Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card
As he stood there, gazing at his friends, he heard a voice at his side. Umbo’s voice. And he was speaking so rapidly that Rigg couldn’t understand him.
Rigg turned to face him, then glanced back at where he could see Umbo right beside Loaf. The two Umbos were dressed differently, and the Umbo standing beside him looked distressed, frightened, and deadly serious. Rigg knew at once what was happening. Somehow a future version of Umbo had managed to learn the trick of following a path back in time—Rigg’s own path. And he had done it in order to warn him of something.
Umbo slowed down—Rigg could see that he was mouthing the words with difficulty, and yet they came so rapidly that Rigg could still only just barely understand him.
“Give the jewels to Loaf to hide them at once.”
Rigg nodded to show he understood. He could see Umbo sag with relief—and in that moment he disappeared.
Rigg walked around to where the coachman was watering the horses. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “There are plenty of coaches here, I can see, so let me pay you for bringing us here and then if we happen to meet for the road back to the dock, so much the better. But meanwhile you’re free to take another fare.”
The man named a price for the one journey, looking vastly disappointed. Rigg knew the fare was much too high, but he doubled it and paid the man, who bowed and fawned and made himself so obnoxious with gratitude that Rigg was glad to turn and jog away from him, trotting toward the others.
They came to him at a walk, and Loaf brandished a pass for three visitors for the whole day. Rigg thanked him, but then drew them away from the tower.
“Where are we going?” asked Umbo.
“We’ll go to the tower soon enough,” said Rigg. “But something must happen first.”
“What?” asked Loaf.
“I’ll tell you where we can’t be overheard by half the pilgrims here.”
They headed for the men’s latrines but then passed them by. Not until they had found a secluded place behind the latrine wall did Rigg stop and, facing the wall, draw the small bag of jewels out of his trousers.
“What are you doing?” whispered Loaf harshly. “Get that back in your pants.”
“No sir,” said Rigg. “I’m giving it to you for safekeeping.”
“Why? A pickpocket’s as likely to get it from me as from you.”
“Quieter,” said Rigg. “I had a warning.”
“Who from?” asked Umbo.
“You,” said Rigg.
Umbo blanched, then looked at Loaf and back again. He seemed nervous. “I’ve been with Loaf the whole time, I didn’t say a word to you.”
“The warning came from you—you in the future. You were very upset. You told me to give the jewels to Loaf, and he should hide them at once.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Loaf. “How could Umbo warn you about anything when he doesn’t know what you’re talking about?”
“He knows all right,” said Rigg. “He’ll explain it to you later. For right now, Loaf, take this bag and hide it—someplace where it will be safe for a few days or a few weeks or a year. I don’t know how far in the future Umbo had gotten before he was able to come back and warn me.”
“I suppose this means I actually learn how to do it,” said Umbo. “Since it was me who came, and not you.”
“If I’m understanding you aright,” said Loaf, “then you’ve lost your mind.”
“Take it on faith for now,” said Rigg. “If I can trust you with wealth like this, you can trust me and Umbo not to be insane.”
“I don’t think the two things have anything to do with each other,” said Loaf, but still he took the little bag in his massive hand. “I’ll hide it all right, but if someone sees me do it or finds it by chance, it’s on your head, not mine.”
“Exactly,” said Rigg. “And to be safe, don’t tell Umbo or me where you hid it. I don’t know what the danger is, but there must be an excellent reason for me not to have the jewels, and it seems to me that it’s best if I also don’t know where they are. I think Umbo will be safer, too, if only you know.”
“So if I die, they’re lost forever,” said Loaf.
“I already have wealth beyond my wildest dreams,” said Rigg.
“Just like a child . . . easy come, easy go.” But Loaf turned away and walked into the park-like woods that surrounded the tower grounds, while Rigg and Umbo started off toward the trail of pilgrims headed back to the tower from the latrines.
“We might as well go, as long as we’re here,” said Umbo.
“Who knows when we’ll get a chance again? Something’s going to go seriously wrong or you wouldn’t have come back to warn me, and it’s probably going to be soon or you wouldn’t have warned me right when you did.”
“Maybe that was the only time I could find you.”
“Who knows?” said Rigg. “I don’t like knowing that something’s going to go wrong. Here I spent the past couple of weeks thinking I was handling things rather well.”
“But things going wrong, that’s the usual, isn’t it?” said Umbo. “My brother died. Your father died. Whatever happens next can’t be as bad as that.”
“Unless I get killed,” said Rigg. “Falling out of the boat into the water and I drown and so you had me give the jewels to Loaf so—”
“I’d tell you not to drown,” said Umbo, “and if I wanted to steal the jewels, I’d tell you to give them to me.”
“So you’ve already thought about this?” asked Rigg.
“Just keep peeing,” said Umbo.
By the time they were through, Loaf was back.
Umbo asked, “Where did you go?”
“Shut up,” replied Loaf. “What now? What’s this all about?”
“Rigg and I decided that whatever it is, it’s probably not the worst thing in the world. I mean, we know that you and I are still alive, whatever happens to Rigg.”
“I thought I told you to shut up,” said Loaf, sounding more like he meant it now.
They showed their three-person pass to a different set of guards from the ones Loaf had talked to before, so they wouldn’t see Rigg’s rich-boy clothing and decide they had been defrauded of their rightful bribe. Then they joined the throng of pilgrims going in.
Though the outside was metal, inside the structure was massive stone, with a long narrow ramp climbing in a spiral up the inside walls. There wasn’t a window in the place, and yet it was brightly lighted by magical globes hanging in the air.
“This ramp is steep,” said Loaf.
“You’re getting old,” said Umbo. “I could run all the way up.”
“Do it then,” said Loaf.
“No,” said Rigg. “The ramp is narrow, and all it takes is one pilgrim getting irritated and giving you a shove.”
“But I can’t die,” said Umbo. “Because I’m alive in the future to come back and warn you to do whatever.”
“Maybe you came back from the dead,” said Rigg.
“Come on, that’s impossible,” said Umbo.
“Coming back from the future is impossible, too,” said Loaf. “If you can explain one, you can explain the other.”
Rigg wasn’t at all sure he could explain anything, at least not well enough to be sure Loaf would believe it. After all the years Father had pressed on him the importance of telling no one, he had no practice in explaining anything to anyone. Nox already knew, and Umbo had a gift of his own. Yet to tell Loaf less than everything now was to make it plain that he was not trusted. That would make him resentful—and therefore less trustworthy. If future-Umbo thought it was safe to trust Loaf with the jewels, it seemed pointless not to include him in the secret of their shared power to reach backward in time.
All the other pilgrims on the ramp ahead and behind them were engaged in their own conversations. Keeping their voices at a normal volume, Rigg and Umbo told him about their abilities, and what they were able to do together. Between Loaf’s questions and Rigg and Umbo correcting each other,
“You still have that knife?” asked Loaf. “It didn’t disappear or anything, did it?”
“In my luggage,” said Rigg.
“Well, not actually,” said Umbo.
Rigg sighed. “What, future-you came back in time to tell you to take it and put it in your own luggage?”
“Loaf’s luggage, actually,” said Umbo.
“I was joking,” said Rigg. “Are you telling me you already knew that some future version of you was paying social calls on us?”
“He—I—woke me up this morning and told me to do it and then disappeared before I could ask any questions. I think me-in-the-future isn’t very good at it and a few seconds were all I could manage. Anyway, I didn’t tell you because why would you believe that I wasn’t just stealing it? Then you got your warning and it seemed way more important than mine. I mean, that’s a fortune in jewels, and you gave it right to Loaf.”
“And if he had told you he took your knife, would you have trusted him when he told you to give me the jewels?” asked Loaf.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Probably.” He thought a little more. “Maybe not.”
“I think he handled it right,” said Loaf. “Unless he is stealing stuff, but then why would he have you give the jewels to me, and put the knife in my luggage? No, I think whatever happens will make it so I’m the only one who doesn’t lose all my stuff.”
“What could make us lose our stuff?” asked Rigg.
“If the boat sinks,” said Umbo, “Loaf would lose his stuff, too.”
“If the boat sinks we all drown,” said Loaf.
“I can swim,” said Umbo. “So can Rigg. Like fish. Can’t you?”
“I’m a soldier. I was always wearing armor, I would have sunk right to the bottom. And since then why would I learn to swim?”
“It’s a useful skill,” said Umbo. “Especially for people who live by the river and might get tossed in by rivermen.”
“Most rivermen can’t swim either,” said Loaf.
“You still haven’t answered,” said Rigg. “Can you swim?”
“The idea is to stay in the boat,” said Loaf.
“Try again,” said Rigg.
“If you never admit you can swim,” said Loaf, “people think they can kill you by throwing you in the water.”
“Look,” said Umbo.
They had finally climbed up just higher than the balls of light and now the glare no longer prevented them from seeing the upper half of the tower. They could see that the stone ended not far above them, with a wide porch that ran all the way around the inside of the tower. It was crowded with pilgrims.
“Keep moving,” said a gruff man behind them. They walked on.
But glances upward told Rigg that from the platform ring, more than a dozen stone pillars rose to form vertical ribs that supported the metal walls. He remembered observing outside the Tower of O that from about the middle, the metal shell tapered in. So he was not surprised that the stone pillars leaned inward, right up against the metal, until the pillars were joined together by a metal-and-stone ring high above them. Beyond that, the metal formed a simple dome with no stone supporting it at all.
It was a marvel of engineering and design, making the stone support its own weight, and then the weight of the metal. It occurred to Rigg that the metal must be very, very thin, or it would be too heavy for the stone to support.
They got to the platform and moved far from the upward ramp. The beginning of the downward ramp was on the opposite side, and between them, hanging in the air, was an enormous ball. The globes from below and fewer globes from above lighted the entire surface of it. Now, though, they could see that wires from the top ring supported the globes of light, and probably there was some wire arrangement supporting the bigger ball.
The surface was painted in a way that Rigg did not understand. It didn’t seem to be a picture of anything, and the colors were drab and ugly and didn’t go together. There were brighter yellow lines making divisions on the largest areas of green and brown, and those seemed to shine. But the pattern of them made no sense. Perhaps a honeycomb made by drunken bees?
“There’s the world,” said Umbo. “It’s a picture of the world right there.”
Umbo was pointing to a particular place on the surface of the big globe. “See? That spot of red, that’s where Aressa Sessamo is. And that white spot, that’s O. The blue line is the Stashik River. So Fall Ford would be a little lower down.”
“Then the yellow lines are the Wall,” said Loaf. “I’ve patrolled the Wall, and that looks about right. But what’s the rest of it?”
“The whole world,” said Rigg, understanding it now. “It’s a globe, round in every direction, just like this.”
“Everybody knows that,” said Loaf. “Even the most ignorant privicks.”
“That’s crazy!” said Umbo, in mock dismay. “We’d all fall off!”
Rigg made a joke of explaining it to him, as if to a little boy. “No, no, little Umbo, the center of the world pulls on us, holding us to the surface. ‘Down’ is really toward the center.”
“This map of the globe is impossible,” said Loaf. “Nobody knows what’s outside the Wall. No one in the whole history of the human race has passed through it to see.”
“But you can see through it, right?” said Rigg.
“Not far enough to know things as distant as this map shows. Not just the neighboring wallfolds, but all of them. If it’s a map.”
“It’s a map,” said Umbo. “Come on, it can’t just be random chance that they show the course of the river and O is a white dot and the capital is a red dot.”
“And we can’t be the first to figure it out if it is,” said Rigg. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”
“Well, we have,” said Loaf. “I have, I mean. Why do you think the pilgrims say, ‘The Tower of O lets you see the whole world’?”
“I thought they meant you could see really far from the top of it,” said Umbo.
“But they also say, ‘All of the world is inside the tower,’” said Loaf.
“I thought that was mystical booshwa,” said Rigg. “Or maybe just talking about how many pilgrims come here.”
“It’s weird to think of the world that way. Very disturbing. I mean, the world is the land inside the Wall—that’s what the word means. How can there be more of the world than the whole world itself? How could anybody know what’s outside the world?”
Rigg had been counting. “There are nineteen of them—nineteen lands surrounded by yellow lines. And quite a bit of land that isn’t inside any of the yellow lines.”
“So there are nineteen worlds on this same globe?” asked Loaf. “Is that what the Tower of O is saying?”
“No wonder people don’t talk about it after coming here,” said Umbo. “It’s just too crazy. Even if they think of it this way—and Rigg’s father was no fool and no liar, either, so if he says that we live on the surface of a ball, it’s probably true. Somehow. Even if they think of this as a map of nineteen worlds on the face of a globe, who’s going to believe them? People would think they were crazy.”
“I think you’re crazy,” said Loaf. “Except the map of the world—of our world—is accurate enough. The military keeps maps like that—all the world inside the walls, all the roads and towns. It’s illegal for anyone else to make them, though. So I wonder how you knew it was a map, Umbo.”
“Our schoolteacher showed us a map. Smaller than this, but it had the river on it, and Aressa Sessamo at the mouth of it, and the big bay. And the line of the Wall.”
“It was against the law for the schoolteacher to have a map like that,” said Loaf.
“Oh, he drew it himself, I think. On a slab of wood. With chalk. And . . . then he went away.”
“How long after he showed you that map?” asked Loaf.
“I don’t know. After. He only showed it to us the once.”
Rigg had been scanning the walls while he listened. “There a
“Do you think if these really are other wallfolds,” said Umbo, “there might be people in them?”
“There are red dots and white dots and blue dots in all of them,” said Rigg.
“Boys,” said Loaf, “you have no idea how illegal this conversation is.”
“You’ve been to the Wall,” said Rigg. “Were there people on the other side?”
“Nobody goes right up to the Wall,” said Loaf. “The closer you get, the more fearful and sad and desperate you get. You have to get away. You’d go crazy if you didn’t. Nobody gets close. Even animals stay away—on both sides.”
“So you only saw it from a distance?” asked Rigg.
“We patrol the edge, because that’s where a lot of criminals and traitors and rebels like to go—close enough to the Wall that other people stay away, but not so close they actually go crazy. In a way, it’s a fitting punishment for them, living with the dread and grief and despair. But it was our job to go into the zone of pain and force them out. So they wouldn’t keep coming out and foraging or raiding or recruiting.”
“If it’s the same way on the other side,” said Rigg, “then even if there are people there, they won’t come any nearer the Wall than you did. So they wouldn’t see anybody on our side and we wouldn’t see anybody on theirs.”
Loaf drew them closer, his hands tight on their shoulders. “You’ve been talking way too loud. Now I think I know why your future self came back to warn us.”
“No,” said Umbo. “If we got arrested for talking, I would have told myself and Rigg to just shut up.”
“Well, I’m telling you to do that,” said Loaf. “Your teacher probably came here and thought about what he saw and memorized the map as best he could. I’m betting that’s what happened. Because any soldier—well, any sergeant or higher officer—might recognize this map for what it is, if he happened to come to this side of the sphere. And then he might memorize it. But soldiers would know to keep their mouths shut. And never, ever to draw an unauthorized copy.”