by IGMS
"It's getting near dark outside," said Loaf. "Is there a safe place to sleep in this city?"
"Everywhere here is safe," said Vadesh.
Rigg nodded. "No large animals ever come here," he said.
"Then is there a comfortable place here?" asked Umbo. "I've slept on hard floors and on grass and pine needles, and unless there's a bed . . ."
"I don't need beds," said Vadesh, "and I didn't expect company."
"You mean they didn't make their beds out of stuff that never decays?" asked Olivenko.
"There is nothing that doesn't decay," said Vadesh. "Some things decay more slowly than others, that's all."
"And how slowly do you decay?" asked Rigg.
"Slower than beds," said Vadesh, "but faster than fieldsteel."
"And yet you seem as good as new," said Rigg. "That's a question."
Vadesh stood by the water pillar gazing at him for a long moment. Deciding, Rigg supposed, how to respond without telling him anything useful.
"My parts are all replaceable," he said. "And my knowledge is fully copied in the library in the Unchanging Star."
"Who makes your new parts?" asked Rigg.
"I do," said Vadesh.
"Here?" asked Rigg. "In this factory?"
"Some of the parts, yes," said Vadesh.
"And the other parts?"
"Somewhere else, obviously," said Vadesh. "Why do you ask? Do you think any of my parts are defective?"
Now, that was interesting, thought Rigg. I was going to ask him if he ever had enough parts to make a complete new copy of himself, but he assumed I was doubting that he was functioning perfectly.
This made Rigg assume that Vadesh himself had doubts about his functionality.
"How could I know if a machine so perfect that I could live with one for thirteen years without realizing it wasn't human is not up to par?" he asked.
"Exactly," said Vadesh, as if they had been arguing and Vadesh had just proved his point.
And maybe we were arguing, thought Rigg. And whatever Vadesh might have done since I met him, he certainly did not prove anything. All he did was make me wonder if he's broken somehow. Did he do that for a purpose? Is it an illusion, so I will underestimate his ability? Or is it a symptom of his imperfection, that he could raise doubts in my mind when his goal was to reassure me?
"Thanks for the water," said Rigg. "I think we'll go out of the city to sleep on softer ground. Unless there's a couple of you who want to sleep on stone."
There were no volunteers. Rigg led the way out of the building, following their own paths back out of the empty city. At first Vadesh seemed to assume he was welcome to come with them, but Rigg disabused him of that notion. "I don't believe you sleep," Rigg said to him. "And we won't need you to find us a resting place."
Vadesh took the hint and returned into the factory -- leaving no trace of himself for Rigg to follow. Just like Father, Vadesh was pathless; only living beings made paths through time. Machines might move about, but they left no track visible to Rigg's timesense.
It would have been so useful to trace Vadesh's movements through these buildings over the past ten thousand years, since all the people left. And perhaps even more interesting to trace his movements for the thousand years before that, when the people were still here. What was he doing when they left? Why did he still come here, if all the people were somewhere else?
* * *
2
Barbfeather
Rigg found that most of the paths of the ancient inhabitants of the city did not follow the road, and he stopped to see where they had led.
"We're supposed to sleep here?" asked Loaf.
Rigg looked around. The ground was stony and they were at the crest of a hill.
"This doesn't look comfortable at all," said Param. "Is this the kind of place you slept when you were living as a trapper?"
"I would never sleep on ground like this," said Rigg.
"Weren't you leading us to where we're going to spend the night?" asked Olivenko.
"I was getting us out of the city," said Rigg. "I didn't have any particular sleeping place in mind."
"Well, you seemed to know where you were going," said Umbo. "So we followed you."
"This isn't a good place to sleep," said Rigg. "Very stony, and no protection from wind."
"Well, we can see that," said Loaf.
"What were you doing, if you weren't finding us a hostelry?" asked Param.
"Sorry," said Rigg. "I got caught up in following paths," said Rigg.
"I thought you said there weren't any."
"None recent," said Rigg. "I was trying to make sense of the old ones."
"From ten thousand years ago," said Umbo.
Since Rigg didn't understand what it was that he hadn't understood about the paths, there was no way to explain. So he returned to the immediate subject. "There's a stand of trees over there," said Rigg. "That'll probably have soft ground. And we'll all sleep in the lee of Loaf, so we'll have shelter from the wind."
"Very funny," said Loaf.
Then Rigg came to a conclusion about what had puzzled him. "I think they may have died," said Rigg.
"The trees?" asked Param.
"The people here. If they moved away, peacefully I mean, then the most recent paths should have them leaving the city on the road. But the most recent people on the road only come in."
"Maybe they left another way," said Olivenko.
Death is another way, thought Rigg. But he kept it to himself. "I don't know if we can believe anything Vadesh says," said Rigg. "Umbo, I want to follow a path and go back and see."
"See what?" asked Loaf.
"If I knew," said Rigg, "I wouldn't have to go back."
"Let's see," said Umbo. "Going into the past has brought us exactly what, so far?"
"Saved our lives," said Loaf, and almost at the same time Param said, "You set me free and saved . . ."
Olivenko added, "It was ten thousand years ago that all the people left this city."
"Or died in it," said Rigg. "It could have been a plague."
"Cities rise and fall," said Olivenko. "That's what history is."
"Let's find a way to be comfortable here tonight," said Loaf. "I wish we were still mounted. We could just leave this place."
"Leave our only known source of safe water?" asked Param.
Then they were among the trees, and the conversation turned to other things. Rigg only happened to stop and look back at the moment that Umbo bent down, picked something up, and tucked it into his pocket. Rigg was too far away to casually say, "Find something?" or "Drop something?" It's not as if he even had a right to ask. Umbo didn't owe him explanations.
At the same time, there had been something furtive in the way Umbo pocketed it and then glanced around. Yet Umbo hadn't looked at Rigg or any of the others to see if they were observing him. On the contrary, he specifically glanced around as if looking for someone else. The person who might have dropped whatever Umbo picked up? Without even thinking about it, Rigg scanned for paths. No one had been here since the city was abandoned, and that long ago it was doubtful that there was a grove of trees here, anyway.
But animals came and went all the time here, Rigg could see. One in particular had been in and out of this grove several times in the past few hours. He recognized its path.
"We have a friend here," said Rigg.
The others looked around, startled.
"Our feathered friend," said Rigg. "The beast that led us into the past and through the wall."
"I thought he went crazy when we popped back into the present and the Wall came back," said Loaf.
"He's not in the wall anymore. He came here. He's been going up to the trees. Tree to tree."
"He didn't look like a climber to me," said Loaf.
"Or a bark-eater," said Umbo.
"We wouldn't know what he looked like," said Olivenko. "There aren't any like him in the modern world."
"He can't have gotten far,"
said Rigg. "He was here not half an hour ago."
"You know we only have that Vadesh's word that the water's not safe," said Olivenko.
"He can't lie," said Umbo.
"And who told us that he can't?" asked Olivenko. "'Hi, I can't possibly lie to you.' Isn't that the first thing a liar would say?"
"He's just like Father," said Rigg, "and Father never lied to me."
"He didn't exactly open up and bare his soul to you, either," said Loaf.
"He didn't tell you about me," said Param.
Rigg started to answer. "He did when he was . . ." But then he realized that Father hadn't been dying, he had just been hiding behind a fallen tree, pretending to be trapped under it. Lying to Rigg.
Rigg covered his eyes with one hand. "I still live in the world he built around me. All his teachings and talk, and I don't know what's true and what isn't."
"Welcome to adult life," said Loaf.
"I'm not an adult," said Rigg.
"Really?" said Umbo. "Well, I think when you're in charge of yourself, you're an adult."
"Oh, right," scoffed Loaf.
"Plenty of full-size grownups don't do half as well as me and Rigg, thanks," said Umbo.
Again Rigg wanted to know what Umbo had found. What he had in his pocket.
They heard a snorting noise from three rods away. Quietly they spread out to surround it. Rigg looked at Umbo and rolled his eyes. None of the others knew how to walk stealthily. Not that they had to. The beast was making so much noise it couldn't have heard them.
It was indeed the beast with the barbed feathers, and it was hitting the side of its head against a tree, then scraping the same area on the bark. As Rigg got closer, he could see that he had mud on that side of his head.
Not mud. The thing that looked like mud was actually another creature in its own right. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see its tiny faint path moving through the air right along with barbfeather's path the whole time it had been in the woods.
Loaf and Umbo, who had both dealt with animals, were much closer to it now; Olivenko and Param were hanging back. They were city people.
"Don't get too close," said Rigg.
"What's it got on its face?" asked Loaf.
"My guess is it drank from the stream," said Umbo.
"I think so too," said Rigg.
"You mean it picked up that parasite? That facemask thing?" asked Olivenko.
"Whatever it's got on its head, it's alive. A separate creature. With its own path."
"Every time the beast smacks it or scrapes at it," said Umbo, "it gets bigger. Spreads more, I mean. There's a strand of it going into the poor beast's ear."
"So all the barbfeather's efforts to get rid of it are actually helping it attach more firmly," said Rigg.
"What a clever evolutionary ploy," said Olivenko. "Facemasks that could make use of the beating and scraping would have a better chance of survival."
"Maybe all the fear and aversion allow the facemask to find the right parts of the brain to attach to in order to get control," suggested Rigg.
"You sound so excited," said Param. "Has anybody noticed what this means?"
"That Vadesh wasn't lying about the parasite, you mean?" asked Loaf. "That's obvious."
"I mean that we're totally dependent on Vadesh for our drinking water," said Param.
"You know," said Umbo, "I'm thinking we ought to be able to find a place to slink back through the Wall and just figure out how to stay alive in our own wallfold."
"Let's see," said Loaf. "A land with one dangerous parasite, or a place where thousands of soldiers will be looking for us and everybody else will be happy to turn us over to them in exchange for a reward." He made weighing motions with his hands.
"They're only looking for me and Param," said Rigg. "Why don't the rest of you go back?"
"And leave us here alone?" Param didn't even try to conceal the panic in her voice.
"They'd still catch us," said Loaf. "And then torture us till we told them where you were. And since they wouldn't believe the truth . . ."
"I was just saying that you don't have to stay here," said Rigg. "I didn't claim it would be perfectly safe."
"What do we do about this poor animal?" asked Param.
Rigg looked at her in surprise. "Do?"
"It's in so much distress," said Param.
"Of course it is," said Rigg. "It's got a parasite sticking to its head that's trying to invade its brain."
"Well, we brought it here," said Param.
"I suppose we did," said Rigg. "But it's from this world and, if Vadesh is telling the truth -- and about these facemask things he seems to be -- then the parasites are natives here, just like old barbfeather. So if we hadn't pulled him to now to run into this parasite, he might just as easily have had exactly the same thing happen to him back then."
"Except that the world was just about to end for him anyway," said Loaf. "Our ancestors were about to wipe him out along with all his cousins, right? We saved him."
"I can see now that he ought to be grateful," said Param.
"Look, if you gave him a choice between parasite on his face and dead, what do you think he'd choose?" asked Rigg.
"Look what he actually is choosing," said Umbo.
Param nodded but she didn't like it. "Life," she said.
"Animals that don't cling to it no matter what don't survive long enough to make babies," said Olivenko. "We don't want to die."
"Then how do you explain suicides?" asked Loaf.
"I don't," said Olivenko.
"Wasn't Father's death a kind of suicide?" asked Param.
It took Rigg a moment to realize that even though Param was his full sister, she wasn't talking about the man he had called Father -- the Golden Man, the Wandering Man, the machine called Ram, who had trained her and Umbo and Rigg in how to use their time-altering talents. She was talking about their real father, whom Rigg had never met: Father Knosso, who had passed unconscious through the Wall on a boat, and then was dragged from the boat and drowned by some kind of manlike sea creatures in another wallfold.
"It wasn't suicide," said Olivenko angrily. As a young scholar in the Great Library he had been Knosso's friend and assistant. "He didn't intend to die."
"No," said Param. "But he knew he might, and he threw his life at it as if nothing else mattered. Not me, certainly."
"He loved you," said Olivenko.
"But he loved his experiment more," said Param.
The barbfeather, Rigg noticed, had stopped beating and scraping its face against the tree. It was turning its gaze toward each one of them who spoke. And it didn't just turn the eye that wasn't covered by the facemask. It turned as if it had two good eyes. As if it could still see through the thing.
In the silence after Param's last few bitter words, the barbfeather trotted straight toward Rigg.
"Rigg!" shouted Umbo.
"It's coming at you!" warned Loaf.
Rigg reached out his hand and the barbfeather stopped and sniffed it. "He wasn't charging at me," said Rigg.
"Keep your hand away!" said Umbo. "Do you want the facemask to jump over to you?"
"Vadesh says they can only attach in water. And not after they've already attached to . . . something." Rigg had almost said "somebody."
"So we're believing everything he says now?" asked Umbo.
"He didn't lie about the facemasks," said Rigg. "He might be lying about some things, but he's not lying about that. And he didn't follow us here, either, or try to prevent us from leaving. Maybe all he really did was lead us to safe water."
"Staying suspicious is what keeps me alive," said Loaf. "That survival instinct, you know?"
"I'm for suspicion, too," said Rigg. "But at some point you have to place your bet and let it ride."
The barbfeather was still sniffing his hand.
"I think he smells himself on my hand," said Rigg. "That's the hand I held against his back as we went through the Wall."
&nbs
p; "And there's no reason he should fear the smell of humans," said Olivenko.
The barbfeather abruptly turned its head, pressing the facemask against Rigg's fingers. Rigg recoiled at once.
"Look at your hand!" shouted Umbo. "Is anything sticking to it?"
"What do you think, that the facemask just made my hand pregnant?" asked Rigg.
"They might have more than one way of reproducing," said Umbo. "Vadesh said they were adaptable."
"Maybe it makes babies on the surface of its skin," said Param, "and rubs them off on you."
"Or on tree bark," said Olivenko.
Rigg considered this. "It felt dryish and a little rough. Like unglazed clay pots. And there is truly, absolutely nothing on my hand. Now let's get back to the spot we picked and prepare some food."
"What do we do about this . . . this . . . what did you call it, Rigg?" asked Param.
"Barbfeather. Just a descriptive name. And we're not going to do anything about it."
"What if it follows us to our camp?" she asked.
"If it lies down, don't snuggle up to it," said Rigg. "Those feathers really are barbed."
"That's it?"
"What do you want me to do, Param, kill it?"
"Isn't that what you and your father -- I mean Ram -- isn't that what you did with animals?"
"We killed the ones whose fur we could sell," said Rigg. "Do you want a coat made out of that?"
"Gloves," said Loaf. "I think Leaky could use gloves like that -- for punching some of our customers who drink too much and won't leave the roadhouse quietly."
They left the barbfeather and set about making camp. But soon it joined them again. Their provisions were meager, but they had been on the road for a while and they were used to them. Rigg offered some of his food to the beast. It sniffed and then wandered away. "Must not smell like anything edible to him," Rigg said.
"Doesn't taste like anything edible to me," said Olivenko.
"Wonder how that barbfeather would taste," said Loaf, "if we could talk him into climbing into a stewpot for us."
"I don't think our bodies could make much use of his meat," said Rigg, "even if we could keep it inside long enough to digest it."