Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

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.