Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“People just stopped wanting children?” asked Loaf.

Param thought it was odd for him to sound so incredulous, considering that he and his wife Leaky had no children, or none that she had heard of.

“It’s not about wanting,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The body still has its primate roots. The body wants to breed. But we owed a duty to the whole world of Garden.”

“You see, the first time the humans came, they visited only Odinfold, because only our civilization was visible from space.”

“From space,” said Umbo, “why would the high towers make a difference?”

“Not the towers,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “The light. Every street had lamps on it. Every building had lights in the windows. There were lights everywhere at night, lights that could be seen from a million kilometers away. Our wallfold was the only patch of light on the whole planet, so they came to us. They thought we kept the rest of Garden as a nature preserve; they thought the name of the world confirmed that idea.”

“But then they learned what this world really was,” said Mouse-Breeder.

“And what is it?” asked Rigg, a little defiant-sounding. “Really?”

“Give just the tiniest thought to the question,” said Mouse-Breeder. “I know you know the answer.”

“A place where the human race could develop

in nineteen completely different ways,” said Param.

“And in Ramfold, we turned out to be time shapers,” said Umbo.

“The three of you are,” said Olivenko.

“But most people in Ramfold can’t do anything with time,” Umbo added.

“You know that’s not true,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And it isn’t really time per se that you manipulate. You create fields with your minds, fields in which time can be altered because of the way you connect yourselves to the planet’s past.”

“What do you do?” asked Umbo.

“They move objects in time and space,” said Param. “They already told us.”

“No, Param, we didn’t tell you that that’s what we do,” said Mouse-Breeder. “It’s merely one manifestation of what we do. You see, we were the only wallfold where the learning of the Earth we came from wasn’t sealed to us. We could study it all. We also knew that the hope of Ram Odin, when he commanded the expendables and the ships to divide the world into folds, was that the human species would find nineteen different ways to evolve and change, either physically or culturally.”

“All of human history on Earth was scarcely twelve thousand years,” said Swims-in-the-Air, “and that’s with a most generous interpretation of the word ‘history.’ That’s how long it had been since the last ice age, as they called them—times when the Earth’s climate grew colder and much of the ocean’s water was locked up in ice caps.”

“Real history—written records and all that—was about five thousand years,” said Mouse-Breeder. “And the biggest leaps in science and technology had taken place in only the last thousand years or so, with the most dramatic transformations in the last two centuries.”

“The expendables were not even regarded as particularly remarkable when Ram Odin’s colony ship set out,” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Indestructible materials, highly advanced language modules, things like that were only fifty years old. But the humans of Earth thought of fifty years as a long time, because they were used to such a fast rate of progress.”

“It hadn’t been two hundred years since humans first went into space, you see,” said Mouse-Breeder. “So the colonists in Odinfold expected to be able to continue making progress at the same pace, though they recognized that with a much smaller population and the need to deal with subsistence issues, there would be a slowdown for a few generations.”

“Oh, we had babies then!” said Swims-in-the-Air. “Babies and babies and babies, because we needed our population to reach a point where we could specialize, where the smartest of us could live the life of the mind.”

“But let’s go down to the river and cross into the city,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The vista from here is only interesting for a while, and then you want to go inside to get a sense of scale, don’t you think?”

They thought so, too, so they walked together down the slope toward the river, while the Odinfolders continued their story.

It wasn’t enough to have lots of babies, they explained. Wasn’t one of the goals of Garden to promote the isolated evolution of new human species? And since Odinfold retained its memory of the science of genetics, they could keep conscious control of the human species.

“Not just selective breeding,” said Mouse-Breeder. “The way I do with mice, where I select for traits I want and allow only those mice that have such traits to reproduce. No, we went into the genes themselves, the seeds within the human body that decide what each new generation will look like.”

They found long-lost traits that they wanted to restore, rare ones they wanted to make common, and then nearly everybody gave birth only to babies that had been enhanced in some way. Improving the species directly.

“What traits?” asked Rigg.

“Short legs,” said Umbo.