Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card
“Oh, is that all?” asked Loaf.
“Why?” said Rigg. “You know such a place?”
“I only worked the west Wall,” said Loaf, “and you know I was being ironic.”
“There were animals here, before humans came,” said Rigg. “Not small, like ebbecks and rutters and weebears. Some of them were huge. Some of them were huge predators. I’ve been looking for them as we walked here near the Wall. Most of the really old ones are nothing like any animal I’ve seen. The old paths are so faint, so worn-out, and they had nothing to do with any animals I was tracking for their fur, so I never really studied them till now. They’re different. From a different place.”
“A different planet, you mean,” said Umbo.
“That’s what I mean, yes,” said Rigg.
“What planet?” asked Param.
“This one,” said Rigg. “Garden. We’re the interlopers. We’re the strangers here. We came a little more than 11,191 years ago. Before that, the world was a different place, filled with different life. It’s one of the native animals I’m going to use to bring us far enough into the past that we can pass through the Wall before it was ever built.”
“So we’ll be the earliest human beings to walk on this world,” said Olivenko. “You do realize this is even crazier than your father’s ideas.”
“Much crazier,” said Rigg. “I’d never believe it except that it’s true.”
In the end, though, they never did find the ideal place. Because as they passed through a fairly arid landscape, with only the scrubbiest of trees and brush, Rigg noticed new paths converging on their own paths—many miles away, but only a few hours behind them if they didn’t keep moving forward. Gaining on them, even if they kept moving.
When he told the others, their first impulse was to hurry, but Rigg stopped them. “The Wall is right here. The ground is stony enough. There’s no major stream between us and the Wall. I just have to find a ground level that stays the same—paths that we can follow. We’ll be gone before they get here.”
“If it works at all,” said Loaf.
“Thanks for the cheerful support,” said Rigg.
“If it doesn’t work,” said Param, “there’s to be no fighting. None at all. They’ll take me and Rigg, and the rest of you can go.”
“They may have opinions about that,” said Loaf. “Even if they make a promise, I don’t expect them to keep it.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Param. “Umbo will just take you two men a month into the past. Or a year. You’ll be gone, then, with plenty of time to hide. They’ll never find you. You don’t have to go through the Wall to be safe. Only us chosen ones, us lucky royals.” She smiled wryly. “Meanwhile, let’s let Rigg concentrate on finding the right place.”
Umbo pulled the bag of jewels out of his pants. “Rigg,” he said. “You should take these.”
“Oh, that’s good, distract him,” said Param softly.
“Why?” asked Rigg. “You’ve been carrying them safely enough.”
“Because they’re yours,” said Umbo. “The Golden Man gave them to you.”
“Who?” asked Rigg.
“Your father.”
“Nobody ever called him that.”
“We children did,” said Umbo. “We all called him that. But not in front of him, and not in front of you.”
“But the Golden Man is the Undying One,” said Rigg. “I think my father’s no longer eligible for the title.”
“He gave the jewels to you, and so they’re yours. Besides, what good would they do me and Loaf and Olivenko if we go into hiding? I think we found out just how much good selling one of them would do.” Then Umbo reached for the sheath at his waist that held the knife Rigg had stolen from the past.
“Keep that,” said Rigg. “It’s yours now.” When Umbo made as if to protest, Rigg added: “A gift.”
Param took a deep breath and said, “Rigg, I don’t understand why we have to divide. Umbo can take us into the past, all of us, all at once. He proved that the day he took us into Olivenko’s time.”
Rigg didn’t have to answer, because Umbo did. “It’s not the getting into the past that Rigg is worried about. It’s getting back to the present.”
“But you’ve done that again and again,” said Param. “The messages you sent to yourself, to Rigg, to Loaf.”
“It’s different when I just appear to somebody and talk. Part of me stays in the present, and only part of me goes back. Or I’m in both times at once. But when I go completely—like the time Loaf and I went back to take a single jewel from the stash near the Tower of O—when I brought us back to the present, we didn’t go all the way. We came back to a time a day before we actually reached O. More than a day before we stepped into the past.”
“But what’s a day? Who cares about a day?” asked Param.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said Umbo. “We don’t know if it’s a day every time. It might be just a day. But it might be the same proportion. We went back six months, and I returned a little over a day early. A year might be two days off. A thousand years could be more than two thousand days. Eleven thousand years might be twenty-two thousand days. Almost fifty years.”
Param nodded. “But if we’re leaving this wallfold, will that matter?”
“What if we want to come back to this wallfold someday?” asked Rigg. “What if we find a way to break the power of General Citizen? Because I have a feeling that he and Mother are about to remind everybody why the People’s Revolution happened in the first place. What good can we do if we arrive thirty years before we were born?”
“Or three hundred years,” added Umbo, “because it might be random.”
“Or maybe,” said Rigg, “going so very far into the past, he couldn’t move forward again at all, and we’d be stuck there in a world before the human race ever arrived here. It’s an experiment we can’t afford to perform when everything’s at stake.”
“So I stay in the present,” said Umbo, “and send Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko into the past, before the Wall existed. Then they wait for us to pass through the Wall, using your power to be invisible. If we can.”
“What if we can’t? What if the Wall blocks us even in slow time?” asked Param.
“Then I come back across,” said Rigg, “and bring you over, too.”
“Leaving Umbo behind.”
“Without us around,” said Rigg, “Umbo won’t be in any particular danger.”
“What would they care about me?” asked Umbo. He sounded lighthearted, but there was an edge to his voice. It occurred to Rigg that it really bothered Umbo that he was nobody much, in the eyes of history.
“You’re right,” said Rigg. “Nobody cares about you—but that’s because they’re stupid. You’re the most powerful of us. You’re the one who actually travels in time. You’re the one who can change things. The only one.”
Rigg saw Param look again at Umbo. Perhaps it had never occurred to her—raised as she had been in a world where only the royals mattered—that Umbo was anything special. He was a peasant’s son from upriver. But he was also the world’s only time traveler. It wouldn’t hurt Param a bit to realize that nobility of birth meant nothing. It was only what you could do, and chose to do, that made you important or genuinely noble.
They walked only a little further, topping a rise, and Rigg saw that this was the right place. It was not ideal—there were outcroppings of rock, and places that had certainly been eroded by wind-borne sand. But it was a crown of a hill in a dry landscape; no rivers cut through their path. And there were paths of ancient animals crossing right through the Wall, their placement showing that the ground had not changed level very much at all.
“This will do,” said Rigg. “As Loaf said—if it works at all.”
They brought the horses to the very edge of the Wall’s influence and unloaded them. They began grazing on such scant food as they could find.
Rigg climbed up onto an outcropping of rock that gave him a view tha
“It’s about a mile,” said Rigg. “Do you see that bent-over scrub oak, next to the spear of rock? When we reach that spot, you can bring us back to the present.”
“That’s more than a mile,” said Umbo.
“Probably,” said Rigg.
“How fast can you walk it, carrying packs?”
“Fast enough. Param will be with you.”
“And what if Param’s ability doesn’t let us go through the Wall after all?”
“Then at least you’ll disappear for a while until they go away.”
“Maybe Param and I should cross first,” said Umbo, “to make sure we can do it.”
“If they weren’t an hour behind us,” said Rigg, “that would be a good idea. But when she’s invisible, she goes very, very slowly. We might be waiting a week for her to bring you across that mile. Or longer.”
“All right then,” said Umbo. “I’ll sit here to watch. Help Param climb up, will you?”
“Saints watch over you,” said Rigg, and started to climb back down.
“Wait,” said Umbo. “Shouldn’t we have some of the provisions?”
Rigg laughed. “Umbo, to you it will be only an hour at the most. However long it takes the two of you to walk a mile together. You won’t get hungry. You won’t even have time to need to pee.”
“I need to pee right now.”
“Well, then, do it off the other side of the rock while I bring her up this one.”
Rigg climbed down and looked for Param.
She was nowhere to be found.
Rigg saw her path and realized that she was testing, after all. But she was moving faster than he had ever seen her go while invisible—which meant that she had actually sped herself up relatively little. He could even glimpse a shimmering in the air where she was, the shape of her—she was at the borders of invisibility.
But it still meant she was moving far more slowly than a normal walk. How far did she intend to go? Because the paths of their pursuers were coming closer all the time, and at the rate they were going, Rigg’s group wouldn’t have a lot of leeway. They needed time to cross the Wall before Umbo would be free to disappear with Param. It was irresponsible of her to use up precious minutes on an experiment. To her she had only been doing this for a minute or two, Rigg was sure. She hadn’t gone more than a few dozen yards into the Wall. How much would she learn from that?
She became visible.
She screamed.
Rigg ran straight for her, as did Olivenko and Loaf.
“I’ll get her!” cried Rigg. “Stay clear!” He already felt the grief and despair and terror filling his heart. He knew that he could never reach her, that all was lost. He knew why she had screamed.
She was staggering toward him, her face a mask of grief and madness. “Run to me!” he shouted. “Don’t disappear again! We haven’t time!”
In a moment he had reached her, but by now the fear was unbearable. His mind kept coming up with reasons for the fear. They were trapped in the Wall and would never get out. The earth would open up and swallow them. General Citizen was already there to kill them. Nothing would work, all would fail.
Param could not have gotten that far if she had been feeling like this as she moved invisibly into the Wall. And she could make it all end by going back into invisibility. But if she did, then there really would be reason to despair. Because by the time she came out of her slow movement, their pursuers would be too close and they’d never make it.
She was stronger than Rigg had feared. For that matter, he was stronger than he had known. Because not only did she not speed up her movement through time in order to end the torment, he did not beg her to, though he longed to.
They took another step, another, and suddenly they could feel the terror fading. Two more steps and they were free of it. Standing with the others.
“I had to know,” said Param. “I had to know if my pathetic little power would let us cross through.”
“Well?” asked Rigg.
“I felt it even in slow time,” said Param. “I thought my ability must have had no influence on it, it was so terrible. But when I returned to real time, it became far worse. Unbearable. As you felt it. So my power did work, and if I slow myself down even more, I think Umbo and I won’t feel it at all. Or not enough to care. And another thing. It doesn’t get worse. It quickly reaches the peak of torment, and continues like that the rest of the way across. That’s when I stopped—when I realized that it wasn’t getting any worse with each step I took. What we experienced there, my brother, I think that was the worst the Wall can do.”
“It was bad enough,” said Rigg.
“You’ve got tears and snot all over your face,” said Loaf. “Very unattractive.”
Rigg wiped his mouth and nose with a kerchief and then glared. “Get her up the rock, the two of you. Get her up there with Umbo and then get back down here and put on your packs. We’re going to have to run that mile if we’re going to get this done before General Citizen and his men get here.”
“General Citizen himself?”
“I know his path,” said Rigg.
“Not Mother, though,” said Param.
She would see for herself soon enough. “Mother too,” said Rigg.
“She came to see him catch us? To see us die?”
“Or to see us go through the Wall,” said Rigg. “They’re on horseback and they’re galloping now. Get up onto that rock!”
Fast as they went, it took five minutes for the two men to put Param atop the rock, get back down, and put their packs on.
“Ready?” asked Rigg.
“Yes,” said Olivenko.
“As I’ll ever be,” said Loaf.
Rigg led them the two steps to the ancient path they were going to follow, right where it entered the Wall. He held Loaf’s hand, and Loaf held on to Olivenko. Then, watching the path intently—for it was very faint and old—Rigg reached up and pumped the air with his fist.
At once he saw the path begin to reveal an animal racing along, over and over. No, he thought. It’s moving too fast, we’ll never keep up. But then he realized that was just the way the path worked. The animal was walking. As he had hoped.
He had never seen such an animal before. It was a little smaller than a deer, and it was obviously a plant-eater, not a predator—he had analyzed that correctly. But it wasn’t fur covering it, or scales—something more like feathers, but with barbs on the ends.
Oh, wonderful. I found a giant porcupine.
But he saw that as long as he laid his hand on it firmly and didn’t stroke upward, he wouldn’t be harmed.
Touch it, he told himself.
Yet he knew that if he made it panic, if it ran away, this would never work. He forced himself to watch the spot in the path where the creature’s line of sight had just passed him, where, by appearing exactly then, he could touch it before it knew he was there.
He reached out and laid his hand on the crown of its shoulder and at once began to match its pace. The feathers were harsh-feeling under his hand, but there was no pain. And all around him, the landscape was changed now. He was in the past. The sky was dazzling—it was noon here, and the climate was hotter. Not a cloud in the sky.
The animal bore his touch, his presence. Perhaps it had no fear of him because it had never seen or smelled a human being. Perhaps it didn’t believe its eyes. Perhaps this is how it showed fear, by continuing to move, its pace unchanged.
Rigg allowed himself to glance back and see that the others were still with him.
Olivenko was reaching out with his free hand. He touched the animal at the rump, just above where its thick, almost reptilian tail separated from the haunches. Still the animal did not bolt. Then Olivenko let go of Loaf’s hand, so Loaf could also touch the beast.
Once Loaf also had his hand on the animal’s back,
No farther, come no farther forward, thought Rigg.
Olivenko didn’t hear him, but apparently he had sense enough to understand the danger. Keep out of its sight, that was the plan, for now Rigg could see that the eyes were not placed like a cow’s eyes, or a deer’s. They were pointed almost directly forward, like a lemur, an owl, a man. In their position right now they could not be seen. Perhaps the nerves in its skin were not as sensitive as in mammals’ skin. Perhaps the feathers kept it from feeling them as long as they made no sharp movements.
And for all they knew, they could let go of the animal entirely, now that they were in its time, and remain in the past. But Rigg couldn’t be sure of that. He had never gone so far back in time before. Without this animal to hold him firmly focused in this moment, could Umbo’s power hold them here?
They had gone a quarter mile like this before it occurred to Rigg to notice that he felt nothing of the Wall. It was as if it didn’t exist. Because it didn’t. He had come to a time before humans came to Garden, and there was no Wall, and no enemy fast approaching behind them.
How fast? Rigg dared not look for the paths of Mother and Citizen, for that would mean taking his concentration off the animal who was their guide. It seemed to him that they must be going much more slowly than their pace across the ground suggested, because the sun had moved away from noon and their shadows were stretching in front of them. How long had they been walking? Only a few minutes, but it had been high noon and now it wasn’t.
The animal’s shoulders bunched and released, the muscles flowing under Rigg’s hand. It was not a herd animal, or Rigg would not have chosen it—herds would have been too dangerous. A solitary beast. He wanted to follow it for days, for a year, to find out how it lived, how it mated, whether it gave birth or laid eggs or some other method entirely, as yet unguessed by human mind, how it passed the winter, what it ate, what would eat it. How could his forebears have had the heart to kill this beast and all its kind?