Ruins

“Since you’re so much stronger than a human now, Loaf,” said Umbo, “perhaps you’d care to pull up the tree so we can get at the yahoos inside it.”

“Trees are sacred,” said Loaf. “I never disturb them if I can help it.”

“They’re also very heavy,” Umbo pointed out.

“They’re also deeply attached to the ground,” said Rigg. “Let’s leave the trees where they are, and deal with the people. I’ve been thinking through as many languages as I can get into my head, saying, ‘Greetings, yahoo, I’m from Ramfold.’ If I can come up with a language where ‘yahoo’ feels like a native word—”

“Don’t bother,” said a voice from the tree. He spoke a language Umbo had never heard spoken, but thanks to the Wall, he understood it at once. “This is the language you want. Yahootalk is mostly grunts and clicks and farts and belches.”

“So . . . I’ve been speaking it my whole life,” said Umbo.

Param chuckled, but Umbo couldn’t be sure if she was appreciating his humor, or taking his irony at face value.

“Who are you?” asked Loaf, “and why are you throwing doo-doo at us?”

“Are you really from Ramfold?” asked the timorous voice.

“You already know who we are,” said Rigg. “Stop pretending and come down here and talk to us.”

A long moment of silence.

“Would you mind terribly if we put on clothes before coming down out of the tree?”

“We’d prefer it,” said Loaf. “Take all the time you need. Empty your bowels and wash your hands. Put yourselves out.”

“How did you decide they were pretending?” asked Umbo.

“Humans are never going to lose language. There’s no reason for it,” said Rigg. “Whether they’re working hard or not, they’ll talk because that’s what humans do. So this nonsense of grunting is obviously false.”

“Obvious to you,” said Umbo.

“It’s obvious to you, too,” said Rigg, “or you’d be arguing with me.”

Everybody thinks they know everybody’s inner life, thought Umbo. But we’ve only known Loaf since Rigg and I stopped by their inn on the way to Aressa Sessamo. None of us really knows anything at all about each other’s motives and what’s going on in our unconscious minds. Nobody ever does.

Two fully clothed, diminutive people leapt lightly down from the tree. They bowed deeply. “Sorry for using you as a trial run for our social experiment,” said the woman, in fluent whatever-the-language-was. “We don’t get a lot of traffic through the Wall.”

“I’m betting we’re the first ever,” said Umbo.

“We have a solvent that will get the stain out of your shirt,” said the man.

“How about not throwing turds in the first place?” said Umbo.

The man sighed. The woman laughed. “I don’t think our disguise is really all that effective,” she said.

“Oh, it made me want to scrub my own skin off,” said Umbo. “If that was your goal—”

“You got here sooner than we expected,” said the woman. “So we weren’t sure it was you.”

“Who do you think we are?” asked Loaf.

The man handed Umbo a clean shirt that seemed to fit well enough. The fabric was smooth and comfortable; the shirt was light in weight, yet very warm.

“You’re Loaf, a soldier-turned-innkeeper-turned-bodyguard,” said the woman. “And you’re wearing one of Vadesh’s nasty little parasites. One of the boys is Rigg and the other is Umbo. The girl is Param, who should be heir to the Queen-in-the-Tent. And, not least, King Knosso’s right-hand boy, the scholar Olivenko.”

The dung had been irritating. This was frightening. “How can you possibly know so much about what’s going on in other wallfolds?” asked Umbo.

“We learned how to intercept and decode all the communications of the expendables, the orbiters, and the ships within a few hundred years of the founding of this colony,” said the man.

“You’re the biggest news in ten thousand years,” added the woman. “Ever since humans went extinct in Vadeshfold.”

“A tragedy,” said the man.

“I’m surprised Vadesh let you leave,” said the woman.

“He’s not equipped to stop us,” said Rigg.

“Oh, he has all the equipment he needs,” said the woman. “But since one of you is carrying his baby”—she indicated the facemask on Loaf—“I suppose he didn’t want to damage any of you.”

Umbo wasn’t sure if she was being literal or figurative. “You don’t mean that that thing is going to give birth,” said Umbo.

“Oh, goodness no,” said the woman. “I forgot you don’t have sufficient knowledge yet to understand irony or analogy in this context.”

“What was your disguise for?” asked Param. “Naked-in-trees doesn’t seem very subtle to me.”

“Primitivity,” said the man.

“Decay and devolution,” said the woman.

“But you didn’t believe it, and so it probably won’t work on them, either,” said the man. “Which is why, ultimately, all our hopes are pinned on you.”

“All your hopes of what? Who are you people?” demanded Rigg.

“Don’t worry,” said the man. “We’ll explain everything. But it’s going to take some time.”

“What it comes down to is this,” said the woman. “We have a little over two years before the humans from Earth arrive for the first time since the terraforming of Garden.”

“And a year after that before they come back and wipe out all life on Garden,” added the man.

“You can see the future?” asked Rigg.

“No,” said the man. “But people of Odinfold, from a different version of our future, wrote an account of the end of the world and sent it back to us five thousand years ago, just before they died.”

“You can travel in time,” said Rigg.

“Not at all,” said the woman. “But we have machines that can send things to any past time and to any place on Garden.”

“And retrieve things,” said the man. “We can also bring things back from the past. Like that jewel they took from you and put in that bank in your capital city.”

“Our displacers got it out and left it for Umbo to find in Vadeshfold,” said the woman.

“We’ve been helping you as much as possible since we first found out about you,” said the man.

It made Umbo feel strange. Somebody had been looking out for them. Or manipulating them. It made Umbo feel vaguely like a pet. But was it really all that different from what the expendables had been doing to them? “Do you have names?” asked Umbo. “What do we call you?”

They looked at each other and laughed. “Names. I suppose we have names, though none of us ever uses them.”

“There are only about ten thousand of us in the whole wallfold now,” said the woman. “So we know each other, know each other’s history, and the compressed version of that history is what we use for names now, if names are needed at all. I’m usually called Woman-Gave-Birth-to-Boy-and-Girl, Swims-in-the-Air, Saves-the- World.”

“There’s a lot more to her name,” said the man, “but that short version is usually enough to distinguish her from everybody else.”

“I’m a little bit famous,” she said apologetically.

“You’re ashamed of being famous,” said Umbo, “but proud of going fecal.”

“Hoping to save the world,” she said with a shrug. “Not everybody thought the yahoo act was worth trying.”

“You intercept the communications among the ships?” asked Olivenko.

The man rolled his eyes. “We said it, didn’t we?”

“What’s your name?” Param asked him.

“Mouse-Breeder, Old-Song-Singer, Lived-in-the-Ruins, Mates-for-Life.”

“What should we call you?” asked Param.