Ruins

“I’m making this up, how would I know why?”

“Was it a plan? Was someone else making him? Does he think this man wronged him terribly? What if he finds out later that the guy didn’t do it. He’s so grateful then that he tripped on the way into the roadhouse or the bank or wherever it was. Now both men are alive, and you didn’t kill anybody.”

“So you think all the murders in the world are done because of mistakes?” asked Rigg.

“I’m saying that not everybody who kills is a murderer. Sometimes killers are idiots. Sometimes they’re just boys. Sometimes they’re idiot boys.”

“Stop bringing me into this,” Umbo had said from the other room, where he was reading something. Rigg didn’t remember what. He just remembered that Loaf finally came around to saying, Yes, this power you have, it can be used to kill, and there might come a time when you have no other choice.

This was that time.

Rigg didn’t leap to that conclusion. It came on him gradually. It began with all the lies. The Odinfolders were sure they had all the information from the chat among the expendables and the ships’ computers, and yet some of the information they had was false, and things were missing. The clincher was the fact that the Odinfolders and the mice had said that there was nothing from Larex about the Larfolders—but instead, Larex met with them all the time and was aware of what they were doing every step of the way.

“We all lie to Vadesh.” What did that even mean? Why Vadesh in particular? Yes, he had lost all of his humans, but now it turned out that Vadesh had actually left his own wallfold to visit Larfold.

What would it mean if he were told the truth—why would they bother lying to him?

So who was really lying? Had the Odinfolders lied to Rigg? Or did they tell what they believed was the truth, and the mice lied to the Odinfolders about what they had learned from their interception of expendable communications?

Who ordered the killing of Param in the library in Odinfold? Was it the mice, acting for their own self-interest, and they blamed it on the Odinfolders? Or did the Odinfolders order it? And if so, why? Who was served by it? Was it to try to kill Param, or to try to get Rigg and Umbo and the others to do exactly what they did—go on to Larfold and take ten thousand mice with them?

Who was in control of all this? Whose plan was being served? What if all the living creatures—human or part-human—were being lied to by the expendables and the ships’ computers?

Which led to yet another round of questions. What if the expendables had gone rogue? The ships’ computers hinted at the possibility; certainly Rigg had gotten different results from giving orders to the ship from the orders he gave to Vadesh.

Yet Vadesh had claimed that he had to obey the owner of the jewels, right from the start. The ships assured him that he was absolutely in control of everything. And yet they were all doing things that had nothing to do with anything he ordered, and sometimes that completely contradicted what they had told him they had done or were going to do or even could do.

How can machines lie? Were they lying when they said they had to obey him? If so, how did they get programmed to be able to tell that lie? In other words, who had ordered them to be capable of disobeying orders?

Ram Odin had ordered the killing of all the other Ram Odins so that the computers and expendables would not be forced to deal with contradictory orders. Yet one of the Ram Odins had lived, and the computers and expendables all knew it, because there existed both Ramfold and Odinfold, named for the founder of the colony.

The kind of lying that was going on—what if it wasn’t lying at all? What if everything that every single expendable and computer ever said to Rigg was true. No, not true, but honest—that is, they were conveying exactly the information they had been ordered to give him.

When they told him he was in command of everything, it was true. But what if shortly afterward it stopped being true, and they were ordered not to tell him that?

Or they were ordered to tell him that he was in control when in fact he was not, so they were lying, but not by their own choice.

Who could possibly give such orders? Rigg was in possession of the jewels, the ships’ logs, and by all rights he should be in command.

But only if the previous commander was gone. Dead.

What if the previous commander was unavailable, so Rigg took command; but then the previous commander became available, and so Rigg was not in command anymore. Or he was in command, but in a subordinate way, the way Umbo was in command in Odinfold because he had the copies of the ships’ logs that were on the knife—but he still served under Rigg and could not countermand an order of Rigg’s.

What if Rigg was also subordinate to another human commander, and the expendables had been ordered not to tell him?

Then it all made sense. All the lying by machines stopped being lies and started being a systematic plan of deception by a commander who didn’t want his existence to be known.

This is the way Father had taught Rigg to think. If things don’t make sense, then question your assumptions. When your assumptions all seem to be wrong, then think of ways that they might be right after all. Find new possibilities.

Here was the possibility that nobody ever talked about, yet it seemed obvious once it occurred to Rigg.

Ram Odin was still alive.

Eleven thousand years later, still alive?

Every starship had that room where sleeping colonists were revived and awakened from stasis. That’s where Vadesh had brought Rigg and Loaf, pretending it was the control room, but really intending to slap a facemask on one of them. Rigg had always assumed he meant to do it to him, not Loaf at all. But now he wondered: Vadesh had put the facemask on one of the two men in their group who had no power over time.

That was when Rigg realized that if he had the enhancements to his senses that Loaf had received, he might be able to use his power far more effectively. Wouldn’t the facemask also enhance his ability to see paths, the way it had enhanced Loaf’s sight and hearing and smell, his quickness, his memory, his mental acuity?

There in Vadesh’s revival chamber, Rigg had all the answers in front of him if he had only known the right questions. This was a room that was still in use. Not for the facemask—Vadesh didn’t have to bring him there to put the facemask on someone, he could have done that in any room in the starship.

So why did Vadesh choose that room? Because then Rigg would know what it was. What it was for. That it existed.

Vadesh was trying to tell him the truth even though he had been forbidden to tell it. Someone is still being kept in stasis. Someone who gets revived from time to time, then goes back to sleep. Someone who has slept his way through eleven thousand years of human history on Garden, only waking up for a few days here and there to give orders, to make tweaks in human history.

Ram Odin. Only he was not in Ramfold, where he had founded a colony and left his seed behind. He was in Vadeshfold, where Vadesh had tried to create a symbiosis of humans and native organisms.

“We all lie to Vadesh”—that was their code, their desperate attempt to signal Rigg, against all of Ram Odin’s orders, that there was something in Vadesh’s starship that they all were trying to resist as best they could.

This was the conclusion Rigg had reached when he heard the story of the mantles of the Larfolders, the tale of how they went under the sea. The contradictions had become too great, the web of lies too complicated. So he thought and thought until he made the leap that brought him to this conclusion: Ram Odin is alive, and Ram Odin is manipulating everything.

Then he made one more leap: It is not the Visitors who trigger the destruction of Garden. It is Ram Odin.

In the Future Books, the dying Odinfolders spoke of Destroyers from Earth, but did they know this was true, or had they been told this by the ships’ computers, by the expendables? Here was the key point: the Destroyers worked through the orbiters—the satellites from the original nineteen starships that circled Garden in stationary orbits.

The satellites obeyed their programming by threatening to destroy any wallfold that developed dangerous weapons. But those dangerous weapons were actually thwarted by the expendables, who forestalled any