Then he erased “we’re” and replaced it with “I’m,” since no one would know whether she was missing or not.
That night he tried not to sleep, hoping she would come again and he might see her. But sleep overcame his plans, and he woke with someone jostling his shoulder. As he stirred, a hand lightly touched his lips. He opened his eyes. It was a woman’s shape, but he couldn’t make out a face.
He got up silently and followed her. She moved unerringly, keeping to her habit of walking near the edge of each corridor and skirting around the borders of each room. She seemed to know the routines of the night quite perfectly—and why wouldn’t she? They encountered no one.
Finally they were in a rarely used corridor that led to some guest rooms. She stopped, and Rigg approached her. “Param?” he whispered softly.
In reply, she embraced him and whispered in his ear, “O my brother, he said that you would come.”
In that moment Rigg realized that Father must have come to her, as he had come to Umbo and Nox, and helped her learn to control and use her power. For who else could have promised her anything about Rigg? Who else knew that he existed? Yet had Father ever been gone from Fall Ford without Rigg long enough to come to Aressa Sessamo and return again? Rigg knew it would be foolish to think that anything was impossible to Father. In a world where Rigg, Umbo, Param, and Nox had such odd powers, who knew what Father was capable of?
“There’s an entrance to the unused passages not far from here,” he whispered back.
She gave him her hand, and he led her to the place. He could see old paths as they moved through what now seemed to be solid wall. As he had done before, he passed a hand all the way around the aperture, but couldn’t find any sign of it.
She touched his shoulder and drew him away. “There’s really a door there?” she whispered.
“There was. But not used in two hundred years.”
“So the wall cannot be stone or cement or brick,” she said.
“It’s an interior wall. I assume that even if they sealed it up, it would still be lath-and-plaster or wood. But I don’t know. Does it matter? It might be light enough that we could kick it in—but then we could never close it behind us.”
In reply, she pushed him gently against the opposite wall of the corridor: Stay, the gesture meant. He watched as she quickly faded, then stood patiently waiting as she passed into the wall, her path echoing exactly the paths of the people who had once used this passage.
On the other side of the wall, he couldn’t tell what she was doing. But after a while, he heard the faintest thud and then a ping, as if a long unused spring had been forced into service after the loosing of a latch. To his surprise, instead of a doorway opening in the wall, the whole section of wall between support posts rose up smoothly, revealing a passage behind it—with Param there waiting.
Rigg stepped through into the passage. Param worked a lever and the wall slid silently back down. No wonder Rigg hadn’t been able to find a door. Just one of the limitations of his gift. He could tell where people had passed, but not what the place had looked like when they came through.
Rigg had expected the passage to be dark, but there was a faint silvery light. He made his way toward the seeming source of the light, wondering if there was some exterior vent that let in the ringlight.
It was soon clear that the light came from a mirror, which was reflecting light from another mirror—beyond that Rigg could not see how many other bends there might be. The light in this space was ringlight. On a cloudy night, this passage would require a candle—or such knowledge of it as would allow someone to pass through it in the dark.
“Did it hurt you?” he asked. “To go through the wall? Or door, or whatever it is?”
“Yes,” she said. She held out a hand. He touched it and recoiled. She was hot, like a child with a bad fever. He touched her forehead, her cheek. Hot all over.
“You can’t do that ever again,” he said.
“I have to,” she said. “I have no idea how to open it from the outside. But it’s not that bad. I cool down soon enough. It’s not like stone or brick—stone burns me, my clothing catches fire. I have to watch to make sure I never brush against stone when I’m hiding.”
In reply he hugged her. “You have no idea what it meant to me, to know I had a sister.”
“And to me,” she said. “He told me never to tell Mother that I knew about you. But you were coming and you would set me free.”
“I will,” he said. “I know how to follow these passages to get through the outside wall.”
“Under it?” she asked.
“The land these houses are built on was raised. It’s not as high now, because the weight of the houses presses it down. So some of the passages may have water in them now—this is the river delta, and water is just below the surface everywhere. But as long as we can breathe, we can make it out of here. One long passage leads to the Library of Nothing.”
“How can you know this? Have you gone into these passages before?”
“No,” said Rigg. “But I’ve seen the paths of the people who’ve used them. I know where they went. That’s what I do—I see their paths, even when they’re hidden behind walls or underground.”
“You have a much more useful gift than mine,” she said.
“Mine didn’t get me into this space. Mine doesn’t allow me to disappear in plain day.”
“Yours doesn’t burn you up when you pass through things.”
“I’m sorry I walked through you that time.”
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “We were both moving—it means we didn’t occupy the same space for very long. Walls are stationary. I’m the only one moving, and the contact lasts a lot longer.”
He held her hands tightly. “What did you call him? The man I knew as Father?”
“Walker,” she said.
“So he was in this house?”
“Yes,” she said. “I told Mother that one of the scholars had inadvertently helped me understand my gift. But really he came here as a gardener. The gardens still show his touch. Why didn’t you know he was here? Couldn’t you see his path?”
“Father—Walker—he doesn’t make a path. He has no path.”
“How could he manage that?”
“I don’t know if he manages it or simply doesn’t have one. He’s a saint, I think. A hero. He has powers other people don’t have.”
“But when I was invisible, he couldn’t see me, the way you can.”
“I can’t see you, I can only see where you were—the spot you passed through and left behind a moment before. And it isn’t seeing, exactly. I can close my eyes or turn my back and still find your path.”
“He said you were the best of us.”
“Us?”
“All his students.”
“So he told you about others?”
“He said the world has bent itself to make us. These powers run strong in this wallfold, he said. So everything depends on us.”
“What everything?” asked Rigg. “Restoring the monarchy? I don’t really care about that.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Neither did he.”
“He told you so much,” said Rigg. “He told me nothing.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Yes,” he said. “And angry. Why didn’t he trust me?”
“He trusted you most of all, he told me that. He said you were the most ready. His best student.”
“I can’t do anything myself. I can see paths, yes, but I can’t do anything without Umbo—he’s the one who actually lets me move back in time. The way you got me in here. I can’t do anything myself.”
“You knew where this passage was.”
Rigg realized they were wasting time on reassurances that his own gift had value. “We don’t have very long. Someone’s going to notice we’re gone.”
“Probably not,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“You’d be surprised how closely they watch
.”
“You forget that I’ve walked these rooms and halls for years now,” she said.
“Turning and turning,” he said.
“What?”
“You can’t hold still or you reappear. So you walk in small circles when you want to stay in a room without being visible. Your whole path is full of curlicues.”
“Yes,” she said. “Around and around. I’m so sick of it.”
“So why not reappear?”
“Because they’ll kill me,” she said.
“I thought it was just—they said it was a man who—took your clothes.”
“I was putting up with nonsense like that my whole life. No, this was a man with a knife. I didn’t have time to do anything but rush toward him—I call it ‘rushing’—and then pass through him. He didn’t know where I’d gone. Back then I hardly ever did it—rushing, I mean—and they might not have known I could do it. Now they know, though. Mother told me about the spies. They know everything.”
“They know only what they see and hear,” said Rigg.
“I can’t hear anything when I rush,” she said. “You were so clever to—the slate, I mean. Even Mother never thought of writing me messages and holding them really still.”
“We have to go. But first—can you see any mechanism here that seems to lead outside the room? Any connection to some trigger that might open the door from the outside?”
They both examined the walls of the passage, but there was nothing. The lever that opened it from this side was rooted in the wall, and everything else was hidden.
“I can go into the wall if you want,” she said, “but it’s pitch black in there. I won’t see anything and I certainly can’t feel anything. Except the heat and the thickness of it.”
“No, no, I don’t want you to do that. But . . . I’m such a fool . . . somebody had to build these passages, right? Somebody built the mechanism. If I go back to the beginning, I can find his path. Their paths. I can see where they went when they were hooking everything together.”
“You mean the paths don’t fade?”
“Not really,” said Rigg. “They get fainter, sort of, but it’s more like they get farther—but it’s not actually distance—they’re still there. They never go away or move. Shhh. Let me concentrate.”
It took five minutes for him to find the right time. Long ago there had been another building here, and as he struggled to find exactly the right path, Rigg realized that they must have built this portion of Flacommo’s house while the old house was still standing. To hide what they were doing from view.
Once he had the right paths, the answer was clear. “The trigger is in the ceiling of the corridor,” he said. “Too high up for us to reach, even if we jump. But if we had a broom, or a sword, or . . . anything with a handle . . . he worked in spots right at the corners of the wall panel. Maybe you have to push both. Or maybe one opens it and the other closes it.”
“Let’s go out and see,” she said.
Rigg reached for the lever.
“Wait!” she said. “What if somebody’s out there?”
“I’d know it if they were,” said Rigg. “There’s nobody.”
“When we go out, we can’t talk any more.”
“But there’s always tomorrow. And the next day.”
“Rigg,” she said, and hugged him again. “You know I’ve gotten younger, waiting for you,” she said.
“Younger?”
“When I rush, the rest of the world flies by. When I’m going really fast, whole days can pass in what seems like a few minutes to me. Most of the time I don’t rush so hard, but—”
“How do you know how much time has passed for you?” asked Rigg. “How do you measure time when you’re rushing?”
“Let’s just say . . . it’s a pretty accurate method. I know how many days have passed in the regular world, and I can—I measure my time by the month. Do you understand? I know when a month has passed for me. And since I went into seclusion, it’s only been two months for me. Everybody else has aged more than a year. But two months for me. So they think I’m sixteen now, but my body has barely lived through fifteen years. At this rate I’ll live forever—only I’ll have no life at all.”
She was crying. Not like a child, face bunched up and whining noises, but like a woman, silently, her shoulders heaving as he held her. “Param, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Getting out of this house isn’t enough. They’ll hunt us down in the city, in the library, wherever we go.”
“Umbo and Loaf will come,” said Rigg. “We’ll find a way. You’ll get your life back. We both will.”
“You’re my little brother,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the one making promises to you.”
“I know,” said Rigg. “You can tell me bedtime stories when we’re out of here. But we’ve got to go now, while there’s still time to figure out how to close the door from the other side.”
In the end, they didn’t look for a broom or anything else. Rigg just cupped his hands and boosted her up. With Param leaning against the wall while stepping onto his shoulder, she could reach the corner. Naturally, they tried the wrong spot first. Nothing happened and Rigg was ready to despair until she pointed out that they were probably pressing the spot that opened it. Sure enough, when she pressed hard in the other corner—and he knew just how hard, since her feet pressed downward into his shoulders—the wall slid silently back into place. There was no sign that it was any different from the other walls.
When she was back down on the floor, she kissed him on the cheek and then she was gone.
In the whole time he had barely caught a glimpse of her face. The silvery mirrored light in the secret passage, the flickering candlelight in the corridor—Rigg wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her if he saw her in broad daylight.
But she was real and alive and he had finally done what Father told him to do—he had found his sister. And she was expecting him. Father had said that he would set her free.
Father trusted me.
She trusts me now.
I’d better not let her down.
CHAPTER 18
Digging in the Past
“We have nineteen starships,” said Ram. “And only one world.”
“That gives us nineteen times the chance of success,” said the expendable.
“Nineteen times the likelihood of terrible confusion between colonies that have exactly the same personnel,” said Ram. “Nineteen times the likelihood of deadly rivalries, adulteries, even murders. Constant comparison between the lives of persons bearing the same names, DNA, even fingerprints. And in the end, our nineteen ships will still end up populating only one world.”
“We have no likely target worlds for the remaining ships,” said the expendable. “And we have only the one captain.”
“One of the best things about settling the human race on a new planet is that a disaster that strikes one human world won’t affect the other, so the species can’t be extinguished by a single event.”
“Except the explosion of the galactic core,” said the expendable helpfully.
“Yes, there is that chance, but there’s not much we can do about that.”
“Yet,” said the expendable.
“Meanwhile,” said Ram, “I think there’s another benefit we might enhance a little. The plan was always for the human race to exist on two planets. What no one planned was for our colony to be separated by more than eleven thousand years in time from the starfaring culture we came from. There is no chance of interbreeding between Earth and this world. It’s a true Galapagos opportunity to see where genetic drift takes the two versions of the human race in complete isolation for more than four hundred generations.”
“Technically, only this world will have 447 generations, using the average of twenty-five years,” said the expendable. “Earth will have had no time elapse at all.”
“So we will drift genetically, and they will not,” said Ram. “We will evolve and they will not.”
“Eleven thousand years is not really very long, in terms of evolution,” said the expendable. “Human populations that were separated for seventy thousand years during the great drought in Africa remained capable of interbreeding.”
“The separation probably wasn’t complete,” said Ram. “If you’re talking about the genetic bottleneck after the explosion of Mount Toba, it only lasted twenty thousand years. And the southern African group was known to be a seafaring one, since they colonized all around the Indian Ocean, including Australia and New Guinea.”
“I used the longer timespan to make my point clear,” said the expendable, “but even your shorter genetic bottleneck was twice as long as the isolation of this colony is going to last.”
“And at the end of it, modern humans were far different. Longer-legged, lighter in weight. Endurance runners who could chase prey until it collapsed from oxygen depletion. Spear throwers and expert blade makers. Storytellers who could use language to create a map that others could follow through strange lands to find water. Creative thinkers who could learn from others and then innovate and adapt, and then spread the cultural innovations across hundreds of miles in a single generation.”
“You seem to have made a detailed study of this,” said the expendable.
“After your question about the human species, of course I did,” said Ram. “Ten thousand years is plenty of time for real change in the human species, because this time the isolation will be complete.”
“But you have a question for us, dealing with nineteen starships and one world,” said the expendable.
“What if we could establish nineteen colonies, each knowing nothing about the others? They would never encounter their genetic doubles. There would be no rivalry. One would not triumph over all the others. These nineteen colonies, plus Earth, would divide the human race into twenty parts. Potentially, our species could explore twenty different paths of development, genetically, culturally, intellectually. All of human history, all the wars and empires and technology and languages and customs and religions, they all evolved in less time than we’ll have here. There is enough land mass to create nineteen enclaves larger than Europe, larger than the land from Egypt to Persia, larger than the Americas from the Aztecs down to the Incas.”
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