Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“We’re wild,” said Rigg. “We humans. We shape nature, but our shapes are also natural. We shouldn’t say that because humans shaped a place, it’s therefore unnatural.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t say it,” said Olivenko, “but I think that if you look at the meanings of the words, whatever humans do is unnatural.”

“But that’s the mistake, for us to think that humans aren’t also a part of nature.”

Olivenko looked out of the flyer at the ground they were passing over, the high thick cushion of leaves only beginning to turn color in preparation for winter. “Not a particularly prominent part of it here,” he said.

“No. We’ve never touched this place.” Then he laughed with a little bitterness. “Except, of course, when the starships crashed so hard they blew rocks into the sky to make the Ring, and raised great circling cliffs like Upsheer, and killed almost all the natural life of Garden, and replaced it with the plants and animals of Earth. Except for that, which means that all of Garden is so vastly shaped by human hands that nothing we’re seeing here is ‘natural.’”

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” said Olivenko. “Except to say that when humans leave it alone, nature comes back and closes the gaps the way the sea fills in behind each passing fish. What we’re seeing down there is natural now, even if it was once reshaped by human action.”

“But now it’ll be reshaped by mice,” said Rigg.

“Humans masquerading as mice,” said Olivenko. “But I don’t think they’ll be cutting down the trees.”

“If they wanted to cut them down,” said Rigg, “they’d find a way. That’s what humans do.”

“And if they wanted to build them up?”

“They’d plant them like an orchard.”

“Or slaughter each other as they did in Vadeshfold,” said Olivenko, “and let the trees come back and plant themselves.”

“I really hate philosophy,” murmured Loaf. “You talk and talk, and in the end, you don’t know any more than you did.”

“Maybe less,” said Rigg, “because I thought I had an idea, and now Olivenko makes me wonder whether I did or not.”

“One idea is as worthless as another,” said Loaf. “Until you actually do something about it, and then it’s the action, not the word, that matters.”

“Who’s philosophizing now?” asked Olivenko. “We take action because of the words we believe in, the stories that we think are true, or intend to make true.”

“I don’t think so,” said Loaf. “I think we do what we do because we desire it. And then we make up stories about why the thing we did was right, and the thing that other people did was wrong.”

“Or both,” said Rigg. “It works both ways, all the time. We act because of our stories; we make up stories to explain or excuse the way we acted.”

But the trees don’t do that, or the squirrels, thought Rigg. They just do what they do. And they can’t change what they do, because they don’t have any of this philosophy.

“Our destination is the shore where humans are most often seen,” said the flyer. “Far in the north.”

“When we get closer,” said Rigg, “skim the coast. I’ll tell you then where to set this flyer down.”

“What will you look for, to decide?” asked Olivenko.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wherever the paths are thickest and most recent, so we have the best chance of meeting people.”

“Of getting killed in our sleep on the first night there,” said Olivenko.

“We didn’t come here to avoid the people,” said Rigg.

“Can’t save ’em if we can’t see ’em,” said Loaf.

Probably can’t save them even if we do see them. “If it turns out I picked a bad spot, we can go back and pick another,” said Rigg.

“But you can’t appear to us here in this flyer,” said Olivenko. “Right? Unless you took the flyer up to exactly the same path and matched the flight perfectly, because the path remains behind us in the air.”

Rigg turned and saw their paths stretch back along the route they had just flown. “That’s right.”

“I wonder how far you have to go upward,” said Olivenko, “until our paths stop being part of the sky of Garden, and remain inside a ship.”