“But not in all.”
“Well, some of them were desert wastelands. Either very cold deserts, or very hot ones. But we have no great deserts in Garden. Only little ones.”
“So all the wallfolds are habitable.”
“When I plotted out where each starship should make landfall, I made sure that every one of them included plenty of well-watered arable land.”
“I get it. Each wallfold is huge and there’s a lot of variation within them.”
“More than you know. And also less. But no, I’ll let you find out.”
Rigg shook his head. “If you’re already dropping hints . . .”
“Do you have any idea how long it’s been, with no other human to talk to?”
“You have the expendables. I know from experience that they can be lively conversationalists.”
“Walking, talking databanks,” said Ram Odin. “Not people.”
“So in Yinfold, what’s our reason for wandering?”
“They have a lot of traveling healers and soothsayers. People who tell fortunes and then move on before anyone can tell whether their prophecies come true.”
“You’re not going to have me time-shift and come back with true answers, are you?”
“It wouldn’t even work, because foreknowledge would change their behavior so it wouldn’t come true after all, likely as not,” said Ram Odin. “But I’m thinking we make up a whole new category. Something that will actually work, but something they’ve never seen before.”
Even though Yinfold was settled everywhere, there was no trouble finding an uninhabited place to set down the flyer, even quite near to what passed for a city there. Rigg thought of Aressa Sessamo, built up out of a swamp in a river delta. Nearly empty watery land all around it, and yet what land there was, incredibly fertile with the silt of millennia of river floods. Water to carry boats and therefore cargos for trade. A huge natural moat for defense. But it still hadn’t kept out the horse warriors of the Sessamoto.
“This is good land,” said Rigg. “Why is it empty?”
“Good land, bad land,” said Ram Odin. “People gather where other people are, so they can mate readily. That leaves lots of empty places where people can go when they can’t stand the place they’re in, or something goes wrong and they have to leave. A place is settled for five thousand years, and then for the next five thousand years, nobody goes near the place, and yet it’s the same place.”
“There used to be a lot of settlement above Upsheer,” said Rigg. “That’s why they kept building bridges over the falls. But nobody lives there now.”
“They’ll go there again,” said Ram Odin. “Ship, where we’ve just parked the flyer—has this ever been settled land?”
“Three different villages,” said the computer voice in the flyer. “And farmland for twenty percent of the time. Usually, though, it’s lightly wooded, sharply cut terrain, because of the ravines.”
“See how much you’ve already learned about Yinfold?” said Ram Odin.
The first morning, Ram Odin put on a nondescript robe. “I have to go alone and get clothing for you.”
“Wearing that?”
“Trousers never came into fashion here. This robe is really from Untungfold, so it’ll look exotic here. But mostly it looks like money, and that’s the impression I need to give here in town while I buy clothes for you.”
“And then I’ll go with you into town?”
“Town? Why would you go into town? No, I’m getting us clothes to travel through the hamlets eight hundred kilometers from here.”
“Fashions from here will look right that far away?”
“We’re strangers,” said Ram Odin. “Travelers. We have to be dressed exotically. But it has to be clothing that won’t look too strange to any Yinfolder. Please trust me. I’ve made visits like this before. A lot more often when I was younger and still thought . . .”
“Still thought the differences between places would matter,” Rigg said, completing the sentence for him.
“Still thought,” Ram Odin replied sternly, “that I would learn something useful from seeing for myself. The differences do matter. The differences are the best and most important thing about Garden.”
“Go get me my clothes,” said Rigg.
Because he had given up on getting a completely unbiased view, Rigg read as much as he could about Yinfold while Ram Odin was gone. Hundreds of small kingdoms and principalities and duchies and counties and free cities, sometimes coming together into something like nations but mostly not. Some major language groups but so much change over the millennia, and so many holdovers from once-widespread languages, that the language map of Yinfold was chaotic. For interest’s sake, Rigg brought up the language map of Ramfold and found that while it used to be the same there, the few centuries of Sessamid rule had already caused hundreds of languages to die out, especially near the river, to be replaced by the common speech. All very fascinating and yet also predictable. A quick scan of the other wallfolds showed similar language maps and language histories, similar political maps with small political units rising and falling, sometimes coalescing but then collapsing back into chaos again.
Like watching the seashore, thought Rigg. Like sitting on the beach at the gathering place in Larfold and watching the waves, never exactly the same, but never all that different, either. Like watching flames, dancing patterns of red and yellow heat, always shifting, never changing till the fire died.
What did the Visitors see in each of these wallfolds, with their too-brief visits? Of course, they were able to copy all the data from the ships’ computers and the satellites and the expendables, so they had plenty of history—all these maps—to study on the way home to Earth, and plenty to discuss afterward.
But somehow what they saw made them send the Destroyers to wipe out all human life on Garden. Something here made us worthy of death, in their eyes.
Ram Odin came back, not with robes, but with tunics and belts and overcoats. “The weather’s warm but we still wear the coats because we’ll need them later in the year. It’s what unwealthy travelers do, because they don’t want to keep buying new coats every year.”
“I’m looking for the underwear,” said Rigg.
“Are you planning to undress in front of the locals?”
“Shouldn’t I be authentic, just in case?”
“In that case, what’s underwear? Only women wear it, and only now and then.”
Rigg felt the fabric. “Ah. Not woolen. It’s cotton.”
“So you don’t need a protective layer,” said Ram Odin. “Put it on, grandson of mine.”
“It’s awfully clean and new.”
“So maybe they’ll think we must be pretty good at our work, to earn enough to buy new clothes.”
“I want to see the town,” said Rigg. “Just because you tell me they’re all alike . . .”
“Suit yourself,” said Ram Odin.
So they spent the rest of the day in town. Rigg forgot the name almost as soon as he heard it, because it didn’t matter. It was so much smaller and grubbier than O, the city he knew best, that he lost interest almost at once. He knew that was cultural chauvinism and that he had to avoid such thoughts. And it wasn’t that small. It had three large market squares and they were bustling. But the merchandise wasn’t terribly different—Rigg knew the use of every object that he saw for sale—and while the flavors of the foods on offer were spiced differently from any fashion he had tasted in his travels in Ramfold, they were based on familiar ingredients.
When he commented on this, Ram Odin chuckled. “A faulty perception, Rigg. They’ve had ten thousand years to breed all kinds of different fruits and vegetables and to reshape the food animals, too. About a thousand years ago they started breeding rodents to eat. They’ve got pig-sized rats now, about thirty varieties, and you just ate a stew blending two kinds.”