Visitors by Orson Scott Card
Rigg began right after breakfast the next morning. “Would it be wrong of me to meet Onishtu’s family?”
“You already have,” he was told.
“I mean . . . would they mind if I asked them about her?”
“Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t,” he was told.
“How can I find out?”
“Ask them about her and see what happens.”
So when the father was pointed out to him among the men bringing in the bees, Rigg waited till he finished with one of the hives and then took him aside. “I don’t mean to give offense,” said Rigg. “But I believe that people leave behind a kind of aura, a trace of the path they took through the world. Your daughter Onishtu sounds like a person who would leave a path of joy, and if I can see where she lived, perhaps I can gain some bit of grace for having met her, even across all these years.”
Couching it in religious terms did the trick. The father wasn’t satisfying idle curiosity, he was allowing his long-missing daughter to give a gift to—and perhaps be admired and remembered by—this young stranger, ugly as his face might be.
So after supper, Rigg and Ram Odin went to their house, to the second story. All the houses had two stories, so when the bottom floor was completely buried in snow, they could still get out of the house and tend to the animals and other tasks.
“This was her room,” said the father. “It’s full of grandchildren at the moment.”
“We kept it for her for a few years,” said the mother, “but we couldn’t afford to keep the room out of a hopeless hope, when there were people here with us who had need of it.” She sounded stern as she said it—as if she was rebuking herself for regretting the necessity.
Rigg found the girl’s path easily—it filled the place, during the years it had been her room. Rigg followed the most common routes—to the bed, to the window, to the small washstand, to the chest where clothes were kept. Now that he knew which path was hers, the facemask helped him see what she looked like. A gracious child, her hair long in gentle waves of ebony, her smile wide and welcoming. He saw her when she was alone, when she was with company. He saw how her path intertwined with others, and without leaving the room, traced her pattern of friendships.
“She had many friends,” said Rigg.
“Everyone loved her,” said her father.
“Don’t pretend to ‘feel’ what everybody already told you,” said the mother scornfully.
Rigg smiled at her. “I want nothing from you. She’s beautiful. I can feel that wide smile of hers shining in this room, that’s all. It’s what I came for. She’s gone, but some of her beauty remains, and I am taking joy in it. I’m sorry if you thought I meant to exploit your love for her. I don’t.” He turned to Ram Odin. “We’ve troubled this good family enough. Let’s be on our way to bed.”
At the door to her room, the father put a hand on Rigg’s chest and said, “I think your gift is real and you know where she went.”
“My gift is real,” said Rigg, “and I don’t know where she went.”
But even as he said it, he was finding out. Without even meaning to, he was tracing the youngest of her paths in the room. Sensing where it went. “It was lambing time when she went, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“It was.”
“And the snow was still far down the slopes, so the flocks were close by.”
“A din and a stink,” said the mother. “It was her favorite time of year. How could she leave during lambing?”
Rigg saw her follow a path she had taken many times before. It wound among the houses and went up through the ruins of a couple of collapsed houses. “Why are there so many abandoned houses here?” Rigg asked.
“Not abandoned,” said the father. “Never finished. Never had the second story or a roof.”
Ram Odin explained. “While you were working to earn our keep,” he said, “I was gossiping with the old men. It’s how folks marry here. A man builds a house for a particular woman. If she says yes, then they put on the second floor and thatch the roof together and they’re wed. But if she refuses him, then he can’t offer that shell of a house to another—it would be wrong. So the walls stand as a monument to false hopes.”
“Not false,” said the father. “The hopes were true, but the girl is free to say no.”
“It shames the fellow, though, doesn’t it?” asked Rigg.
“They say not,” said Ram Odin. “They say nobody knows who built what house, or who it was for.”
Rigg cocked his head a little. “I think maybe everyone pretends not to know.”
The father nodded ruefully. “We always know who’s building,” said the father. “But not always who he’s a-building for.”
Rigg nodded. “Did anyone build a house for Onishtu?”
“She was too young,” said the mother quickly.
“I would have torn down such a house with my bare hands,” said the father. “A girl her age, there should have been no house built for her.”
“A man usually won’t build a house unless he has a good idea the girl has her eye on him,” said the mother. “But what has any of this to do with our Onishtu?”
“I think she liked to wander among the empty roofless houses, that’s all,” said Rigg. “I think she dreamed of marrying.”
“As all girls do,” said the mother. “Will it be a good man and a happy house? Or a sad one, or an angry one.”
“We had a ewe once who always went within walls to lamb,” said the father. “At lambing time, you follow where the ewes have gone to bear. I think if she wandered among the houses, it was looking for that ewe.”
“I’d forgotten that crazy old sheep,” said the mother. “She was Onishtu’s favorite. And she being the oldest, she was fully able to help with lambing by herself. We thought that’s where she had gone that day, but we found the ewe, still full, and we never found Onishtu however much we searched.” She had tears down her cheeks now.
“I’m sorry to have made you cry,” said Rigg. “I wish now that I hadn’t troubled you.”
“Pay no heed to the crying,” said the father. “Tears come easy, no matter how many years go by. When you have a child of your own someday, if some girl is willing to see past your face, you’ll know what I’m saying. You lose a child, and the tears are always just inside your eyes waiting to spill. But it’s a joy to remember her, too, and we’re not ashamed to cry, nor any sadder for it.”
“I’m crying to think of how she loved that sheep and how she cared for the lambs. She had a loving touch with the sheep, but she hated the goats!”
And the two parents burst into laughter, perhaps remembering a particular event in Onishtu’s childhood.
“It’s late all the same,” said Ram Odin. “Glad we are that we’ve not brought you grief, but it’s time for us to leave you to your sleep, and go take ours. Rigg has a lot of work to do tomorrow, and I have another day of faith-talk ahead of me.”
“Your boy works as hard as any man,” said the father, “and no one begrudges what he eats. Many a stick that keeps the family warm will have his handprints on it, as they say.”
With such polite talk they made their goodbyes and Rigg and Ram Odin spoke not at all as they walked back through the sharp cold of the night breeze. Only when they were inside the haybarn, and Rigg had assured Ram Odin that no one was inside with them, or even near enough to overhear, did Ram Odin ask, “Well? What happened to her?”
“There was a man who followed her. Always at a distance. I’ve scanned all their paths and he was close, but never beside her. I don’t think they ever spoke until the end.”
“Let me guess. He was subtle enough about it that nobody accused him of stalking her like prey.”
“Everyone had their eye on her, but no, I don’t get a sense that anyone was wary of him. He’s still here in the village. Nobody knows th
Ram Odin covered his face with his hands.
“I didn’t expect you to be so moved,” said Rigg.
“I’m hiding my eyes from the future. I don’t have to have any time-shifting ability to know what you’re planning to do.”
“I have no plan yet, so you can’t possibly know.”
“I do know,” said Ram Odin, “even if you don’t know it yet yourself.”
“Oh,” said Rigg. “What am I planning, then?”
“There are two courses of action you could follow,” said Ram Odin. “The first is to find her body, wherever it’s buried—I assume it’s buried, and that you know where.”
“Yes and yes,” said Rigg.
“You find it—tomorrow, say—and then the family has an answer to the mystery. She’s dead, and here in the village, not in some other town. But you won’t like that plan because it leaves more questions than it answers.”
“And also, if I go finding the body, people will think I put it there.”
“I suppose they might,” said Ram Odin. “Though you’d have to have been no older than five at the time.”
“They can’t read my age through this mask,” said Rigg. “Finding the body is just too hard to explain.”
“I wish you’d do it that way, though, compared to the other thing.”
“You think I’ll go back in time and prevent it,” said Rigg. “And you have a powerful argument against it, yes?”
“I think saving the life of a young girl, keeping her from being raped and murdered—I’m always for that. Even if she’s not extraordinarily pretty. Is she, by the way? Or is that just fond memory that has made her flawless?”
“She’s more beautiful than I imagined. Extraordinary. Unforgettable.”
“Now you’re teasing,” said Ram Odin.
“I’m not,” said Rigg. “The man had built a house for her. She was kind and gentle but she said no. Maybe he took her attitude for coyness, but he tried to kiss her and she was still too young and small to put up much of a fight. When he was done with the rape, she was crying and her clothing was torn. There was no way that people wouldn’t know what he had done. I haven’t actually gone back and listened, by the way. I’m just telling you what I saw. He actually tried to comfort her. Maybe he was apologizing. But she turned away from him and at one point tried to get out of the shell of the house he had built for her. I wish I could say that he killed her accidentally, in the heat of the moment. But no. He dragged her back into the house and she was sitting on the floor, crying again. It took him a while—several minutes—to make up his mind, but then he dragged her to her feet and strangled her. It was brutal. He held her up and she flailed and kicked but her arms weren’t long enough to reach his eyes and her kicking him did no good. When she stopped struggling, he kissed her. Then he pulled away stones from the wall under a window, put her into the earth behind them, and piled the stones back in place. There was already a space there for the body. He didn’t have to dig. I think he planned to kill her if she said no to him. I think he had already decided that if he couldn’t have her, no one would.”
“It’s a bitter story.”
“The man built another house years later, and he has five children now.”
“Is it someone we know? Not our host, I hope.”
“You’ve talked with him some in the Cave,” said Rigg. “He’s never said a word to me, but he has friends, a normal life. She was his one obsession, and he never did such a thing again.”
“So much for having no anonymity here in these villages,” said Ram Odin.
“This house-building thing,” said Rigg. “If they all pretend not to know who’s a-building, that means they don’t cast their eyes toward a house under construction. The first floor of these houses is always half buried, so once a man has dug the hole, he’s out of sight. But they know who’s gathering stones from old abandoned houses and reusing them. If I even said, ‘It was a man who had built a house for her,’ I’ll bet they’d figure out who it was, pretty quick.”
“They just wouldn’t be able to figure out how you knew,” said Ram Odin.
“Exactly. But if I go back in time, I can prevent it.”
“Really? How?”
Rigg knew Ram Odin was taunting him. “There are plenty of ways. Distract her and keep her from going after the ewe that day.”
“He’d just wait for another day. You plan on spending your life watching her?”
“Maybe I’d have a talk with him. He’s bigger than me but with the facemask I’m a match for anyone.”
“A match? How would such a fight end?”
“I wouldn’t have any qualms about killing a murderer.”
“But when you do it, he won’t be a murderer yet.”
“Even if he hasn’t done it yet, he built that house with space behind the wall to hide a corpse.”
“I’m surprised the stink of putrefaction didn’t bring them.”
Rigg shook his head. “The body wouldn’t have rotted yet when they went searching. And people avoid a house under construction that hasn’t been offered yet. I would have to actually go to that time to know whether the house was finished at the time, but I’m guessing not. I think he took her to a house that only had the walls up to ground level, say, and he said, ‘I’m building this for you, say you’ll marry me,’ but after she went missing, he still had months of work to do on it. So they’d think he hadn’t asked a girl yet, and the girl he wanted was one of the ones of age. If he was smart, he’d wait until a likely girl accepted another man’s house, and then stop his own building. So nobody would think he built the house for Onishtu.”
“What you’re really saying,” said Ram Odin, “is that you prefer to kill this man. You think he deserves to die. And I agree—today, even after all these years, he deserves whatever penalty these people put on a rapist and cold-blooded murderer. But when you go back in time, Rigg, he won’t be a murderer.”
“No, he’ll just be a man planning murder.”
“But at that point, he still might not do it. He might even believe that he won’t really do it, even as he hollows out that space for her body.”
“It doesn’t matter. I know he does it.”
“You know, from here, that he did it. But when you’re there, do you see his future path?”
“Of course not.”
“You can’t just go killing people because you know they’re going to do something terrible.”
“Explain to me why not,” said Rigg.
“Because until he does the murder, he doesn’t deserve to die.”
Rigg shook his head. “But I know.”
“But justice doesn’t know,” said Ram Odin. “Look at it the other way. In your own life, when you did something stupid and wrong, Umbo would appear to you and warn you not to do it after all. So you were constantly undoing your own actions and trying something else. So . . . did you do those bad things, or didn’t you?”
“The me-that-was did them, but I didn’t.”
“Should you be punished for your misdeeds? How many times did Umbo and Loaf try to break into that bank to get the missing jewel back? Are they thieves?”
Rigg shook his head.
“And why not? Say it, Rigg Sessamekesh.”
“Because they didn’t actually do it. The realities in which they did are gone.”
“And the reality in which this man killed Onishtu also doesn’t exist, at the time you plan to kill him.”
“It’s not the same.” Rigg understood his point, but he couldn’t doubt the reality of what he knew about this man. And how much more valuable Onishtu’s life was than any justice owed to her murderer.
“Fine,” said Ram Odin. “I see you’re not convinced, but I don’t mind, because that’s not my real argument.”
<
“Yes,” said Ram Odin. “If you save her, will she never die?”
“No, of course she’ll die. But she might never be raped.”
“Do you plan to undo all the rapes and murders that ever happened in Singhfold?”
“If that’s your argument, then—”
“That’s groundwork. Listen up. You don’t know if saving her from this admittedly terrible death will prolong her life for a week or ninety years. You don’t know if the life you’re giving her will be happy or sad.”
“I don’t even care about that,” said Rigg. “All I care about is that she have the right to choose her own life.”
“Because the life she chooses to live, that’s who she is, yes? She’ll decide whether to be joyful or sad within the events and years of her life, yes?”
“That’s what life is.”
“That’s what life is, unless a timeshaper comes along,” said Ram Odin.
“Oh, come on,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to make her do anything.”
“You’re going to make this murderer die without having raped or murdered anybody,” said Ram Odin. “So what happens to this man’s eventual wife and children?”
“She marries somebody else.”
“So those children never exist.”
Rigg had no answer that sounded right in his own mind. But he said one of them, anyway. “Never existing is not the same thing as murdering somebody.”
“But you’ll be taking away all those choices in life. Those children will never exist so they’ll never have those experiences, they’ll never become anybody at all. At least Onishtu had years enough to win the hearts of a village, to live on in their memory, to color the way the whole valley looks at the world outside. But now they’ll never become who they are.”
“Suspicious and resentful and sad,” said Rigg.
“Have they gone to war over it? Made a revenge raid on another village? Killed one girl in each of the other valleys in order to retaliate?”
“They suffer.”
“They have a wistful memory of an extraordinary child whom they all loved and whose disappearance shattered them. But they’ve turned it into something rather ennobling and fine, even if it looks like a shadow to you. They all share this grief. It helps unite them.”