Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  The message in every face was the same, if he could dare to believe it. All the men and women who came into the room looked at him with warmth. With—or so it seemed to him—affection.

  As he held their hands, and they held his, each one said his or her area of specialty. Not the general subject matter, like botany or physics, but the particular study that had made their reputation. “Mutation of plants through interspecies pollination.” “Propulsion of machinery through the controlled release of steam.” “The redevelopment of noun declensions through the accretion of particles in the transition from Middle to Late Umik.” “The tails of comets considered as ice boiled off by the heat of the sun.”

  Each one, after letting go of his hand, stepped back to let the next approach. In the end, they formed two lines, and it was into the space between them that the last two from the other room finally came. The botanist was one, and the other was the woman who had asked him the practical and dangerous question near the end. Her face was set and hard—it was quite possible the botanist had been telling her off. Even now, she hung back and let the botanist come to Rigg ahead of her.

  The botanist took his hands and said, “Alteration of a species through direct injection of cell nuclei from a species with a desired trait.” Then he stepped back.

  The old woman came last. She took his hands as the others had, but said nothing.

  “Go ahead,” the botanist said.

  The old woman cocked her head slightly and got a touch of a smile. “The likelihood of two separate origins for the flora and fauna of this wallfold.”

  This was something Rigg had never heard of—something Father had never touched on. “How could they be separate?” he asked. “Did life begin twice?”

  She winked, even as a few of the other scholars groaned.

  “That’s not the subject of her master piece,” said the botanist. “This is the scab she picks whenever she can find someone willing to listen to her. Her paper on that topic was never published.”

  “Will I see you in the library?” Rigg asked the woman.

  She smiled. “Isn’t the question whether we’ll see you?” Then she let go of his hands and left the room, walking out into the garden.

  Flacommo must have been waiting outside, because Rigg could hear his voice as he protested that she couldn’t want to leave without sharing the meal that his cooks had prepared for such distinguished company.

  “She was once very great,” said the botanist.

  Rigg looked at him; he was watching her through the still-open door.

  “Who is she?” asked Rigg.

  “Bleht. She practically invented the science of microbiology, or revived it, anyway. But she got on a weird kick about two separate streams of evolution that only came together eleven thousand years ago—mystical claptrap. What does an ancient religious calendar have to do with science, I’d like to know,” said the botanist.

  But Rigg understood immediately what she meant. He had skinned and gutted many of the “anomalous creatures,” as Father called them, and knew well how their anatomy differed from the patterns of most of the animals. He had also had to learn the “anomalous plants,” for the excellent reason that they could not be digested by humans and sometimes had toxic effects.

  Now, just from her words, it occurred to him that instead of regarding these anomalous beasts and plants as the result of random chance, what if they were all related to each other? Instead of one great stream of life, with inexplicable variations, could there really be two streams of life, each one consistent within itself?

  “I can see you’re taking her seriously,” said the botanist.

  “He’s young,” said the physicist—a woman, and probably the youngest of them all; Rigg put her age at about thirty. “Of course he’s intrigued.”

  Rigg was more than intrigued. He was already thinking through what he had found when he gutted ebbecks and weebears. Were they similar to each other? And which scavengers did they find devouring the carcasses after Rigg had taken the skins? Were they all anomalies, too? He wanted to go back—with Umbo in tow—so he could look at the paths of anomalous creatures and see whether they fed selectively on anomalous plants, and whether the predators of odd sorts hunted only odd prey.

  Surely if there were such a pattern, Father would have pointed it out.

  Or maybe Father was hoping he’d notice it on his own.

  He noticed it now. He hadn’t made a study of it, so he couldn’t be sure, but what he could remember at this moment didn’t contradict her idea.

  The scholars dined together—except Bleht—and conversed with Rigg quite readily. It seemed to him that they would not have been so comfortable talking with him if they intended to give a negative report on his examination.

  And so it turned out. The next morning four men in the uniform of the City Guard arrived to escort him from Flacommo’s house to the library.

  Rigg had hoped to catch a glimpse of the city of Aressa Sessamo, but he was disappointed. He could hear the sounds of a large city, but from a distance. Flacommo’s house was surrounded on three sides by other huge houses of similar design—high walls surrounding a central garden, with no windows facing out. The streets had only local traffic—servants on errands, a few people of some wealth and standing walking or riding, a few mothers—or nannies?—with children.

  And on the fourth side—directly across the wide tree-lined avenue from Flacommo’s house—were the gardens of the library.

  Rigg knew already from studying the paths that moved through them that the library’s large buildings stood well apart from each other, each one making a stately impression of its own, showing the architectural style that was in favor at the time it was added. The library buildings stood on a built-up rise of ground—there were no natural hills in this delta country. The mansions were also on raised ground, though not so high; between them, just across the avenue, were the tiny apartments that were provided free for visiting scholars while conducting their library research. The librarians themselves lived in the attics above the stacks of books.

  Rigg believed that Umbo and Loaf would try to reach Aressa Sessamo, as soon as Umbo had learned how to deliver messages to himself and Rigg in the past. Rigg had hoped that the library might be a place where they could meet, but now it was clear that he would have to find another way to get to them. It wasn’t likely they would be able to pass themselves off as scholars, and if they tried to walk around in this part of the city they would instantly be recognized as interlopers. They would never be able to come anywhere near him.

  The first morning, they took him to the Library of Life, where he hoped to meet Bleht. Instead, he was given into the charge of a young assistant librarian who led him on a tour of the building, with the guards in tow. The assistant was a woman of no more than twenty, and she put on quite a show of being very bored and put upon, having to take a child on a tour. She even remarked to the guards about the irony that the Revolutionary Council still provided special services for the royals.

  Rigg let her attitude roll off him. He did not try to chat with her—or the guards, for that matter, having learned some kind of lesson from his time with Shouter. But when he wanted more information, he asked her, and since she really did love the place, his questions led her to occasional displays of enthusiasm, though she soon caught herself and resumed her cold attitude. But it was a little less cold as the hours progressed.

  On the outside, the building looked like a simple rectangle. Inside, though, it was a labyrinth, and Rigg reflected that if he did not have his ability to retrace his own path he might never find his way out again. The shelves of books he had expected, but there were also bins where old scrolls were kept, and catalogues that listed abstracts of books that existed only on thin sheets of metal, baked-clay tablets, tree bark, and animal skins.

  “Aren’t these so ancient that their science has nothing to teach us?” asked Rigg.

  “This isn’t just a library of contemporary biology,”
she answered coldly. “We also keep the entire history of the life sciences, so that we can see how we got to our present understanding.”

  “Were there any civilizations of the past that surpassed us in understanding of some areas of biology?”

  “I’m not a historical librarian,” she said. “I supervise the record-keeping in the laboratories, and since very few scholars are using the labs right now, they decided I was free to waste a morning.”

  “But then you must be involved with the cutting edge of science all the time,” said Rigg.

  She did not answer—but a little more of the hostility drained away from her. Still, she didn’t even bother to say good-bye when the noon bell rang and it was time for him to go.

  On the way out of the building, the guards twice got lost enough that he had to correct them and lead them out himself. They went back to Flacommo’s house, which was only five minutes’ walk, to eat, and then returned, this time to the Library of Past Lives. This time his guide was not a librarian but a young scholar who was drafted into the service. He wasn’t hostile at all, and if it were not for the glowering guards, he might have spent the whole time quizzing Rigg on what the Empress Hagia Sessamin was like, and whether he had seen the mysterious Param.

  At the end of the day, the guards were going to lead Rigg straight back to Flacommo’s house, but Rigg asked to see whoever was in charge.

  “In charge of what?” asked the scholar. “Each library has its own dean or mayor or rector—they all have different titles—and nobody’s in charge of the whole thing.”

  “I think I need to see whoever is in charge of me.”

  “You?” asked the scholar. “Aren’t these men . . .”

  “Somebody decided the order in which I should tour the libraries. Somebody drafted you to lead me through this one. Who is making those decisions?”

  “Oh. I don’t know.”

  “This is a library,” said Rigg. “Could we look it up?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  So the guards sighed and sat down, insisting that Rigg do the same, for the long fifteen minutes before the scholar returned with a fierce-looking elderly woman. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “I want to stop wasting the time of young scholars and librarians,” said Rigg. “For all that each library has unique features, the differences could be explained to me in fifteen minutes. But even that isn’t necessary. I want to end the tour and begin my research.”

  “I was told to give you a tour,” said the woman coldly.

  “And I was given a splendid one,” said Rigg gently. “But who knows how long I have to live? I’d like to be taken to whoever would have the records of my father’s research.”

  “And your father is . . .?”

  Rigg couldn’t believe she was asking. During his moment of hesitation, the young scholar piped up—and couldn’t keep all of the scorn out of his voice, for to him it seemed impossible that someone might not know who the father of Rigg Sessamekesh must be.

  “Knosso Sissamik,” he said. “He was a noted scholar and he died at the Wall.”

  “I don’t keep track of former royals the way some do,” said the old woman. “And Knosso whatever-his-name was a physicist. That’s the Library of Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  The old woman had her spiel ready. “Physicists long since determined that most of space was empty, and most of each atom was empty, so that the overwhelming nature of the universe is nothingness, with tiny interruptions that contain all of existence. So their library is named for this Nothing that comprises most of the universe. And the mathematicians share the space, because they are proud to say that what they study is even less real than what the physicists study, so their portion is called the Library of Less than Nothing.”

  Rigg decided he was going to like the physicists. It seemed to him, though, that the mathematicians must have an annoying competitive streak.

  The next day he was taken straight to the Library of Nothing and shown a list of the books Father Knosso had read in the last two years of his life. It was a very long list, and as Rigg began to open and try to read them, he realized that there were technical words and mathematical operations he did not understand. So he began a remedial course of his own design, to prepare himself to make sense of what his father Knosso had thought was worth spending his time on.

  The days settled into a routine that spanned several weeks, and Rigg was making real progress. He still couldn’t understand any of the books on Knosso’s list, but he at least recognized most of the terms and he felt as though he was on the verge of grasping enough that he could figure out what Father Knosso had built his theories on.

  But as he sat at his small table with books open before him, the guards often slept, and he used those opportunities to close his eyes and study the paths around him. One of these paths, he knew, belonged to Father Knosso. He had never lived in Flacommo’s house—his widow and daughter moved there only after his death. But he had been here, in this library, and by finding all the books he had read, Rigg hoped to identify a path that connected with them all.

  Finally he found it, by following a likely candidate backward and backward in time until he went—or, to be correct, came from—the home he then shared with Mother. Their paths intersected, again and again; it could be no one but Father Knosso.

  For a moment he wished Umbo were there, so that he could actually see him. The royal family had been forbidden to have portraits taken—there was no image of his father to give him any idea of his face. But his path was distinctive enough. Now that he had identified it, Rigg could spot it easily.

  And after a while, he began to notice something rather surprising. Father Knosso did, indeed, study all the books on the list. But he also ventured into other libraries, particularly the Library of Past Lives and the Library of Dead Words. Rigg found excuses to go to each of these places and retrace his father’s steps. The librarians in each place assured him that books were still stored in the same general area, usually even the same shelf, as during his father’s time. But he never checked out any books from these libraries, so there was no record.

  Still, Rigg learned something—from the Library of Dead Words, he assembled a list of languages whose shelf areas Father Knosso had visited; from Past Lives, he put together a list of historical periods and topics that had interested him. A pattern emerged.

  Father Knosso’s search had involved physics, yes—but he had been looking into observations of the Wall from many cultures and languages, stretching at least eight thousand years into the past. Did he think that in some ancient time, someone had found a way through the Wall? There were stories of saints and heroes that came from Overwall, or returned there in death, but the same stories told of them leaping between stars, creating earthquakes and volcanoes, and building machines that came to life.

  No educated man would take them seriously. And even if Father Knosso had given them some credence, Rigg never could—hadn’t he been a participant in the true events behind the myth of the Wandering Saint?

  What else, then? Had Father Knosso been looking for a time before the Wall? Everybody knew there was no such time—the Wall had always been there. Then again, just because everybody knew it didn’t mean it was true.

  And why would he avoid leaving a written record of his researches into the past? There was something more going on than mere physics; there must be a political slant to it as well, or Father Knosso would not have been so wary.

  But without the specific titles Father Knosso had studied, Rigg couldn’t think of a way to learn what Father Knosso had tried to learn.

  The library took up his days, but his evenings and nights and early mornings were spent in Flacommo’s house. Rigg took to sleeping in different places each night, often simply curling up in the garden, which reminded him a little bit of nights in the wild with Father. Rigg helped in the kitchen and maintained his friendship with the bakers of both shifts, especially Lolonga’s son Long, who treat
ed Rigg like a regular person instead of something either contemptible or lofty. Of course, as soon as it became known that Long and Rigg spent time together, Long was summoned to various alehouses and parks and shops for periodic interrogations.

  As soon as Rigg realized this was going on, he told Long, “Tell them everything. I don’t say or do anything that needs to be hidden.” This eased Long’s mind considerably.

  Rigg’s statement was true enough, though he omitted the words “with you.” He did plenty of things alone that he did not want reported to anybody.

  Mostly what he did was try to communicate with Param. Partly because meeting her was the only thing Father had actually told him to do, and partly because he wanted to get to know her and win her trust. Messages he left with Mother were useless—she relayed them faithfully enough, but there was never an answer. Besides, there were things he needed to discuss with Param that Mother could not know about.

  So he took to carrying around a slate, like a schoolchild. He told Flacommo, when asking for the use of one, that he must have it to practice mathematical calculations that he needed in order to understand the physics books he was studying. And he really used the slate for that . . . except when Rigg saw that Param’s path was approaching him.

  Then he would erase a corner of the slate and write messages to her. He would print them out and then hold the slate as still as he could, so that she could still have plenty of time to read them. And he saw right away that she was reading them, for she orbited around him while he was writing to her, though she couldn’t answer with chalk or voice.

  He told her little bits about his own life—about Father, how he died, how they had lived together. About discovering the truth—especially that he had a sister, something he had never suspected until Father lay there dying and told him to go find her.