Pathfinder

by Card, Orson Scott; Yuen Jr. , Sammy

  “That’s right, Rigg. People forget. But you and I, Rigg—we don’t forget, do we?”

  But Rigg knew that it wasn’t true. He couldn’t remember a lot of things.

  He remembered the route across the rocks. But he didn’t trust that memory. He always checked it again when he got to the starting place, just above the surface of the lake.

  It seemed so calm, but Rigg knew that if he dropped a stone it wouldn’t sink into the water, it would immediately be pushed toward the falls, moving as rapidly as if someone under the water had thrown it. If he dropped himself into the water, he, too, would be over the cliff in about two seconds—having been bashed into six or seven big rocks along the way, so that whatever fell down the waterfall would be a bloody bashed-up version of Rigg, probably in several pieces.

  He stood and looked out over the water, seeing—feeling—the paths of countless travelers.

  It wasn’t like a main road, which was so thick with paths that Rigg could only pick out an individual with great difficulty, and even then he would lose the path almost at once.

  Here, there were only hundreds, not thousands or millions of paths.

  And a disturbing number of them did not make it all the way across. They got to this spot or that, and then suddenly lurched toward the cliff face; they had to have been swept away by the water.

  Then, of course, there were the ancient paths. This is why Rigg had been able to figure out about the erosion of the rock, the way the falls moved back and lower over time. Because Rigg could see paths that walked through the air, higher than the falls and fathoms outward. These paths jogged and lurched the way the current paths did, for the people who made those paths had been crossing on another set of rocks that penned in a higher, deeper lake.

  And where the bridges used to be, thousands of ancient, fading paths sweeping smoothly through midair.

  Of course the land had moved, the water had lowered. Someone who could see what Rigg could see was bound to figure out that the falls kept moving.

  But today, here is where they were, and these rocks were the rocks that Rigg would have to cross.

  He always chose a route that almost everyone had crossed safely; he always tried for a route that was well back from the edge.

  Rigg remembered—or remembered Father telling him about it, which was as close to memory as didn’t matter—how Father had first discovered Rigg’s ability to find old paths, right here at the footcrossing of the water. Father had been about to leap, carrying little Rigg, from one stone to another, and Rigg shouted, “No!” He made Father take a different path because, as Father told him, “You said, ‘Nobody fell into the water this other way.’”

  Rigg saw now the thing he saw then: Paths from stone to stone, different people, days or years or decades apart. He saw which of the paths of fallers were old and which were new. He chose a route that looked dry, that had been used most recently.

  He saw his own past paths, of course.

  And, of course, he saw no path at all belonging to Father.

  What an odd thing for a son to be blind about—to see every person in the world, or at least to see the way they went, except his own father.

  This time Rigg had to make doubly sure of his calculations, because he had to make the crossing with many pounds of bulky, unwieldy furs and hides bound on his back. A crossing he could make easily, carrying only a canteen and traps and a bit of food, would now require him to jump onto too small a rock; he would overbalance and fall in.

  He was three leaps out, on a dry platform of rock a full two fathoms wide, when he caught a glimpse of movement and saw, on the far side of the water, a boy of about ten. He thought perhaps he knew him, but since Rigg only came to Fall Ford a few times a year, more or less, and didn’t always see everybody, it might be the younger brother of the boy he thought it was; or it might be a boy from another family entirely, or a complete stranger.

  Rigg waved a greeting and the boy waved back.

  Rigg made his next leap, and now he was on a much smaller rock, so there’d be no room to make a run. This was the trickiest place in his crossing, where he was most at risk of dying, and he thought that perhaps he should have let down his burden on the big rock he had just left, and crossed with only a third of the furs, and then gone back for the rest. He had never made this leap with such a burden—Father always carried more than half.

  It wasn’t too late to go back to the big platform and divide his burden.

  But then he saw that the boy had moved out onto a rock. It was much too close to the lip of the falls—Rigg knew that it was the beginning of a path that had the most deaths of any.

  Rigg waved and gave a sign with both hands, as if he were pushing the boy back. “Go back!” he yelled. “Too dangerous!”

  But the boy just waved, and made the push-back sign in return, which told Rigg that the boy hadn’t understood him. Obviously Rigg could not be heard above the roaring of the water as it swept among the rocks.

  The boy leapt to the next rock, and now he was on a path that was pure peril. It would be hard for him to get back now, even if he tried. And the boy was apparently so stupid he was determined to go on.

  Rigg had only a moment to decide. If he went back the way he had come, he could set down his burden and then take a dangerous path that would get him nearer to the boy, perhaps near enough to be heard, near enough to stop him. But it would take time to get the furs off his back, and he’d be farther from the boy while he did it.

  So instead he simply made the leap he was already planning. He did it exactly right, and a moment later he was ready to leap for a slightly bigger rock. He made that leap, too.

  He was only two stones from the boy.

  The boy jumped one more time, and almost made it. But the water caught just a part of one foot and swept his leg toward the lip, and it threw the boy off balance and he whirled around and both his feet went into the water, and the water pulled savagely at him.

  The boy wasn’t quite stupid after all. He knew he was doomed to lose the rock he was on, so he tried to catch at a smaller rock that was right at the lip of the falls.

  He caught it, but the water whirled him around so that he hung by his fingers from the outward, dry edge of the rock and his body dangled over the vast drop to the river below.

  “Hold on!” cried Rigg.

  A whole winter’s trapping, and he was about to discard it in order to have a slim chance of saving the life of a boy so stupid that surely he deserved to die.

  It took Rigg only a moment to get the thongs untied, so he could shrug the load of furs from his back into the water.

  He was so close to the lip now that the huge bundle caromed only once against the rocks as it hurtled toward the lip of the falls and then flew out into empty air and fell.

  Meanwhile, Rigg dived for the rock that the boy had not quite made; Rigg made it, even though the boy had splashed water onto the surface and made it wet. “Hold on!” Rigg cried again. All he could see of the boy now was his fingers on the rock.

  There wasn’t room on the rock for Rigg to jump for it; though it was very close, it was too likely that he would kick the boy’s fingers in the process of stepping there. So instead, Rigg knelt on his rock and then let himself topple forward, planning to catch the boy’s rock with his hands, making a bridge of his body.

  Only something strange happened. Time nearly stopped.

  Rigg had been in tense situations before. He knew what it was like when your perceptions became suddenly keener, when every second was more fully experienced. It felt at such times as though time held still. But it did not really happen that way. As Father explained it, there were glands in the human body that secreted a substance that gave greater strength and speed at times of stress.

  This was not the same thing at all. As Rigg let himself fall forward, an operation that should have taken a second or less, it was suddenly as if he were sinking slowly into something very thick. He had time to notice everything, and while
he could not turn his eyes any faster than he could move any other part of his body, his attention could shift as rapidly as he wanted it to, so that anything within his field of vision, even at the edges, could be seen.

  Then his attention was engaged by something far stranger. As time slowed down, so did the paths he saw in the air. They thickened. They became more solid.

  They became people.

  Every person who had tried to cross these rocks at this place became, first a blur of motion, then solid individuals, walking at their real pace. Whoever he concentrated on, he could see walking, jumping, leaping his or her course across the rocks. As soon as he focused his attention on someone else, the other people all became a streak of movement again.

  So in mid-fall, he became aware of, concentrated on, a barelegged man who was standing right in the middle of the rock to which the young boy was clinging. The man’s back was to him; but because Rigg was falling so slowly, he had plenty of time to register that the man was dressed in a costume rather like those on the old fallen statues and crumbled friezes of the ruined buildings where the newer of the two old bridges had once rooted into the cliff.

  Rigg realized that he was going to fall right into the man. But he couldn’t be solid, could he? This was just part of Rigg’s gift, weirdly changed in this moment of fear, and the paths were never tangible.

  Yet this man looked so real—the hairs and pores on his calves, a raw place where something had scraped against his ankle, the frayed and half-opened hem of his kilt, the drooping band of embroidery only half-attached to it. Once the man had dressed in finery; now the finery had become rags.

  Whatever ill-fortune had come upon the man, the fact remained that at this moment he was in Rigg’s way. Rigg thought: The people I’m not paying attention to become blurs of motion. If I turn my thoughts away from him, he, too, will become insubstantial.

  So Rigg tried to focus on a woman who had tried to make the leap to this same rock, but had slipped and fallen immediately into the current and been swept over. He did this—and saw the horror on her face, flashing almost immediately to the death look of an animal that knows there is no escape. But then she was gone, and his attention returned at once to the man in front of him. If he had become insubstantial for a moment, he was solid enough now.

  Rigg’s forehead smacked into the man’s calf; he felt the force of it, yet he was moving so slowly he could feel the texture of the man’s skin on his forehead and then, as Rigg’s head was compelled to turn, the abrasion of the hairs of his leg on Rigg’s face.

  Just as Rigg’s face was forced to turn in order to slide down the man’s leg, so also the weight of Rigg’s head and shoulder striking the man caused his leg to buckle, and the man twisted, started to topple forward.

  I came to save a boy and now I’m killing a man.

  But this man was a soldier or athlete; he whipped around in mid-fall and reached out and clutched the rock, so that when he fell he dangled from both hands.

  His left hand completely covered the right hand of the boy.

  Apparently two solid objects could occupy the same space at the same time. Or, technically, not at the same time, because the man was actually here hundreds of years ago, but to Rigg it was the same moment. The man’s hand was solid. Rigg could feel it as his own hand, flung out by reflex to support himself after the collision with the man’s leg, slid across the rock and rammed into the fingers of the man’s right hand.

  The result was that Rigg stopped sliding forward barely in time to keep his knees from sliding off the previous rock and into the water. Rigg’s body now made the bridge between rocks that he had planned to make. The man had, without meaning to, saved Rigg’s life.

  But Rigg had not returned the favor. First he knocked him off his perch and toppled him over the side; and then Rigg’s hand, sliding across the rock, had jammed into the man’s fingers and shoved his right hand from the lip of the stone.

  Now the man held on only by his left hand—the hand that completely covered the right hand of the dangling boy Rigg was here to save.

  The man’s hand was not transparent in any way. It was real, thick, muscular, tanned, hairy, callused, spotted with freckles and ridged with veins. Yet at exactly the same time, Rigg could also see the taut, slender, nut-brown fingers of the boy, starting to slip just a little. Rigg knew he could help the boy, could hold him if he could only reach past his fingers and get ahold of his wrist. The boy was smaller than Rigg, and Rigg was very strong; if he could lock that wrist between his own fingers he could hang on to him long enough to get his other hand out for the boy to grab.

  He could imagine it, plan it, and he could have done it except that he could not get past the thick wrist and forearm of the man.

  You’re already dead, for decades and centuries you’re dead, so get out of the way and let me save this child!

  But when Rigg’s hand clutched at the man’s forearm, trying to get through him to the forearm of the boy, the man felt him and seized the opportunity. His right hand came up and caught Rigg by the wrist with a grip as much stronger and thicker than Rigg as Rigg’s grip would have been stronger and thicker than the boy’s wrist.

  And the weight of the man began to drag Rigg forward.

  Rigg’s right knee dipped into the current, and if the man had not had such a tight hold on him, he might have been swept away; at it was, it spun his body so he lay on his side. But that took his knee back out of the water, so once again his body was a bridge between stones.

  Still the man’s weight dragged at him. Rigg momentarily lost all thought of the boy—he couldn’t save anybody if he himself was dragged off the cliff.

  Rigg clutched at the man’s fingers with his other hand and pried his little finger up and bent it backward, backward. All of this took forever, it seemed—he thought of the movement, and then, slowly, his hand obeyed, reached out, clutched, pried, pushed.

  The man let go. With agonizing slowness his right hand slipped away from Rigg, his fingers sliding over Rigg’s skin. Just as slowly, Rigg righted himself so that he could once again try to reach out for the boy; but still the man’s left hand covered the boy’s right.

  Just as Rigg’s hand once again settled over the man’s left wrist, trying to get past him or through him or under him to reach the boy, Rigg saw the boy’s fingers lose their grip and slide away from the rock, slowly, slowly . . . and then they were gone.

  In fury and frustration and grief at his failure, Rigg raised his hand to strike downward at the man’s hand. It did not enter his mind that he was preparing to do murder. In Rigg’s time the man was already long since dead, no matter what the outcome here; all Rigg knew was that because that man had suddenly become visible and tangible, Rigg had not been able to save the boy—a boy he almost certainly knew in the village, if he could only place him.

  But Rigg never got the chance to complete the action of striking the man. Instead time sped up again, became normal, the man simply disappeared without Rigg seeing whether he fell or somehow managed to clamber back up onto the rock, and Rigg’s fist struck only stone.

  A moment later, Rigg heard a scream. It couldn’t be the boy—he would already have been so far down before the scream began that he could not have been heard where Rigg was, and the scream went on much too long. Yet it was not a man’s scream—the voice was too high.

  So there was someone else on the shore, someone else who had seen the boy die. Someone who might help Rigg get himself back off this rock.

  But of course no one could help him. It would be insane for anyone to try. It had been insane for Rigg to try to save the boy. For here he was, his body bridging two stones, barely out of the water himself, and if he even bent his knees he would be carried away by the torrent.

  He inched backward, trying to get his knees back onto the rock where his toes were. Already his arms and shoulders were aching with the strain of holding himself like a bridge. And now, when he might have used the slowing of time to help him pay attenti
on to even the slightest move he made, his fear gave him no more than the normal degree of heightened concentration.

  Yet after a while his knees were on the hind rock, and he was able to rise up on his hands till he was as high as he could get above the water, and his fingers still had enough strength in them that he could shove himself up and back, and . . .

  He shoved, rose up, and then teetered for a moment that felt like forever, unsure whether he had pushed too lightly and would fall forward again, or pushed too hard and would tumble off the back of the rock.

  But he found his balance. He stood up.

  A rock hit him in the shoulder just as he was standing up. For a moment he lost his balance, could have fallen, but he recovered and turned to see a boy of perhaps his own age, maybe older, standing on the first rock from the shore, where the dead boy had started his fatal journey, and he was preparing to hurl an even bigger rock.

  It was not as if Rigg had anywhere to hide.

  So he had no choice but to try to slap the rock away with his bare hands. Rigg quickly discovered that his own slapping motion caused him to lose his balance as surely as if the rock had hit him. Somehow, though, he managed to twist himself and turn his fall into a lunge that got him, barely, onto the next rock back from the falls.

  “Stop it!” cried Rigg.

  But the rock-throwing boy couldn’t hear him. Only the boy’s scream had been loud enough to be audible over the roaring of the water.

  Now Rigg recognized him—this was Umbo, a village boy, son of the cobbler, who had been his best friend when they were both much younger, and Father had kept him longer in Fall Ford than in recent years.

  Now Rigg realized why he had known the boy who fell—it was Umbo’s little brother, Kyokay, a daredevil of a boy who was always getting into trouble and always taking insane chances. The boy’s arm had been in splints, healing from a break, during the time Rigg and Umbo had been friends, but even then he would climb impossible trees and leap from high places onto rough ground, so that Umbo constantly had to go and stop him or rescue him or scream at him.