Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

  He couldn’t see the past—he wasn’t Rigg—but he could remember it. Not every second of it, but the key moments. Mostly times when he had sent messages or time-shifted, but also a few other events. The death of Kyokay. Jumping off the rock with Param. The moment when he accepted Param’s proposal of marriage.

  He couldn’t see the future—nobody could. How could he have markers in times he had never lived through? But the next few years, though they lay ahead of him at this moment, had once been part of his past. No, they had often been part of his past.

  Those few years that he had already lived through more than once were part of his map. If he were ahead of them in the stream of time, he’d have no hesitation in time-shifting back to them. Couldn’t he use that same timesense to shift to other remembered points in time, even though at this particular moment they now lay in his future?

  He had always thought of shifting into the future as a leap off a cliff. Not knowing what the future felt like, what was happening there, to jump into it would be insane. What if he jumped ten years into the future? By then the Destroyers would have come, and the future he entered would be an uninhabitable wasteland. And if by ill luck he should jump into the exact moment in the future when they were burning Garden to a cinder, he would probably die before he could realize that he’d better jump out of there.

  But no, not now. Because he had already lived through that time. He had stood on the beach in Larfold and watched the fires begin, before they all jumped back to a safer time.

  That moment—the end of the world—was one of those markers in the future that he remembered with all the certainty of the most important times he had lived through or visited in the past.

  And because his time map had nothing to do with place—it was a map of whens, not wheres—he could jump to any particular moment in the past, no matter where he was. He’d still be however many hundreds of leagues away that he had been before the time-shift, but he would be when he wanted, even if he wasn’t yet where he wanted. Just as he had done in jumping back to the time before Kyokay’s death.

  Now Kyokay was alive again, but the day Umbo saved him was the same marker as the day he had failed to save him the first time around.

  Maybe I can jump into the future. Not slice into it, a fraction of a second at a time, invisible to everyone, yet vulnerable to enemies. Jump to it.

  Not while I’m out in the middle of the river. I don’t want to arrive at exactly the moment a boat is passing through this exact spot.

  And what if for some reason the boat didn’t come with him? Even if he could shift into the future, there was no guarantee he could take anything with him in that direction. Umbo could swim, but he didn’t relish a soaking.

  As he pulled the boat onto a firm landing place, it occurred to him that if he couldn’t take the boat, what about clothing? The jeweled knife?

  No, no, these were foolish fears. Param jumped into the future all the time. A microsecond at a time, but she skipped forward with clothes and whatever she was carrying on her. I’ll have everything with me when I get there. If I get there. Won’t I?

  He stood on the bank, then decided that he’d better do this sitting down. And not just sitting, but sitting inside the boat, holding on to the knife with one hand and the rim of the boat with the other. Just to make it clear to whatever force in the universe controlled time-shifting that this was his stuff and he wanted it with him.

  Then he slowed down time—sped up his perceptions—and found the marker he was looking for. He sharpened his awareness even more, and then chose a time a little bit this side of the time when he left Loaf and Leaky to come on this errand.

  And then he jumped.

  He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened.

  Well, that was disappointing.

  He sighed and rose to get out of the boat.

  The boat shifted and slid awkwardly under him. He nearly fell.

  The solid ground at the riverbank was muddy now. It hadn’t been muddy when he landed. He looked at the sky. It was sunny, but he could see the clouds that must have just finished dumping rain here not an hour ago.

  It had rained two days before they got to Leaky’s Landing.

  Of course everything looked unchanged. He was sitting on the riverbank looking at the river. What, exactly, had he thought would be different?

  But his timesense didn’t lie. When he checked to see when this moment was, he could sense the marker looming only a ­couple of days from now.

  Since he didn’t know how far upriver he was from Leaky’s Landing, if he was going to arrive when he said, he would have to hurry.

  Then he laughed at himself. If he arrived late, he could easily jump back to the right time.

  I jumped into the future. Not slicing, jumping. To the time I chose. Nobody else can do that. With no external paths, only the map of time I unconsciously formed while doing all this jumping, I was able to jump into a future I had already lived through.

  As he got the boat back out into the middle of the stream, he checked his markers again. The end of the world was the farthest in that direction. And in the past, the farthest he had gone—well, the farthest he had pushed anybody—was to almost the exact time when Ram Odin’s nineteen ships crashed into Garden, destroying native life almost as thoroughly as the Destroyers would. Rigg had chosen the moment by attaching to the path of the last animal to pass through the space where the Wall would be. Rigg had chosen the animal thinking that it would be the last moment before the Wall was created, but no. After the crash of the nineteen ships, there were no large animals to leave paths through the wall. So Rigg had inadvertently taken them almost to the exact moment of the previous destruction of life on Garden.

  We were the Destroyers that time. Not us exactly, not Rigg and me and the others, but we humans. Ram Odin. The expendables. Garden has had bad luck with living through the arrival of ships from Earth.

  Still, this meant that Umbo’s map of time extended from the last moment before humans came until nearly the last moments that humans survived. Almost all his time-shifting had been within the past dozen years, but they had gone back to a time only a few centuries after the establishment of the colonies, when they all went to witness, in Vadeshfold, the battle between the people with facemasks and the people without them. That is, they had all gone except Umbo, because he had had to stay behind as their anchor, so they could return to the time they had left.

  Now, though, I don’t need an anchor. Now I could go with them on such an expedition, and bring us all back. Because the whole history of Garden, up to the end, is the past in my mind.

  He reached Leaky’s Landing with a few hours to spare. He didn’t want to walk into the roadhouse before he left to go save Kyokay, lest he should cause a copy of himself to pop into existence or, worse, deflect his earlier self enough to make it so he did not figure out the plan that worked to save the reckless boy.

  He was looking for an out-of-the-way place to wait, one where he wouldn’t be noticed by his earlier self while he was waiting for an upriver boat. Then he realized: I don’t have to wait. I can jump to the right time. Just because it’s only a few hours doesn’t make it any less possible.

  Umbo chose an out-of-the-way place to make the jump in privacy. Not for the first time he wished for Rigg’s path-sense, because Rigg would have known just how heavily trafficked any spot might be. Then again, Rigg couldn’t help him in this case because the paths that would be most pertinent had not yet been laid down in this place. Rigg could not see into the future.

  Umbo tried to keep from thinking, Rigg can’t do what I can do. But the effort not to think it was nothing more than another way to think it, while feeling even more guilty and frustrated.

  He made the jump forward to the exact time he wanted. To Loaf and Leaky, he would have been gone only an hour.

  He walked to the roadhouse door, opened, came in
side. “Well, I’m back,” he announced.

  Loaf and Leaky looked up from behind the bar, where Loaf was putting away glasses and mugs on the highest shelf.

  “Took you long enough,” said Loaf.

  “Sorry,” said Umbo.

  “Well, did you save him?” asked Loaf.

  “Mostly,” said Umbo. “Pulled him out of the water before he drowned. His arms were—no, his legs were broken.”

  “You can’t remember the difference?” asked Loaf. “Remind me not to let you tend to my injuries.”

  “That’s my job,” said Leaky.

  “The first time, he broke his arms. The second time, it happened a little differently. He landed legs-first, so those are what broke.”

  “So you didn’t interfere with events until after everybody thought he had died in the water.”

  “The first time I was so stupid I carried him home before Rigg and I had even left town, and that wrecked everything. So I had to do it over.”

  “Well, now that that’s done,” said Leaky, “Let’s set out for the Wall.”

  “Give the boy a chance to rest,” said Loaf.

  “He’s only been gone an hour,” said Leaky impatiently. Then she gave a sheepish grin. “I haven’t had as long as you two to get used to how things work now. He’s been gone for weeks, hasn’t he?”

  She said it to Loaf, but spoke it while looking Umbo up and down. “Not a very cleanly expedition, it would seem,” she said.

  “I haven’t done much clotheswashing.”

  “You never do.”

  “I keep thinking I’ll just jump back to a time when they were clean.”

  Loaf glowered. “That really doesn’t make sense.”

  “It was a time-shifting joke,” said Umbo. “I don’t have many people I can tell those to.”

  “Lucky them,” murmured Loaf. “We’ll leave for the Wall in the morning.”

  “One tiny problem,” said Umbo. “We can’t go through the Wall now.”

  “Rigg set it up so any two of our group can go through,” said Loaf. “That’s how we got back here to Ramfold.”

  Umbo shook his head. “Rigg hasn’t set it up that way yet. And Vadeshex hasn’t even met us. We don’t want to arrive with you wearing that facemask. Who knows how differently he’d act if he already knew he would succeed.”

  “So we do have to wait,” said Loaf.

  “Not necessarily,” said Umbo. “We have two choices. One. We can go back in time to before the Wall was made. Two. We can skip forward to right after we passed through on the way here.”

  Loaf looked at Umbo for a split second and then began a low chuckle. “You sly barbfeather,” he said. “You’ve learned how to make forward jumps.”

  “I’ve been to the end of the world,” said Umbo. “All of the future that we can possibly use has already been the past to me. So I can jump there now.”

  “This,” said Loaf to Leaky, “is a very useful boy. I’m not sure any child of ours wouldn’t make us feel disappointed at the clever things he couldn’t do.”

  “But he’ll be bigger, stronger, and not half so smug as this one,” said Leaky, “so I’ll take ours over him any day.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Lord of Walls

  “So am I a Finder of Lost Things again here?” asked Rigg.

  “Not in Gathuurifold, no.” Ram Odin chuckled. “No, for this wallfold you’re going to have to go back to the rich-young-man pose you carried off so well in O when you were just starting out.”

  “I ended up in prison,” said Rigg.

  “Because they believed you were a royal, not because they didn’t believe you were rich and educated.”

  “But I’m not educated in Gathuurifold. I won’t know anything about their history or customs.”

  “Gathuurifold is as large as any other wallfold. You can be from one part of it and know nothing about the other parts. Science you’ll know—more of it than they do—and ­mathematics. As for economics . . .” and here Ram Odin chuckled again, “they’ll have a bit to teach you, though I hope you don’t come away a true believer.”

  “So I’m a rich young man.”

  “No, you act like a rich young man. What you are, in terms they’ll understand, is this. You are my owner. And you, in turn, are directly the property of the Lord of Walls.”

  “Property!” Rigg was appalled. “They have slavery here? That was done away with in Ramfold a thousand years ago. Long before the Sessamoto came out of the northwest.”

  “Slavery was abolished fifteen separate times in the past eleven thousand years in Ramfold, though admittedly I’m rather proud of Ramfold that this last time it was the whole wallfold that got rid of it, and it hasn’t been reinvented yet. Though the People’s Revolutionary Council was getting close.”

  “You’re saying slavery is one of those universals.”

  “When you have wars, what do you do with the prisoners?” asked Ram Odin. “You can kill them all. Bloody work, that, and it encourages your enemies to fight to the death. You can send them all back home again as soon as the war is over, but in the meantime you have to feed them, and after they go home they’re a ready-made, fully-trained army.”

  “I’m getting your point.”

  “You can sacrifice them to your gods, which makes a difference only if they believe in the same gods. Or you can put them to work as forced labor, to earn their keep. Or, let’s see . . . keep them in prison camps, not working but having to be fed, until they die of old age. Which is the cruelest course?”

  “You’ve made your point. So Gathuurifold is unusually warlike? So they’re constantly generating new slaves?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I’d say Gathuurifold is unusually peaceful. War is quite rare. Because of all the things that slaves have been known to do, provoking wars is rarely one of them.”

  Rigg thought about this for a moment. “You mean everybody in Gathuurifold is a slave?”

  “Slavery became pervasive, with this wrinkle, that slaves could own property which did not belong to their owners. That meant that slaves can own slaves, who own slaves, who own slaves.”

  “If you can own property, how are you a slave?” asked Rigg.

  “Because your owner can move you to one place or another, can break up your marriage, can sell your children to some other owner, can decide how much education you’ll receive, and what work you’ll do, and what hours you’ll keep.”

  “And this system persists?” asked Rigg.

  “I’m not saying I like it,” said Ram Odin. “It’s just another way of organizing human life. It’s only been like this for fifteen hundred years or so, and Wall-to-Wall for only nine centuries. But in human terms, nine centuries might as well be forever. People here have little idea that society can be organized any other way.”

  “Everybody owns everybody?” Rigg asked.

  “Everybody is owned by somebody,” said Ram Odin. “There are plenty of people who don’t own anybody.”

  “So who’s at the top of this pyramid? Who owns him?”

  “I own him,” said Ram Odin. “Or, properly speaking, you do, since you are now the master of all ships. But since you didn’t know about this system, you haven’t been giving him any instructions. Therefore he continues to follow the last instructions I gave him. And for our purposes in Gathuurifold, you are posing as his slave.”

  “Gathuuriex,” said Rigg. “The Lord of Walls is the expendable.”

  “Who else?” said Ram Odin. “He never dies. He travels wherever he wants in his flying house, to make sure that his slaves are doing his will. I’ve instructed him to govern with a light hand. Whenever possible, he adjudicates disputes by making them work it out themselves, within certain parameters. He only goes after the Savages when they become particularly destructive, which he forestalls by making sure there are f
eeding stations in hard winters and droughts.”

  “Savages? So not everyone is in this slave system?”

  “No system is good for everybody,” said Ram Odin. “So yes, some people run away and escape into the wild. But most of them come back. The wild isn’t safe. Nobody knows who they belong to, and so there are no rules.”

  “You make it sound like slavery is a good idea,” said Rigg.

  “I think slavery is a terrible idea,” said Ram Odin. “But the whole idea of the wallfolds was to see what humans would do, what they would become with eleven thousand years of non­interference. Gathuuriex did absolutely nothing to promote slavery. He only stepped in to become the Lord of Walls—at my instructions—when there were getting to be too many murders among the top families.”

  “How kind of you,” said Rigg. “Maybe that would have brought down the whole system, did you think of that?”

  “I did,” said Ram Odin. “But this was only two hundred years ago, so I knew the end was coming, and these feuds had turned into wars before during the previous seven centuries of universal slavery. So I sent in Gathuuriex to become the owner of the top owners. He broke up the conspiracies, ended the feuds, arranged a few key divorces, dispersed the children who were the most tyrannical to learn some humility farther down the slave chain. I thought it wouldn’t hurt anything to have a few centuries of peace in this place.”

  “Why not eleven thousand years of peace?”

  “I didn’t create the slave system,” said Ram Odin. “For a long time I truly hated this place worse than any except Vadeshfold. I thought of it as a failure.”

  “So you intervened.”

  “No. It had already stopped being such an evil place a couple of thousand years ago. But no more talking about it, Rigg. I could have given you a history lesson about Gathuurifold and heard your tut-tuts and tsk-tsks back in Larfold. We have work to do.”