Pathfinder sw-1

by Orson Scott Card

  One of the difficulties in explaining the events in this novel is that no point-of-view character ever has the full picture, which means I had no choice but to hope that readers would make the connections themselves. For those who are still confused, here’s a brief explanation of what “really” happened: When Ram’s ship entered the fold in space, the nineteen computers on board generated nineteen separate calculations, which created nineteen separate sets of fields. These interacted with Ram’s own mind, and Ram’s own strange ability with time caused each of those fields to be separately effective. That is, the jump was made nineteen times, creating nineteen copies of the ship going forward and nineteen copies going backward.

  The nineteen ships going backward tied themselves to the original one ship that made the voyage out to the point of the fold. Because they were going backward in time, they were unable to affect or be affected by the forward-moving universe in any way. In essence, they used the same space as each other without affecting each other.

  The backward-moving Rams began their existence at the exact moment when the jump was made. On the other hand, the nineteen forward-moving Rams not only popped into existence in the space near the planet Garden in nineteen separate locations (so they did not explode by trying to occupy the same space at the same time), but also they did so 11,191 years before the jump was made.

  To observers on Earth, the light-and-heat signature of Ram’s ship simply disappeared. This told them, not that the ship was successful in reaching its destination, but that the ship was successful in jumping out of its position in space. Because of lightspeed, it would have taken 31 years before observers could see the same light-and-heat signature pop into existence near Garden (if they were visible at all at such a distance), so the human observers could do nothing but keep rechecking their math and physics theories and hypotheses to decide whether they judged the jump to be successful.

  In the next book, we will discover that they made new calculations that improved their theory; thus they learned to make ships that could handle the jump without duplicating the ship for each set of calculations. They worked out a theory that mathematically required a backward-moving ship to be created for each jump, but realized that its existence could be ignored since it could affect nothing.

  They did not know of Ram’s abilities, however, and so had no notion that the ship(s) that made it through that first jump had popped up, not in the “present,” but 11,191 years earlier (31 lightyears from Earth times 19 squared). So they have no idea that humans have existed on Garden, not just the few years since Ram’s ship made its jump, but eleven thousand years. Indeed, they expect to find that the colony has not actually been established, since the expendables and ship’s computers should still be preparing to establish Earthborn life on Garden.

  I am grateful to my first readers, who had their own time-travel problems. Most of my books I write very quickly, all in a rush, so there’s rarely more than a day or two between chapters. This time, because of the weirdness of the story and the need to keep inventing new characters and situations along the road, the writing of the book was spread out over six months, with weeks between chapters. This made it very difficult for them to maintain continuity, yet they did a splendid job. My wife, Kristine, is always the first reader of everything; she was joined in this endeavor by Erin and Phillip Absher, and by Kathryn H. Kidd.

  My editor, Anica Rissi, gave this manuscript a close reading while it was still under construction; thanks to her, many contradictions and continuity errors that had eluded the notice of me and my first readers were caught and fixed almost at once. I am grateful for her comments and suggestions, all of which were valuable and led to substantial improvements in this complicated story. And I’m glad of Stephanie Evans’s excellent job of copy-editing, always difficult with a writer as quirky and self-willed, not to mention as easily distracted, as me.

  This book is dedicated to my agent, Barbara Bova, who passed away before I finished writing it. She never read it, but the book would not exist without her impetus. My thanks to her husband, Ben Bova (the editor who first bought a science fiction story from me back in 1976), and her son, Ken Bova, who together have kept her agency (and her network of foreign-rights agents) functioning smoothly.

  Thanks also to managing editor Kathleen Bellamy and editor Ed Shubert of my online magazine Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.oscIGMS.com), for accepting the early Ram material as a separate short story. Since I own the magazine and they both work for me, I submitted it to them under a false name, so they would consider it without bias. The fact that they took it and decided to make it a cover story before I revealed that I was its writer gave me the assurance I needed that it actually worked as a short story without the rest of the novel to sustain it.

  I am grateful for all who keep my household functioning when I’m buried in the writing of a book—Kathleen Bellamy in her guise as my assistant, Scott Allen as our webwright and IT expert, and of course my wife, Kristine, and our daughter Zina, who tolerated the strange writer man who wandered back and forth between the attic and the rest of the house, occasionally making sense in conversation but usually, because of the madness of this story, not.

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