CHAPTER 4
Shrine of the Wandering Saint
“How did I ever become the one to make this decision for everyone?” Ram asked aloud.
“You spent six years winning your way through the testing process,” said the expendable.
“What I meant was, Why is this choice being left up to one human being, who cannot possibly have enough information to decide?”
“You can always leave it up to me,” said the expendable.
That was the failsafe: If Ram died, or froze up, or had a crippling injury, or refused to decide, any of the expendables was prepared to take over and make the decision.
“If it were your decision,” asked Ram, “what would you decide?”
“You know I’m not allowed to answer that, Ram,” said the expendable. “Either you make the decision or you turn it over to me. But you must not ask me what I would decide. That would add an irrelevant and complicating factor to your decision. Will you choose the opposite in order to assert the difference between humans and expendables? Or follow me blindly, and then blame the expendables, on which you have no choice but to rely, if anything goes wrong?”
“I know,” said Ram.
“I know you know,” said the expendable, “and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let’s just assume the dot dot dot.”
Ram chuckled. The expendables had learned that Ram enjoyed a little sarcasm now and then, so as part of their responsibility to maintain his mental health, they all used the same degree of sarcasm in their conversations with him.
“How long do I have before I have to make the decision?”
“You can decide any time, Ram,” said the expendable.
“But there has to be a point of no return. When I either miss the fold or plunge into it.”
“Wouldn’t that be convenient,” said the expendable. “If you just wait long enough, the decision gets taken out of your hands. You will not be informed of any default decision or point of no return, because that might influence your decision.”
“The data are so ambivalent,” said Ram.
“The data have no valents, take no sides, lean in no direction, Ram,” said the expendable. “The computers do their calculations and report their findings.”
“But what do I make of the fact that all nineteen computers have such different predictions?”
“You celebrate the fact that reality is even more fuzzy than the logic algorithms in the software.”
“Whoop-de-do,” said Ram.
“What?”
“I’m celebrating.”
“Was that irony or loss of mental function?” asked the expendable.
“Was that a rhetorical question, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?”
“I have no confidence in you, Ram,” said the expendable.
“Well, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Ram wasn’t quite sure he had made the decision even as he reached over and poked his finger into the yes-option box on the computer’s display. Then it was done, and he was sure.
“So that’s it?” asked the expendable.
“Final decision,” said Ram. “And it’s the right one.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because live or die, we’ll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don’t make the jump, we’ll learn nothing, have no new options.”
“A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions.”
“Shut up,” said Ram.
The expendable laughed. That laugh—it was one of the reasons why the expendables made such good company. Even knowing that it was programmed into the expendable to laugh at just such a moment, and for just this long, tapering off in just such a way, did not keep Ram from feeling the warmth of acceptance that laughter of this kind brought to primates of the genus homo.
* * *
Rigg scanned for recent paths as he walked briskly through fields and woods. No one could hide from him. If someone had moved within the last day or two his path would be intense, and if in the last hour or so, it would be downright vivid. So if someone had set up an ambush for him, he would see by what route they had approached their hiding place, and he could avoid them.
So within a few hundred yards of Nox’s rooming house, Rigg went between a couple of buildings and stepped into the road. The whole course of the ancient highway from Upsheer to the old imperial capital at Aressa Sessamo was packed with hundreds of thousand of paths, but most of them were old and faded, left over from ancient times when there was a great city atop Upsheer, and Fall Ford had been a sprawling metropolis at its foot. These days the paths were in the hundreds per year instead of thousands.
Rigg’s heart was full of Father’s death now, and the death of the boy at the falls just this morning, and the strange man from the past. Rigg could not keep his mind on any one of them. Instead, with a kind of franticness his thoughts would skip from one to another. Father!—but the horror of seeing the boy’s hand, knowing it would slip away—and the man clutching at him, dragging Rigg toward the edge.
Father wouldn’t let me see him, dying with a tree pressing on him, so I wouldn’t have to live with the memory. Now I’ve seen something nearly as awful to haunt my dreams.
He was rounding a bend when he saw it—a very recent path of someone crossing the road, scrambling up an embankment, and then lying down in thick bushes.
He did not even slow down—but he drifted to the far side of the road. And as he got closer, he was able to recognize the path. It was the same one he had followed down Cliff Road, and had seen again behind the boy who faced Nox in the doorway of her house.
“Umbo!” called Rigg. “If you plan to kill me, then come ahead and try. But don’t wait for me in ambush. That’s a coward’s way, an assassin’s path. I didn’t mean to let your brother die, I truly meant to save him.”
Umbo rose up among the bushes. “I’m not here to kill you,” he said.
“You seem to be alone,” said Rigg, “so I believe you.”
“My father banished me,” said Umbo.
“Why?”
“I was supposed to keep Kyokay out of trouble.” There was a world of misery and shame in the words.
“Kyokay was too big for you to control,” said Rigg. “Your father should know that. Why didn’t he watch him?”
“If I said that to my father . . .” Umbo shuddered.
“Come down out of the bushes,” said Rigg. “I don’t have much time to stay and talk. I have to get as far as I can before dark.” He didn’t bother to explain that he could find his path as easily by night as by day.
Umbo half slid, half stepped down the slope. He fetched up on the road at a jog, and came to a stop right in front of Rigg. They were about of a size, though that would probably change—Father had been very tall, and Umbo’s father was no giant.
“I’m going with you, if you’ll let me,” said Umbo.
Umbo had tried to get Rigg killed with his accusations back at Nox’s house. And now he wanted to be Rigg’s traveling companion? “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You know how to live and travel on your own,” said Umbo. “I don’t.”
“You’re not going as far as I am,” said Rigg.
“Yes I am,” said Umbo. “Because I have nowhere at all to go.”
“Your father will relent in a day or two. Just linger at the fringes of town until he comes looking for you to apologize.” Rigg remembered the time when, drunk, Tegay the cobbler had threatened to kill Umbo the next time he saw him. Umbo and Rigg had both believed him—they were about five years old—and so they fled into the woods on the west bank of the river. It wasn’t six hours before Tegay came out of his house and hollered, then pleaded for his son to come home.
“Not this time,” said Umbo, no doubt remembering the same event. “You didn’t hear him. Yo
u didn’t see his face when he said it. I’m dead, he said. His son Umbo died at the falls along with the brother he was supposed to take care of. ‘Because my son would have done all he could to save his brother, not watched another boy try to do it and then accuse him falsely of murder.’”
“So you’re saying it’s somehow my fault that your father threw you out?”
“Even if he changes his mind,” said Umbo, “I can’t stay here. I spent my whole life worrying about Kyokay, watching out for him, protecting him, hiding him, catching him, nursing him. I was more father to him than Father ever was. More mother to him than Mother was, too. But now he’s gone. I don’t even know why I’m alive, if I don’t have him to keep watch over. His constant chatter—I never thought I’d miss it.” And he began to cry. He cried like a man, his shoulders heaving, and sobs almost howls, his cheeks flowing with tears and making no effort to hide them. “By the Wandering Saint,” Umbo finally said. “I’ll be a true friend to you, Rigg, though I was false to you this very day. I’ll stand by you always, in everything.”
Rigg had no idea what to do. He had seen mothers and fathers comfort crying children—but those had been little kids, crying eye-rubbing baby tears with little hiccupy sobs. A man’s tears needed a man’s comfort, and as Rigg thought back to any experience that might show him what to do, Umbo came out of it himself.
“Sorry for letting go like that,” said Umbo. “I didn’t know that was going to happen. Thanks for not trying to comfort me.”
What a relief, thought Rigg. Doing nothing happened to be exactly the thing to do.
“Let me come with you,” said Umbo. “You’re the only friend I have.”
And it occurred to Rigg that with Father dead and Nox left behind, Rigg had no other friend than Umbo. If he truly was Rigg’s friend.
“I travel alone,” said Rigg.
“Now that’s just stupid,” said Umbo. “You’ve never traveled alone, you were always with your father.”
“I travel alone now.”
“If you can’t have your father, you won’t have any companion?”
Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings. Yes, he was hurt and angry and grieving and filled with spite and bitter at the irony of Umbo now asking him for help, after nearly getting him killed. But that had nothing to do with deciding the wisest course.
Will Umbo be trustworthy? He always has been in the past, and he seems truly sorry for accusing me falsely.
Does Umbo have the stamina for the road I travel? He doesn’t have to. I have money enough to stay at inns if the weather turns bad.
Will he be useful? Two strong young striplings would be much safer on the road than one boy alone. If there came a time they needed to keep watch at night, there’d be the two of them to divide the task.
“Can you cook anything?” asked Rigg. “I can always catch some animal we can eat, but . . . meat begs for seasoning.”
“You’ll have to do it,” said Umbo. “I’ve never cooked meat.”
Rigg nodded. “What can you do?”
“Put a new sole on your shoes, when you wear a hole in them or the stitching comes out. If you provide me with the leather and a heavy needle.”
Rigg couldn’t help but laugh. “Who brings a cobbler along on a journey?”
“You do,” said Umbo. “For the sake of the old days, when I kept the other boys from throwing rocks at you for being a wild boy from the woods.”
It was true that Umbo had looked out for him when they were much smaller, and Rigg was seen as a stranger among the village children.
“No promises,” said Rigg, “but you can start the journey with me and we’ll talk about how well or badly it’s working at the end of each day.”
“Yes,” said Umbo. “Yes.”
Rigg strode boldly into the great stream of ancient paths that flowed up and down the road like a river going both ways at once. Rigg thought of what he had seen at the top of Stashi Falls—how everything had slowed down and the paths had become people rushing by. Now he understood that all these paths still contained a vision of the real person passing, a vision that could become real. Now he was plunging into that flow of people up and down the road, swept onward with half the current and yet at the same time fighting his way upstream against the other half.
“Are you in a rush?” Umbo asked when he caught up and began to jog alongside Rigg. “Or have you changed your mind and you’re deliberately leaving me behind?”
Rigg slowed down. He had merely been walking as fast as he and Father always did on every journey, but few adult men and no boys Umbo’s size could match the pace without real exertion. Umbo was strong and healthy, only a little smaller than Rigg, but he was a cobbler’s son, a village boy. His legs had never tried to cover distance this way before, taking long strides every hour, day after day.
Rigg almost answered as heartlessly as Father always had: “Keep up if you can, and don’t if you can’t.” But why should he speak like Father? Rigg had always resented his utter unwillingness to make any concessions to Rigg’s age and size.
So instead of giving a snippy, cold answer, Rigg simply slowed down and walked at Umbo’s version of a brisk pace.
They said very little for the two hours until dusk obscured the path. The silence felt wrong—and when Rigg realized it was because in times past Kyokay had always been with them, keeping up a stream of chatter, it felt even more wrong.
At last, though, it was dark enough that while Rigg could still find his way among the paths, Umbo could not.
“It’s dark,” said Rigg. “Let’s get some sleep.”
“Where?” asked Umbo. “I can’t sleep while I’m walking, and I don’t see an inn or even a barn.”
“You can sleep while walking,” said Rigg, thinking back to all-night pursuits of fleeing animals. “Or something like sleep, and something like walking. You just aren’t tired enough yet to fall asleep on your feet.”
“And you’ve done that?”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Though it isn’t very efficient, since you can’t see your way and you fall down a lot.”
“Which has nearly happened to me three times in the last five minutes.”
“So we’ll go off the road a few yards—far enough that anyone on the road will fail to see us.”
Umbo nodded and then, because it was dark, added, “Good plan. Except the part about leaving the road and walking in the dark among the brambles.”
“We’re coming to a side road,” said Rigg. He knew it was there because he could see the paths of quite a few recent travelers take a turn from the highway. Wherever they had gone, they all came back the same way and rejoined the road. He couldn’t explain how he knew any of this without telling Umbo about his pathseeing, and so he made no explanation at all. Umbo must have thought Rigg was familiar with this area, since he didn’t ask how Rigg knew they were coming to a path.
They walked only a dozen yards into the woods beside the road and found themselves standing before a very small temple—or a very substantial shrine. It had stone walls and a heavy flat wooden roof topped with living grass to keep it cool.
None of the paths that came here was much more than two hundred years old. This was a fairly recent shrine.
“The Wandering Saint,” said Umbo.
“The what?” asked Rigg.
“We used to play the game—you’d be the Wandering Saint, or I would, or Kyokay, and the others would try to push him off the cliff, over the falls. You know.”
But Rigg did not know what Umbo was talking about. It can’t have been very important or surely Rigg would remember. And what a horrible game, anyway—to play at falling off the cliff! If that’s how Umbo and Kyokay played when Rigg wasn’t there, no wonder Kyokay thought it was all right to dance around on the edge of the falls.
Umbo stared intently at Rigg’s face. “Are you insane?” asked Umbo. “It’s our local saint.”
“What’s a saint?” asked Rigg. “You swore by one be
fore—the same one? This wandering one?”
“A holy man,” said Umbo impatiently. “A man some god has favored. Or at least some demon has been merciful to.”
Gods and demons Rigg had heard about, but Father had no patience with such ideas. “There are some gods and some demons whose stories are based on real things that happened to real men,” Father had taught him. “And some that are completely made up—to frighten children, or get them to obey, or to make people feel better when something goes terribly wrong in their lives.”
Now a new category had been added: saint.
“So this saint isn’t a god, he just has a friend who is.”
“Or a demon who favors him. Like a pet. They go out hunting or whatever. Ordinary people just stay away from the gods and demons as best they can. It’s the saints we talk to, since they’re so thick with the powerful ones. But you know this, Rigg. You went to Hemopheron’s lessons same as me.”
Rigg knew Hemopheron, the schoolteacher for the boys whose parents could afford the tuition. Rigg had gone with Umbo now and then, but Father had ridiculed him for it, pointing out that if Hemopheron knew anything, he wouldn’t be teaching in Fall Ford. “I’ll teach you everything you need to know,” Father had said. But he hadn’t, after all. He had held back some of the most important bits. In fact, Rigg wondered if Father had mostly taught him things he didn’t need.
“Come inside,” said Umbo. “We can stay here—it’s a sanctuary for travelers, all the shrines of the Wandering Saint are. The only curse on it comes if we desecrate the place.”
“Desecrate?” asked Rigg.
“Poo or pee,” said Umbo. “Inside it, I mean.”
They were standing there in nearly complete darkness, just a bit of starlight seeping in through the door. There were walls. There was a floor.
“Well,” said Rigg, “I’d better go back out before I lie down on this very hard stone floor to sleep. In fact, since it isn’t raining, I think I’ll sleep outside.”
“But . . .” Umbo began.
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