Ruins

course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do, we do—”

“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”

“I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became real and—”

“And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”

“Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.

Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her weeks and he got it with the first lesson.

Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught him nothing.

“They’re all lying snakes,” she said.

The others looked at her. “The men with those facemasks on them?” asked Loaf.

“How could they lie?” asked Rigg. “They can’t even talk.”

Umbo had understood her, though. “She means the expendables. Vadesh and Ram. Your father, Rigg.”

“All I gave you was the first fifteen seconds of the very first lesson your so-called father gave me when he first started teaching me to control my timesense,” said Param. “Why didn’t he give you those fifteen seconds?”

Rigg’s excitement gave way to realization. “He taught me everything he wanted me to know.”

“Just like Vadesh,” said Param. “They think they’re gods, they think they have the right to just decide, regardless of what we want or need—they think they know best about everything.”

“Maybe they do,” said Olivenko.

Param whirled on him. “Yes, just like Mother, she thought she knew best—she thought she had the right to kill me, the way Vadesh betrayed the people of the city—”

“He did what?” asked Loaf.

“He burned a gap in the stockade,” said Rigg. “He let the facemask people drive the uninfected ones out of the city. He chose one side over the other and it was the parasites he chose. He calls them ‘natives’ but he claims they’re still human.”

“Does it matter?” asked Olivenko. “They’re all dead now.”

“He picked,” said Param angrily, “and he chose the parasites over the human race.”

“We can’t trust him,” said Rigg.

“But we already didn’t trust him,” said Olivenko.

“Now we know he’s our enemy,” said Param.

“At least now Rigg can go into the past without me,” said Umbo. But it seemed to Param that he wasn’t entirely happy about it.

“I could never have gotten us back to the present,” said Rigg. “I can only go into the past where there are paths I can hook onto. How would I get back into the future without you to anchor us?”

Param realized what was going on. Umbo was feeling unneeded and Rigg was trying to reassure him. But the more Rigg said, the angrier Umbo seemed to be getting. Or maybe he wasn’t angry. Maybe he was just hurt. Maybe he hated having Rigg reassure him.

“We’re all talented and we still need each other,” said Param, trying to stop them.

“Not all of us,” said Olivenko. “Loaf and I are completely talent-free, when it comes to time.”

“Except that I’ve lived through a lot more of it than any of you,” said Loaf.

“Is everybody going to be offended or embarrassed because they don’t have everybody else’s ability?” demanded Param. “None of us knows what we’re doing. We’re all still learning, we all still need each other, and we’re up against this expendable who apparently likes monsters more than humans.”

“And here he comes,” said Olivenko. His glance made them all look in the same direction. Vadesh was crossing the lawn toward them, just as he had done ten thousand years in the past, the week after the battle.

“Careful,” said Param softly. “He can hear every word we say, even at this distance.”

“Then he’ll understand my contempt for him,” said Loaf.

“Oh, I do!” called Vadesh. “But now you know why I was so happy to see you cross through the Wall! I’ve been waiting ten thousand years for you! And Ram refused to tell me anything about you when I asked him. Of course, until you were born he might not have known anything. It just occurred to me— maybe my inquiries were the reason he started looking for people with the power to manipulate time. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully paradoxical? I met you, I asked Ram about you, and because of my questions, he started manipulating the bloodlines until you were born! I think perhaps I created you! Isn’t that amusing?”

“Ha ha,” said Loaf. “And you know what’s really funny?”

By now Vadesh was almost there with them. “Please tell me,” he said.

“You still don’t get it that maybe the reason Ram wouldn’t tell you anything is that you managed to get all the humans in your wallfold killed.”

Vadesh reached out and knocked Loaf down. Flicked him, or so it seemed, with a casual brush of his hand, and Loaf staggered backward and fell. When he got up he clutched his left shoulder, where Vadesh had hit him, and he was panting from the pain.

“It’s not broken,” said Vadesh. “I don’t damage human beings. I don’t kill them. We expendables can’t kill people. Why do you think I only burned the grass between the armies?”

“But people died,” said Olivenko.

“People killed each other,” said Vadesh. “But I never did.”

“Just the way you didn’t damage me,” said Loaf savagely. “You were just telling me to shut up, is that it?”

“And yet you still didn’t get the message,” said Vadesh with a smile. “Why did the smart ones bother to bring you along?”

Loaf became even more furious, but he had felt the power of Vadesh’s blow—Param watched him restrain himself.

“Very good,” said Vadesh. “Slow, but he does learn.”

“You’ve made your point,” said Rigg. “You’re stronger than we are. You can knock us around. But we can get away from you whenever we want. So I suggest that you never hit any of us again, or we’re gone.”

Vadesh looked genuinely stricken—but what did any of his humanlike expressions mean? He was as false as Mother; yet, just as with Mother, Param couldn’t keep herself from responding to him as if he were a real person, with real feelings. When he looked so hurt at Rigg’s words, Param found herself wanting to reassure him.

“Just tell us what you want from us,” said Param. “Then we’ll decide if we want to give it to you.”

“And I’ll decide if I want to give you more water,” said Vadesh.

“And we’ll decide if we want to go back to a time before you and your kind ever got to this world, cross back through the Wall, and never let you anywhere near us again,” said Rigg.

Vadesh’s smile never wavered. “Stalemate,” he said. “Come back into the city and you can have all the safe water you want. Then I’ll tell you what I need from you, and you can decide what you want to do about it. What could be more fair than that?”

“Coming from a genocidal traitor,” said Param, “I think that’s a generous offer.”