Visitors

by Orson Scott Card

  There was no answer to this, but it didn’t stop Noxon from thinking of possible ways that such things might work—or not work at all. It was a pleasure to be alone with his thoughts. Especially because he did not waste time thinking about the one vital thing: what he would find when he followed Ram Odin’s path backward to the moment of the anomaly that created all these copies and plunged them back more than eleven millennia in time.

  Either he would be able to detect the paths across that 11,191-year gap, or he would not. Either he would be able to detect the timeflow of the one backward copy of the ship, or he would not. And if he detected that impossible ship, either he would be able to attach himself to it, or he would not.

  Fretting about it would not relieve his ignorance or allow him any insight into what it would be like, and how he would deal with it. There was a very good chance—the ship’s computer had implied as much several times—that in trying to make any of these possible jumps, Noxon would find himself stranded outside the rational universe and never be able to get back. If this happened in the cold of empty space, his last moments would be mercifully brief. And he would not spend them wishing he could have saved Garden—if he failed and died, it would no longer be his responsibility.

  Only if he failed but lived would he need to regret whatever mistakes he might be about to make that would lead to that failure.

  Not a productive line of thought.

  But as he walked from Larfold to Ramfold, he gradually lost interest in all the thoughts that he had wanted to think, and by the time he reached the Wall, he was weary of the journey. He even got to the point where he started speaking now and then to the twenty mice embedded in his clothing and in his small pack of tools and supplies. They must have been getting bored, too, because they answered now and then. Not that there was any real attempt at conversation. They might be sentient beings with a lot of human genes in common, but they were definitely not of the same village or the same tribe as Noxon. They had little in common, except this mission.

  It was no problem for Noxon to pass through the Wall without one of his erstwhile human companions. The computers did not bother distinguishing between the two Riggs, so they were both exempt from the rule. He knew that the ships’ computers monitored the Wall continuously, and when he entered Ramfold, that meant the expendable Ramex would be alert to his presence. So in the midst of the Wall he spoke aloud. “I’d like the flyer, please, Father.”

  Since he had had no itinerary, being content to eat whatever came to hand as he traveled, as he emerged from the Wall he had no idea where in Ramfold he might be, except that he was near the eastern Wall somewhere well to the north of the latitude of Aressa Sessamo. This was wild land, where various villages and tribes lived in an uneasy relationship with the central government. Never conquered and never assimilated into the Stashiland culture, these people paid, not taxes, but tribute. And not very much of that, because they were poor.

  Or at least they made themselves seem poor when the emissaries of the Sessamids or the taxmen of the People’s Revolutionary Council came for a visit. Who knew? A few of their people spoke Stashi; nobody from Stashiland spoke their language.

  Except Noxon, since he had passed through the Wall and had all possible human languages instilled in him.

  It would have been interesting to get to know these people, as he imagined Rigg was getting to know people in other wallfolds. But that was not his errand. He would rather avoid contact with them.

  Yet he could not avoid it in the obvious ways—by slicing time, or jumping back and forth in time as the people’s paths made it seem advisable. For if he strayed from this exact timeline, how would the flyer find him?

  He saw the path of the man who spotted him, as he watched, then ran off through the woods to report. He saw the paths of the people gathering to intercept him. Apparently strangers here were rare—or at least, strangers coming from the direction of the Wall. He wondered how long it would take the flyer to reach him. He knew they were fast, but this fast? And would the ship send the flyer with urgency? Or at leisure?

  Noxon walked to the middle of a large meadow and stood there waiting. Soon they formed a ring around him, out of sight to his eyes, just inside the shelter of the trees.

  “I am a visitor from beyond the Wall,” said Noxon.

  They made no sound, but he imagined their consternation at hearing their own language spoken by a stranger. Especially a stranger with a weird, semi-human face.

  Then he saw the arrows coming toward him and realized that people responded to consternation in different ways. One of them was to kill the alarming stranger.

  By now he was able to jump into time-slicing almost as quickly as Param. But he did not dare to slice his way too rapidly into the future. He had to remain in this spot until the flyer arrived.

  Which was almost immediately, though it might have felt to Noxon like less time than actually passed. Certainly the first wave of arrows had all hit the ground, having passed through seeming nothingness—though Noxon felt them all as heat passing through him. They were very good at hitting what they aimed at. He knew the flyer had arrived by the way the people, who had started walking out into the meadow, suddenly rushed back to the cover of the trees.

  A ladder dropped down out of the sky. Noxon stopped his time-slicing, dashed for the ladder, and began to climb. The flyer rose into the air, the ladder rose into the flyer, and they were gone before any arrows could find the range.

  Inside the flyer, Noxon found Father waiting for him.

  “You timed your arrival well,” said Noxon.

  “Good thing, too. The flyer was all for leaving when it found you had disappeared.”

  “Do you mind if I call you Father?”

  “You can call me whatever you like,” said Father. Or Ramex. “Do you expect me to call you Noxon instead of Rigg?”

  “I wish you would. I once was Rigg, back when we spent so many years together, but I’ve been Noxon for months now and I need to make that identity completely my own.”

  “As you wish,” said Ramex.

  Father would never have said that, so this was the obedient expendable, not the domineering tutor.

  It took very little time to reach the starship in Ramfold. Noxon watched out the windows and then on the screen that showed what was passing directly under and a little ahead of the flyer. They passed over Upsheer right at the falls. He barely caught a glimpse of the handful of buildings that made up Fall Ford. He couldn’t see the stairway but he did see the broken-off nubs of the most recent of the bridges over the top of the falls. The others had long since crumbled away, becoming boulders in the pool at the base of the falls, and eventually becoming ever smaller rocks and stones as one rock broke another.

  “You didn’t want to linger, did you?” asked Father. “Stop by and say a fond farewell to Nox? I think she’d be flattered that you took her name.”

  “I think she’d be annoyed. And with this thing on my face, I doubt she’d believe that I’m me.”

  “She would if I told her to.”

  “She’d be alarmed to see you back from the dead.”

  “Less alarmed than you might think,” said Father. “I think she has some idea of my seeming immortality. I’m not sure if she believed your story.”

  “If she had thought I was lying—”

  “She would never have protected you, I know. But there’s a difference between believing in your honesty and believing in the factuality of the story you were telling. If you believed it, then it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t necessarily the truth, either.”

  “I don’t want to stop in and see her.”

  “I think the flyer would have been hard to conceal from prying eyes,” said Father. “But I do miss the old village.”

  “No you don’t,” said Noxon. “You just pretend to have feelings like a human being.”

  �
��I have much nicer feelings than most.”

  “I’m sure,” said Noxon.

  He had wandered for years through the forest on the plateau of the starship’s crater. Now it seemed small. They passed over it so quickly, and then straight down the shaft to the starship itself.

  The starship of Ramfold was no different from any other. Except for a difference that only Rigg and Noxon could see. This one had Ram Odin’s continuous path. Not the Ram Odin that was with Rigg, touring the world right now—that was the Ram of Odinfold. No, these paths were of the Ram Odin who had ordered the expendables to kill all the others, and then brought out his colonists when the land was habitable again. This was the Ram Odin who had married, had children who then had children of their own, and so on until that time-traveling gene had made its way into the embryo that grew up to be Noxon.

  That Ram’s path was all over the inside of the starship, but it was very, very old.

  There were several iterations of more recent paths, too—the Ram Odin of Odinfold had visited here now and then over the years. But Noxon could see the faint but detectable differences between the paths of the two Ram Odins. They had begun to diverge once the copies had been made, and now Noxon could tell them apart with only a moment’s hesitation, and not just because the Ram of Odinfold had all the recent paths.

  Noxon went right to work, finding the very oldest path. It began in the pilot’s seat in the small control room—just like the room where Rigg had come to stop Noxon from killing Ram Odin before Ram Odin could come and kill him.

  But it could not begin in the pilot’s seat. “He wasn’t born here, in that chair.”

  “But he arrived here that way. You know your paths are tied to the surface of the planet, not to any vehicle.”

  “Then I’ve failed before I even began.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Father. “You don’t know anything about what the paths do when the starship is not on a planet’s surface. Besides, what you’re seeing may not be the ship’s arrival here. It might be the moment when the ship passed through the fold. Ram Odin was sitting in that chair for that, too.”

  “If I could see a path for you, I might be able to tell.”

  “But the facemask lets you see more than the mere path. Look closely. Even if you can’t see me, you can see whether he’s talking to me.”

  Noxon looked. “He’s talking to you in all the paths. Talking to you seems to have been his main activity.”

  “It was,” said Father. “I’m excellent company. Part of my programming.”

  “And sounding proud of it—that’s part of your programming, too?”

  “And a bit shy—don’t forget that I also had a hint of modesty as well as pride.”

  “Well done,” said Noxon. Now that he knew Father was a machine, he wasn’t half so frightening. Nor, to tell the truth, was he trying to dominate Noxon the way he had dominated the child named Rigg.

  “After he ordered the killing of the other Ram Odins,” said Father, “I recall that he turned around in his seat in this direction. Because I was standing here.”

  Noxon looked at the oldest moments of the path and yes, there was indeed such a turn.

  “Of course, I often stood here, and he always turned in that direction to face me, when he felt the need to face me. That time, though, he was looking to see if I was going to kill him—he didn’t know if his command was the one with primacy.”

  “He looks relieved,” said Noxon. “It’s subtle—Ram Odin doesn’t show much—but the facemask can detect the difference in expression.”

  “I think we can safely say that the evidence indicates that the paths here in the starship go all the way back to the moment of division.”

  “The moment after.”

  “The moment of or the moment after. That will make a difference, won’t it?” said Father.

  “When I appear, the computers will read the jewels, won’t they?”

  “Oh my,” said Father. “How full of perplexing possibilities that question is.”

  “Can the computers detect the jewels if I’m slicing time?”

  “Slice away and we’ll see,” said Father.

  Noxon sliced a little, and then moved very quickly. Father did not move, so it was hard to gauge just how far he had gone.

  He came out of time-slicing. “Well?” he asked.

  “Did you have to do it for a whole day?”

  “You didn’t move,” said Noxon. “It was hard to gauge duration or speed.”

  “The answer is that for just a few minutes, the jewels were detectable but not readable. Then they became undetectable for the rest of the day.”

  “So if I slice time at a moderate pace, you can tell that I’m there. But when I really race, you can’t.”

  “Here’s a question,” said Father. “You can slice time in such a way as to skip over fractions of a second in rapid succession, moving forward in time much faster than normal people do. But can you slice the other way? No, not backward—I know you can do that, too, though not as smoothly. No, I mean can you jump back into the past at the rate of one second every second, so that you freeze in exactly the same moment?”

  “Except for the millions of collisions between the atoms of myself that would cause me to burst into flame or explode, yes, I think I could do that.”

  “Oh,” said Father. “That’s right. Slicing means you’re nearly in the same place for a long time, but never in the same time at all. In fact, mostly not there at all.”

  “You raise an excellent point, though,” said Noxon. “When I’m slicing—backward or forward—everything outside of me moves much faster. Which means that I’ll have even less time to observe what’s going on, at precisely the moment when I need to have as long as possible to observe.”

  “I’m not sure of the math on this,” said Father—which Noxon, by old habit, took to mean that Father was sure to the hundredth decimal place—“but the exact moment of the jump has no duration at all. It isn’t a moment. It isn’t in time at all.”

  “That’s not encouraging.”

  “But don’t you see? If you can get to that moment, you can stay there as long as you want. Observe everything.”

  “Or I can be completely obliterated.”

  “Well, that was your gamble from the start, wasn’t it?”

  The tone of voice was Father’s “what did you think?” and, just as if he were still a child, it made Noxon feel hopelessly stupid.

  “It’s not as if you can do any of this,” said Noxon. And, for having responded like a child, he now felt that he deserved to feel stupid.

  “You can do what you can do,” said Father, “and I can do what I can do.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Noxon.

  “No one ever does,” said Father. “But at least we expendables always know what we did. You humans can’t even hold on to your memories, just the echo of a shadow of a dream.”

  Noxon didn’t bother arguing. “You are superior in every way,” he said placidly. “I’m content with my second-rate yet biologically active state.”

  “And every bug is content to be a bug.”

  “Proud to be a bug, and don’t you forget it.”

  “I won’t,” said Father.

  Noxon laughed. “I’m having so much fun, it makes me want to kill and skin a beast of some kind. Just for old times’ sake.”

  “Old times,” said Father. “I don’t suppose you want to take me back to the beginning with you.”

  “Then there’d be two of you in Ramfold, and no way to hide you from your old self.”

  “I just want to know what happens,” said Father. “You can understand my curiosity.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Noxon. “That’s such a human emotion.”

  “It’s in my programming. I have to know.”

 
; “And yet you won’t.”

  “But the mice will,” said Father.

  “If I decide to bring them,” said Noxon.

  “And if you don’t?”

  “We can’t have them infesting Ramfold,” said Noxon. “They know that. So if I go, and I leave them behind, it’s your job to make sure they never get off this ship.”

  “My job to kill them.”

  “You’ve done it before,” said Noxon. “After all, you’re expendable yourself.”

  “But you’re going to take them,” said Father.

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “But you are.”

  “I’ve killed and skinned a thousand animals. More. Do you think the deaths of these mice will bother me?”

  “Yes,” said Father.

  “Well, you’re right. And I’m taking them. If I die, they die. If I live, they’ll share my fate.”

  “They’re not saying anything about your magnanimous decision,” said Father.

  “They weren’t sent on this mission because they were the chattiest of mice,” said Noxon. “And I don’t imagine they’re rejoicing that I’m not going to have you kill them here, but instead I’m going to take them to die with me in oblivion between stars and between millennia.”

  “Or they weren’t expecting to die even if you decided not to take them. You forget how much of my programming they understand.”

  “Now there’s something it’s easy to forget, since none of us learned anything about your programming,” said Noxon.

  “The Odinfolders know a lot,” said Father. “But the mice know more.”

  “Do the mice know everything?”

  “They know everything that can be known by mice,” said Father.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That it’s good to keep them guessing.”

  “I think I’m going to go now,” said Noxon. “It was good to see you again.”

  “Every time you see any of the expendables, you see me,” said Father. “I have all their memories. They have all of mine.”