Visitors Read online

  “See how much you’ve already learned about Yinfold?” said Ram Odin.

  The first morning, Ram Odin put on a nondescript robe. “I have to go alone and get clothing for you.”

  “Wearing that?”

  “Trousers never came into fashion here. This robe is really from Untungfold, so it’ll look exotic here. But mostly it looks like money, and that’s the impression I need to give here in town while I buy clothes for you.”

  “And then I’ll go with you into town?”

  “Town? Why would you go into town? No, I’m getting us clothes to travel through the hamlets eight hundred kilometers from here.”

  “Fashions from here will look right that far away?”

  “We’re strangers,” said Ram Odin. “Travelers. We have to be dressed exotically. But it has to be clothing that won’t look too strange to any Yinfolder. Please trust me. I’ve made visits like this before. A lot more often when I was younger and still thought . . .”

  “Still thought the differences between places would matter,” Rigg said, completing the sentence for him.

  “Still thought,” Ram Odin replied sternly, “that I would learn something useful from seeing for myself. The differences do matter. The differences are the best and most important thing about Garden.”

  “Go get me my clothes,” said Rigg.

  Because he had given up on getting a completely unbiased view, Rigg read as much as he could about Yinfold while Ram Odin was gone. Hundreds of small kingdoms and princi­palities and duchies and counties and free cities, sometimes coming together into something like nations but mostly not. Some major language groups but so much change over the millennia, and so many holdovers from once-widespread languages, that the language map of Yinfold was chaotic. For interest’s sake, Rigg brought up the language map of Ramfold and found that while it used to be the same there, the few centuries of Sessamid rule had already caused hundreds of languages to die out, especially near the river, to be replaced by the common speech. All very fascinating and yet also predictable. A quick scan of the other wallfolds showed similar language maps and language histories, similar political maps with small political units rising and falling, sometimes coalescing but then collapsing back into chaos again.

  Like watching the seashore, thought Rigg. Like sitting on the beach at the gathering place in Larfold and watching the waves, never exactly the same, but never all that different, either. Like watching flames, dancing patterns of red and yellow heat, always shifting, never changing till the fire died.

  What did the Visitors see in each of these wallfolds, with their too-brief visits? Of course, they were able to copy all the data from the ships’ computers and the satellites and the expendables, so they had plenty of history—all these maps—to study on the way home to Earth, and plenty to discuss afterward.

  But somehow what they saw made them send the Destroyers to wipe out all human life on Garden. Something here made us worthy of death, in their eyes.

  Ram Odin came back, not with robes, but with tunics and belts and overcoats. “The weather’s warm but we still wear the coats because we’ll need them later in the year. It’s what unwealthy travelers do, because they don’t want to keep buying new coats every year.”

  “I’m looking for the underwear,” said Rigg.

  “Are you planning to undress in front of the locals?”

  “Shouldn’t I be authentic, just in case?”

  “In that case, what’s underwear? Only women wear it, and only now and then.”

  Rigg felt the fabric. “Ah. Not woolen. It’s cotton.”

  “So you don’t need a protective layer,” said Ram Odin. “Put it on, grandson of mine.”

  “It’s awfully clean and new.”

  “So maybe they’ll think we must be pretty good at our work, to earn enough to buy new clothes.”

  “I want to see the town,” said Rigg. “Just because you tell me they’re all alike . . .”

  “Suit yourself,” said Ram Odin.

  So they spent the rest of the day in town. Rigg forgot the name almost as soon as he heard it, because it didn’t matter. It was so much smaller and grubbier than O, the city he knew best, that he lost interest almost at once. He knew that was cultural chauvinism and that he had to avoid such thoughts. And it wasn’t that small. It had three large market squares and they were ­bustling. But the merchandise wasn’t terribly different—Rigg knew the use of every object that he saw for sale—and while the flavors of the foods on offer were spiced differently from any fashion he had tasted in his travels in Ramfold, they were based on familiar ingredients.

  When he commented on this, Ram Odin chuckled. “A faulty perception, Rigg. They’ve had ten thousand years to breed all kinds of different fruits and vegetables and to reshape the food animals, too. About a thousand years ago they started breeding rodents to eat. They’ve got pig-sized rats now, about thirty ­varieties, and you just ate a stew blending two kinds.”

  “Very tender,” said Rigg. “Huge rats? No wonder the Visitors blow Garden to smithereens.”

  “They just burn off the surface,” said Ram Odin. “Hard to smither a planet.”

  The flyer carried them that night to the place Ram Odin had chosen to begin their experience as itinerants. They slept in the self-adjusting beds of the flyer and it occurred to Rigg that people from Ram Odin’s world all slept on beds like that, not the rough places Rigg had grown up sleeping. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe such beds were only for the elite, but the elite were the ones who traveled in space so they demanded beds like this. Was this Ram Odin’s whole life? In beds that shaped themselves to fit you?

  Yet he came here to make a world—nineteen worlds, as it turned out—where people slept on straw, or on the ground, or on a hundred other kinds of bed. Worlds where people kept ­reinventing everything, but still did the same human tasks. The same animal tasks. Eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, reproducing, sleeping, finding or making food, finding or making shelter, and finally dying. Animal life, with clothing. Animal life, with better explanations for what we do.

  All the animals Rigg had trapped and killed and skinned during his years with Father, Rigg had known they were his kin. That they, too, were only hungry or cold, libidinous or sleepy, seeking a way to satisfy whatever need their body made first priority. I used that against them, to lay traps for them because they weren’t clever enough to foresee their danger.

  That’s all we are—animals who are better at telling the future, better at understanding causality in the past. We see how things got how they are, or guess at it, and use that information to make better choices for the future. Not good choices, just better ones than the other animals.

  He thought of how he made traps of string and sticks and realized: Brains and fingers, that’s what we have.

  But then he felt the mattress under him, and the light sheet over him, and thought: Brains and fingers have wrought marvels in these worlds.

  They woke and dressed in their tunics and strapped on their walking sandals and made small packs out of the other things Ram Odin had bought—a pot, a ladle, a spoon, two blankets, needles and thread, rope and string, some cheese, some crusty bread, a bit of dried meat—of which rodent Rigg didn’t bother to ask. They hitched the packs onto their shoulders. They weren’t that heavy, but Rigg could tell right away that he would hate the way the pot bounced against his back when he walked. But he also knew that in time he’d get used to it. Or find a way to repack so that the pot didn’t shift so much with each step.

  From the flyer it was a two-hour walk to get to a road. Ram Odin called it a road. He called it the King’s Highway, in fact, but it was barely a track.

  “Ah, but you can see it clearly, and it goes from the Wall in the northwest to the Wall in the southeast. We’re a hundred kilometers from the northwest Wall, so it’s only a track here. Farther on, it’s wide enough
for two coaches to pass. In two cities, it’s paved and four carriages wide.”

  They walked along the track till, coming over a rise no different from the past few rises, they saw a cluster of houses and wide, well-cultivated fields. A few of the houses were rather substantial, with two stories; one had three. From the crest of the rise, they could see that there was another, larger village in the shimmering distance. They were in a wide valley now, and a river twisted its way through the level ground. Rigg saw no boats on it.

  “No point in boats here,” said Ram Odin. “There are falls not far behind us, and falls again after the lake a few dozen ­kilometers on. They’re not much for fish.”

  “Humans need fish.”

  “They grow the substitute vegetables,” said Ram Odin. “And by the way, let’s start speaking this language.” He switched to the one they had heard on the streets of the town the day before.

  “They speak that here?” asked Rigg, in that language.

  “Not at all, but they speak it somewhere in Yinfold and so if someone is hiding in the brush along the edges of the fields, they’ll hear us using a language from this wallfold.”

  Sure enough, there were soon children darting out of cover and running down the track ahead of them. “I guess we don’t look too threatening,” said Ram Odin. “If the children are willing to run openly down the road ahead of us.”

  “But they still ran.”

  “To give news of our coming,” said Ram Odin. “We’re the most exciting thing in days, I’ll wager.”

  Rigg remembered life in Fall Ford. The children there noticed the arrival of strangers, but didn’t run to tell. That’s because strangers came several times a week and always went to Nox’s boardinghouse for a meal and news and perhaps a bed. Then they would go up the stair beside the falls into Upsheer Forest, or along the road—much more of a road than this King’s Highway—that ran east and west below the face of Upsheer Cliff, to the other towns that lived in its shadow. He had thought Fall Ford an isolated, sleepy place, but now he saw it as a hub of traffic, compared to this.

  Fall Ford was also five times as big. More houses. More tradesmen’s shops. Rigg wondered if they thought of themselves as a village or a town? There was an open square in the middle that might be a weekly market. Or might not. It could simply be the place where they hanged strangers.

  Ram Odin was making it a point to nod—but not smile—at the faces peering out of windows. “These aren’t smiley folk,” Ram Odin explained. “In this region, a smile means you’re a liar.”

  Rigg noticed that people weren’t peering through cracks in curtains. They were fully visible in open windows. They returned Ram Odin’s solemn nod, some so slightly as to hardly be visible, some sharply, clearly, as if putting a bit of punctuation at the end of an unspoken sentence.

  People must have gone out back doors and made their way to the square, because as Ram Odin and Rigg stepped into the open space, so did about twenty people, mostly adult men but some women, coming from behind houses on both sides, but only one man and one woman from the far side, where they hadn’t walked.

  “Good morning,” said Ram Odin, glancing at the sun to be sure it wasn’t yet past noon. “We’re hoping to earn a bit of bread and ale in this place, if you find us worthy. And if you have enough work for us, a place to pass the night.”

  “That’s what you want,” said the man who had come from the far side of the square. “Why do we want you?” Rigg figured him to be the mayor or headman. He seemed to have authority. Or at least none of the locals thought it out of place that he spoke first.

  “What’s wrong with the young one?” asked a woman.

  “Two questions deserving of fair answers. May I answer the second one first, seeing how you’re all looking so curious at my grandson here?”

  Ram Odin directed his question at the mayor, who gave him one of those sharp nods. It was an answer.

  “The boy was a baby, not three days old, when the house caught fire. It was a thatchy roof and the whole thing was ablaze at once. Inside the house, too. My son was screaming in pain, but the mother, my daughter-in-law, she was from a strange folk. My son brought her into the village from afar, and she knew a blessing, I think, because she came to the window and she was also aflame, but the baby wasn’t burning, not a lick. She dropped him out the window. Nobody was close enough to catch him, the house was so hot afire, but the baby didn’t burn even though she did. My son screaming, but her making never a sound.”

  So Ram Odin was a storyteller. Rigg saw how the people were spellbound. He also heard how Ram Odin was speaking the local language perfectly, but he was bending the vowels to be a little like the language in the town where they spent yesterday. So he sounded a little foreign, but they could understand every word.

  “When the ruin of the house cooled enough to come close, I picked up the baby. Not burnt at all, not even the blanket he was wrapped in. Whatever she was, the boy’s mother was powerful. Not powerful enough to put out the fire, but powerful enough to spare his life.”

  “If he didn’t burn, what’s wrong with his face?” asked the same woman as before.

  “She kept the flame off him, but not the heat. Couldn’t kill him, but his face melted. I tried to push it back into place as best I could, but you can see I’m no master with clay. Did my best and the boy’s used to it, an’t you, boy?”

  Rigg nodded.

  “Can’t talk?” asked the mayor.

  “Now it’s three questions, and me barely finished with the first,” said Ram Odin. “The boy can talk all right. But he’s shy and he’d rather talk to me, mostly, when meeting strange folk.”

  There was a general recoiling at that, some murmurs.

  “Oh, now, don’t take me amiss,” said Ram Odin. “I know that in this place, we’re the strange folk. But you’re strange to us, don’t you see, just as we’re strange to you. Only we come here of our own choice, so we mean nothing wrong by it. We hope to serve you, and that brings me to the original question, the first question, Question Prime, the question of questions.”

  “What are you good for that we should feed you?” asked the mayor again.

  “Well, I’m not good for much. Old but still strong for my age, but that says little. It’s the boy, you see. A bit of the mother’s blood in him. Never got no training and he don’t know no spells, so you’ve nought to fear from him. But he’s got him a way of finding lost things.”

  “What things?” demanded the mayor.

  “Well, he don’t just happen to find them and then go looking for the owner,” said Ram Odin. “You have to tell him what you lost, and then he finds it, if it’s to be found, or tells you what’s become of it, if he can’t lay hands on it. Doesn’t always work, only about half the time, but here’s what I offer. You give us the meal for trying, and the bed for succeeding.”

  “It’s a way to get a meal for nothing,” said the mayor dismissively.

  “If you don’t even want us to try, we’ve still got a bit of cheese and bread and meat from yesterday, and we’ll leave right now. I saw another hamlet off in the distance.”

  “That’s Stinkville Manor,” said a half-grown lad, and people laughed.

  “Don’t like them much,” said the mayor. “They do everything wrong.”

  “Then I suppose they’re likelier to have lost things so they’ll have more need of us.” Ram Odin clapped his hand on Rigg’s shoulder. “This is a lucky place, Rigg. They never lost anything they need to find.” He started walking across the square.

  But the story had made an impression and most folk seemed disappointed. Then a man, a tall man, stepped into their way. “I lost a thing,” he said.

  The mayor looked annoyed but didn’t try to stop the man from talking.

  “I went to town a few year back,” he said. “Bought my wife five brass buttons with a bird etched into them, every
single one. She sewed them into the back of her blouse, but now one’s gone missing.”

  “Must be I bent over and it popped off, that’s all,” said his wife, who seemed reluctant to step forward.

  “Cost me a bit,” said the man. “I’d like that button back.”

  “That’s not hard, is it?” Ram Odin asked Rigg.

  Rigg had already marked the woman’s path. Could see which buildings in town she had visited most, and most recently. He already had a good guess where the button was, and why she didn’t want it looked for. But she couldn’t admit that she didn’t want it found.

  “Where was she when they was last sure the button was on the blouse?” Rigg asked softly. He pitched his voice so only Ram Odin and the people nearest them could hear, but that meant somebody could hear him, so he tried to do the same thing with his vowels that Ram Odin had done. So they might seem to come from the same place.

  “How can I remember?” the woman said. “I didn’t even notice it was gone, till Bak noticed it.”

  “But you would have known when you put it on, so you know the day,” said an older woman. Might it be her mother? From the way the women looked at each other, Rigg thought it was likely. And yes, sure enough their paths converged some years ago at another house. And that was where Bak’s wife’s path began.

  “May I know your name?” asked Rigg.

  “What do you need names for? No names!” said the mayor. “Ain’t going to have no witchery on folk here!”

  “Might help me find the button,” Rigg murmured, “but it don’t matter.”

  “Her name’s Jobo,” said Bak. “Everybody knows that.”

  The mayor glared at him, but Bak only had eyes for Rigg.

  “She had it at breakfast five days ago,” said Bak. “And at supper she didn’t. Don’t know where she went all day because we all was out haying. Second day of haying.”

  “I didn’t feel well,” said Jobo. “I stayed home to rest.”

  “Then he’ll find the button in our house,” said Bak to her gently.

  To Rigg, it sounded as if he loved her. Very tender to her. But it also sounded as if he was going to find out about that button. Five days ago, and it still troubled him.