Ruins by Card Orson Scott

Author:Card, Orson Scott [Card, Orson Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Adventure, Age Range 2 Older Audience, Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781441820310
Amazon: 1441820310
Goodreads: 10148930
Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

The Knife

Umbo had always had mixed feelings about school. On the one hand, it got him away from home, and he didn’t have to work all that hard. On the other hand, he envied his friend Rigg for the way he only came to school now and then, and spent the rest of the year out in the deep forest with his father, trapping animals and bringing home the furs.

Then he learned that Rigg’s time in the forest was spent in a kind of schooling far more rigorous than the country school Umbo attended. And, after traveling with Rigg in varying degrees of wilderness, from the edges of civilization beside the Stashik River to the untouched wilderness of Vadeshfold, and seeing how hard Rigg had to work to find food and water for them all, and good campsites where they’d be safe from animals, Umbo had a new appreciation for the rigors of that supposedly free life that Rigg had lived.

Here in Odinfold, Umbo felt like he was back in school—and as a rather poor student, too. Knowing he could never catch up with Rigg’s sophisticated education, Olivenko’s deep scholarly training with King Knosso, and Param’s courtly training at her mother’s knee, Umbo set himself a much simpler, but very practical task—to learn everything he could about the starships from Earth.

He worked hard at this, and mastered it as well as could be expected. Now that he knew he had the heredity to be very bright, he enjoyed testing his own memory, wondering if he was a match for Rigg’s nearly perfect recall, or even Rigg’s superior.

But it was all a deception, because Umbo had a much more important purpose—one he could not speak of to anyone, not until he learned something useful.

There were deep holes in the things that the Odinfolders had told them, subjects they simply didn’t touch on. Moreover, the only Odinfolders who ever spoke to them were Mouse-Breeder and Swims-in-the-Air. They were affable, likeable, patient adults—but Umbo didn’t like the fact that apparently the rest of the people who lived here near the Wall were either forbidden to talk to the Ramfolders or uninterested in them, which seemed extravagantly unlikely.

Weren’t the Odinfolders supposed to be completely free? Weren’t they brilliant, creative people? Why, then, were they acting so incurious? Here were people who could manipulate the flow of time as if it were just another bodily function, and the Odinfolders didn’t want to meet them, talk to them, see a demonstration? No, there was a reason nobody talked to them, and Umbo was pretty sure that it was to keep the Ramfolders from learning things that the Odinfolders didn’t want them to know.

They only had the Odinfolders’ word for it that any person that developed serious weapons would be killed, that they had broken into the programs that controlled the Wall but for some reason couldn’t break into the programs controlling the orbiters. It also seemed unbelievable to Umbo that the Odinfolders were really going to leave all the decisions up to the Ramfolders.

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