and took her hand. “Let’s do it again.”

  She took his hand and looked at him, laughing. Then her face darkened and she took her hand back. “No,” she said. “Let’s never do that again.”

  She turned away and ran lightly back into the grove.

  Never do what! he wanted to shout after her. Never jump from the rock with enemies beneath? Or never let me hold your hand again? Or never talk to me. Or never time-jump. Or . . .

  Anything he asked would show just how desperate he was. For a few moments it was as if she actually liked him. And then suddenly she snatched her hand away and was gone and he had no idea why. No idea what she actually felt about him.

  This is agony. I didn’t ask to fall in love with Rigg’s sister.

  She called me her hero.

  Umbo stalked off through the grass toward the city until he reached the path. Or road. It was grassy, but in the cold grey light of the Ring, it was as if Umbo could see the road that lay under the grass. It was wide, and while a thatch of grass roots lay over it thickly, no tree grew where the road had been. If we peeled up all this grass, it would still be there, like the roads in the city, changed not a whit by the passing of ten thousand years.

  Umbo walked back to the camp. Param had already resumed her place and was either asleep or wasn’t, but wanted to seem so. Umbo didn’t walk anymore. He was wide awake now—she had wakened him even more than stepping in water had. He kept his watch and even after the position of the stars told him that his watch was over, he waited another half-watch before waking Rigg to take his turn. I won’t sleep anyway, Umbo thought. But he also knew that he was letting Rigg sleep to make up for all the terrible things that Umbo had thought about him that day. Not that Rigg had any idea. But punishing himself a little, serving Rigg a little, that made Umbo feel better. A little less ashamed.

  Naturally, Rigg noticed that Umbo had wakened him late. “I couldn’t sleep anyway,” Umbo whispered. “No reason for both of us to lose sleep.”

  Rigg moved off a few paces. Umbo lay down and, even though he thought he wasn’t sleepy at all, he was unconscious within moments, and then it was morning, and it was as if no time had passed. He thought: Param touched me. Of course I could sleep. I wanted to get to my dreams as quickly as possible.

  Except that if he had any dreams, he didn’t remember them.

  Being awake at dawn felt perfectly normal to them all—they went about their normal chores, except for boiling water. There’d be no hot gruel this morning. Nor was there any shaving or washing. They needed to hold on to every bit of water for drinking.

  “So,” said Loaf, when they had all gnawed their jerky and cheese and had their sips. “You time travelers, are you going to go back and see what happened here?”

  “I’d like to,” said Rigg, “if Umbo’s willing.”

  Rigg seemed so deferent. Umbo blushed with embarrassment at how he had blamed Rigg for always deciding everything.

  Then again, was Rigg really leaving it up to him? How could Umbo possibly say no?

  I can say no, if I want to, thought Umbo. “No,” he said.

  Everyone except Rigg seemed surprised. “Umbo?” asked Param.

  Now that he had refused, he had to come up with a reason. “Are we going to change it?” asked Umbo. “And what if it changes us? What if I send Rigg back and he gets killed? We don’t know how violent these people were. Or what diseases they had. What if Rigg catches the plague that wiped them out? What’s the point?”

  “Don’t send him back alone,” said Olivenko. “Send me and Loaf along to protect him.”

  “From disease?” asked Umbo.

  “Whatever happened here to empty the city,” said Rigg, “I think it has everything to do with what Vadesh wants us to do here.”

  “He hasn’t asked us to do anything,” said Param.

  “But he wants it all the same,” said Rigg. “Didn’t you see how attentive he was to us? We matter to him. Father was that way—Ram was. If you mattered to him, he homed on you like a bat after a fly. You filled his whole gaze. But if you didn’t matter, it was like you didn’t exist.”

  “True,” said Umbo. “Sometimes I mattered to him, but mostly not.”

  “Vadesh couldn’t take his eyes off us,” said Rigg.

  “Off you,” said Olivenko, chuckling.

  “And Param, and Umbo,” said Rigg. “The time travelers.”

  “We all traveled in time,” said Loaf, with a slight smile. “He just has a thing for children.”

  “Someday, Loaf, I’m going to be big enough to smack you around,” Rigg answered him.

  “I’ve seen both your parents,” said Olivenko, “and no, Rigg, you’ll never be that big. I’ll never be that big.”

  “Good to keep that in mind,” said Loaf.

  Olivenko rolled his eyes. “I’m trying to show you proper respect here, Loaf. You don’t have to put me in my place. I know my place.”

  “I was just joking,” said Loaf uncomfortably.

  But he had not been joking—nobody in this group knew Loaf as well as Umbo did, and he knew Loaf had spoken his mind.

  “What I think,” said Rigg, “is that I should walk around out here and see what
the paths can tell me. There’s no purpose to going back in time if we arrive at some point where nothing decisive is happening, right? And if I can’t find anything that looks promising, then we won’t do it. Agreed?”

  Umbo wanted to laugh. Rigg sounded so conciliatory, as if he was giving in. But in fact what he was really getting them all to agree to was that if, in Rigg’s sole judgment, there was some point in the past where they could learn something, then they would go back. Rigg hadn’t argued with anybody, but he was getting his way.

  Nobody else seemed to notice, and nobody else seemed to mind. And what bothered Umbo most was the fact that he knew Rigg was right, they had to find something out before trusting Vadesh another moment, and Umbo had only disagreed because he couldn’t stand having Rigg decide everything. But what could he do when Rigg was right?

  Umbo and the others tagged along, watching Rigg as he got lost in thought, seeing whatever it was that he called “paths.” For an hour they watched him move around through the lawns and meadows surrounding the city. Finally he sat down and Loaf immediately led the others closer to him. Only Umbo hung back and looked, not at Rigg, but at the city. It was more magnificent than anything Umbo had seen in O or Aressa Sessamo. Every building was a separate work of art, and yet they were all pieces of something much larger and more beautiful. It’s as if each building were part of a tapestry, some parts raised, some parts kept low. Perhaps if we could stand inside the tallest tower, we could see what the tapestry depicted. Maybe a map, like the globe inside the Tower of O. Maybe a portrait of a person. Maybe some message spelled out in towers, or the shadows of towers at sunset.

  Umbo became aware of voices coming closer.

  “The last thing we want to do is go back into the middle of a battle,” said Loaf. So apparently Rigg had learned something about what had happened here.

  “Not in the middle,” said Rigg. “At the edge. Far back from the edge. Out of danger. Nobody was dying right here, for instance.”

  “You can see death?” asked Umbo.

  “No,” said Param. “Rigg already explained—if you had come with us you’d know. He just sees where paths end.”

  “There were people watching the battle,” said Rigg. “Just a few. Umbo can send me back to their time—”