Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  “You a sharp player?”

  “No,” said Loaf. “But I had to kill a sharp player once to save Rubal’s neck.”

  “So he owes you this passage.”

  “We’ve saved each other’s necks about twenty times. He’ll do it as a favor, not as a debt.”

  “How did you know he was coming?”

  “I didn’t know it would be Rubal. I knew that soon enough there’d be somebody I knew well enough to trust he wouldn’t rob us and float our bodies downstream. I live and work on the river, Umbo. There’s only so many boats and only so many pilots, and after a while you get to know a lot of them.”

  The passage upriver was uneventful. They stopped here and there. Loaf introduced himself to other innkeepers. They always got along cheerfully, because there was no competition between them. Rivermen stopped at the nearest inn when darkness approached; it was not as if they would continue upriver in the dark to stop at a favorite place. So unless your beds were so bugridden or your food so rancid that rivermen went out of their way to avoid it, the money was there to be made for all of them, but with steadily diminishing trade the farther upriver you went.

  Loaf joined in with the poling and rowing from time to time—his muscles weren’t shaped to the work, but he was strong and learned quickly enough. Umbo, though, was so little that when he offered to help they only laughed at him. “Besides,” murmured Loaf to him, “you have other work to do. Inside your head.”

  Thus Umbo spent hour after hour lying in the shade of a sail, when the wind helped them upriver, or a tarpaulin, when it didn’t. It was an easy thing to speed up the perceptions of the crewmen, so that they were more alert and had plenty of time to deal with obstructions or possible collisions on the river. None of them suspected they had had any help from Umbo, except Loaf himself, who squinted and glared at Umbo the few times he did it. Now that he was trying to study what he was doing—something he hadn’t done since Wandering Man stopped his lessons—he realized some useful facts.

  First, the speeding up lasted for several minutes after Umbo stopped imposing it on the other person.

  Second, it worked rather like the quick rush of energy that came when you were in danger—only it didn’t cause the racing heartbeat, the panting for breath, and the sheer terror that usually caused such intense concentration and speeded-up perceptions. Umbo’s gift to them was really a kind of panic without the fear.

  So to cause himself to have the effect, he tried for a while to make himself afraid, in order to speed himself up. It didn’t work. For one thing, he didn’t really believe it. For another, it simply wasn’t the same thing at all, so fear had no effect.

  If he had had a mirror he might have tried looking in it in order to cast the spell on himself, but the more he thought of that, the more ridiculous it seemed. He knew that mirrors worked by reflecting light—but there was no reason to think it would reflect whatever power it was that he wielded.

  He tried looking at his hands or feet, the way he looked at the person he was targeting, but again, there was no effect that he could discern—no quickening, no perceived slowing down of the world around him.

  Finally, he gave up in despair and just lay there in the shade, letting the boat surge upstream with each call of “Pole!” or “Stick!” then slacken as half the poles were reset at a time. It was almost smooth, but not quite, and lying there on the deck he could feel each surge, each slackening. He concentrated intensely on it, and it seemed to him that they were slowing down, the calls coming more slowly, each surge lasting longer, each slackening more sharp.

  Then he fell asleep.

  And when he woke up—nudged awake by a boatman’s toe, with a muttered, “Supper, lad”—he had almost forgotten that feeling just before he slept, of everything moving slowly, and even when he remembered it he did so only to think, I wonder if that’s how it feels to be under the time-slowing spell.

  “Fool,” he whispered.

  “What?” asked the riverman nearest him. They were pulled up along shore for the noon meal and a bit of a rest, so no one was at the poles right now.

  “Myself,” said Umbo. “I called myself a fool.”

  “Honest of you,” said the riverman. “Though it was obvious to the rest of us days ago.”

  Umbo gave him a quick grin—it did feel good to have their acceptance, though it was Loaf, not Umbo, who had earned it. But when he met Loaf’s eyes across the coals of the cookfire still red in the metal firepan, he gave him a wink, and Loaf nodded. Progress.

  That afternoon, Umbo worked to isolate what caused him to go into the trance himself. It was not sleepiness—that had ended, not triggered, the phenomenon. Nor was it concentration, really—he had not been thinking about the rhythm of “pole, stick, pole, stick” as the two teams alternated their surges. Rather it was a different thing, different from the way it felt when he did it to others, but still, in a strange way, the same. Just like learning to use a new muscle, and the more he practiced, the more easily he found himself in that inward place where time slowed down, or he speeded up.

  It was as if, instead of doing something to himself, he simply found the place inside himself where time was already moving along at a different clip. And as he got more practiced at it, he realized that he had much more versatility and control over his own trance than over the timeflow of other people, when he worked the trick on them. He could go much faster than he could make them go; he could vary the tempo across quite a broad range of speeds. And it didn’t weary him to do it to himself; he was rather invigorated by it, instead of its wearing him out.

  “All well and good,” murmured Loaf. “But can you do it with your eyes open?”

  Umbo woke up. Or not really—he hadn’t been asleep this time—but coming out of the trance of time always felt like awakening, though it also felt like leaving home and coming out into a harsher world.

  “How did you know I was doing it?” Umbo whispered.

  “Because when I sit by you,” murmured Loaf, “or walk near you, I can feel it happening to me. A quickening of my step. And it’s stronger than when you were practicing on us all, back at the beginning. It grows as I come nearer to you, and fades as I walk away.”

  “Do you think the others feel it?” asked Umbo.

  “If they do, they don’t know why. It feels, to a man my age, as if I were younger, fresher, less tired. As if I thought more sharply, saw more clearly, heard things from farther away and could tell them apart more easily. In other words, it just feels good. Who would try to blame feeling good on a boy who seems to be asleep on the deck?”

  “I really do need to open my eyes,” said Umbo. “I don’t know why I haven’t already. I don’t think I have to keep my eyes closed to make it happen to myself, not anymore. I just don’t know if there’ll be anything to see. It was Rigg that saw people moving through time, without any help from me.”

  “But it’s you that knows how to move a man backward in time, whether he can see anything there or not.”

  “I need Rigg. I really do. Maybe I don’t send the message until he gets out of his captivity.”

  “If that’s how it worked, then it would have been Rigg delivering the messages instead of you, wouldn’t it?” Loaf got to his feet again. “My rest time is over. I’m on the stick team today. Stick, pole, stick, pole—no wonder these rivermen need so many pints of strong ale when they stop at Leaky’s Landing!”

  In the remaining two days of the upriver voyage, Umbo grew so practiced at slipping into quicktime that he began having to work at not moving about in that mode. He felt sluggish when he did not have that alertness about him, and he wondered if this ability to speed himself up in relation to the world might not be rather like ale to these rivermen—a way of making the world brighter and pleasanter. Because it felt good to be so aware of everything, and to have time to think of what he wanted to say before he said it. It made him seem cleverer—to others and to himself—to have the time to think of an answer before speaking, or
not to speak at all when his first impulse was to say or ask something stupid.

  But in all the time he spent in quicktime, he never saw so much as a glimpse of the “paths” Rigg talked about seeing all the time, still less any person from another era. It seemed hopeless to him, for Rigg, when Umbo put him into quicktime, had to pick out a particular path and then look at it closely in order for the individual person to emerge clearly enough for Rigg to pick his pocket. But Umbo, seeing no paths, could not pick out a target for his attention, and therefore could not possibly make them become solid and real.

  I can’t do it. And yet I did it.

  Not until they arrived at Leaky’s Landing was there another opportunity to talk, for this part of the river Loaf knew well, having plied it up and down to buy groceries and linens, tools and hardware, furniture and liquid refreshments for the inn. So as they passed each landmark, Loaf would offer his opinion of the place—“You never buy your sheets from the weavers in that town, they make them all too small to tuck in tight on a goodsized bed. It must be a town of dwarfs, eh?”—and then the rivermen would offer their opinions of the place—“There’s a girl there so ugly they don’t castrate their hogs anymore, they just bring them to look at her and their equipment freezes up and drops off.”

  Umbo was quite aware that what Loaf said was always literally true, and what the rivermen said was almost never true at all—and yet no one was lying and all were entertained by each other. Umbo could well see why rivermen might prefer to live in an exaggerated or downright imaginary world, what with all the poling, and the sameness of the river going up or coming down. While Loaf, the soldier, the hardheaded man of trade, the toiler in all trades, he needed to keep a clear-eyed view of the world.

  When they got home they bade good-bye to the rivermen, who did not stop the night, “Because why should we give you back, for food and ale, the very passage money you just gave to us?” said the captain of the boat.

  Leaky barely seemed interested in them—neither Umbo nor her own husband. She was busy, she said, and didn’t have time for greetings, what with doing everything single-handed while they were off playing the tourist in far countries. Loaf’s answer was not to rail at her, as Umbo’s father would have done, but rather to pitch in beside her and help her make short work of her tasks. And as they labored side by side, she began to smile now and then—not looking at him yet, but just smiling—and then she hummed, and then sang, and finally began to tell him stories of things that had happened while he was gone.

  Umbo, meanwhile, tried to make himself useful, too, though he did not know how to do many of the tasks they did, and had to learn by watching. That, however, he did very well, for he could quicken himself so he had plenty of time to watch and understand exactly what they were doing, and then observe his own actions and correct them. He didn’t move any faster than he normally did—that is, exactly in proportion to the time of the people or creatures or things he was interacting with. But while acting, he had time to think again and stop himself or change his action. It was a wonderful luxury, that ability to rethink and still have time to change his course.

  So now he understood, at last, how his quickening gift was useful to the people he had used it on, though he hadn’t really understood how. They really are better able to carry out their plan of action, when I put a quickening on them. Wandering Man called it “slowing” because it made things around a person seem to proceed at a leisurely pace. He had gotten it all wrong, as if Wandering Man thought it was time itself that Umbo affected, rather than the person’s perceptions and thought processes within time.

  It was actually a bit of a relief to realize that Wandering Man didn’t know everything about everything; he wondered if the man himself had ever realized it before he died. Or maybe he died because he was so sure he knew everything that it didn’t occur to him that he might be wrong about the direction in which a hewn tree would fall.

  Supper was the best food Umbo had eaten on the river, and he said so. “That’s because you’re eating like family now, not the swill we slop the pigs with,” said Loaf, at which Leaky smacked him across the top of his head, saying, “We eat from the same pot as the guests and that’s a fact, which you well know, Loaf, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.”

  “No, my love, you won’t have me saying otherwise in your presence,” which earned him another smack, and a harder one.

  The room they put Umbo in was not one of the guest rooms. It was a smallish bedroom right next to their own, and Umbo realized that this was the room where, if they ever had a child, that child would sleep. How old is Leaky, Umbo wondered as he readied himself for bed. Might she have children? Or is one of them unable? When they built this place it was clear they meant to have children. Sad if they couldn’t have what they wanted, when a lout like Umbo’s father popped babies into women every time he had a go at them, and heaven knows why any woman ever let him.

  Umbo had just fallen asleep when he was wakened by Loaf shaking him gently.

  “What?” murmured Umbo.

  “I know you can’t see them,” said Loaf. “But does that matter, if you know right where they are?”

  Umbo was too tired to get what Loaf was trying to say, and fell asleep again in moments. But when he awoke in the middle of the night to pee, the words came back to him, and actually took on some meaning. In fact he realized he had been dreaming about them. In his dreams, Umbo pictured Rigg standing a very long time by the carriage, so that Umbo did not have to be able to see him in order to tell him his message. And the same with Umbo’s message to himself—he had received it while lying in his bed in their lodging in O, so that he, too, was firmly in the same place and Umbo did not actually have to be able to see himself to give the message.

  Awake now, Umbo tried to remember what his future self had looked like, and now he realized that his head had been bowed, as if he was staring at a spot on the floor rather than himself lying in bed. He had seemed rather shy or humble to Umbo, but what if he were simply not looking at anything at all, only talking into the air and hoping someone would receive his message?

  But no, he had heard what Umbo asked him. Or had he? Perhaps, already knowing what past-Umbo would say, having said it himself, future-Umbo was able to answer it.

  Closing the lid of the pissoir, he thought back to last night’s supper and almost went downstairs to try quickening himself and then speaking to the invisible past versions of himself and Loaf and Leaky. But he stopped himself in time. He couldn’t do that, because he hadn’t done it. There had been no visitation and no message last night. He’d have to do it tonight, instead.

  Unless Loaf was right, and it was perfectly possible for him to go back and give a message where no message had been received, and then it would be received, and thus change the future, and after that there would be no need to actually do the message giving again. But Umbo could not see how such a thing was possible. It was maddening enough that trying to make sense of it put him back to sleep almost as soon as he was back under the covers.

  The next day he said nothing to Loaf about his dreams and quandaries, and still less about his plans. During the afternoon he managed to filch some bread and cheese from the kitchen and secrete it in his room, because he intended to eat no supper at the table that night. In order to avoid confusing himself with the issue of whether he could take a message into the past that he had not already seen when it was delivered, prior to delivering it, he decided to be absent from the place where the message would be received.

  So he pretended to have a little headache which needed nothing but sleep to be cured, and went to his room. He ate his bread and cheese and wished he had thought to bring water or weak ale into the room. But he resolutely did not leave the room, and waited until he could hear the quieting of the house. Only when all was dark and quiet did he get up and make his way down the stairs by the scant light of the stars and the silver night-ring coming through skylights and windows, then down a dark hall by feel alone.
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  He came into the little room off the kitchen where Loaf and Leaky must have eaten their private meal—late, as always, after the guests were served—and found no one there and the room dark, except for the flickering light from the kitchen fire.

  Only then, imagining where Leaky and Loaf would have sat, did he realize just how many holes there were in his plan. Because even though he himself was not present for dinner, it is absolutely certain that if they had received his message—the one he was preparing to slip into the recent past and give them now—they would have come up to his bedroom and wakened him and told him of the success of it.

  Unless I told them to let me sleep uninterrupted till morning. That’s what my message should be—to go to sleep as normal and not waken me till morning!

  Satisfied now that he had resolved the contradictions, Umbo closed the doors to the room and, keeping his voice low, put himself into the trance of quickening. “Don’t waken me till morning, please,” he whispered entreatingly to the empty chair where Leaky usually sat. Then he spoke again, but with the trance shallower, or so he hoped. And again and again. At no point did he see any trace or flicker of Loaf and Leaky, or hear a speck of answer, but he resolutely tried to do it at every level of trance, thinking that perhaps the depth of the trance determined how far back he would go in time.

  Exhausted and stupid from lack of sleep and long concentration, he was whispering now from hoarseness rather than a desire to be quiet. He hit on the idea of varying the message a little so that he’d remember which level of trance had been seen by them, but then gave up on it because how could he remember how “deep” the trance was at the time of a given message?

  Even when he thought he was done and resolved to go back upstairs, he did not. Instead he sat down in his own place at the table and rubbed his eyes and knew, without knowing why or how, that he had failed. He had only been talking to himself.

  Sitting there, drifting near sleep, yet still trying to quicken himself, he fell into an even deeper quickening—or dreamed he did—and this time when he spoke his message, talking across the table to his two friends, he reached out his hands and dreamed—or was it a dream?—that he felt their hands in his, and their voices assuring him that they would comply with his wishes.