Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  To Rigg, the garden was almost as artificial and unnatural as the wood-floored interior of the house. Nothing grew wild here, and there was no life more complicated than a few birds, which were not allowed to nest here. Insects left paths, but so thin and faint that even if he wanted to, Rigg would not be able to single out individuals. It was just as well—for every vertebrate creature’s path there were ten thousand insect paths, and if all paths glowed equally wide and bright in Rigg’s mind the insects would blot out everything else.

  Rigg kept his eyes open only so he could find where the paths went in relation to the building. He could sense all the paths, no matter how many walls rose up between. The outside walls of the house were clear—for six hundred years at least, there had been no passage that crossed those barriers.

  Rigg had many things to learn, but he attached first importance to the path of the person who had placed the half-dozen akses in a flimsy cage under the bed he was supposed to have slept in. Without quite knowing how he distinguished them, Rigg had learned when very young how to identify a particular person’s path and recognize it when he saw it again in another place. The older the path, the harder it was to do this, as if they lost detail and resolution with age—though Rigg could not have described exactly what the details were that he recognized. He simply knew.

  The would-be assassin had come in through the servants’ door in the alleyway, and from the way his path moved—smoothly, until, inside the large pantry, it lurched upward and then down—he concluded that he had come into the house inside something, most likely a barrel. He had emerged last night at the same time Rigg arrived inside the courtyard in a sedan chair; that’s when the akses had been placed.

  What Rigg needed to see was whether the assassin had had any contact with anyone in the household. He also had to know whether he had used any of the secret passages. No, to both questions. The assassin had moved unerringly and without encountering anyone else or even pausing to hide somewhere, straight to Rigg’s designated room.

  But he did not go back to the pantry. Instead he went up onto the roof by way of the steep ladderway used by the workmen who fixed leaks, removed the nests of birds and wasps, and washed the skylights and the windows in the attic cupolas. There he had been until the exact moment Erbald had walked Rigg to the gate—for Rigg had also learned to discern the relative ages of paths, to a high degree of precision with very recent ones.

  At that point, the assassin had emerged onto the roof, scooted over the top of it, and down into the next-door neighbor’s courtyard. No one had been awake in that house, and though it was almost as fine a house as Flacommo’s, it had no need for a guard beyond the sleepy old man who was apparently dozing at his post—for the assassin passed right by him, vaulted the gate, and went into the street without the old man waking.

  The assassin had moved with the confidence of someone who had been in the house before and knew his way, so Rigg began looking deeper and deeper into the past, finding older and older paths. In a way his eyes could never have done, it was as if only the paths of the age he was looking for were visible, while the newer and older ones attenuated until he shifted his attention to yet another set. It was time-consuming work, and required iron self-discipline, like forcing himself to read fine print in a dim light and refusing to give up just because the letters were hard to focus on. But he had trained himself to peel away each layer, examine it thoroughly and methodically throughout the entire house, then start with the next layer back, and so on.

  The assassin might have been sent to scout the layout of the house only in the days since General Citizen’s report arrived, or he might have come the moment the first rumors of Rigg’s existence reached Aressa Sessamo nearly two months ago. Or the assassin might have learned the house before the royal family ever moved into it, in the expectation that at some point his services were bound to be needed. If his previous visit was that old, Rigg was unlikely to be able to find it—a slow, methodical search would take months to get back that far, and a quicker, skimming search would be likely to miss a single visit.

  Realizing this, Rigg chose a different strategy. Instead of searching the whole house, he searched only at the gate. On his first visit, the assassin would surely have entered on some legitimate pretext; he would be someone with a cover story so bland as to make him forgettable. If he hadn’t come through the gate, he would have come through the servants’ door; if Rigg didn’t find him in a thorough search at the one place, he’d search again at the other.

  Found. The assassin had come through the gate, and it had been only a month ago. Before General Citizen’s messenger could have made it here, but not before a different messenger might have come, from some spy in O who might have investigated Rigg before Citizen even arrived.

  Still, it was something of a relief to know that whoever sent the assassin was not someone who depended on General Citizen to inform them. Rigg had come to rather like, or at least respect, General Citizen, and he didn’t want him to be the type of man who resorted to assassination.

  Who ushered the assassin into the house on his first visit? The normal servants who greeted everyone, and then Flacommo himself—but that meant nothing except that the party was of some lofty social standing. Most of the party went on with Flacommo to meet with Mother in a room just off the garden where her paths showed she spent most of her waking hours. But the assassin was left behind.

  That suggested that he was posing as a servant, and his master had dismissed him. The assassin prowled the bedroom level of the house, exploring every room. No one challenged him, though he took at least an hour doing it.

  Then he went straight to the room where the rest of his party was conversing with Mother, and the whole group left almost at once.

  If only he had Umbo with him! Then he could slow down the paths to see whether Mother knew about the plan to assassinate Rigg when he showed up there.

  This much was certain: Mother spent an hour talking with the people who brought the assassin along with them.

  But there was no indication whether the rest of the party knew the assassin’s real mission, still less whether Mother knew about it. And just because Flacommo never encountered the assassin on either of his visits to the house said nothing about what he knew, or what the Revolutionary Council knew. Rigg’s gift told him many things that no one else could know—but it did not tell him a tenth as much as would have been useful to him.

  Someone was in the garden with him.

  He could see the path, and it was new—it was being created even as he watched. But it moved incredibly slowly, and faded more quickly than usual, and when he looked with his eyes, there was no one there.

  There were folktales about invisible people, about saints who had the power to walk through a crowd unseen, or people who had offended a wizard and been turned invisible so they were always alone. But he had never believed them for a moment. Since Father had explained to him how vision worked—the photons of different wavelengths variously reflected or absorbed, and the retina of the eye detecting them—it seemed impossible to Rigg that someone might be able to make it so every atom of his body became transparent to photons.

  But hadn’t Father said, “Only a fool says ‘impossible,’ the wise man says, ‘unlikely.’” That had become a joke between them for several months—instead of “no,” they told each other “unlikely.” Now it occurred to Rigg that Father might have had a specific example in mind when they were discussing whether invisibility was impossible or not.

  Stubbornly, Rigg decided he would not yet believe in a human being transparent to photons. There must be some other explanation, and he closed his eyes and studied the slowly moving path for some kind of clue.

  There was the fact that it was moving more slowly than any human being could possibly move. More important, though, was the fact that the path faded far too abruptly. The beginning of the stranger’s path into the garden was actually earlier than Rigg’s own path as he came in.

  And
at the head of the path, right where the person should be visible, but wasn’t, the path flickered.

  Not blinking on and off, but the color of it—or flavor, or whatever sense you might want to use as a metaphor—seemed to be changing slightly in abrupt shifts.

  Rigg opened his eyes again. If this was another assassin, Rigg would certainly have no problem getting away from him, his progress was so slow. Then again, he might move slowly when invisible, then turn visible and leap upon Rigg like a stooping hawk.

  Still, Rigg had to learn more. So he stood up, walked directly to the head of the slow path and blocked it.

  It took a few moments but the path stopped moving, and then began moving backward. But in that moment of hesitation, when the invisible one did not move forward or back, his shape became faintly visible to Rigg’s eyes. Not enough that Rigg could see him clearly, but he knew where the eyes were, could see the height. He could see the outline of the clothing and the hair, telling him that this was a woman. And in the eyes, he caught a glimpse of—what, fear? Startlement?

  Rigg knew that he had revealed to the invisible person that her invisibility was not complete. But he had also learned that when the invisible person ceased moving, she became somewhat visible again.

  “Who are you?” Rigg asked softly. He was so close she could not help but hear him, though no one inside the house could have. Yet there was no hint of a response. The Invisible just kept moving away, moving perhaps a little faster but not much.

  Frustrated, Rigg walked up her path and did not pause, but kept moving right through the place where she had to be.

  He passed right through.

  Did Rigg feel anything odd during that passage? Perhaps a slight shakiness, or perhaps a little warmth. Or maybe he was just imagining the sensation because he knew he had to be passing through a living person.

  When he looked back at the path, it was unchanged, except that it continued moving forward—perhaps a little more swiftly than before, if “swiftly” could be used to describe a speed that would make a snail ashamed.

  Rigg had a good idea now who the Invisible might be. If he could not speak to her or force her to become more visible to him, he at least could find out where she had been and who might know who she was. Rigg stood out of the Invisible’s way and closed his eyes so he could focus on her path backward in time. Not terribly far away, the path changed—it lost its trait of rapid fading, and instead seemed quite normal as it moved through the house. Back to a bedroom where Mother lay asleep.

  The Invisible had come straight from Mother’s room, and at a normal pace. But she had done so in the middle of the night, when no one was about. Rigg made the reasonable assumption: When the Invisible moved at an ordinary speed, she was completely visible, and remain unnoticed because the house was dark and everyone was asleep. As soon as the Invisible realized there was someone in the garden—Rigg—she slowed down and became invisible.

  She is not “slowing down,” Rigg realized. Whatever she’s doing affects her path, and paths have to do with time. The Invisible is actually jumping forward in time, in tiny increments.

  Silently in his mind, Rigg explained it all as if he were expounding his theory to Father. Suppose the Invisible moved an inch a second. Suppose that at the end of every second, she then jumped forward one second in time. To the Invisible, she is making a continuous forward movement, one second per inch. But because she is jumping forward a second at the end of every second, to an outside observer she would seem to move one inch every two seconds—but for one of those seconds she would seem to flash out of existence.

  Now suppose that instead of a second per inch, it was a millionth of a second per millionth of an inch. The pace would be the same, but now she would not exist in any moment long enough for a significant number of photons to hit her.

  He could almost hear Father’s voice raise an objection. If she exists in any moment for exactly as long as she does not exist between moments, then she should be half visible, for half the photons would pass through her, and half would strike her and reflect or be absorbed.

  All right, Rigg answered himself. Suppose the Invisible exists for one millionth of a second, but then jumps forward a thousandth of a second. Now she exists far less time than she does not exist. She’s only reflecting light for one millionth of a second every thousandth of a second. Our eyes simply can’t notice that tiny amount of light, can’t focus on it.

  She has to keep moving, though. And very quickly, so that each thousandth of a second, when she reappears so briefly, she’s in a different place. When I made her stop and back up because I stood directly in front of her, for that fleeting second she did not move quickly enough and she became much more visible—I could see her height, her shape, her eyes, a trace of her mouth. Then she sped up, moving backward, and disappeared again.

  She never disappeared, really. She was always there. When I walked through her, she was there.

  Father had taught Rigg that all solid objects were actually mostly empty space, the atoms very far apart, and within each atom the nucleus and electrons were separated by spaces many times their size.

  So when he passed through the Invisible, the Invisible must have flashed into existence many times, maybe a thousand times. Most of the actual particles of their bodies would not have collided, and the Invisible jumped ahead in time before they could distort or destroy each other.

  But some particles must have collided, and those that did . . .

  No wonder the Invisible backed up rather than collide with Rigg. Even though such a collision would do no visible harm, there must be significant radiation from the relatively few crashes between atoms that did take place during the passage. If the Invisible did not avoid collisions as much as possible, eventually the radiation would become significant. Enough, perhaps, to make her sick or even kill her.

  For the first time, Rigg understood that it was useful that Father had taught him so much about physics. He wanted me to be able to make sense of things like this.

  Except that it didn’t really make sense yet. How could a human being divide time into such tiny bits? How could the Invisible possibly even comprehend such intervals?

  Again, Rigg answered his own objection. The Invisible no more understands what she’s doing than Umbo understood what he was doing when he “slowed down time,” no more than I understood the nature of the paths that only I could see. It was instinctive. A reflex.

  Like sweating. You know what causes sweat, but you don’t have to consciously activate every pore for sweating to take place.

  No, sweating was involuntary. More like walking. You don’t think about each tiny muscle movement involved in walking, you just walk, and your body does what it does. Or like seeing—you decide what to look at, how wide to open your eyes, how long to stare—but you don’t have to understand the photons striking the rods and cones of your retina.

  The Invisible may not even know that she’s moving forward in time. She only knows that when she becomes invisible, her forward movement slows down. With years of practice, she would learn just how much time-movement was needed to stay invisible, because if she became too invisible, her movement through space would become so slow she would be unable to get from one place to another. But if she did not move forward far enough with each tiny time-jump, she would become visible and people would see her—as a ghost, a dream, an apparition, a memory, but they would see her.

  So over the years she has learned to control it the way Umbo learned to control his sense of timeflow, the way I learned to distinguish among the paths and see at a glance how old they were compared to each other, and peel them away with my mind so I could concentrate on the paths of a certain time or of a certain person rather than all the paths that passed through that point in space.

  This Invisible is like me. And like Umbo. Talented.

  Umbo and I were both trained by Father to hone our talents. So was Nox. Did Father know this person and train her, too?

  Rigg remem
bered Father’s voice as he lay dying under the fallen tree. “Then you must go and find your sister. She lives with your mother.”

  Father had sent Rigg to find his sister, not his mother. His mother, the queen-by-right, was not the important one. What mattered to Father was Rigg’s talented sister.

  Everything came together and made sense. His theory fit all the facts and omitted none that he could think of. He might later learn of many flaws in the theory, but for right now, as Father had taught him, it was useful enough to act on the assumption that he was right.

  Rigg allowed himself to notice the paths again. The Invisible was moving toward the door she had come out of—and she was moving much faster. Which meant she was actually leaping forward in time by smaller increments, or less frequently, which meant that she was reflecting more photons. And sure enough, Rigg could make out a shadowy form, and it was running—running so very slowly that he could still have overtaken the Invisible in a dozen steps.

  This is how the Invisible has learned to escape—trading a little bit of visibility for speed in getting away.

  Now he knew better than to try to speak to her. Existing only a thousandth of a moment in any one position in space, there was no way the Invisible could distinguish speech.

  The Invisible. She has a name. Param Sissaminka.

  Rigg walked into the kitchen, where the morning shift was now beginning to be about their business—bakers shaping the dough that had been left for them by the night bakers, cooks starting the pots for the afternoon stews, servants sleepily going here and there, taking care of their needs so they could begin their chores.