Speculation—all guesswork. Rigg knew this.
He also knew that with mice listening in on everything said among Rigg’s little company of five, and no doubt relaying the information to expendables or computers that passed it along to Odin, he couldn’t discuss his conclusions with anybody.
But there was a way that he could figure it all out. He could go to the starship where Ram Odin lived—in Vadeshfold. He could look for the path of Ram Odin. He could see how often he had been revived.
More to the point, Rigg could enhance himself the way Loaf was enhanced. It was possible that Ram Odin would forbid it—he might already have forbidden it, which would explain why Loaf got the mask, and not Rigg. It was also possible that Rigg would not have the strength of will that had allowed Loaf to overmaster the powerful forces that the facemask used to try to control its symbiote.
Either way, the world would not be any worse off than it was before. Rigg blocked from access to a facemask, or driven mad by a facemask, or even dead—how would that change the world for the worse?
But if he could get those enhancements, he could find out the truth, and if his suppositions turned out to be right, he could set the world free from this godlike monster who was set to destroy it in only a few years’ time, in order to prevent being called to account by the humans from Earth, who had the power to override his control of the computers and expendables.
Only when Rigg actually had those enhancements would he know how it would affect his time-shifting. Everything depended on his being able to get to Ram Odin at a time when there was no way an expendable could save him. No way that Ram Odin could command the mice to send some kind of object into the past that would prevent the assassination.
Or Rigg might find out that he was wrong, that Ram Odin was not alive, that the expendables were simply capable of lying, that the situation really was as chaotic and unknowable as it seemed. Maybe this brilliant guess of his was just wishful thinking. Maybe there was no theory that could unify and explain everything.
So Rigg tried to keep himself calm during his flight to the Wall. But then, he didn’t really need to conceal his trepidation, his excitement. After all, whatever changes in his behavior and vital signs the flyer’s sensors picked up could be completely explained by Rigg’s stated decision to go get a facemask. Who wouldn’t be tense, flustered, fearful, excited?
The flyer landed and Rigg got out.
Waiting on the other side of the Wall was Vadesh, looking so much like Father.
Rigg’s first thought was to wave him over. Don’t pretend you can’t go through the Wall, because I know you can.
But no, better to just go along with the way the expendables pretended the world worked.
Rigg walked into the Wall and felt the frisson of distant dread and anguish, the rekindling of language. In both the jewels and the knife, the ships’ logs would be updating. Rigg kept his attention focused on Vadesh.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Vadesh said when Rigg was close enough.
“No,” said Rigg. “You weren’t right. You let all your people die. You’re a failure. But I don’t want to be a failure like you. When the Visitors come, I need to have the enhancements that Loaf has, so I’m better able to assess them and figure out how to prevent the destruction of Garden.”
It was a long speech. It sounded rehearsed, even though Rigg had not known what he was going to say. How would Vadesh interpret it? Or, more to the point, how would Ram Odin, listening, interpret it?
Am I defending myself when nobody has challenged me? Probably. But will the expendable conclude from this that I’m deceiving him? Probably not. Humans always defend themselves when they think they might be wrong. And anyone about to receive a facemask who doesn’t wonder if his decision is wrong must be an idiot.
“In other words, I was right,” said Vadesh. “But it’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to admit it. Ego plays such a strong role in the self-deceptions of human beings.”
“With a facemask, will my self-deception be even more effective?” asked Rigg.
“Oh yes,” said Vadesh. “But so will your ability to see right through your own self-deceptions.”
Even now, knowing what he knew, suspecting what he suspected, Rigg couldn’t help feeling a closeness to Vadesh, especially when he talked in conundrums and paradoxes the way Father always did.
He also felt as much loathing for Vadesh as ever.
Any human who is guided by his emotions is a fool, thought Rigg. Because we can feel absurdly opposite things at the same time.
“Did you bring a facemask to me?” asked Rigg.
“No,” said Vadesh. “You don’t want to take on the struggle for dominance here, where there is so much outside stimulation to distract you. You’d be swallowed up.”
“You found that out by seeing people go mad?”
“Of course,” said Vadesh. “There’s such a steep price for failure.”
“But you never pay it,” said Rigg.
“I’m a machine,” said Vadesh. “And the Pinocchio story is absurd. Machines don’t want to be real boys. Real boys are so corruptible, so easily distracted, deceived, killed.”
“And no one deceives you?”
“Many think they do,” said Vadesh. “And I pretend that they’ve succeeded.”
“So you’re the deceiver.”
“We’re all deceivers, Rigg Sessamekesh,” said Vadesh. “I’m just better at it.”
“So is there any point in my asking you whether you have prepared a facemask for me that will be too powerful for me to master?”
“No, there’s no point in your asking, and no, I have prepared nothing different to what I prepared for Loaf.”
“So you did prepare it for Loaf.”
“I prepared it for whoever chose to accept it,” said Vadesh.
“Loaf took it to save me.”
“He chose to be a hero. Who was I to refuse to allow him to play the role?”
“But you weren’t going to force it on me?” said Rigg. He found that hard to believe.
“I don’t force anyone to do anything,” said Vadesh. “I explain and let them decide for themselves.”
“You didn’t explain anything to Loaf,” said Rigg.
“He didn’t give me time.”
Rigg searched back in his memory. Did Loaf really cause the facemask to leap onto his body, or did Vadesh flip it up into place? Human memory was so unreliable. As soon as Rigg tried to imagine either scenario, each seemed equally real and equally false.
“Did you bring a flyer, or were you going to carry me to the starship?” asked Rigg.
“Do you want a flyer? You merely asked me to meet you.”
Rigg shook his head. “Bring the flyer and take me there. Or don’t, and I’ll walk. I enjoy solitude and I know my way around a forest.”
Of course the flyer was close by—expendables could move faster than humans, but not fast enough to get to the Wall without using a flyer, not in the amount of time Rigg had given Vadesh to comply with his orders.
“Why did you decide on my poor primitive facemask instead of those wonderful Companions of the Larfolders?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg did not answer.
“Are you going to leave me in suspense?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg wanted to retort, Why would a machine feel suspense? But instead he did not answer at all. Why should he pretend that the normal human courtesies applied in a conversation between a man and a machine? Especially when the man was the one who supposedly commanded all the ships and expendables.
Man! Rigg inwardly grimaced at his own vanity. How I strut. I’m not a man, I’m a boy, trying to do a man’s job.
Or commit a monstrous crime.
One or the other.
The flight was without incident. They landed, not at the city, where they would need to take the high-speed tram through the mountain, but at a structure inside the crater made by the ancient impact when the starship collided with Garde
n. Then there was an elevator ride down to the starship far below.
But they crossed the same bridge from the wall of the stone chamber to the outside door in the starship’s side. All the starships dwelt inside an identical wound in the stone of the world, because all those wounds had been shaped by the forcefield that protected the starship and its passengers from all the effects of collision and sudden changes in inertia.
Rigg followed Vadesh carefully, trying to be aware of any new hazards, trying to notice all kinds of things he had overlooked before.
But the main thing Rigg searched for was the path of Ram Odin.
It was surprisingly easy to find, now that he knew it might exist. It was the oldest path in the starship. It was also the newest. It led again and again from the control room to the stasis chambers and then to the revival room and then back to the control room.
But in the past eleven thousand years, Ram Odin had not left the starship. Not since he crossed through the Wall from Ramfold.
Interesting. The Ram Odin that had been on the Vadeshfold copy of the starship had been killed by his expendable. And yet his path was here in the ship. A path markedly older than the already ancient passage of Ram Odin from Ramfold into Vadeshfold.
For a moment, Rigg wondered if that meant that the Ram Odin of this starship had not been killed; maybe all of them had lived, the way the Ram Odin of Odinfold had lived.
But no. That most ancient path moved throughout the ship, and then abruptly ended in the control room a few decades before another version of Ram Odin came through the Wall.
Thus Rigg learned the answer to a question that had bothered both him and Umbo ever since they learned about the starships. Paths were tied to the gravity of planets, and moved through space with the world where the paths were laid down. But when people were in space, their paths stayed with the ship transporting them. Unlike boat passengers on the Stashik River, whose paths stayed in the same position relative to the river, and not with the boats, the path of Ram Odin during the starship’s voyage stayed with the starship, even after the ship impacted with the planet’s surface.
I can see it all, thought Rigg. When the time comes, I can watch Vadeshex murder the Ram Odin of this starship.
But no. Being there as an observer would be hard to conceal from the expendable, who would then know there were such things as time-shifting humans from the future. It might cause the expendable—all the expendables—to behave differently. It might utterly change the course of history.
It couldn’t erase Rigg, of course—he and Umbo had settled that long ago. The agents of time change could not be undone by the shifts they themselves caused. They called it the “conservation of causality,” like the conservation of matter and energy. As causers, they had to remain in existence, even if the future they came from was otherwise erased.
But I’m not the only one whose existence I need to protect.
Rigg followed Vadesh to the revival chamber. “I need to do it here in case you have an adverse physical reaction,” Vadesh explained. “Loaf was robust and needed no life support. You might need to be sustained during your struggle for control.”
“When will you know if I’ve failed?”
“I’ll know,” said Vadesh.
“Tell me the symptoms that will lead you to that conclusion,” said Rigg.
Vadesh said nothing.
“I think I gave you a command.”
“I don’t have an answer,” said Vadesh. “I don’t know the symptoms that would lead to that conclusion, because you’re only the second person to receive one of this particular genotype of facemask, and the first one did not fail.”
“You’ve seen failure with early genotypes.”
“They were so different that they could not be the same.”
Rigg didn’t believe him. But should he show that, or would it lead Ram Odin—who was no doubt giving orders to Vadesh from his current location in the control room—to suspect that he knew too much?
“What concerns me,” said Rigg, “is that you might conclude that I had failed when I don’t think I’ve failed.”
“Here’s a simple test,” said Vadesh. “If you think, from my actions, that I have concluded that the facemask is in complete control, all you have to do to avoid my actions is to jump into the past and out of my reach.”
“Here’s a simpler test,” said Rigg. “I order you not to take any action at all concerning me and the facemask for three years, and even then you have to tell me what you’re planning to do.”
“In three years,” said Vadesh, “the Destroyers will be here.”
“That’s why I chose that number,” said Rigg.
Vadesh paused a moment, then said, “I will obey your command.”
“How nice of you. Did you have any choice?”
“I don’t have to obey a command that cannot take effect until after your death. But my programming does not permit me to regard facemask domination as death. Rather it is temporary disablement, so I will follow those rules instead of the death rules.”
“How nice of you,” said Rigg.
“You asked,” said Vadesh.
Rigg sat on the edge of the revival table. “Get me my facemask now,” said Rigg. “I assume you already have one picked out?”
“I have several dozen facemasks. I have no criteria for choosing one over another.”
“ ‘Several dozen,’ ” echoed Rigg. “You know an exact number. Say it.”
“One hundred and seventy,” said Vadesh.
“You have quite a supply of them. Expecting that many visitors?”
“It was to avoid that false conclusion that I used the term ‘several dozen,’ ” said Vadesh. “The large number is because that’s how many happened to survive and remain viable in stasis.”
“So you keep the facemasks in stasis,” said Rigg. “Like the voyagers in flight.”
“Someone’s been researching the starship,” said Vadesh.
“Yes, Umbo. And then he talked about what he learned.”
“Stasis and revival work almost identically for humans and facemasks, which is not a surprise, since these facemasks have been genetically designed for compatibility with humans.”
“Please get my facemask,” said Rigg. “Now.”
Vadesh left the room at once, and returned within the minute. “This one is as healthy as any other.”
“Then let’s . . .”
Rigg didn’t get to say “do it,” because the facemask flew out of the basin containing it. Did Vadesh fling it, or did the facemask somehow propel itself? Or had Rigg, without realizing it, bowed his head over the basin to look inside? He had only a split second to contemplate this question, and then there was agony and panic as his face was covered, his breath choked off, and tendrils inserted themselves with brutal irresistibility into his nostrils, his mouth, his ears and, most painful and frightening of all, his eyes.
This is irrevocable, he thought. My eyes are gone.
Then the tendrils reached through otic and optic nerves into his brain and the struggle began.
It was not like a tug of war. Not like a wrestling match. It was more like being lost in a maze. He could sense that his body was feeling things. Doing things. Yet he could not find his body, could not find the way to control his body.
It was as if the maze were constantly being changed so that nothing was in the same place twice, and barriers popped up where there had been no barriers before.
Pains came and went. His body needed to urinate. Then it did. It got up and walked, but not at Rigg’s command. It acted for its own reasons.
No, not its own reasons. The facemask’s reasons.
A rush of rejection swept over him; the feeling of hostility Rigg had seen in the faces of the people of Fall Ford when they gathered outside Nox’s house, intending to kill him in punishment for the death of Umbo’s little brother, whom Rigg had tried so hard to save. It was as if the facemask knew such a memory was there, and now used it to overwhelm Rigg
with feelings and memories from his own past.
Rigg decided that this sudden emotional rush came because the facemask recognized that Rigg had somehow attempted to assert control over his own body. When it got up and moved at the facemask’s command, there had been no resistance from Rigg. But Rigg’s thought that his body was moving at the facemask’s command must have felt, to the facemask, like resistance.
My thoughts are my weapons in this war. What did Loaf say? Something about its being pointless to try to give orders to his own body, at first anyway. So the resistance is in my thoughts. In making my brain hold the thoughts I put there, and not letting them be swept away in the feelings and desires the facemask forces on me.
Easy enough to think this thought; hard to hold on to it when every desire of his body cried out for his attention.
It was like the Wall. Only instead of anguish and despair, what threatened to overwhelm him was thirst and hunger and lust, the urges of elimination, the inchoate yearnings of an adolescent boy.
In the end of this silent war, it turned out that the vulnerability of the facemask came from the sheer sameness of its weaponry. Once Rigg was swept by all the desires of his body, over and over, he began simply to get used to them, and through it all his mind remained his own, and it held the thoughts he reached for.
He opened his eyes.
He knew that what was opening were not his eyes at all, but the new eyes created by the facemask. But it was his nerves that controlled them, his brain that received and interpreted the signals from those eyes.
Whatever the facemask was, it was now part of himself.
Did that mean the facemask had failed?
No, it meant that the facemask was broken to his will, like a horse to its rider; it was still itself, and its needs would still be met. It would be alive. It would reproduce and continue, which was the goal of every kind of life. The native fauna of Garden was alive in this facemask, and had become a part of Rigg. It was Rigg’s servant, yes, but Rigg would now see the world through its eyes, and its needs and desires would form a part of his decision-making. It would not die until he died; he would never remove it; it had found a home embedded in his flesh.
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