Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

d Loaf, “we wouldn’t ever find out the things we learned here. We’ll grab Param just before the mice kill her, and then we all disappear. The Odinfolders will see that the mice tried to obey, but you two were able to prevent it. They won’t realize the mice are no longer obedient to them.”

“Are they obedient to you?” asked Olivenko.

“They aren’t obedient to anybody,” said Loaf. “They’re people. They’re a whole civilization that has existed for hundreds of generations, building on the ruins of another, older one. They aren’t going to obey an old soldier like me who can’t even shift time.”

“They aren’t obeying you now?” asked Rigg.

“They’re telling me the truth, and doing what they think they should,” said Loaf. “I told them that it was all right to kill Param, because we could go back and save her. Was I wrong?”

“No,” said Rigg doubtfully.

“We hope you weren’t wrong,” said Umbo. “Because I can see some problems with saving Param. At least saving her without showing the Odinfolders that the mice are on our side. Or . . . not on their side, anyway.”

“We can work it out as we fly back,” said Loaf. “We’ll want to hold on to the flyer and bring it back in time with us. Save us the effort of walking to some remote spot along the Wall so we can pass through it into another wallfold.”

“So right now,” said Umbo, “Param is dead.”

“It’s all right, Umbo,” said Loaf. “You two get to save her—you push Rigg back into the time before she dies, and when he has her, you snatch them back.”

“Besides,” said Rigg, “you’re twice as dead yourself.”

CHAPTER 16

Temporary Death

For Param, the months in the Odinfolder library were the happiest time of her life. Her childhood had been spent as the target of symbolic rejection of the Sessamid monarchy. Whatever was done to her, was done to the royal family, so the People’s government never tired of “accidentally” allowing her to be humiliated. Only the discovery of her ability to vanish from their sight, to let the world pass rapidly by while she observed in perfect silence, had protected her.

During her childhood, her education had been limited. It consisted of whatever her mother told her, the Gardener’s few lessons in controlling her time-slicing, and whatever she learned from the occasional host who took some interest in her. She learned to read and write, and enjoyed reading, but she had no idea what to read. Any book she knew enough to ask for was obtained for her, but without books to browse, she could make no discoveries.

In her solitude she had thought much about what little she had read, but now, with the histories of all the wallfolds opened up before her, she could replace her empty childhood with the memories of kingdoms and republics, of nations nomadic or sedentary, marauding or peaceful.

Let Rigg and Umbo, Loaf and Olivenko study whatever they wanted—the human race on Earth, the functioning of starships, military techniques and technology, the deep science of the Odinfolders—none of it interested Param. She was discovering the world of her birth, the world that she had only seen as it came to visit within the walls of her dwellingplaces, then raced past her whenever she felt the need to hide in the invisibility of her time-slicing. She was finding out who she would have been, if she had been free; or, if not free, then shaped within her destiny as the royal child.

Accustomed as she was to contemplation, meditation, reflection, and the fantasies of a lonely child, Param saw herself in every history, and found lessons for herself as well. In this nation, this wallfold, this event, here is what she would be, that is what she would do. She would not have committed her people to fruitless attempts to conquer the mountain fastness of Gorogo; she would have sheltered the trading people of Inkik instead of persecuting them and driving them out; she would have married for love where another ruler married for reasons of state, and vice versa.

I would have been a great queen, she concluded on many days.

I would have been happiest as a commoner, for powerful people are more miserable and lonely than simple ones, she concluded on other days.

But every day saw her horizons widening, her vicarious memory deepening. There were worlds now blossoming inside her imagination. The others might think her solitary and withdrawn, but for Param, compared to her life before, she was gregarious and enthusiastic. She was broadening, reaching out, filled with curiosity and wonder.

She knew that the others usually talked around her and seemed surprised whenever she spoke; often, too, she could see that they thought that what she spoke of was not to the point of their conversation. But what of that? Their conversations were rarely on a point she cared about, and when their words made her think of something she did care about, she said it, boldly speaking up at the moment of her thought, in a way she never had before.

Umbo thought that he loved her? He hardly listened to her, since she had nothing to say of spaceships and he cared nothing about the intense spiritual lives of the people of Adamfold, or the strange chaos of the child-ruled forest dwellers of Mamom, who allowed certain children to choose the site of their next village by seeing where they wandered, and what they were curious about.

And Olivenko, who once had seemed so wise to her, was surprisingly ignorant of history and uninterested in learning more about it. Instead he was all physics and metaphysics, wondering about how time travel worked and how it was related to gravity. Why should they care? It was not as if Param or her fellow émigrés from Ramfold could change how the world worked; they obeyed the laws of physics, whatever they were, and had whatever talents they had. Did Olivenko think that by studying these things, he would acquire some talent for time travel that he never had before? Or was he hoping to discover a machine like the Odinfolders’ time-sender? What good is it to study things too big to move?

Loaf, on the other hand, seemed to understand the world much as Param did. He listened to her accounts of strange customs and histories as if he were interested in what she was saying, and not just in the fact that the only woman in their group was saying them. He might bend everything to his own understanding, but Param didn’t mind that: It only mattered that he received what she offered to them all from her research, and treated it as having value.

And then there was her brother, Rigg, so desperate to be a good man that he would never be a truly effective leader. Real leadership required authority and ruthlessness, she well understood. That’s why she didn’t want it. But Rigg did want to lead, yet thought he could do it by persuasion, by meekly taking suggestions, by genuinely loving the members of their little band.

Didn’t he know that gentleness didn’t just seem weak, it was weak? Yet she found it endearing that he tried so earnestly, and so she treated him with a kind of respect that he didn’t really deserve, since only strength mattered, in the end. She saw in Rigg the person she might have been, if she, too, had wandered in the wild with the Gardener, the Golden Man. With only wild animals and a manlike machine for company, what could Rigg ever understand about the ravening appetites of human beings? We are the wildest animals, Rigg, she wanted to say. And then he would say, Who was talking about animals?

We are all talking about animals. More to the point, we are talking as animals. We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.

The only thing that keeps me from being a truly extraordinary ruler, as I was born to be, is that I have no access to the people whom it would have been my right to rule, and no idea what to do with them if I ever won my place.

My place? There is no such place. I’m a queen-in-training when I ought to be studying horticulture and growing flowers, beautiful and useless.