Ruins

CHAPTER 22

Warning

When Umbo walked back to the others, they were full of questions. They had seen the flyer take off, and when Umbo explained that Rigg was gone, Param was hurt, Olivenko baffled, and Loaf enraged.

“The fool!” he cried. “He thinks he wants one of these? What for? To put himself in Vadesh’s hands again— Vadesh is the champion of all the liars, and that’s saying something, since I don’t think one word in ten that I’ve heard in my life was true! And none since we left Ramfold, not one thing that anyone has told us.”

But it was done, and they didn’t blame Umbo for it.

“Arrogant little twit,” Loaf grumbled. “Rigg I mean, not you, Umbo. Arrogant foolish stupid brave little—he’s going to take this whole thing on himself, I’m sure of it.”

“I think he’s backed out of it,” said Param. “I think he’s frightened.”

“Well, he’s not,” said Umbo.

“I think he doesn’t want to face the Visitors,” said Param. “They’ll be here in only two years, and he’s making sure he’s not with us.”

“Why talk him down, when you’re glad he’s gone?”

“I am not!”

“You want your father all to yourself. You hated it when he was so happy to see Rigg—I was watching you,” said Umbo.

“Stop it,” said Olivenko. “We don’t know what Rigg is doing and we don’t know what his motive is but we know that we can trust him to do right, because he’s had so many chances to do wrong and he’s never taken them. But it’s up to us to act as if whatever he’s doing won’t work, so it’s all entirely up to us to try to stop the Visitors from reaching whatever decision they reach that leads to the destruction of this world. Don’t you think?”

“Father will tell us what to do,” said Param.

“He won’t tell me what to do,” said Umbo. “Though I’ll listen to suggestions.”

“You’re just jealous because I have a father,” said Param.

“I’ve had a father,” said Umbo, “and I’m not impressed.”

“When the two of you become capable of rational thought,” said Loaf, “consider this: The Larfolders have their own way of remembering things, and they know a few facts that somehow missed the all-knowing Odinfolders. I’m for laying out all that we know for them to hear, and getting their counsel.”

“All we know?” asked Umbo. “Even about the mice?”

“Yes,” said Olivenko.

“No!” cried Param.

“We don’t know anything about the mice,” said Loaf, “except what they’ve told us themselves, and they’re liars.”

“We know that there are thousands of them here,” said Umbo, “and that we brought them, and in the day since we arrived they’ve probably already had a thousand babies.”

“Mice aren’t that quick,” said Loaf.

“Really? How many of them were pregnant?” asked Umbo. “How many were about to pop?”

“Probably half of them,” said Olivenko. “The real question is, will telling the Larfolders make them trust us more, or less?”

“They’ll stop talking to us,” said Param. “They’ll cut us off from Father. Or hurt him because he’s one of us.”

“He has a mantle like theirs,” said Loaf. “He’s not one of us.”

“He’s more a part of me than you are,” said Param.

“Whatever you say,” said Loaf, turning away from her impatiently.

Umbo wanted to answer Param: You’re not part of us and never have been. But he knew that Loaf’s silence was the wiser course, and added nothing to it. He knew he shouldn’t have said as much as he already had.

“I think we need to tell them everything,” said Olivenko. “Or we’re as deceptive as the mice.”

“They’re actually good at deception,” said Param.

“We resent how little we can trust others,” said Olivenko, “so let’s be the kind of people that others can believe. They may not approve of what we do, but they can believe what we say.”

“If we tell the Larfolders about the mice, then we’re betraying their trust,” said Param.

“The mice already don’t trust us,” said Loaf, “and we never promised them we wouldn’t tell.”

Umbo realized that there was no point in arguing any further. When it involved a secret, one person’s decision to tell would always defeat any number of other people’s decision not to.

The real problem was figuring out what the mice intended to do. Umbo didn’t really know what the mice could do, without full-sized humans creating the real technology. He had never figured out the problem of how their tiny hands could do any serious work. They could never work with hot metals, for instance—a man with a heavy glove and apron could get close enough to a fire for him to lift iron out of it with tongs. But a short-armed mouse trying to lift a teeny-tiny bit of molten metal with teeny-tiny tongs would still have to stand so close to the fire that its entire body would be instantly cooked.

So how could they make anything comparable to what humans made? What could their technology be in Larfold, where Odinfolders hadn’t already created an infrastructure of tools and machinery?

The mice manipulated genes—they admitted to having done that, when they claimed to have created Knosso and Umbo. Well, actually, it was the Odinfolders who had claimed those feats, but then it became clear that really accurate displacement was done only by the mice.

So the Odinfolders had worked metal and built mighty cities; the mice worked with time and with genes, and made new species.

Then Umbo reached the only sensible conclusion. The mice must use time-and-space displacement for everything that humans used tools for. They never had to stand close to a fire; they could shift masses far too heavy for them to move by hand.

So if the mice made it all the way to Earth undetected, what if their time displacement didn’t work? There was no reason to believe that any of this planet-rooted time-shifting could function away from Garden. If it didn’t, what was their fallback plan? To reproduce at an insane rate, eat all the food on Earth, and starve the human race to death? Not likely—mice were too easy to kill.

Perhaps they could genetically manipulate the humans of Earth. But in what way? Any genetic change they made would take many long human generations to take effect. It couldn’t stop the destruction of Garden a year after the Visitors left.

And now that he was here in Larfold, Umbo couldn’t go to the library in Odinfold and try to learn more about what the mice could do. He couldn’t even ask Mouse-Breeder, which he’d like to do, even though he knew Mouse- Breeder would probably lie to him. Or the mice were lying to Mouse-Breeder so any answer he gave would be wrong.

The mice could move items from one place to another, and from one time to another. If that power continued to work on Earth, they would have a wide range of possibilities. They had killed Param by inserting a slab of metal into her body. But could they have simply removed a vital organ from her?

What were the rules governing their powers? How many mice did it take to handle a single displacement? Did the items they shifted in time and space have to be already detached or detachable from all other items? Or could they move a section of a pillar out of place and collapse a roof? And how large an object could they move? A building? A starship?

Could they move the Visitors’ starship into space very near the Sun and let it roast?

No, that couldn’t be it—if the Visitors did not return to Earth, it would only signal the humans of Earth that Garden posed some kind of threat.

All Umbo’s questions went around and around in his head.

Until, in the middle of the night, he got the answer.