Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“Oh, no,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The short legs came later, when we were tailoring ourselves to look like yahoos.”

“We made ourselves tall and slender at first,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We metabolized food very efficiently, so we required less of it per person.”

“And we rebuilt ourselves to concentrate on the brain,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Each increase in brain size required more blood for the brain, less for the rest of the body. So the leaner we were, the better. Any organs we could eliminate or shrink saved blood.”

“Larger brains?” asked Param. Their heads were disproportionately large for their small bodies, but not larger than normal adults’ heads.

“The human brain folds quite elaborately, increasing the surface area,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Ours fold more. Also, our skulls are much thinner. Less bone here, more brain inside. It makes us fragile, but we don’t face the same sorts of enemies that our ancestors had to deal with. And when we’re doing something risky, we wear helmets.”

“Throwing dung at Loaf is risky,” said Umbo.

“But thrown dung is not going to break skulls,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “As weapons go, it’s more annoying than damaging.”

The Odinfolders also tried, in the early days, to bring out what they called “savant” abilities—perfect visual and auditory memory, the ability to count and solve equations with astonishing rapidity, vast expansion of available vocabulary. “We never quite succeeded. It seems that for true savant capability, you have to pay the savant price—a loss of social function, the inability to do the fuzzy thinking that leads to creativity. Once we realized that the price was too high, we worked to strike a balance. Creativity and better memory, better ability to notice things, better abstract and spatial reasoning.”

They did so well at shaping their own brains that any one of them might be trained as thoroughly in three or five or ten disciplines as ordinary humans were in one or two.

By five hundred years into life on Garden, they had built machines that could intercept and decode all the messages between expendables and starships, so that no secrets could be kept from them. By a thousand years, they were able to alter the programs that operated the Walls, so that the fields not only triggered powerful emotions in the human mind, but also wakened the latent language abilities present in all humans.

“It’s the grammar of grammars, the key to all vocabulary,” explained Mouse-Breeder. “It’s as if we sing you to sleep in all languages, when you pass through the Wall.”

“But nobody passes through it,” said Param. “Except us.”

“‘Through the Wall’ means in at one place and out at another,” said Mouse-Breeder. “You were the first to transverse the Wall, but many thousands have gone in and out; some have ventured well inside it, and for longer than you might have thought possible.”

“But what’s the point?” asked Param. “If you can never leave your wallfold, then what does it matter whether you learn languages you’ll never speak.”

“You’re not listening well enough, Param,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “These concepts are well within your reach.”

Param thought a moment more and then blushed. “You don’t give us languages. You changed the Wall so that it gives us Language.”

“Yes!” cried Swims-in-the-Air happily.

“I have no idea what that means,” said Loaf.

“The deep language of the human mind,” said Rigg. “The instinctive grammar of meaning that’s born into every human mind, on which we build our particular languages. Father told me that there was such a thing, but no one in the world had ever found the key to it.”

“In our world, we did,” said Mouse-Breeder. “Barely a thousand years into our history, we found it, and then embedded the key to it in the Walls, so that it was potentially available to any people who could bear the torment of the Wall long enough for it to take root.”

“And now let’s cross the river,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “We can’t have bridges, you know, since we’re supposed to be yahoos, so we arranged stones to allow passage. Your feet get a bit wet, but it’s not that unpleasant, and you’ll dry off quickly enough in the grass on the other side.”

She and Mouse-Breeder led the way, taking off their shoes and walking easily across on stones just under or just breaking the surface. Rigg followed next, being used to such traverses from his life in the wild, and Umbo and Loaf went next, almost as easily. Only Olivenko bothered to stay behind to help Param across, for Param had never had to learn the art of delicate balance, and she was more afraid of falling and injuring herself than the others were. With Olivenko’s hand gripping hers, however, she was at no risk of falling, and she could cross in no more than twice the time it took the others.

Once across the ford, the walls began to rise on either side, and it was plain that the grass they walked on overlay smooth and level roads.

Also, other Odinfolders began to emerge from the large trees near the river. They waved, they smiled, but none of them made a move to join them; none tried to speak. Apparently Mouse and Swim had been delegated to be the only Odinfolders that their party would be allowed to meet. Param wondered why.

Meanwhile, as they ascended into the ruined city, the Odinfolders continued their story.

The Odinfold colonists had maximized their population over the years, growing food efficiently, living in splendid high towers so they used up the least possible surface area with mere habitation. As a result, they had enormous numbers of extremely brilliant people working on every scientific and technological problem they could think of—along with art, literature, history, and philosophy.

But in the midst of this vast civilizational florescence, something astonishing happened: A message reached them from their own future.

It consisted of a stack of thin sheets of noncorroding metal, inscribed with fine writing, laying out the key events of the history of the next five thousand years.

This Book of the Future appeared out of nowhere, in the midst of a meeting of scientists who were working on the problem of movement through time. One speaker was leaving the lectern, another rising from his seat at the table to take his place. And there, where the first one had been sitting before, the Future Book appeared, shiny, new.

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