Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  “I am a version that can do nothing, change nothing, affect nothing. Because of the direction of my movement through time I am, in effect, nonexistent already in the real universe. I declare this copy of myself to be flawed, useless, and—let’s admit it—completely expendable. There can only be one real version of myself.”

  “Killing you will only eliminate the back-flowing Ram or Rams,” said the expendable. “It will not affect the nineteen forward-moving Rams, of which eighteen will be as redundant as you say you are.”

  “That’s not my problem,” said Ram.

  * * *

  It took twenty-two days for the boat to carry Rigg from O to Aressa Sessamo. This was long for such a voyage, but Rigg thought of several reasons for their slow progress.

  First, they stopped every night and anchored well away from shore but out of the current—this much he learned from careful listening to the commands being given in loud voices. This was common practice—away from shore to avoid land-based brigands, but ceasing to move downstream for fear of running aground on a sand bar or other obstruction in the dark.

  Second, the current slowed and was spread among many channels as it moved into the vast alluvial plain of the Stashik River. It no longer gave a sure direction, and the pilot could not guess which formerly useful channels were too silted up to be safe. Twice they had to pole their way out of a channel in order to return to a main channel and search out another way.

  Third, a slow passage for the boat meant that any messengers General Citizen might have sent by land would reach Aressa Sessamo long before the boat could get there, despite the fact that the road was constantly winding this way and that, and often blocked, having to be rebuilt with each collapse of a portion of it as the water of the Stashik delta seeped under it and eroded it away. (Many a ruler of the various empires that had chosen Aressa Sessamo for their capital were saved from invaders by this natural, unmappable, three-hundred-mile series of moats and obstacles.)

  During the whole of the voyage, after Rigg was given dry clothes and no longer had to be fettered to a spy or assassin or whatever Talisco had been, he was left completely alone. A crewman—a different one each day—would bring him food on a tray in the morning, which was to last him for the day. The meal was brought in under the watchful eyes of two soldiers, who said nothing and allowed neither the crewman nor Rigg to speak, either.

  Rigg ate whatever was hot for breakfast, and then waited to eat the rest—even though some of it tended to wilt—until he could hear the sounds of the boat being anchored for the evening. The food was decent—by the standards of riverboat fare—and they must have been sending small boats to shore now and then to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables, because these were not lacking.

  Twice a day—once as soon as he awoke and had used the chamber pot, and once again when he imagined it was getting near dinnertime (and he was never wrong)—Rigg walked the periphery of the room with a steady stride until his heart began to beat faster and his breath was needed more quickly, and then continued for at least half an hour, by his best reckoning. He went around one direction in the morning, the other in the afternoon.

  When those outside the cabin were getting a noon meal, he took none, but instead did the kind of physical exercise Father had taught him to make a part of his daily regimen, to keep strong the muscles that weren’t used in whatever work he happened to be doing. Since he was doing no work at all, he did all the exercises.

  He slept well twice a day, four hours at a time. He had long since learned the trick of deciding how long he wanted to sleep, and then waking at the time he chose. So after breakfast and again after supper, he took his sleeps. This meant that in the afternoons and in the long silent hours of the morning, he was wide awake. He made sure to stay awake by not lying on his bed except when it was time to sleep, and he varied his position from sitting in a chair to sitting on the floor to standing—even sometimes standing on his hands or balancing himself on his head while leaning against the wall.

  His assignment to himself was to think. Being temporarily powerless, deprived of any ability to gain new information or influence events, he had only two projects that mattered to him: to see what he might learn from the information he already had, and to try to learn how to broaden his visions of paths into the skill that Umbo and he had mastered together, and which Umbo had now obviously learned to accomplish by himself. He knew that it was unworthy of him to think this, but he could not help it: If Umbo can do it alone, though he never saw a path, surely I can do it alone.

  He told himself that he meant no slight to Umbo by thinking this: If one of them could learn to acquire or replace the other one’s contribution to their shared time travels, then surely the other could as well. But he was honest with himself, and he knew that there was too much of pride and contempt in the thought, for in his own heart it took this inflection. If even Umbo can do it, then surely I can do it—and better, and more easily.

  Rigg had taken it as a matter of course that when time travel happened, it was he who did it. Yes, he had needed Umbo’s help, but it was Rigg who actually fell in step beside a man and took the knife from its sheath. It was Rigg who saw the paths, and had always seen them and used them to track game and see where people had gone, while Umbo hadn’t really understood very much at all about his own gift.

  Do I have the natural arrogance of royalty? he asked himself. Do I automatically assume that everything about me is better than everything about other people?

  For all I know, it is Umbo with the precious gift—the ability to alter time, or at least to alter a person’s speed of passage through it—while mine is more that of a scout, searching out particular paths where Umbo’s gift might be used. Umbo can bestow the power of time travel on other people—I can share my gift with no one.

  And yet there was something in him that made him think less of Umbo than of himself.

  Maybe he felt that way because Father had spent so much time with him, training him, and had only spent a relatively little time training Umbo. Or maybe it was the soul-numbing arrogance that came with having so much money for a few weeks in O. He had put on the act of a proud young man of wealth, but it was quite possible that at an unconscious level he had come to believe his own performance, that it had become part of his nature. But he resolved now to get rid of any trace of that arrogance, because he knew it would make him into that kind of idiot who says, when he’s not getting his own way, “Do you know who I am?”

  Father had always taught him, “A person is what he says and does; that’s how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.”

  That much Rigg had come to understand on his first day of solitude, and from then on he humbly and assiduously tried to learn how to do to himself what Umbo had done to him—make his own perceptions speed up so that his observation could keep pace with the swift movement of long-past people along their paths.

  Two things kept him from making even the slightest progress, as far as he could tell. First, every time Umbo had allowed him to see the people in the paths, he and Umbo had been standing still, watching the paths for a dozen seconds at least. It took time for Rigg to discern the individual people racing along, and to pick one of them to concentrate on; only then did the person slow down until Rigg could choose one of the iterations of his passage and take action.

  On the boat, this was impossible. Not that there weren’t countless paths up and down—and across—the river—it was a chaos of paths. But when the boat was moving, Rigg could never study the same path long enough to have a hope of discerning anything.

  And even when they were anchored at night, and he could study a few paths for some length of time before the current shifted his position, he ran into the second problem, which was that he had no idea how to go about duplicating what Umbo’s gift had done. He could imagine that Umbo’s need to duplicate Rigg’s gift, by locating a person in the past in order to focus on him, was sidestepped by choosing someone whose location had been
known to him and who remained in the same spot for a considerable length of time. In such cases, Rigg’s vision of paths would be unnecessary to Umbo, or at least less necessary.

  But Rigg had seen the paths his whole life, had learned to distinguish between them and identify a particular path and follow it through time—always knowing in which direction it flowed, though he could never explain to Father how he knew—and yet he had never once suspected that the path was actually the rapid blur of the person himself endlessly repeating his movements. Not until Umbo’s gift had opened his eyes.

  So now Rigg knew the truth behind what he had always known—where the long-past people and animals had gone. He even had a clear sense of which paths were older and which newer, which were of men or of women, which were of adults or of children, just as he could tell which species and gender and age of animal had made a certain path. He conceived this information as colors, thickness, intensity, texture, as if it were sight, but he knew now that he was gleaning information from the paths that sight alone could never have given him. At some level he was penetrating the paths and “seeing” who it was—though of course sight had nothing to do with it.

  Well, not nothing. He could sense paths that lay behind hills or walls—he could sense paths, for instance, far outside the bounds of the little cabin that served as his prison. The paths were mostly just a blur to him in the darkness, and with his eyes closed they were like an indistinct haze—but they were there, and he could sense them, and with concentration could achieve some kind of clarity. He could see as they were made the movements of the men on board the boat, even though the paths quickly receded upriver as the boat drifted down, which helped him make sense of the sounds he heard. All this depended little on what his eyes could see.

  But his eyes gave him context for what he was seeing. He knew which wall of the cabin he was seeing these paths through, and remembering the general layout of the boat, he was able to understand what he sensed. The paths that crossed the gap over the Stashi Falls in midair, many rods out from the falls, still passed from side to side of the canyon cliffs, so Father’s explanation of the falls’ having eroded the edge in and down, and of bridges once having spanned the gap, made sense to Rigg.

  On the river, though, the paths were far more confusing, because all the movements of people—except the rare swimmers and waders—had taken place on boats or bridges that had long since disappeared. A path would suddenly rise up into the air and pass overhead; others made strange looping motions; it was a mind-numbing tangle, when the ladder or mast a man had climbed was no longer there. Add to that the fact that in the delta, the river had changed course so many times that paths ran in every conceivable direction and bore little relation to the present channel, and Rigg could hardly be blamed for not being able to pick out one path and make it slow down (or himself speed up) to see the person making it.

  The worst problem he faced, however, was that he had no idea what Umbo had done. They had decided by reason alone that Umbo must be speeding up Rigg’s perceptions so he could see faster, so to speak. But nothing about the experience had felt to Rigg as if he were actually speeding up. In fact, he had felt nothing at all, so he could hardly figure out how to replicate the feeling. All that had happened was that what once had been a path now became a blur of human motion, and by concentrating closely on one target he could make it resolve into a person and visually slow him or her. And that was eyesight.

  Or was it?

  Rigg thought back to his experience at the falls, lying on the rock. Hadn’t he seen the man with his eyes? He had certainly touched him with his body when he knocked him from the rock! Yet there had been a different quality to his seeing, compared to the way he saw the rock itself, and Umbo’s brother Kyokay. As Father had taught him much about the workings of human brains, Rigg now imagined that the rocks and water and sky and Kyokay were coming into his brain the normal way, through his eyes; but the man who fell had come into his brain a different way, not through his eyes. Instead his brain had interpreted it as vision and laid it over what his eyes showed him. It had been fitted into his vision—which, now that he thought about it, was what Rigg always did with the information his path-sense gave him.

  But this did not help him in any way to discover how Umbo had changed him—or the paths, or time itself—so that a path that had seemed to Rigg like a smooth ribbon became instead a blur of a rapidly moving person. Nor could Rigg make any progress by concentrating hard, squinching up his face, or trying to juice up some emotion.

  He even tried, in a few insane experiments, to try to walk beside and keep pace with a path that he knew must be a person, in hopes of being able to see a human shape. He even ran with one for a moment, but of course crashed into the wall and caused a guard to open the door, though by then Rigg had contrived to pick up his chair so he could ruefully explain, “I fell asleep and the chair fell over,” which the guard had no way of knowing was not true. In any event, the guard was forbidden to speak—all he could do was either go back out and shut the door, or waken General Citizen to come investigate. He chose the easier path and merely closed and rebarred the door.

  Rigg even spent time philosophizing about what his and Umbo’s experiences proved about the nature of time. For instance: The paths did not follow the present contours of the land; they remained exactly where they were regardless of how the land changed beneath them—or the water, or buildings, or vehicles.

  Yet Rigg knew that the world was a spheroid planet with a ring of debris around it that raced through its orbit, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther from the sun, like the unsteady path of a drunken man. The sun itself did not hold still, but moved through a huge sea of stars, orbiting the center of the galaxy, while the galaxy itself drifted through space. So if the world had shifted a vast distance since these people first moved along its surface, why didn’t the paths remain out in space where they had been made, instead of staying with this world wherever it roamed?

  The passage of living creatures was preserved in paths that were tied, not to the absolute locations of those creatures in space, but to their position relative to the center of planet Garden. Their paths continued to pass through exactly the same spot above the rotating world.

  To Rigg, this meant that living things had a firm connection to the planet itself, and not just to the surface to which gravity pressed them. Time remembered the movements of all things which lived, but it kept the record engraved in exact relation to the center of gravity of the planet on which they dwelt, keeping their original relationship to each other as they stretched over the surface of the world.

  Why time should be tied to gravity he did not know, but clearly it was. Rigg wondered all kinds of things, in his solitude—why, for instance, their movements were not preserved in relation to the sun, whose gravity was so powerful that it controlled Garden and kept it from whirling off into space; or whether, if a man could fly between worlds the way he sailed across rivers and seas, he would leave any kind of path behind him, or if his path would flex and bend between one world and the next? It was a strange kind of imagining, and he could imagine Loaf telling him it was a complete waste of time to wonder about such things, since men couldn’t fly and certainly couldn’t fly between planets. For Father had taught Rigg from childhood on that there is no thought that is not worth thinking, but that all ideas might be examined logically to see if they meant anything useful. Admittedly, Rigg had no idea now why thoughts about traveling between worlds and the persistence of paths on the voyage might be useful, but it was a pleasure to think them, and since pleasures were few and far between these days, he would take those he had and enjoy them.

  Besides, thinking about travel between worlds kept him from brooding about what awaited him in Aressa Sessamo.

  For that was his other project, and he could never get away from it for long. What did he know? What could he learn from the information he already had?

  General Citizen had talked about various parties in Aressa
Sessamo—the royalists divided into camps between followers of the female succession and those who yearned for a return to the male, and supporters of the People’s Revolution, though if Citizen had told the truth, there were those who didn’t so much support the Revolution as oppose the female succession.

  Citizen seemed to be satisfied that Rigg really was the long-lost son of Hagia Sessamin and her husband Knosso Sissamik, so that whatever someone thought about royalty—or males of the royal line, of which Rigg was presumably the only living specimen—they would think about Rigg.

  But Rigg couldn’t even be sure which party he was under the control of now. If Citizen really was of the male-royal party, then he was in the hands of one who might exploit him in service of a monarchical restoration. But if Citizen was testing him by pretending to be of that party, then he might be in the hands of either a true servant of the Revolutionary Council, or of a follower of the female-succession party, in which case Rigg was in grave danger and might be murdered at any time.

  There might also be other possibilities, no more or less far-fetched than these obvious ones. Citizen might indeed be a male-royalist but his party was not ready yet to make use of Rigg’s existence, so he might be perfectly safe and would be delivered to the Revolutionary Council under circumstances that would make it difficult or impossible simply to kill him.

  Or the royal family might actually have more influence than it seemed, and his own mother might wish to have him killed—if she was a true believer in her grandmother’s decision to slaughter all the males of the royal line, then having Rigg delivered to Aressa Sessamo might be something so loathsome to her that she would seek to kill him the moment they met.

  So many scenarios played out in his mind that he had no choice but to set them all aside, as much as possible. I’ll know what I know when I know it, he told himself over and over. I can’t predict the future from the facts that I have, so I can’t prepare any more than I was already prepared, by Father, to speak with authority and understand the way politics in general was conducted.