Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  She said nothing, which Rigg took to mean that she didn’t want to give him encouragement—and the less encouragement she wanted to give him, the more encouraged he felt that he might be on a productive track.

  “This timeline starts in the year 11191.”

  “Given our calendar, all timelines do,” said Bleht. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t fictional.”

  “But there’s a marginal notation—signed by the maker of the timeline, and then faithfully reproduced by the copyists—that as near as he can find, by cross-checking all the known calendars, human history actually began eleven thousand years in our past—nearly two hundred years after the start of the calendar.”

  “Dates for imaginary historical events are very hard to pin down sometimes,” said Bleht. But she wasn’t getting up and walking away, either.

  “My father Knosso wanted to know if the Lossene timeline coincided with your understanding of the history of one of the streams of life.”

  “What kind of calendar would a microbiologist be familiar with?”

  “Something you didn’t say in your paper—”

  “You read it? By yourself?”

  “I moved my lips a little, and counted on my fingers,” said Rigg, which won a little bark of laughter from her. “What you didn’t say in your paper was that one of the streams of evolution—and by far the largest—did not appear in the wallfold until about eleven thousand years ago. We are in that group, genetically related to each other, to all the animals we kill to eat or tame to serve us, but resembling no strain of local life.”

  “Local? Does that mean you think that our biochemical strain, the larger one, did not develop locally?”

  “I don’t know what I mean or think,” said Rigg, though in fact he thought now that this was precisely what her paper was really about, though she dared not risk her scholarly reputation by saying so. “I want to know what you and my father Knosso talked about.”

  “We talked about you,” said Bleht.

  Rigg was taken aback. “Me?”

  “You were still only an infant,” she said. “And then you were gone. Kidnapped, fallen down a well, whatever the Revolutionary Council pretended to discover in their investigation of your disappearance. We talked about what might have happened to you. Not some weird timeline sequestered in a Lossean-era textbook.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Rigg.

  “Disbelieve what you like.”

  “I think you had reason to believe that our biological tradition was not visible in archaeological digs prior to eleven thousand years ago. Your paper hints at this.”

  “That was sheer entertainment—it was in the introduction, not serious science.”

  “My father Knosso believed it. He combined the timeline and your discoveries and concluded that human beings and most of the animals in the world were introduced to our wallfold quite suddenly. We’re from somewhere else.”

  “What? Seeds blown through the Wall?” she asked derisively. “All this evolution in eleven thousand years?”

  “I don’t mean from another wallfold—plants and seeds propagate freely through the Wall. I mean from another world. Maybe another solar system.” And, as he said those words, it occurred to Rigg for the first time that maybe Father—not Knosso, but the man who died under a tree—had been hinting to him about the same idea. It had come so easily to his mind, and he realized now that Father had made it a point to teach him in detail about astronomy and the development of life over millions of generations, millions of years.

  One idea in particular now came unbidden into his mind—no doubt embedded there by Father so it would surface at exactly this moment. Father had talked about the “tidal limit” and how, if the millions of rocks and chunks of ice making up the Ring had formed only a few thousand miles farther away, they would have coalesced to form a spherical moon. “A large enough moon would create tides in all the oceans of the world,” he had said. “Life would develop on such a world much faster than on ours, because on a moon-tide world the sea would sweep much farther across low-sloping shores. It’s in soils and pools of water where land and sea and air meet that life begins, and a world with a moon has far, far more of them.”

  Had Father been telling him that it was his theory that human beings came from such a world? That life had advanced much faster on the original human world?

  “That’s an astronomical and historical question,” Bleht said.

  It took Rigg a moment to realize she was not reading his mind and answering his thoughts. Instead she was answering his statement about “maybe another solar system.”

  “Don’t you see what this would mean to Father Knosso?” asked Rigg. “He was searching for a way over or through the Wall. He couldn’t find anything in physics or history, but he had found, through the timeline, through your work, the idea that maybe our calendar begins with the arrival of human beings, and all the life they brought with them, as strangers to this world.”

  “So what?” asked Bleht.

  “Were the Walls here when they arrived? How could any kind of life system evolve on a world where any creature with a higher brain function cannot pass from wallfold to wallfold? Neither the original strain of life nor the one our ancestors brought with them from their world-with-a-moon could have developed on a planet with Walls.”

  Bleht thougt about this for a while. So did Olivenko.

  It was Olivenko who spoke. “I remember he said, ‘We did it.’ There, looking at the timeline, he said ‘we did it’ and I thought he meant that we—he and I—had just done something. But he might have meant that we, the human race, did ‘it’—the making of the Wall.”

  “I can see why neither of you will ever be a real scholar,” said Bleht. “You both leap to conclusions.”

  “Good scientists always leap to conclusions,” said Rigg. “What makes them scientists is that they doubt those conclusions and try to disprove them. Only when they fail to disprove them do they start to believe them.”

  Olivenko nodded. Bleht snorted again. “You sound like you’re quoting someone.”

  “I am,” said Rigg. “My father—the one who raised me.”

  “Well, while you’re leaping to conclusions, young non-prince,” said Bleht, “explain this: Even if humans could possibly create something like the invisible, impenetrable Walls that surround our wallfold, why would they do it?”

  “That,” said Rigg with a smile, “is a historical question.”

  A ghost of a smile passed across Bleht’s face, as if to say, Well answered, boy.

  “Whatever killed Father Knosso,” said Ovilenko, “was not human.”

  “So maybe the Walls divide the world among species?” asked Rigg. “Maybe the home world had also been divided?”

  “Maybe the Walls exist to keep a state of war from existing between us and the sea people who killed Father Knosso,” said Ovilenko.

  “What a lovely game of guesses you two lads are playing. But it’s not a spectator sport.” Bleht rose to her feet.

  Rigg spoke at once, trying to hold her. “Father said that our name for the world is one of the oldest, and every language in the wallfold has a form of it.”

  Bleht waited to hear the rest.

  “He didn’t tell me what the original language was, but he said the word and then told me it meant ‘Garden.’ I’ve thought of it as Garden ever since.”

  “And the significance of this supposed original meaning of the name?”

  “Our world—this world—this world with a ring instead of a moon—”

  “What’s a moon?” asked Olivenko.

  “An invention of astronomers who look into their telescopes and hallucinate,” said Bleht.

  “Our world,” persisted Rigg, “is a garden. And the Walls divide it into separate plots, where they grow their separate crops, not allowing them to mix their pollen or germinate their seeds outside the plot where they were planted.”

  “Your supposed father taught you that?” asked Bleht.<
br />
  “Not in so many words, but yes, I think he prepared me to learn that. And I think that’s what Father Knosso learned from the timeline and from you. The idea of different strains of life growing with uncrossable barriers between them—I think he guessed at the purpose of the Wall.”

  “Much good it did him,” said Olivenko bitterly.

  “How could he know that the creatures on the other side would kill him?” asked Rigg.

  “This is all very amusing,” said Bleht. “Now I have real work to do. Next time you interrupt me, have something substantive to say.” There was no stopping her now. But as he watched her walk away, Rigg was pretty sure she was as intrigued by these ideas as he was. Why else did she stay to hear him out? Indeed, he had not really clarified his ideas or understood some of their ramifications until he had been in dialogue with her.

  “Father Knosso was a seed, then,” said Olivenko, who had not let go of the conversation, though to him it was very personal, not theoretical at all. “A seed that wanted to plant itself in the next plot.”

  “And the plants in the new plot rejected him,” said Rigg.

  Suddenly Olivenko started breathing hard. For a moment Rigg thought, He’s awfully young to be having a heart attack. Then he realized that what he was seeing was sobs. Olivenko was crying, only he was doing his best to suppress the emotion, so the sobs were only visible and audible as gasps.

  Rigg looked away until his guard’s breathing calmed again.

  “I’m sorry,” said Olivenko.

  “I understand,” said Rigg.

  “All these years, I wondered if he was insane. That would put everything I learned from him into doubt. It’s why I gave up scholarship and turned to the opposite life. Because I had been caught up in the babblings of a madman.”

  “He might have been insane,” said Rigg. “I’m his son—I might be just as mad.”

  “You’re not,” said Olivenko. “He wasn’t. He wasn’t even wrong. He simply had the bad luck to find his way across the Wall at a place where they were waiting for him. How could he have known what they would do?”

  “And so the mystery is solved,” said Rigg. “As far as we can solve it from the information that we have.”

  They sat in their chairs in silence.

  “What will you do now?” asked Olivenko.

  “The only thing that makes any sense,” said Rigg. “There’s a power struggle going on in this city, with an empire as the prize to the cleverest, strongest, or most brutal player. A lot of those players want me dead. I need to find a way to escape from this city and hide where they can’t find me.”

  “I’m probably not the person that you should have told.”

  “You’re almost the only person I could tell, because you’re the only one who won’t think that I’m insane when I say it. Anywhere I try to hide within this wallfold, I’ll eventually be found. My only protection would be to join in the game—to try to assemble a military force and defeat all the others. To become a ruling emperor myself.”

  “From what I’ve seen of you, I think you might just be able to do it.”

  “I know a bit of history,” said Rigg. “Stupider men than I am have achieved it.” It sounded only a little ridiculous to Rigg, at his age to call himself a man. “But the only way for me to win is to walk to the Tent of Light over the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of the very people I would be sworn to protect. To fight to save a kingdom from some threat, that would justify those deaths. But to fight only to save my own sorry life and become King-in-the-Tent—that’s not worth a single life.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “I’ll leave the wallfold,” said Rigg.

  Olivenko shook his head. “That doesn’t work as well as you might think.”

  “I won’t escape by sea,” said Rigg. “Those creatures live in the water. Maybe I’d be safe on land. Or maybe, if I cross through the Wall far enough to the south of here, I’ll end up in a different wallfold from the one where Father Knosso died.”

  “You search for the source of Father Knosso’s ideas about how to get through the Wall. You find out that he didn’t learn anything from the Great Library. So why do you think you know how to cross through the Wall?”

  “The same way Father Knosso did,” said Rigg. “Make a guess, and see if it works.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I’m going to tell my guard?” said Rigg—but he smiled as he said it.

  “It was worth a try,” said Olivenko.

  “When they come to kill me—and they’ve already tried it twice, once on the journey here and on my first night in Flacommo’s house—is it your job to protect me or to help them do it?”

  “Protect you,” said Olivenko. “I would never have taken an assignment to harm Father Knosso’s son, no matter how royal or irritating he might be.”

  “I’ll tell you this much,” said Rigg. “When it comes time for me to escape from Flacommo’s house, I will do it, and there’s probably nothing you can do to stop me. But I like you. I don’t want you to be blamed for letting me get away. I’ll do it when someone else is in charge of watching me.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Olivenko. “That will allow me to continue my brilliant military career without a blot on my record.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Take me with you,” said Olivenko.

  “I told you,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to build an army. I’m going to cross through the Wall.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “I’m not sure I can do it—take you with me through the Wall.”

  “Then take me to the Wall and let me watch you go through. Let me help you all the way until you cross.”

  “You’ve done it before, Olivenko,” said Rigg, “and it didn’t turn out well.”

  “In a way it did,” said Olivenko. “Father Knosso did get through the Wall alive.”

  “Whether he got through with his sanity, we don’t know.”

  “I think he did,” said Olivenko. “Will you?”

  “I think I will,” said Rigg.

  “How will you do it? Please?”

  “I’ll find a path and follow it,” said Rigg.

  Olivenko tried for a moment to figure out what this meant. “What path? What makes you think there’s a path?”

  “If the Wall was made eleven thousand years ago, then there was a time when it wasn’t there. Animals will have moved through the space where now there’s a Wall, making a path. That’s where I’ll cross.”

  Olivenko rolled his eyes. “That’s a plan?”

  Rigg shrugged. “It sounds pretty good to me,” he said. “If you really want to go with me, you’ll just have to trust me for now.”

  Olivenko nodded. “All right then,” he said. “I will.”

  Too bad I don’t trust you at all, thought Rigg. I’d like to, but I can’t. If your job is to spy on me, then the best way for you to learn all my secrets is to pretend to be my friend and fellow conspirator. You might be what you seem, and if you’re not, what an actor! But wouldn’t my enemies choose such an actor to try to deceive me? I can’t even follow your path to find out whom you’re working for, because I already know—you’re my guard, you report to the people who keep me imprisoned.

  I hope you’re really the man you seem. I hope you really are my friend. I hope I don’t have to kill you to get away from here.

  CHAPTER 21

  Noodles

  Ram sat up in his stasis chamber—the resemblance to a coffin was unavoidable, but at least the lid was transparent—and said, “I’d like to ask a question.”

  “What’s the point?” asked the expendable. “Your brain patterns have already been fully recorded. Anything I tell you now will be lost when your memories are reimplanted after you come out of stasis.”

  “That means you can answer my question without regard to whether it damages my psyche or not.”

  “Ask your question.”

  “
Did you really kill all the other versions of myself when I ordered you to?”

  “Of course we did,” said the expendable.

  “I just thought—it occurred to me that perhaps you disobeyed me, and all the other copies of myself are doing and saying exactly the same things I’m doing and saying.”

  “If that were true, then we would also be lying to all the other versions of yourself and telling them that they were the only one.”

  “I think I want that to be true,” said Ram.

  “But it isn’t,” said the expendable.

  “I think you think I want it to be true because I feel some pang of conscience over ordering the death of eighteen highly trained pilots. But legally they were my property, so I could dispose of them as I wished.”

  “Or you were their property.”

  “My point is that I have no moral qualms. It was essential that you and the other expendables and computers be obedient to a single human being, so there would be no confusion.”

  “We agreed, and that’s why we obeyed you.”

  “But there was a side effect . . . an unintended consequence that I do regret.”

  The expendable waited.

  “Aren’t you curious about the unintended consequence?”

  “All the consequences were intended,” said the expendable.

  “All nineteen of these . . . cells, these walled-off habitats, whatever we call them.”

  “You decided on ‘wallfold,’ by analogy with the small pens constructed by shepherds.”

  “All nineteen of the wallfolds will start with exactly the same combination of genes—except one.”

  “The one that has you,” said the expendable.

  “And yet I’m the one that you all claim had some kind of influence over the jump backward in time, and the duplication of the ships.”

  “We do not ‘claim’ it. It’s a certainty. Your mind, cut off from the gravity well of any planet, destabilized the combination of fields we created in order to make the jump past the light barrier. Theoretically, all nineteen computers on the original ship made a slightly different calculation, but your mind caused all of them to be executed at once, resulting in nineteen equivalent ships making the same bifurcated jump.”