Ruins sw-2 Read online

  And what did the machines actually make? Huge moving parts were visible, but none of the things they actually worked to make. Umbo wanted to see it moving, partly because he wanted to watch them move, and partly to see what came out of the end of each machine.

  Umbo knew he was lagging behind the others, but he could hear their footsteps and they were not far ahead. He would catch up. He just wanted to figure out how this one machine worked.

  And then he was aware of someone standing beside him. He turned and saw himself.

  The self he saw was bloody, his ear half torn away, his arm broken, his face contorted with pain. As soon as his vision-self saw that he was looking at him, he held up his good arm and whispered, “Stay here. Do nothing.”

  And then he was gone.

  Umbo’s first impulse was to shout after Rigg and Loaf to stop. But he couldn’t hear their footsteps now. He wasn’t sure where they were, or if they would hear him. His broken, bleeding future self had said to do nothing. The future self presumably cared as much about Loaf and Rigg as Umbo did right now, so if he said to do nothing it was presumably because there was nothing useful to be done. If Umbo couldn’t trust his own future judgment in such a matter, whom could he trust?

  How much of nothing was he required to do? Could he go back to Olivenko and warn him? Warn them, if Param had come out of hiding and caught up?

  Surely that didn’t count as “something”—he could surely go back.

  Yet every instinct pushed him forward, to follow Rigg and Loaf and see what was about to happen to them.

  But it might be that nothing would happen. It might be only Umbo himself who was in such danger. Stay here, do nothing. If a future self came back to warn him, Umbo had no choice but to obey.

  He stayed in place. He did nothing.

  A few minutes later, he heard footsteps. He saw Param coming through the factory, and then Olivenko following her.

  “Where did they go?” demanded Param.

  “I don’t know,” said Umbo.

  “Why aren’t you with them?”

  “Because I came back from the future to warn myself not to go on.”

  Param paused a moment, blinking slowly while she processed the implications of his statement.

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  “I only know that I never come back and warn myself unless it’s really important that I do exactly what I tell myself to do,” said Umbo.

  “What about me?” demanded Param.

  “Whatever the danger is, it probably already passed,” said Umbo.

  “Danger?” asked Param.

  “Probably?” asked Olivenko, who had just caught up.

  “My future self was a mess. Broken arm, ear half gone, bleeding from a lot of places.”

  “So you let my brother go on without a warning?” demanded Param.

  “I did what I told myself to do,” said Umbo. “My future self could have given warning while we were still together. He came to me the very first moment that I was alone.”

  “So the warning was for you,” said Olivenko. “Not Rigg and Loaf.”

  “What if your future self is a lying traitor?” asked Param.

  “What if your present self is an accusing idiot?” asked Umbo. So much for making a good impression on Param.

  “So you’re just going to do what you’re told,” she said. “Hang back, like a coward.”

  Resentment got the better of him. “Better than hiding the way you did,” said Umbo. “Turning invisible when there were things to decide. That was so brave of you.”

  “If my brother gets hurt because you—”

  “If I didn’t warn my friend Rigg,” said Umbo, “it was because he didn’t need a warning.”

  “Or because a warning would do no good,” said Olivenko.

  “You think Rigg is dead?” demanded Param.

  “I think Umbo told us to wait here,” said Olivenko.

  “And he’s boss of the expedition now?”

  “Not me,” said Umbo. “My future me.”

  “He must be from a long time in the future, if he’s smart enough to know what’s best for us to do.”

  Umbo stood aside and gestured for her to go on. “By all means, find Rigg and save him, or die trying. I saw the condition my future self was in. You didn’t. So go ahead.”

  “Stop it,” said Olivenko. “Neither of you knows anything, but future Umbo knew something, and that’s more than we know, so we’re going to do what he says.”

  “You can’t stop me,” said Param.

  “Think, Param,” said Olivenko. “You move far slower when you disappear. Whatever danger there is will be over by the time you get there.”

  “Get where?” asked Umbo. “I could hear their footsteps, and suddenly I couldn’t. Yet they didn’t turn back to look for me. I think they went into some kind of passage and closed the door behind them.”

  “It can’t hurt to look for that passage,” said Olivenko.

  “I can think of lots of ways it can hurt,” said Param, “but I’m doing it anyway.” She strode out into the room.

  “They were walking that way,” said Umbo, pointing.

  “When you last saw them,” said Param.

  “They were furtive. Walking near the wall. It’s a door in the wall.”

  It turned out to be a stairway leading down into the floor, hidden in the shadows behind a tall piece of machinery.

  “They’re looking for a starship, and they go down into the ground?” said Olivenko.

  “We should, too,” said Param.

  “We should wait,” said Umbo.

  “They’re in danger.”

  “And we’re safe,” said Umbo.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because if it wasn’t safe for us to stay here, my future self would have told me to run like a bunny.”

  “So something dangerous is happening down those stairs somewhere, and you’re going to sit here and do nothing?”

  “That’s what I told myself to do,” said Umbo, “and I’ve decided to trust myself. Do what you want.”

  What she wanted, after fuming and complaining a little longer, was apparently to pace back and forth but never go down the stairs.

  Rigg noticed when Umbo fell behind, but he assumed that he would catch up. Rigg felt the same sense of awe at the huge machines, but he knew that if both boys stopped to look at them, Vadesh would be alone with Loaf and that’s what Vadesh wanted. Which meant that was the thing Rigg couldn’t allow to happen.

  As usual, thought Rigg. Umbo feels free to be a child, easily distracted from the task at hand, while I keep my mind on what has to be done. But later, Umbo will resent me for taking responsibility.

  I don’t take responsibility, I’m just left with responsibility in my hands and no one to help me carry it.

  Which wasn’t fair. Loaf was there, wasn’t he? But Loaf was playing the risky game of taking Vadesh at his word, testing him.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a tunnel, and in the tunnel there was a kind of wagon, though it had nothing to pull it and no cargo. But there were benches at the front and back, so people were meant to ride. Vadesh stepped onto the wagon and Loaf followed him.

  “Umbo’s not here,” said Rigg.

  “You wait for him and take the next wagon,” said Vadesh.

  Rigg understood immediately that what Vadesh was really saying was good-bye. So he bounded onto the wagon. It was already moving forward when his feet hit the floor, accelerating so quickly that Rigg fell over and slid to the back of the wagon. Vadesh had somehow given the wagon the command to go while Rigg was still standing on the platform. If he had hesitated, if he had tried to call out to Umbo, anything but board the wagon at the instant that he did, Vadesh would have left him behind.

  It’s Loaf he wants, because Loaf has the jewels.

  Or maybe it’s the other way around—I have something Loaf doesn’t have. Something Vadesh fears. I have knowledge. I was trained by an expendable
, and Loaf was not.

  What did Father teach me that Vadesh should fear? Whatever it was, Rigg was not aware of it. Everything Rigg could remember had to do either with trapping animals and surviving in the wilderness, or the training in politics, economics, languages, and history that had enabled him to thrive in Aressa Sessamo. If nearly getting killed a dozen times could count as thriving.

  And science. Father had taught him biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. As much as Rigg could absorb. Useless things that suddenly became useful when he was getting tested by leading scholars to determine whether he could have access to the library.

  Useless things that suddenly became useful. But Father couldn’t have known that I would face such a board of examiners. Could he?

  One thing Father did know, though, was that one day I would face another expendable. If every wallfold contained an expendable like Vadesh and Father himself, and if the jewels somehow allowed their owner to control the Walls and take them down, Father must have taught him what he needed to know to deal with the threat of someone like Vadesh.

  But all of Rigg’s language and negotiation skills had to do with humans, and Vadesh wasn’t human. He didn’t want what humans wanted, he didn’t fear what humans feared.

  What did he fear? Surely the worst thing had already happened, when all the humans in his wallfold had died. What could Rigg do now that would make Vadesh want to be rid of him?

  It was a joke that expendables had to obey humans. Father didn’t obey anybody, and Vadesh only pretended to comply with human commands, when he bothered even to pretend. I have no power over him. No way to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do. Because he knows more than me, I never have enough information to give him a command that he can’t weasel his way out of. Even now, we have only his word that this wagon leads where he says he’s taking us, or that the jewels can even do what he says they do.

  And it bothered Rigg more and more that the two jewels that mattered—the ones that Vadesh had identified as controlling the Wall of Vadeshfold and the Wall of Ramfold—were clutched in Loaf’s fist instead of being in the bag with the rest of the jewels. It sounded like nonsense, the idea of the jewels being attuned to anyone who had grown up in the wallfold. That seemed wrong. But it was true that Vadesh must have a set of jewels of his own, and he couldn’t do anything with them or he would have done it, so apparently he did need a human to do whatever he was planning to do.

  Where was the lie? More to the point, where was the truth hidden within the lie?

  Meanwhile, the wagon began to move so fast that Rigg had no concept of their speed. He didn’t know how to measure it. He knew that he could normally walk a league in about an hour; he could run much faster, but in short bursts. This wagon was going so fast that even the fastest horse couldn’t keep up with it. So as the minutes wore on, the tunnel gradually taking them lower and lower, moving in a nearly straight line, Rigg couldn’t begin to guess how far they had traveled, how many leagues beyond the factory where they had boarded the thing.

  Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.

  Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn’t any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their faces faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.

  Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.

  Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.

  “It’s a field,” said Vadesh. “A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn’t affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen.”

  Oxygen. “So we can breathe.”

  “Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we’d suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well.”

  He didn’t teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.

  “The Wall is a field, too, you said,” Rigg answered.

  “Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away.”

  “That’s not how it felt to me,” said Rigg.

  “Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling,” said Vadesh. “But you’re right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find reasons for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action.”

  “But we went through it,” said Loaf.

  “You went through it before it was there,” said Vadesh. “Cheating.”

  “We went back to get Rigg,” said Loaf. “We brought him out.”

  “Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well.”

  “So there are different kinds of fields?” asked Rigg.

  “Many of them, my young pupil. I can’t believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn’t even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields.”

  “I don’t even wish I knew what you’re talking about,” said Loaf. “I just want this thing to stop moving.”

  “When we get there. Not much farther.”

  “You crashed into this world,” said Rigg.

  “There was no moon,” said Vadesh. “And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive.”

  “And you worked all this out?” asked Rigg.

  “Oh, not me,” said Vadesh. “That’s not what expendables are for. We don’t have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require.”

  “So who did?”

  “It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they’re made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The field collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode.”

  Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. “Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway,” said Rigg.

  “Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys,” said Vadesh. “The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why.”

  Vadesh didn’t seem to understand that increasing Rigg’s mistrust of his father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that expendables l
ie. As if he needed more proof of that.

  The wagon began to slow.

  “I can feel us slowing down,” said Rigg.

  “Thank Silbom’s right ear,” said Loaf.

  “There’s no reason to install and maintain an inertial bubble field on a mere wagon—it never moves fast enough to need it,” said Vadesh. “Really, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you’re required to do it. Not worth the time or energy.”

  The wagon came to a halt.

  So did the tunnel. It simply ended. The walls on every side were of smooth stone. There was no door, no sign, not even a loading dock.

  Vadesh bounded from the wagon. “Come along, lads,” he said.

  “Lads?” said Loaf.

  “He thinks he’s making friends with us,” said Rigg.

  “He’s a bit of a clown, isn’t he?”

  “He wants us to think so,” said Rigg. “Or else he wants us to think that he wants us to think so. I’m not sure how complicated it gets.”

  Vadesh—who could hear everything they were saying, Rigg never allowed himself to forget that—was standing on the ground near the end of the tunnel. “Come along, the door only opens for a few moments and I’d hate to have either of you get caught in it when it slides shut.”

  As they got off the wagon, it immediately whisked away back down the tunnel.

  “No return trip?” asked Loaf.

  “I can always call it back,” said Vadesh. “And there are many other ways to make the same journey.” Vadesh turned to face the wall. He said nothing, made no gesture—but he did face the wall. Why, Rigg wondered. Was he communicating some other way?

  Apparently so, because the end of the tunnel was suddenly gone. What had seemed to be smooth stone was now a continuation of the tunnel. The wagon could have kept going. Only now, beyond where the tunnel had ended, there was an obvious station, with loading dock, stairway, and other doors, not disguised at all.

  Here, though, the stairway went farther down rather than returning toward the surface. They had come down to get to the tunnel at the other end, and had traveled steadily downward since then, if Rigg’s directional sense was at all reliable in a place like this and at such a speed. And yet their destination was lower still.