Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  “Why not?” asked Umbo.

  “Because,” said Rigg, putting things together the way Father had taught him, “the army doesn’t want any of its enemies to have an accurate map of the world.”

  “Exactly,” said Loaf. “Now let’s get out of here before somebody notices us lingering so long looking at the globe.”

  But Rigg would not leave, not yet. He looked at the maps of the other eighteen wallfolds and tried to imagine the cities. In one, the wallfold just to the north of the one they lived in, the cities were out on the blue part, even though the blue had to be the ocean and the rivers that feed into it. The blue covered more of the globe than Rigg had imagined possible, though Father had told him there was more ocean than land in the world. It never crossed his mind to wonder how Father could know such a thing. Father knew everything, Rigg took that for granted, but now he had to ask himself, how could Father have known how much ocean there was in the world, when you couldn’t get through the Wall?

  Father has been through the Wall.

  No, thought Rigg. Father merely came here to the Tower of O and reached the same conclusion we did.

  But someone must have been through the Wall, or this map could never have been made.

  Until today Rigg had never even worried about the Wall. He knew it was there, everybody knew it was there, and so what? It was the edge of the wallfold, which meant it was the edge of the world. You didn’t even think about it. But now, in this moment, knowing that there were eighteen other wallfolds, all of them surrounded by an invisible Wall, Rigg longed to get to one of the other wallfolds and see who lived there and what they were like.

  And the only thing blocking him was an invisible Wall, one that supposedly drove you crazy if you got too near. But you could see through it. You should be able to walk through and get to the other side.

  At last Rigg gave in to Loaf’s prodding, and they set out on the downward ramp. “I’m going to go to the Wall,” said Rigg softly.

  “No you’re not,” said Loaf. “Unless you’re a criminal or a rebel, and then it will be the job of somebody like me to hunt you down and kill you.”

  “I’m going to go there and see the paths,” said Rigg. “If anybody ever crossed the Wall, I’ll be able to see where. And if I have you with me, Umbo, I’ll be able to go back and ask them how they’re going to do it. How it’s done. Just before they cross I’ll ask them.”

  “Unless it was somebody like your father,” said Umbo, “who made no path.”

  “True. If Father crossed I wouldn’t know it.”

  “Or anybody like your father.”

  “There’s nobody like my father,” said Rigg.

  “That you know of,” said Umbo. “Because if there were others before him who left no path, you wouldn’t know about them.”

  “That’s kind of an important hole in your talent, there, Rigg,” said Loaf. “That’s like saying, ‘We have a spy network that sees all our enemies . . . except the ones we can’t see.’ How sound do you think that sergeant will sleep at night?”

  “There could be hundreds like your father,” said Umbo.

  “Father wasn’t invisible,” said Rigg. “If we had ever run into somebody else without a path, I would have known it.”

  “But you never saw many people,” said Umbo. “You just went out into the woods and then came to Fall Ford and how many other villages did you even visit?”

  “A few. Mostly tiny ones above Upsheer,” said Rigg.

  “Hardly anybody,” said Umbo. “So that means there could be hundreds like your father, and you wouldn’t know it.”

  “Father would have told me,” said Rigg.

  “Unless he thought it wasn’t good for you to know,” said Umbo.

  Rigg had to admit, that was the truth.

  At last they reached the bottom and passed through the entrance of the tower into the bright noon sunlight. It had taken at least an hour to get up, and almost as long to get down, and despite all the things they said and observed up in the tower, they hadn’t been there all that long.

  “They’re checking people,” said Rigg.

  He only noticed it because he saw the converging paths of many guards—people who were not part of the general flow of pilgrims to and from the tower. There was a choke point, and they were heading for it. Rigg felt the dread from future-Umbo’s warning come to the surface. “They’re looking for someone,” he said.

  “That’s why they check people,” said Loaf.

  “Separate from us,” Rigg said to Loaf.

  “No,” said Loaf.

  “There are too many guards, you couldn’t fight them. We need you to stay free. That’s why Umbo warned us to give things to you, don’t you see? Separate from us. Drift back, don’t make a sudden movement the wrong way.”

  “I know how to do it, thank you, boy,” said Loaf. And he began to walk a little faster, drifting forward through the crowd. As he went, he took off his outer jacket and carried it, tucking his hat under the jacket as well.

  Rigg was pleased to find out that his instinct had been the same as a soldier’s knowledge.

  But after a while, Loaf drifted back to them. “It’s Cooper, the banker,” said Loaf. “He’ll know my face.”

  “Cooper?” asked Rigg.

  “There are two officers of the People’s Army with him, letting him look at everybody who passes. One of the officers is very high, a general I’m sure.”

  “I thought the People’s Army had no ranks,” said Umbo.

  “They have no insignias of rank,” said Loaf dismissively. “But a general is a general. Look, Rigg, if Cooper hadn’t been scrutinizing all the nearer faces, he would have seen me—I was in plain view.”

  “Maybe he’s looking for someone else,” said Umbo.

  But Rigg knew that for some reason, on some pretext, Cooper had betrayed them. “Go back into the Tower of O and wait for a couple of hours.”

  “Cooper will just tell them to look for me inside,” said Loaf.

  “No,” said Rigg. “We’ll tell them you left us hours ago because you were tired and didn’t want to climb. Do you have the money?”

  “Most of it. But they’ll still search my luggage,” said Loaf.

  “I’ll try to get them to turn Umbo loose, too,” said Rigg. “I’m the one Cooper wants.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m the one who owns the money,” said Rigg. “I should have known it was too good to be true.”

  Umbo spoke up, his face reddening. “Loaf, I didn’t put the knife in your luggage.”

  “Why not?” asked Rigg.

  “Where did you put it?” asked Loaf.

  “Behind a barrel of salt pork in the boat’s galley,” said Umbo.

  “Got it,” said Loaf. Then he drifted back in the queue, made a show of looking for something, and then went back against the flow of the crowd, ostensibly to find it.

  “Why did you lie about the knife?” asked Rigg, as he and Umbo continued forward toward the checkpoint.

  “I told you I put it in Loaf’s bags so you wouldn’t think I was trying to steal it. You even said yourself that you wouldn’t trust me if you thought I was stealing.”

  “Umbo,” said Rigg, “I was wrong when I said I wouldn’t trust you. I trust you with my life.”

  Umbo said nothing.

  Rigg tried to keep other people between him and Cooper—he wanted to give Loaf plenty of time to get back inside the tower.

  “Father always accused me of the worst thing,” said Umbo. “Whatever it was, he always said I was planning to do it. I’m just . . . used to it.”

  “We’re friends, Umbo,” said Rigg. “Now try to act stupid and confused.”

  “That won’t be acting,” said Umbo.

  “I’m going to try to get you out of this,” said Rigg.

  Then the people in front moved quickly forward and Rigg was staring Cooper in the face.

  “That’s him,” said Cooper. “That’s the boy
who’s claiming to be a prince.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Umbo

  “If we are trapped inside the same starship, Ram, on the same voyage, moving backwards through time,” said the expendable, “why did the ship’s computers show that we made the jump successfully?”

  “What were the criteria for determining a successful jump?” asked Ram.

  “Observations of the positions of distant stars relative to how they should look near the target star system.”

  “Can you bring up an image of what the stars looked like at the moment the computers determined that the jump was successful?”

  In an instant, a hologram of a starfield appeared in the air over Ram’s console.

  “I take it that’s not the appearance of the stars around our present position.”

  “Correct,” said the expendable.

  “How long did the stars have the appearance recorded here?”

  “The scan was repeated three nanoseconds later and the stars were as they had been just before the jump.”

  “So we made the jump, and then we unjumped,” said Ram.

  “So it seems.”

  “And we’re sure that this wasn’t just a glitch? That the computers weren’t just ‘detecting’ what they were predicted to detect?”

  “No, because the starfield of the target was not quite identical to the prediction.”

  “Show me the difference,” said Ram.

  The starfield view on his holodisplay changed to show yellow and green dots instead of white ones.

  “The nearest stars show the most difference, and the farthest ones the least,” Ram observed.

  “Not always,” said the expendable, pointing to the few exceptions. “This is expected because our observations of the universe are based on old data—light that has had to travel ninety lightyears to reach Earth.”

  “Didn’t the astronomers allow for that?”

  “Yes,” said the expendable. “But it was partly guesswork.”

  “Let’s play a game,” said Ram. “What if the difference between the prediction and what was observed in that less-than-three-nanosecond interval could be explained, not by astronomer error, but by the passage of time. Is there some point in the future or in the past when the stars would be in these positions relative to the target star system?”

  One second. Two seconds.

  “Eleven thousand years ago, roughly speaking,” said the expendable.

  “So when we made our jump through a stuttering, quantized fold in spacetime, the fold didn’t just move us through space, it also moved us backward in time.”

  “That is one explanation,” said the expendable.

  “And so we got hurtled back into our previous position in spacetime, only progressing backward.”

  “So it would seem,” said the expendable.

  “That must have taken enormous energy,” said Ram. “To move us eleven thousand years backward in history, and then to recoil back to the present while reversing the flow of time.”

  “It might have,” said the expendable, “if we understood how this actually works.”

  “Please tell the computers to calculate what laws of physics would explain an exactly equal expenditure of energy for the two operations—passing through the fold into the past, and passing back but reversing direction.”

  • • •

  Umbo tried not to glare at Cooper. Stupid and confused, that’s how he was supposed to act. So he stared at the officers. Loaf had been right—the one with the more rumpled-looking uniform was showing nothing on his face, but there was something about his posture, the tilt of his head, that suggested he expected to be noticed and obeyed.

  Umbo had expected that Rigg would talk to Cooper, challenge him, argue with him. But instead Rigg was as silent as Umbo. And when Umbo stole a glance at Rigg, he was looking the general straight in the face—not defiantly, but with the same steadiness as a bird.

  “You thought I was fooled by your act, didn’t you, boy!” said Mr. Cooper. “All your strutting and posing, but the moment I saw your signature on the paper I knew you were a fraud and a thief.”

  Umbo wanted to answer him, to say, You certainly gave us a lot of money for someone who knew we were frauds and thieves. He wanted to say, Rigg never even knew that was his name until he saw it on the paper. But instead Umbo said nothing, as Rigg was doing.

  “Well, I notified the authorities in Aressa Sessamo that a boy was claiming to be the dead prince and had an ancient jewel—”

  “Rigg Sessamekesh” was the name of a dead prince? Rigg had never heard of him, if that was so. But then, the People’s Revolutionary Council had made it illegal to talk about royals. Not that people in Fall Ford would have worried much about such a law, from such a far-off government. They simply didn’t care about royals, or the People’s Council either, for that matter. So until this moment Rigg had no idea that the name Father wrote on the paper meant anything except Rigg himself.

  “That’s more of our business than needs to be discussed here,” said the officer who wasn’t the general. “You said there was a man.”

  “A big man, a roadhouse keeper, they called him Loaf,” said Cooper.

  “And this other boy?”

  “They keep him like a pet, I have no idea what he’s good for, he’s the most ignorant privick of them all.”

  Umbo couldn’t help the way his face reddened.

  The officer chuckled. “He doesn’t like that.”

  “I said he was ignorant, not deaf,” said Cooper.

  “I notice you’re not denying anything,” said the officer to Rigg.

  Rigg turned his gaze to the officer for a long, steady moment, and then returned to looking at the general. Umbo wanted to shout with laughter. In that simple look, Rigg had as much as told the officer he was a worm, not worth talking to. And yet his expression had not changed at all.

  On impulse, Umbo started to cast his net of speeded-up time around Rigg.

  Rigg turned to him and said, “No.”

  Umbo stopped.

  “No what?” the officer demanded.

  Rigg said nothing.

  The officer turned to Umbo. “What did he tell you not to do?”

  Umbo shrugged.

  The officer seized him by the shoulder, his grip fiercely painful, as if he meant to drill a hole through his shoulder with his thumb. “What did he tell you not to do, boy?”

  “He was thinking of running,” said Rigg.

  “Oh, you can read his mind?” said the officer.

  One of the tower guards approached them gingerly. “If you’ve found them, can we let people continue to leave the tower?”

  The officer turned to him and said harshly, “Don’t bother us!”

  The general turned his head to the guard, ignoring his own subordinate from the People’s Army. “There’s no reason to block them now. Thank you for helping us.”

  The officer showed no sign that the general had just contradicted him.

  The tower guard bowed deeply. “Thank you, your excellency.”

  “The People’s Army has no ‘excellencies,’” snapped the officer.

  “Sadly enough,” said the general, “that is true. Guard, if you wouldn’t mind, could you send a man or two into the tower to search for a tall man who looks like a former soldier? I saw him with these two, and when he saw Mr. Cooper, he headed back into the tower, pretending to look for something.”

  Umbo was impressed. Maybe generals got to be generals because they were smart, or at least observant.

  Then again, the general seemed to carry himself and turn his head and speak exactly the way Rigg was acting. When Rigg told Umbo no, he had spoken with the same kind of calm authority the general used when speaking to the guard. It was a voice that expected to be obeyed—yet there was no anger or emotion in it, so that it didn’t provoke resentment. When Rigg spoke, Umbo had simply obeyed, without even thinking of arguing or doubting or even hesitating. How had Rigg learned how to do that
? He had never been in the army. But maybe it was something he learned from the Wandering Man. He had the power of command.

  What a fine thing it must have been, to be raised by the Wandering Man. And what had Rigg’s father been planning for him? Not just the jewels, not just a royal name that apparently belonged to someone who was supposed to be dead, but also this air of command, all the knowledge of finances Rigg had, his understanding of how to bargain with adults—Rigg’s father must have trained him in all of that.

  Had he foreseen this moment? Wouldn’t this make him one of the heroes, to be able to see into the future? Umbo had never heard of a hero with such a power, but wouldn’t that be a mighty gift from a god? All that Umbo and Rigg had been able to do, between them, was reach into the past—and even that was a rare gift, and hard to do.

  I will have to learn how to do it alone.

  “I’ll take the boys with me back to their boat,” said the general. “We’ll wait there while you see to getting the man called Loaf.”

  “That’s his name,” said Umbo.

  The general looked at him steadily.

  “It’s not a nickname or anything,” said Umbo. “In his native village, that’s how they name people. His wife’s name is Leaky.” Umbo had no idea why he had felt the need to speak up, but it had been an irresistible impulse. And now the tiniest trace of a smile played at the corners of the general’s mouth. Umbo looked to Rigg to see if he had said too much, but Rigg’s face was calm and showed nothing.

  “By all means,” said the general. “Wassam, the man’s name is ‘Loaf,’ so there’s no need to demand a realer-sounding one. Bring him to me unquestioned and unbeaten, please.” With that the general reached out his hands toward Umbo and Rigg. Without needing a bit of explanation, they each took one of his hands and he walked with them back toward the city.

  He held their hands lightly. But when Umbo thought—just thought—of running off, he could feel the grip tighten on his hand.

  Can the man hear my thoughts?

  No, thought Umbo. I must have tensed up just a little when the idea of running crossed my mind. Or maybe he noticed that I glanced off toward that canebrake.