Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

That was when Rigg realized that if he had the enhancements to his senses that Loaf had received, he might be able to use his power far more effectively. Wouldn’t the facemask also enhance his ability to see paths, the way it had enhanced Loaf’s sight and hearing and smell, his quickness, his memory, his mental acuity?

There in Vadesh’s revival chamber, Rigg had all the answers in front of him if he had only known the right questions. This was a room that was still in use. Not for the facemask—Vadesh didn’t have to bring him there to put the facemask on someone, he could have done that in any room in the starship.

So why did Vadesh choose that room? Because then Rigg would know what it was. What it was for. That it existed.

Vadesh was trying to tell him the truth even though he had been forbidden to tell it. Someone is still being kept in stasis. Someone who gets revived from time to time, then goes back to sleep. Someone who has slept his way through eleven thousand years of human history on Garden, only waking up for a few days here and there to give orders, to make tweaks in human history.

Ram Odin. Only he was not in Ramfold, where he had founded a colony and left his seed behind. He was in Vadeshfold, where Vadesh had tried to create a symbiosis of humans and native organisms.

“We all lie to Vadesh”—that was their code, their desperate attempt to signal Rigg, against all of Ram Odin’s orders, that there was something in Vadesh’s starship that they all were trying to resist as best they could.

This was the conclusion Rigg had reached when he heard the story of the mantles of the Larfolders, the tale of how they went under the sea. The contradictions had become too great, the web of lies too complicated. So he thought and thought until he made the leap that brought him to this conclusion: Ram Odin is alive, and Ram Odin is manipulating everything.

Then he made one more leap: It is not the Visitors who trigger the destruction of Garden. It is Ram Odin.

In the Future Books, the dying Odinfolders spoke of Destroyers from Earth, but did they know this was true, or had they been told this by the ships’ computers, by the expendables? Here was the key point: the Destroyers worked through the orbiters—the satellites from the original nineteen starships that circled Garden in stationary orbits.

The satellites obeyed their programming by threatening to destroy any wallfold that developed dangerous weapons. But those dangerous weapons were actually thwarted by the expendables, who forestalled any experimentation along those lines. What weapons were considered too dangerous to allow?

Any weapons that could threaten the starships’ control of this planet.

There were terrible slaughters in the wallfolds. The humans of Vadeshfold had made themselves extinct. There was apparently some kind of terrible plague that affected all the wallfolds early on. Many horrible wars and massacres and famines and genocides had happened, but it never triggered any reaction from the orbiters.

But then the Visitors come and a year later the Destroyers activate the orbiters to destroy every single wallfold.

Nine times the Odinfolders had tried various ways to placate these vengeful, terrible gods, remaking themselves, unbuilding their society, leaving everything, even their own bodies, in ruins; devolving all their powers and knowledge upon sentient mice; even contemplating the slaughter of the human race on Earth in order to prevent the destruction of Garden.

What if it wasn’t the humans from Earth who did this?

What if it was Ram Odin?

The Visitors came. They got complete access to all the ships’ logs. Then they went away.

What if they studied those logs and realized what

had happened. The whole system was under the control of the man whose first act upon discovering the accidental nineteen-copy, eleven-thousand-year time-shift event was to order the murder of all other copies of himself, and then the destruction of almost all life on Garden to make room for his colonies. The man who used Garden as a means of creating people with his own strange time-shifting powers, only enhanced, clarified.

Now this same Ram Odin saw the people of Earth returning. Maybe they even got near enough to send an order to the ships’ computers, taking command away from Ram Odin.

Only Ram Odin had already programmed in an automatic response to this move. The result of any order that took command away from Ram Odin was the immediate destruction of all life on Garden.

If Ram could not rule, he would destroy.

The humans from Earth had tried to save Garden from its secret god, and the god had wrecked all rather than let his own power be curtailed.

Now it all made sense. No matter how many times the Odinfolders tried to make a better impression on the Visitors, nothing would ever work because the Visitors had always gotten a good impression and had never turned against the people of Garden.

All the lies were part of Ram Odin’s mad or evil plan to keep control over Garden while creating a race of time-shifters who were subservient to him without ever knowing it was him whom they served.

Speculation—all guesswork. Rigg knew this.

He also knew that with mice listening in on everything said among Rigg’s little company of five, and no doubt relaying the information to expendables or computers that passed it along to Odin, he couldn’t discuss his conclusions with anybody.

But there was a way that he could figure it all out. He could go to the starship where Ram Odin lived—in Vadeshfold. He could look for the path of Ram Odin. He could see how often he had been revived.

More to the point, Rigg could enhance himself the way Loaf was enhanced. It was possible that Ram Odin would forbid it—he might already have forbidden it, which would explain why Loaf got the mask, and not Rigg. It was also possible that Rigg would not have the strength of will that had allowed Loaf to overmaster the powerful forces that the facemask used to try to control its symbiote.

Either way, the world would not be any worse off than it was before. Rigg blocked from access to a facemask, or driven mad by a facemask, or even dead—how would that change the world for the worse?