Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

Umbo wanted to answer Param: You’re not part of us and never have been. But he knew that Loaf’s silence was the wiser course, and added nothing to it. He knew he shouldn’t have said as much as he already had.

“I think we need to tell them everything,” said Olivenko. “Or we’re as deceptive as the mice.”

“They’re actually good at deception,” said Param.

“We resent how little we can trust others,” said Olivenko, “so let’s be the kind of people that others can believe. They may not approve of what we do, but they can believe what we say.”

“If we tell the Larfolders about the mice, then we’re betraying their trust,” said Param.

“The mice already don’t trust us,” said Loaf, “and we never promised them we wouldn’t tell.”

Umbo realized that there was no point in arguing any further. When it involved a secret, one person’s decision to tell would always defeat any number of other people’s decision not to.

The real problem was figuring out what the mice intended to do. Umbo didn’t really know what the mice could do, without full-sized humans creating the real technology. He had never figured out the problem of how their tiny hands could do any serious work. They could never work with hot metals, for instance—a man with a heavy glove and apron could get close enough to a fire for him to lift iron out of it with tongs. But a short-armed mouse trying to lift a teeny-tiny bit of molten metal with teeny-tiny tongs would still have to stand so close to the fire that its entire body would be instantly cooked.

So how could they make anything comparable to what humans made? What could their technology be in Larfold, where Odinfolders hadn’t already created an infrastructure of tools and machinery?

The mice manipulated genes—they admitted to having done that, when they claimed to have created Knosso and Umbo. Well, actually, it was the Odinfolders who had claimed those feats, but then it became clear that really accurate displacement was done only by the mice.

So the Odinfolders had worked metal and built mighty cities; the mice worked with time and with genes, and made new species.

Then Umbo reached the only sensible conclusion. The mice must use time-and-space displacement for everything that humans used tools for. They never had to stand close to a fire; they could shift masses far too heavy for them to move by hand.

So if the mice made it all the way to Earth undetected, what if their time displacement didn’t work? There was no reason to believe that any of this planet-rooted time-shifting could function away from Garden. If it didn’t, what was their fallback plan? To reproduce at an insane rate, eat all the food on Earth, and starve the human race to death? Not likely—mice were too easy to kill.

Perhaps they could genetically manipulate the humans of Earth. But in what way? Any genetic change they made would take many long human generations to take effect. It couldn’t stop the destruction of Garden a year after the Visitors left.

And now that he was here in Larfold, Umbo couldn’t go to the library in Odinfold and try to learn more about what the mice could do. He couldn’t even ask Mouse-Breeder, which he’d like to do, even though he knew Mouse-Breeder would probably lie to him. Or the mice were lying to Mouse-Breeder so any answer he gave would be wrong.

The mice could move items from one place to another, and from one time to another. If that power continued to work on Earth, they would have a wide range of possibilities. They had killed Param by inserting a slab of metal into her body. But could they have simply removed a vital organ from her?

What were the rules governing their powers? How many mice did it take to handle a single displacement? Did the items they shifted in time and space have to be already detached or detachable from all other items? Or could they move a section of a pillar out of place and collapse a roof? And how large an object could they move? A building? A starship?

Could they move the Visitors’ starship into space very near the Sun and let it roast?

No, that couldn’t be it—if the Visitors did not return to Earth, it would only signal the humans of Earth that Garden posed some kind of threat.

All Umbo’s questions went around and around in his head.

Until, in the middle of the night, he got the answer.

He woke up Param.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “I was asleep!”

“I know,” said Umbo. “But how can you sleep, when I have the answer?”

“What answer?”

“The answer to the problem that we don’t know enough to decide what to do about anything. We don’t even know enough to know what questions to ask.”

“For this you woke me?” asked Param. “Go away.”

“I woke you because you’re the solution.”

“You have no problems, I assure you, to which I am a possible solution.”

“We need to go into the future and meet the Visitors and see what happens with them and then come back here and figure out what to do about them.”