Visitors (Pathfinder 3)
“So all the wallfolds are habitable.”
“When I plotted out where each starship should make landfall, I made sure that every one of them included plenty of well-watered arable land.”
“I get it. Each wallfold is huge and there’s a lot of variation within them.”
“More than you know. And also less. But no, I’ll let you find out.”
Rigg shook his head. “If you’re already dropping hints . . .”
“Do you have any idea how long it’s been, with no other human to talk to?”
“You have the expendables. I know from experience that they can be lively conversationalists.”
“Walking, talking databanks,” said Ram Odin. “Not
people.”
“So in Yinfold, what’s our reason for wandering?”
“They have a lot of traveling healers and soothsayers. People who tell fortunes and then move on before anyone can tell whether their prophecies come true.”
“You’re not going to have me time-shift and come back with true answers, are you?”
“It wouldn’t even work, because foreknowledge would change their behavior so it wouldn’t come true after all, likely as not,” said Ram Odin. “But I’m thinking we make up a whole new category. Something that will actually work, but something they’ve never seen before.”
Even though Yinfold was settled everywhere, there was no trouble finding an uninhabited place to set down the flyer, even quite near to what passed for a city there. Rigg thought of Aressa Sessamo, built up out of a swamp in a river delta. Nearly empty watery land all around it, and yet what land there was, incredibly fertile with the silt of millennia of river floods. Water to carry boats and therefore cargos for trade. A huge natural moat for defense. But it still hadn’t kept out the horse warriors of the Sessamoto.
“This is good land,” said Rigg. “Why is it empty?”
“Good land, bad land,” said Ram Odin. “People gather where other people are, so they can mate readily. That leaves lots of empty places where people can go when they can’t stand the place they’re in, or something goes wrong and they have to leave. A place is settled for five thousand years, and then for the next five thousand years, nobody goes near the place, and yet it’s the same place.”
“There used to be a lot of settlement above Upsheer,” said Rigg. “That’s why they kept building bridges over the falls. But nobody lives there now.”
“They’ll go there again,” said Ram Odin. “Ship, where we’ve just parked the flyer—has this ever been settled land?”
“Three different villages,” said the computer voice in the flyer. “And farmland for twenty percent of the time. Usually, though, it’s lightly wooded, sharply cut terrain, because of the ravines.”
“See how much you’ve already learned about Yinfold?” said Ram Odin.
The first morning, Ram Odin put on a nondescript robe. “I have to go alone and get clothing for you.”
“Wearing that?”
“Trousers never came into fashion here. This robe is really from Untungfold, so it’ll look exotic here. But mostly it looks like money, and that’s the impression I need to give here in town while I buy clothes for you.”
“And then I’ll go with you into town?”
“Town? Why would you go into town? No, I’m getting us clothes to travel through the hamlets eight hundred kilometers from here.”
“Fashions from here will look right that far away?”
“We’re strangers,” said Ram Odin. “Travelers. We have to be dressed exotically. But it has to be clothing that won’t look too strange to any Yinfolder. Please trust me. I’ve made visits like this before. A lot more often when I was younger and still thought . . .”
“Still thought the differences between places would matter,” Rigg said, completing the sentence for him.
“Still thought,” Ram Odin replied sternly, “that I would learn something useful from seeing for myself. The differences do matter. The differences are the best and most important thing about Garden.”
“Go get me my clothes,” said Rigg.