Ruins

“It isn’t now,” said Ram Odin.

“I remember pushing in the knife,” said Rigg, “and how it felt to triumph over you, and stop you from slaughtering the world.”

“I made this world!” said Ram Odin. “How could you imagine I would ever kill it?”

“You killed a world before,” said Rigg.

“But that was the plan I came with. Those were my orders. The machines would have done it even if I’d been in stasis,” said Ram Odin.

It was a thought that would never have occurred to Rigg. “The program was originally to wipe out the life of Garden?”

“We didn’t even know if there would be life, when the voyage set out,” said Ram. “But we were desperate to make a world where we could establish the human race. If this were truly a world within the zone of life, then this ship—these ships now, but I started out with only one—would have to reshape everything as quickly as I could, so other ships could follow after me.”

“And the Destroyers—what are they?”

“I don’t know. The world had been remade. The proteins growing here are mostly edible by humans, and the world is empty enough to make a place for them. I don’t want them here; our civilizations have more history than Earth, and so my plan was to persuade them not to come at all. I don’t know why they burn it all. I only know that I haven’t yet figured out a way to prevent its happening.”

“There are two of us forever,” said the early Rigg, the one who hadn’t killed.

“I’m the one who spawned you,” said Rigg, “by preventing you from killing Ram. So I get to keep the name. You pick another.”

“No, you pick one.”

“I called it first,” said Rigg, drawing upon the memory of childhood games and childhood quarrels.

The other Rigg smiled. “I know,” he said. “I’ll call myself Kyokay. Because however you might brag about your murderings, Ram Odin wasn’t the first to die under my hand.”

“I didn’t kill Kyokay,” said Rigg.

“I failed to save him. But now I have a facemask. Now I think I can.”

“And undo everything that’s happened up to now?” asked Rigg.

“No, you fool. Did you ever realize quite how stupid you are?”

“The more you talk, the clearer it becomes,” said Rigg.

“I’ll save him after the fact. I’ll take him into the future. I’ll restore him to his brother now. But no, I won’t take his name—he’ll be alive, he’ll be using it. I’ll take the surname Noxon, after Nox, the woman I once thought was my mother, the woman Father entrusted with the jewels.”

“Call yourself what you want, and do whatever you think you must,” said Rigg. “If we prevented every death, the world would soon fill up, and what would we have accomplished? Kyokay would have got himself killed eventually the way he killed himself by accident that day. It’s not our responsibility.”

“It’s all my responsibility,” said Rigg Noxon. “And you know that as well as anyone.”

“What have I created here?” said Ram Odin, looking back and forth between them.

“You’ve created nothing,” said Rigg. “We are who we are, and you didn’t make us, even if we have some seed of you and at some point along the way you intervened.”

“Whatever we are,” said Rigg Noxon, “we’re what we made ourselves, by our own choices, by what we did with the opportunities that came along. Just like you. We’re not machines.”

“But I am,” said Vadesh, who was standing in the door. He looked at each of them in turn, and laughed. “Two for the price of one. You really need to be more careful what you do, Rigg A and Rigg B. Or you’ll run out of souls to populate these bodies that you accidentally make.”

“Shut up, Vadesh,” said Ram Odin.

Vadesh fell silent.

The machines obey Ram Odin. But they also obey me, thought Rigg.

And then, because both Riggs were, in fact, Rigg, they proved that in this case, at least, they still thought alike, for both of them drew out the bag of jewels. Two complete sets now. And Rigg Noxon still had the knife—the one that Rigg had given back to Umbo on the beach in Larfold.

“See?” said Vadesh. “See how you clutter up the world?”