Ruins Read online

  “I think that answers our question about who won,” said Rigg. “Those shouts came from the direction of the city.”

  “Do you think they’ve seen us? I think the cries are coming closer.”

  “I can’t see anybody,” said Rigg.

  “But maybe they can see us,” said Param. “Those facemasks made them quicker, sped up their reaction time. Maybe it gives them better eyesight, too.”

  Rigg held up his arm, pumped the air, signaling Umbo.

  Nothing happened.

  “He’s lost us,” said Rigg.

  “He can’t see us,” said Param at the same time. She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice, but Rigg seemed so calm.

  “Let’s get back to the spot where Umbo pushed us into the past,” said Rigg. “We jumped half a day into the future, so I should be able to find Loaf’s and Olivenko’s paths.” He drew her away from the stockade.

  Now Param could see the facemask men who were shouting. They had clubs and spears and they were running straight toward Rigg and her. It was a terrifying, fascinating sight.

  “I think this would be a good time for you to make us disappear,” said Rigg.

  “But Umbo will lose us!” She knew how stupid that was even as she said it. Umbo had already lost them.

  “We won’t be able to figure anything out if we’re dead,” said Rigg. “They have nothing made of metal. Make us disappear.”

  This time there was no jump, just the sudden silence from the sectioning of time, the mental buzz she always felt.

  But the facemask men showed no sign of having lost sight of them. They showed no confusion. They were still coming straight for Param and Rigg, as if she had done nothing at all.

  All Param could think to do was push harder, make the buzz more intense and more rapid, so time was getting sliced into thinner bits, and she was leaping forward farther between moments of visibility.

  It made the enemy seem to be even faster—far faster—so they were instantly upon them. But to Param’s relief the facemask men were confused now, looking around, swinging clubs and jabbing or sweeping with spears. They raced back and forth, some of them running off in different directions to search, some of them remaining in place to stab or slice the air.

  Unlike Mother’s soldiers, though, they had little staying power. Having lost sight of Param and Rigg, they soon gave up. Well, perhaps not so soon as it appeared to Param, since she was pushing herself and Rigg into the future at a headlong pace, so that the few moments the facemask men kept searching might have been a half hour, an hour, more.

  Most of the facemask men went away, but some stayed as sentinels, and as soon as morning came—only a few minutes, at the pace Param was keeping—the rest came back. Now they knelt and examined the grass, and in only a few moments they had found Rigg’s and Param’s footprints in the grass. Not the footprints they had left behind them—the grass there had long since sprung back up. What they found were the footprints Param and Rigg were making right now, for the grass had little chance to spring back up during the microseconds of their nonexistence between the tiny jumps she was making into the future.

  The facemask men probed the footprints. When they used their fingers or clubs, it was not a problem, but the stone heads of the spears could damage her, Param knew. She pressed harder on her sense of time, shoving herself and Rigg farther and farther into the future with each tiny jump, so the stone spear points coexisted in the same space as their feet for ever-shorter slices of time. The buzzing sense was now a deep, rapid throbbing. The day ended, the facemask men were gone. Then it was day again and they did not come back, then night, then day, then night, day, night, day . . .

  Gasping, she eased up on the pressure inside herself. Her heart was beating so fast. She was exhausted. She had never pushed herself so hard, not even in the panic coming down from the rock.

  They returned to realtime. They could hear again.

  The stockade had been knocked over completely, some of the poles broken off just above the ground, but most of them uprooted. They had been shallowly set; it had not taken superhuman strength to put the thing down, especially pushing outward.

  The bodies were also gone from the battlefield, and all the fires were out.

  “Thank you,” murmured Rigg. “I thought we were dead.”

  “We might as well be,” said Param softly. “I’ve stranded us ten thousand years in the past.”

  “Minus about five days,” said Rigg. “Maybe a week, I’m not sure I was counting right.”

  “They could have crippled us by holding those stone spear-points in our footprints.”

  “In our feet, you mean,” said Rigg. “It was the strangest feeling. My feet were getting hot.”

  Then Param, who had been scanning the battlefield and the city while they talked—as Rigg was also doing—spotted Vadesh. He was standing where the gap in the stockade had been, surveying the battlefield just as Param and Rigg had been doing.

  Rigg must have seen him, too, because he gripped her hand tightly. “Don’t call to him,” he murmured. “He’s never seen us before.”

  Of course he hadn’t. The Vadesh of this era would have no idea who they were.

  But talking softly had done them no good. The machine had been made with extraordinarily acute hearing. He was walking toward them.

  “Turn your back on him,” said Rigg. “Don’t let him see our faces.”

  “I have seen your faces,” Vadesh called. After the silence of time-slicing, his voice was shockingly loud. “I will never forget them.”

  “Umbo’s lost us, or we’ve lost him,” said Rigg. “And the only paths I can see are here, where you and Olivenko and Loaf stood looking at the battle. But Umbo can’t see us, so he can’t push us back into the past to rejoin them.”

  “Can you see the moment where Umbo took them into the future?” asked Param. “Maybe if you hold on to the path right at that point . . .”

  “I can’t hold a path,” said Rigg. “I don’t even see them, not really, not with my eyes, I just know where they are, I—I can’t touch them.”

  “But you can, when Umbo . . . you have to try.”

  Rigg reached out his hand. “Here’s where Olivenko was when his path jumps away. But I don’t know how he was standing. Was his arm here? Here?”

  Vadesh was hearing everything they said. No wonder, when they showed up in the far future, he knew all about their ability to move through time. “Vadesh is almost here,” Param said.

  “I know, but this isn’t working.” He kept moving his hand, trying to make some kind of contact. “I’d rather not have a conversation with the traitor who got all the uninfected humans killed.”

  “They aren’t dead,” said Vadesh, still calling from some distance away. Could he hear even the slightest whisper? “They fled the city as the natives entered it.”

  “Don’t argue with him,” said Param.

  “He calls them natives,” whispered Rigg angrily. “Because they have that native parasite.”

  “At least he doesn’t think they’re human,” said Param.

  “But they are, and better than human,” said Vadesh, who was now close enough to speak loudly instead of shouting. “Didn’t you see how quick and clever they were on the battlefield?”

  “Native and human,” said Rigg. “Come on, Umbo, see us, take us.”

  To Param it sounded as if Rigg was praying. “This isn’t working, he can’t see us, so try something else.”

  “There is nothing else.”

  “No,” said Param. Her mind was racing. “When the woman tried to stab you, it wasn’t me that made us jump forward in time to the middle of the night, and it wasn’t Umbo because he would have brought us back to the time we came from.”

  Rigg was looking at her, listening. But clearly he didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand.

  “It was you,” said Param. “The knife was coming at you, and you jumped away. But in time, not in space.”

  “
I can’t do that. It’s Umbo who does that.”

  “No, you do it—you’re the one who finds the other time, who pulls us to it. Or at least you join him in doing it. Your body’s been learning how to do it even if your mind doesn’t understand it or control it yet. But you can do it.”

  “I’ve tried. My whole voyage downriver I tried, and—”

  She didn’t have time for his chat about despair. She remembered how the Gardener—the expendable named Ram—had helped her find her own timesense. “Stop talking and listen,” she said, using the voice Mother had always used to command instant attention. “You feel it in your nose, like the beginning of a sneeze or the start of wanting to weep. But then it draws down, through your throat, down your breastbone, then down through your stomach to your groin. You draw it tight with your diaphragm, as if you were straining to lift something. Draw it tight. Only pull your nose down and your groin up with it.”

  He looked baffled and confused as she talked. Clearly Ram hadn’t taught him this, maybe because with Rigg’s gift it wouldn’t work. But he had to do it—her gift wouldn’t get them away from Vadesh because he was a machine and he had heard everything they said, he’d know that if he just waited long enough he’d see them again. Rigg had to get them away, and so all she could do was try to help him get control of the power he had used to jump away from the knife.

  She started to repeat the instructions and this time he tried to obey her. She could see tears starting in his eyes, just as they had in hers when she was first learning. A quivering in the muscles beside his nose, a twitching of the lower eyelids. And a clenching of his belly, a slight bend to his body.

  His hand was still in midair, trembling, where he expected to find Olivenko.

  Vadesh was nearly upon them, smiling, smiling, smiling.

  “I can see him,” whispered Rigg. His hand moved.

  And then Param could see that there was a sleeve in Rigg’s hand. No arm, just a sleeve. But then the arm was there, and in that instant it became Olivenko, turning now to face them, and there was Loaf, also turning, and the sounds of battle came back again, the stench of war, and Vadesh was gone.

  Rigg didn’t hesitate, he turned his head back toward where Umbo had been. Rigg gave a vigorous nod, then cast his chin high, then nodded forward again. Param realized: He’s not going to give the hand signal because that would require him to let go either of her or of Olivenko.

  But what if their jaunt to the week after the battle had made them invisible to Umbo? What if they were lost to him no matter what they did?

  “Give Umbo the signal!” Param shouted to Loaf, to Olivenko.

  But before they could obey her, the stockade was gone, and the stink, and the noise. It was a quiet morning again. Umbo was right where he should be. The city had all its tallest towers again. And Param and Rigg were both there with the others.

  “Ram’s left elbow,” exclaimed Rigg in his relief.

  “No, it’s my left elbow you’ve got,” said Olivenko. “Where did you come from? I thought you were over talking to those women.”

  “You disappeared,” said Loaf. “I thought Param had done whatever it is she does.”

  “No,” said Param. “I almost did, but I stopped myself.”

  “But I felt you slip out of my control,” said Umbo. “Like having a loose tooth pull away. I’d been holding you so tightly, it hurt when you vanished. I lost you.”

  “I know,” said Rigg, and then he grinned foolishly. “Umbo, it was me. Param figured it out. I’ve been learning how to jump without even realizing it. I felt what you were doing, I think I was even helping, but I didn’t know how to make it happen only I did by reflex, when she tried to stab me.”

  “Param?” asked Loaf, alarmed.

  “No, the woman we were talking to, we scared her, she was in the middle of a war, she was armed, so of course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do, we do—”

  “Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”

  “I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became real and—”

  “And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”

  “Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.

  Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her weeks and he got it with the first lesson.

  Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught him nothing.

  “They’re all lying snakes,” she said.

  The others looked at her. “The men with those facemasks on them?” asked Loaf.

  “How could they lie?” asked Rigg. “They can’t even talk.”

  Umbo had understood her, though. “She means the expendables. Vadesh and Ram. Your father, Rigg.”

  “All I gave you was the first fifteen seconds of the very first lesson your so-called father gave me when he first started teaching me to control my timesense,” said Param. “Why didn’t he give you those fifteen seconds?”

  Rigg’s excitement gave way to realization. “He taught me everything he wanted me to know.”

  “Just like Vadesh,” said Param. “They think they’re gods, they think they have the right to just decide, regardless of what we want or need—they think they know best about everything.”

  “Maybe they do,” said Olivenko.

  Param whirled on him. “Yes, just like Mother, she thought she knew best—she thought she had the right to kill me, the way Vadesh betrayed the people of the city—”

  “He did what?” asked Loaf.

  “He burned a gap in the stockade,” said Rigg. “He let the facemask people drive the uninfected ones out of the city. He chose one side over the other and it was the parasites he chose. He calls them ‘natives’ but he claims they’re still human.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Olivenko. “They’re all dead now.”

  “He picked,” said Param angrily, “and he chose the parasites over the human race.”

  “We can’t trust him,” said Rigg.

  “But we already didn’t trust him,” said Olivenko.

  “Now we know he’s our enemy,” said Param.

  “At least now Rigg can go into the past without me,” said Umbo. But it seemed to Param that he wasn’t entirely happy about it.

  “I could never have gotten us back to the present,” said Rigg. “I can only go into the past where there are paths I can hook onto. How would I get back into the future without you to anchor us?”

  Param realized what was going on. Umbo was feeling unneeded and Rigg was trying to reassure him. But the more Rigg said, the angrier Umbo seemed to be getting. Or maybe he wasn’t angry. Maybe he was just hurt. Maybe he hated having Rigg reassure him.

  “We’re all talented and we still need each other,” said Param, trying to stop them.

&nb
sp; “Not all of us,” said Olivenko. “Loaf and I are completely talent-free, when it comes to time.”

  “Except that I’ve lived through a lot more of it than any of you,” said Loaf.

  “Is everybody going to be offended or embarrassed because they don’t have everybody else’s ability?” demanded Param. “None of us knows what we’re doing. We’re all still learning, we all still need each other, and we’re up against this expendable who apparently likes monsters more than humans.”

  “And here he comes,” said Olivenko. His glance made them all look in the same direction. Vadesh was crossing the lawn toward them, just as he had done ten thousand years in the past, the week after the battle.

  “Careful,” said Param softly. “He can hear every word we say, even at this distance.”

  “Then he’ll understand my contempt for him,” said Loaf.

  “Oh, I do!” called Vadesh. “But now you know why I was so happy to see you cross through the Wall! I’ve been waiting ten thousand years for you! And Ram refused to tell me anything about you when I asked him. Of course, until you were born he might not have known anything. It just occurred to me—maybe my inquiries were the reason he started looking for people with the power to manipulate time. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully paradoxical? I met you, I asked Ram about you, and because of my questions, he started manipulating the bloodlines until you were born! I think perhaps I created you! Isn’t that amusing?”

  “Ha ha,” said Loaf. “And you know what’s really funny?”

  By now Vadesh was almost there with them. “Please tell me,” he said.

  “You still don’t get it that maybe the reason Ram wouldn’t tell you anything is that you managed to get all the humans in your wallfold killed.”

  Vadesh reached out and knocked Loaf down. Flicked him, or so it seemed, with a casual brush of his hand, and Loaf staggered backward and fell. When he got up he clutched his left shoulder, where Vadesh had hit him, and he was panting from the pain.

  “It’s not broken,” said Vadesh. “I don’t damage human beings. I don’t kill them. We expendables can’t kill people. Why do you think I only burned the grass between the armies?”