Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  “Whatever enhances the ability of the human race to survive in the face of threats.”

  “What threats?”

  “In descending order of likelihood of extinction of the species: collision with meteors above a certain combined mass and velocity; eruption of volcanoes that produce above a certain amount of certain kinds of ejecta; plagues above a certain mortality rate and contagiousness; war employing weapons above a certain level and permanence of destructive power; stellar events that decrease the viability of life—”

  “It seems to me,” said Ram, “that if we succeed in planting a viable human colony on this new world, we will have made it impossible for any of these to wipe out the species.”

  “And if we succeed in planting nineteen viable human colonies—”

  “All nineteen would be equally affected by your list of dangers, should they happen to this planet or this star. One bad meteor collision wipes out all nineteen.”

  “Yes,” said the expendable.

  “Yet it matters to you that we specify nineteen colonies, and not just one.”

  “Yes,” said the expendable.

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re waiting for me to make a decision about something.”

  “Yes,” said the expendable.

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” said Ram.

  “We cannot think of the thing we cannot think of,” said the expend able. “It would be unthinkable.”

  Ram thought about this for a long time. He made many guesses about what the required decision might be. He said only a few of them aloud, and the expendable agreed every time that this would be a useful decision, but it was not the crucial one.

  A decision that would explain the importance of having nineteen colonies in order to preserve and advance the survival of the human species. Ram went through every decision that would have to be made, including the degree of destruction of the native flora and fauna that might be required, and won the agreement of the expendables that every effort would be made to create a thorough and representative genetic record, seed bank, and embryana of the native life forms of the planet, so that anything destroyed in the process of establishing the colonies might be restored at some later date.

  But even this decision was not the crucial one.

  And then one morning he realized what the expendables were waiting for. It came to him as he was pondering what it meant that the computers and expendables agreed that the cloning of the starship and the travel backward in time were caused by Ram himself. Most humans could not alter the flow of time. One might say that no human had ever done so. And if that statement was still true . . .

  “I am human,” said Ram, with perhaps more emphasis than the sentence required.

  “Thank you,” said the expendable.

  “Is that the full decision that you wanted?”

  “If that is the full decision that you want, then we are satisfied.”

  This was such an ambiguous answer that Ram demanded clarification.

  “But there is nothing to clarify,” said the expendable. “If it is your full decision, complete and final, we will act accordingly.”

  “Then it is not my final decision until I understand all the implications of it.”

  “It is not within the capacity of a human mind to understand all the implications of anything. Your lifespan is not long enough.”

  That had been time enough for Ram to put the situation, as he understood it, into words. “What you seem to need,” said Ram, “is a definition of ‘human species’ before you can plan the colonies. This means that you contemplate circumstances in which the definition of ‘human species’ might be in question.”

  “We contemplate billions of circumstances,” said the expendable.

  “But not all of them?”

  “Our lifespan, too, is finite,” said the expendable.

  Another question occurred to Ram. “Do you have evidence that there is a species on the new planet that might have intelligence at the level of humans?”

  “No.”

  “Or above the human level?”

  “No.”

  So they weren’t trying to squeeze an alien species into the definition of what was human.

  But they needed to be reassured, thought Ram, that whatever I am, it is included in the definition of the human species. Otherwise, I would have been used to advance the survival of the colonists and their offspring, but my own genetic survival would not have been protected, because I am so different from other human beings that something going on in my mind affected the flow of time and the fabric of reality.

  If I reproduce, then my difference might be passed on to my descendants. For that matter, living here in isolation from the rest of the human race for at least 11,191 years, who could guess what other differences might develop between us and the rest of the human species back on Earth?

  Ram did his best to be precise, to speak like a scientist or lawyer. “The definition of ‘human species’ shall include the existing range of genetic variability and all variations of it that might come to be, as long as the variations are not likely to be harmful to the survival of the human species in general.”

  “Vague,” said the expendable.

  “On this world or any other,” Ram added.

  The expendable said nothing.

  Ram thought a moment and tried again. “‘Human species’ means the interreproducing gene pool now understood to be human, plus all future variations on the human genome even if they cannot interreproduce with the existing gene pool, provided that the future variants do not threaten to destroy or weaken the survival chances of the existing gene pool, either deliberately or inadvertently.”

  The expendable was silent for a long five seconds.

  “We have discussed your definition, analyzed its ramifications to a reasonable depth, and accept it,” said the expendable.

  “Meaning that I gave you what you wanted?”

  “Ambition and desire are human traits. You gave us what we lacked.”

  • • •

  While Rigg had the ability to perceive paths without regard to walls or distance, in the confusion of Aressa Sessamo there was a practical limit to how far he could follow any path that wove in and out among all the threads of the city. Here inside the walls of Flacommo’s house, Rigg could track everyone who had ever lived here, though most of them weren’t interesting. Rigg mostly cared about people who came in and out of the house for the past year or so—and the paths that revealed to him the secret passages of the house.

  He also tried tracing the paths of the spies who watched from peepholes in the walls, but once they left the house, they took convoluted paths through the busiest streets, like fugitives walking up or down a stream in order to confuse the dogs tracking them by scent. He wondered if they had some idea of what he could do, but then saw that they followed this pattern long before Rigg came here—before anyone here knew he was still alive. Perhaps the spies simply walked on the main streets like anyone else, and it was mere chance that it made it impossible for Rigg to keep them clearly in view far enough to know whom they reported to. Or perhaps they were choosing evasive routes in order to avoid observation by ordinary agents of some other faction or power.

  They definitely did not report to Flacommo. As far as Rigg could tell, nobody did—not even the servants. The cooks and bakers cooked what they wanted; the housekeeper made up whatever schedule she pleased. Flacommo simply wandered around the house, talking to whomever he happened to meet. He was like a toddler, wandering to wherever something interesting was going on and then getting underfoot.

  Rigg wasn’t sure whether going to the library would help him solve this problem—he could see the paths that wound through the buildings of the library, which weren’t far away, and while they were clear and orderly in a way the paths of the city streets were not, neither did any of the spies ever go there.

  So if he got to the library, Rigg’s research would b
e exactly what he said it would be—an attempt to duplicate everything that his real father, Knosso, had studied in order to discover whatever it was he knew. Which might be nothing at all—it didn’t take a deep knowledge of theoretical physics to figure out that you might be able to make it through the Wall in a state of drug-induced unconsciousness.

  But Father Knosso had studied the human brain in order to develop the sedatives he used. And if there was anything Rigg desperately needed to understand, it was the workings of the human brain. His own in particular, but a nice working knowledge of Umbo’s and Param’s and even Nox’s would be very useful, too.

  At the same time, he couldn’t think of any reason why the Revolutionary Council would want to let him go anywhere or do anything—particularly something that he wanted to do. It might be a simple matter of policy that if the royal son, whose very existence is an affront both to the Revolutionary Council and to the matriarchal royal line, wants to do something, it must not be permitted.

  Apparently, though, there were enough partisans of the male line—or enough people who thought it might be easier to kill him outside the walls of Flacommo’s house—that a bevy of scholars descended upon the house early one morning, without any kind of warning. “Because, you see,” said the elderly botanist who seemed to be in charge, “we didn’t want you to have any chance to prepare.”

  “Beyond my lifetime of preparation,” said Rigg.

  “That goes without saying,” said the botanist.

  “I’m curious about the standard of judgment that you’ll use. Do I have to have the same level of knowledge as you? Aren’t there younger scholars who know less than you do, who are still scholars?”

  “We are much less interested in the quantity or even the quality of your knowledge,” said the botanist, “than we are in the quality and quickness of your mind.”

  “And are there no slow scholars among you?”

  “Many are slow to remember the things that most people consider to be essentials of life,” said the botanist, “but all are quick enough to reason, to recognize illogic and error and unlikelihood. And in case you’re wondering, the test has already begun, and I’m not sure I like the cautious way you are trying to influence the ground rules in advance.”

  “You leap to the conclusion that my goal is to influence them rather than merely discover them,” said Rigg.

  “Discovering the rules will do you no good,” said the botanist, “because you will either think like a scholar or not, and if you don’t, it will be because you can’t, and if you can’t, no advance information will help you.”

  “Fair enough,” said Rigg. “One point against me.”

  “We are not keeping score,” said the botanist. “We are forming an impression.”

  “Then I will stop trying to control things and surrender to your questioning.”

  “Even with that statement you are trying to explain yourself, when silence would have been wiser.”

  Rigg kept his silence.

  The scholars went into the most comfortable parlor. Rigg sat on a backless stool in the next room, where he could not see any of them, but could hear anything they said loudly.

  Rigg also noticed that two of the spies-in-the-walls were there to watch him and his examiners.

  The questions began innocuously enough. They were so easy, in fact, that Rigg kept trying to find overcomplicated answers, fearing some kind of trick or trap. Until the botanist sighed and said, “If you keep answering like this we’ll never finish before some of us—including, probably, me—have died of old age. We aren’t trying to trick you, we’re trying get to know you. If a question seems simple, it is simple.”

  “Oh,” said Rigg.

  Now things moved very quickly. Often he could answer in a few words. They checked his general knowledge of history, botany, zoology, grammar, languages, physics, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, and engineering. They asked him nothing about music or any of the arts; they steered clear of any history that involved the glorious Revolution or any events since.

  Rigg confessed ignorance more frequently the farther they went. He stayed right with the zoologists—he had spent most of his life tracking, trapping, skinning, dissecting, cooking, and eating the fauna of the highlands to the south, and he enjoyed answering those questions in greater detail than was probably necessary. He enjoyed showing off.

  But even in the areas where he didn’t have anywhere near as much experience, he held his own. Father had quizzed him constantly, and Rigg responded to these examiners exactly as he would have responded to Father, though with less flippancy. When he didn’t know the answer, he would say so; when he had a guess, he would identify it as speculation and explain why he thought it might be so.

  He soon realized that they were actually more interested in his guesses than in his knowledge. Once they knew he had a deep and wide knowledge of the vertebrates, they left zoology alone; whatever he knew little about, but still made guesses, they would pursue sharply. Always they brought him to a point where he had to say, “I just don’t know enough about it to make any kind of answer.”

  “Where would you look, then?” the physicist finally asked. “Where within the library?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rigg.

  “If you don’t know where to look for the answer, then what good will the library do you?” the physicist demanded.

  Rigg allowed his voice to reveal a little impatience. “I’m from upriver. I’ve never been in a library in my life. That’s why I want to be allowed to study in the Great Library here—so I can begin to find out where I would look for answers to questions like these.”

  “There was a library in O,” said the botanist. “Why didn’t you go there to pursue your studies?”

  “I was not planning to be a scholar then,” said Rigg. “I was still following what I thought was my father’s plan—that is, the man I thought was my father. By the time I got here, I realized either my father had no plan, or his plan simply didn’t work. So now I can choose for myself what I want to do. Only I don’t have enough information to make an intelligent decision about anything. So I thought I might attempt to add to what my father taught me, since his teachings were obviously incomplete.”

  “All teachings are incomplete,” said the historian impatiently.

  “And yet a wise man tries to add to his knowledge before making crucial decisions,” said Rigg.

  “What sorts of decisions are you hoping to make?” asked the botanist.

  “I don’t know enough to know what I need to know in order to decide what I need to decide,” said Rigg.

  Rigg could sense that one of the scholars in the next room had stood up and was now pacing. Her voice was old-sounding. “There might be those who think your position here—as a member of the discredited royal family—”

  Several of the other scholars got up, and one started toward her.

  “I’m not speaking treason, I’m saying what everyone in this room knows, so sit down and let’s see how he answers!”

  Rigg tried to remember who the speaker was, but finally concluded it was someone who had not spoken before.

  “As I was saying, there might be those who think that it doesn’t matter in the slightest what you decide about anything. For the rest of your life, other people will decide everything that matters, including whether you live or die.”

  She sat back down. Again there were murmurs of protest, but Rigg spoke loudly to cut them off. “I’m not afraid to face the situation I’m in. I’m quite aware that my power to decide is limited right now, and might be ended completely at any time. There have already been two attempts on my life since I was arrested—two that I know of, that is. In both cases, I managed to be alert enough to stay alive, but how long can I keep that up? One of you will have to write about that after the answer is known.”

  There were a few nervous chuckles.

  “But there’s always the chance that I might not die young. How will I occupy the long years of a very l
imited kind of life? My choice is to pursue scholarship. To do that I need to find out what I’m good at. To do that I need to have access to the library. Eventually I may be able to contribute to the sum of human knowledge. If I don’t, then at least I will have had an interesting life. A larger life than is possible in this house, with so few books.”

  More murmuring, and then someone started to speak. Rigg didn’t even let him get a whole word out. “Please! Learned doctors and philosophers like you certainly have enough answers from me to make your decision. Let me ask you a question.”

  “We are not here to be examined,” said the botanist stiffly. “And you do not decide when the—”

  “Of course you’re here to be examined,” said Rigg. “All of you have carefully phrased your questions so as to impress each other with your profundity. I know you’ve impressed me. So I want to ask you all: What do you expect of a child my age? I am all potential, without accomplishments. If I were your student, would you find me promising? Would you trust me with a book in my hands? Is mine a mind worth teaching? My father thought so, because he spent every waking moment doing it, and then testing me on it—including the very kinds of tests that you’ve been putting me through here, taking me beyond the boundaries of my education, seeing what I could figure out for myself. He died without telling me whether I was meeting his standards or not. He never said or implied that I had learned enough about anything. But he also never stopped teaching me. Was my father right? Am I worth teaching? And if I’m not, why in the world have you spent all these hours pressing me further? Is there some great wisdom to be gained by calibrating exactly how worthless a mind I have?”

  “This examination is over,” said the botanist.

  Gratefully Rigg rose from his stool. His back was as tired as if he’d slept on cold hard ground. He had probably offended everyone by his final question, but there was a point where continuing the examination was a waste of everyone’s time.

  To his surprise, the scholars did not go out the door leading into the garden. Instead, most of them came immediately into the room where Rigg was stretching himself. Some of them walked with great dignity, but others rushed in, hands extended. They said nothing at first. But each in turn held out a hand to him. Rigg took each hand, held it for a moment between his, and looked into their eyes.