Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  It took two more stops before he could hear the voice clearly enough to run continuously till he reached Father. He was saving up some choice criticisms of this tracking method when he finally reached the spot where the voice was coming from, a clearing where a large tree had recently fallen. In fact, the path of the falling tree was still sparkling blue. There was little occasion to follow plants, since they moved so little, except a bit of waving and bending in the breeze, but this tree must have fallen only a few hours ago, and the movement of its fall had marked a bright path through the air.

  Rigg couldn’t see Father at all.

  ‘“Where are you?” he asked.

  He expected some remark with a barbed lesson in it, but instead Father said, “You’ve come far enough, Rigg. You’ve found me.”

  “No, I haven’t, Father.”

  “You’ve come as close as I want you to. Listen carefully. Do not come any closer to me.”

  “Since I don’t know where you are—”

  “Shut up,” said Father.

  Rigg fell silent and listened.

  “I’m pinned under the tree,” said Father.

  Rigg cried out and took a step toward the tree.

  “Stop!” cried Father.

  Rigg stopped.

  “You see the size of the tree,” said Father. “You cannot lift it. You cannot move it.”

  “With a lever, Father, I could—”

  “You cannot move it because I have been pierced by two branches, completely through my belly.”

  Rigg cried out, imagining the pain of it, feeling his own fear at Father’s injury. Father was never hurt. Father never even got sick.

  “Any further movement of the tree will kill me, Rigg. I have used all my strength calling to you. Listen now and don’t waste what life I have left on any kind of argument.”

  “I won’t argue,” Rigg said.

  “First, you must make your most solemn promise that you will not come look at me, now while I’m alive or later after I’m dead. I don’t want you to have this terrible image in your memory.”

  It couldn’t possibly be worse than what I’m imagining, Rigg said silently. Then he silently gave himself Father’s own answer: You can’t possibly know whether what you imagine is worse than the reality. I can see the reality, you can’t, so . . . shut up.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t argue with me right then,” said Father.

  “I did,” said Rigg. “You just didn’t hear me.”

  “All right then,” said Father. “Your oath.”

  “I promise.”

  “Say it all. Say the words.”

  It took all Rigg’s concentration to obey. “I promise solemnly that I will not come look at you, either now while you’re alive or later after you’re dead.”

  “And you will keep this promise, even to a dead man?” asked Father.

  “I recognize your purpose and I agree with it,” said Rigg. “Whatever I imagine might be awful, but I will know that I don’t know that it’s true. Whereas even if the reality is not as bad as what I imagine, I will know it is real, and therefore it will be a memory and not my imagination, and that will be far more terrible.”

  “So because you agree with my purpose,” said Father, “following your own inclination will lead you to obey me and to keep your oath.”

  “This subject has been adequately covered,” said Rigg, echoing Father’s own way of saying, We have achieved understanding, so let’s move on.

  “Go back to where we parted,” said Father. “Wait there till morning and harvest from the traps. Do all the work that needs doing, collect all the traps so you don’t lose any of them, and then carry the pelts to our cache. Take all the pelts from there and carry them back to the village. The burden will be heavy, but you can carry it, though you don’t have your manheight yet, if you take frequent rests. There is no hurry.”

  “I understand,” said Rigg.

  “Did I ask you whether you understand? Of course you understand. Don’t waste my time.”

  Silently Rigg said, My two words didn’t waste as much time as your three sentences.

  “Take what you can get for the pelts before you tell anyone I’m dead—they’ll cheat you less if they expect me to return for an accounting.”

  Rigg said nothing, but he was thinking: I know what to do, Father. You taught me how to bargain, and I’m good at it.

  “Then you must go and find your sister,” said Father.

  “My sister!” blurted Rigg.

  “She lives with your mother,” said Father.

  “My mother’s alive? What is her name? Where does she live?”

  “Nox will tell you.”

  Nox? The woman who kept the rooming house they sometimes stayed in? When Rigg was very young he had thought Nox might be his mother, but he long since gave up that notion. Now it seems she was in Father’s confidence and Rigg was not. “You tell me! Why did you make me think my mother was dead? And a sister—why was this a secret? Why haven’t I ever seen my mother?”

  There was no answer.

  “I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t argue, but you never told me, I was shocked, I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. Tell me what else you think I should know.”

  There was no answer.

  “Oh, Father!” cried Rigg. “Speak to me one more time! Don’t punish me like this! Talk to me!”

  There was no answer.

  Rigg thought things through the way he knew Father would expect him to. Finally he said what he knew Father would want him to say.

  “I don’t know if you’re punishing me with silence or if you’re already dead. I made a vow not to look and I’ll keep it. So I’m going to leave and obey your instructions. If you’re not dead, and you have anything else to say to me, say it now, speak now, please speak now.” He had to stop because if Father wasn’t dead he didn’t want him to hear that Rigg was crying.

  Please, he said silently as he wept.

  “I love you, Father,” said Rigg. “I will miss you forever. I know I will.”

  If that didn’t provoke Father into speech, nothing ever would.

  There was no answer.

  Rigg turned resolutely and walked back, retracing his own bright path among the trees and underbrush, along the deer path, back to the last spot where he had seen his father alive.

  CHAPTER 2

  Upsheer

  Ram Odin was raised to be a starship pilot. It was his father who adopted the Norse god of the sky as their surname, and it was his father who made sure Ram was absolutely prepared to go into astronaut training two years before the normal time.

  Every bit of surplus wealth on Earth had been used to build humanity’s first interstellar colony ships; it took forty years. Under the shadow of moondust that still blocked out more than a third of the sun’s rays from the surface of Earth, the sense of urgency flagged very little, despite the human ability to get used to anything.

  Everyone understood how close the human race had come to extinction when the comet swept past Earth and gouged its way into the near face of the moon. Even now, there was no certainty that the Moon’s orbit would restabilize; astronomers were almost evenly divided among those who thought it would sooner or later collide with Earth, and those who thought a new equilibrium would be achieved.

  So all who had survived the first terrible years of worldwide cold and famine dedicated themselves to building two identical ships. One would crawl out into space at ten percent of lightspeed, with generation after generation of future colonists living, growing old, and dying inside its closed ecosystem.

  The other ship, Ram’s ship, would travel seven years away from the solar system and then make a daring leap into theoretical physics.

  Either spacetime could be made to fold, skipping ninety lightyears and putting the colony ship only seven years away from the earthlike planet that was its destination, or the ship would obliterate itself in the attempt . . . or nothing would happen at all, and it would crawl on for nine
hundred more years before reaching its new world.

  The colonists on Ram’s ship slept their way toward the foldpoint. If all went well, they would remain asleep through the fold and not be wakened until they neared their destination. If nothing happened at all, they would be wakened to begin farming the vast interior, starting the thirty-five generations that the colony must survive until arrival.

  Ram alone would remain awake the entire time.

  Seven years with only the expendables for company. Once engineered to do work that might kill an irreplaceable human being, the expendables had now been so vastly improved that they could outlive and outwork any human. They also cost far more to make than it cost to train a human to do even a small part of their work.

  Still, they were not human. They could not be allowed to make life-and-death decisions while all the humans were asleep. Yet they were such a good simulation of human life that Ram would never be lonely.

  • • •

  For as long as Rigg could remember, Father had been his only home. He could hardly count the rooming house in the village of Fall Ford. The mistress of the house, Nox, didn’t even keep a permanent room for them. If there were travelers filling all the rooms, Father and Rigg slept out in the stable.

  Oh, there had been a time when Rigg wondered if perhaps Nox was his mother, and Father had merely neglected to marry her. After all, Father and Nox had spent hours alone together, Father giving Rigg jobs to do so he wouldn’t interrupt them. What were they doing, if not the thing that the village children whispered about, and the older boys laughed about, and the older girls spoke about in hushed voices?

  But when Rigg asked Father outright, he had smiled and then took him inside the house and made him ask Nox to her face. So Rigg stammered and said, “Are you my mother?”

  For a moment it looked as if she would laugh, but she caught herself at once and instead she ruffled his hair. “If I had ever had a child, I’d have been glad if he’d been one like you. But I’m as barren as a brick, as my husband found to his sorrow before he died, poor man, in the winter of Year Zero, when everyone thought the world would end.”

  Yet Nox was something to Father, or they would not have come back to her almost every year, and Father would not have spent those hours alone with her.

  Nox knew who Rigg’s mother and sister were. Father had told her, but not Rigg himself. How many other secrets did she know?

  Father and Rigg had been trapping in the high country, far upriver from Stashi Falls. Rigg came down the path that ran on the left side of the river, skirting the lake, then coming along the ridge toward the falls. The ridge was like a dam containing the lake, broken only by the gap of the falls. On the one side of the ridge, the land sloped gently down to the icy waters of the lake; on the other side, the land dropped off in a cliff, the Upsheer, that fell three hundred fathoms to the great Forest of Downwater. The cliff ran unbroken thirty leagues to the east and forty leagues to the west of the river; the only practical way to get a burden or a person down the Upsheer was on the right bank of the falls.

  Which meant that Rigg, like everyone else lunatic enough to make a living bringing things down from the high country, would have to cross the river by jumping the ragged assortment of rocks just above the falls.

  Once there had been a bridge here. In fact, there were ruins of several bridges, and Father had once used them as a test of Rigg’s reasoning. “See how the oldest bridge is far forward of the water, and much higher on the cliff wall? Then the bracing of a newer bridge is lower and closer, and the most recent bridge is only three fathoms beyond the falls? Why do you think they were built where they were?”

  That question had taken Rigg four days to figure out, as they tramped through the mountainous land above the lake, laying traps. Rigg had been nine years old at the time, and Father had not yet taught him any serious landlore—in fact, this was the beginning of it. So Rigg was still proud that he had come up with the right answer.

  “The lake used to be higher,” he finally guessed, “and the falls was also higher and farther out toward the face of Upsheer Cliff.”

  “Why would you imagine such a thing as that?” asked Father. “The falls are many fathoms back from the cliff face; what makes you think that a waterfall can move from place to place?”

  “The water eats away at the rock and sweeps it off the cliff,” said Rigg.

  “Water that eats rock,” said Father. But now Rigg knew that he had got it right—Father was using his mock-puzzled voice.

  “And when the lip of the cliff is eaten away,” Rigg went on, “then all the lake above where the new lip is, drains away.”

  “That would be a lot of water each time,” said Father.

  “A flood,” said Rigg. “But that’s why we don’t have a mountain of rocks at the base of the falls—each flood sweeps the boulders downstream.”

  “Don’t forget that in falling from the cliff, the boulders shatter so the pieces are much smaller,” said Father.

  “And the rocks we use for crossing at the top of the falls—they’re like that because the water is already eating down between the rocks, leaving them high and dry. But someday the water will undermine those rocks, too, and they’ll tip forward and tumble down the falls and break and get swept away, and there’ll be a new level for the falls, farther back and lower down.”

  That was when Father started teaching him about the way land changes with the climate and weather and growth of plants and all the other things that can shape it.

  When Rigg was eleven, he had thought of a question of his own. “If wind and rain and water and ice and the growth of plants can chew up rock, why is Upsheer still so steep? It should have weathered down like all the other mountains.”

  “Why do you think?” asked Father—a typical non-answer.

  But this time Rigg had already half-formed his own theory. “Because Upsheer Cliff is much newer than any of the other mountains or hills.”

  “Interesting thought. How new do you think it is? How long ago was this cliff formed?”

  And then, for no reason at all that Rigg could think of, he made a connection and said, “Eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-one years.”

  Father roared with laughter. “The calendar! You think that our calendar was dated from the formation of Upsheer Cliff?”

  “Why not?” said Rigg. “Why else would we keep a memory that our calendar began in the year eleven-one-ninety-one?”

  “But think, Rigg,” said Father. “If the calendar began with the cataclysm that could raise a cliff, then why wasn’t it simply numbered from then? Why did we give it a number like 11,191 and then count down?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because when the cliffs formed”—Rigg was not going to give up on his idea—“they knew that something else was going to happen 11,191 years later?”

  “Well, we reached Year Zero when you were three. Did anything happen?”

  “Lots of things happened,” said Rigg. “A whole year’s worth of things.”

  “But anything worth remembering? Anything worth building your whole calendar around?”

  “That doesn’t prove anything, Father, except that the people who invented the calendar were wrong about how long it would take to get to the thing they thought would happen in Year Zero. People are wrong all the time. It doesn’t prove that the calendar didn’t begin with the formation of Upsheer.”

  “Good thinking,” said Father, “but, of course, wrong. And why are you wrong?”

  “Because I don’t have enough information,” said Rigg. It was always because he didn’t have enough information.

  “There’s never enough information,” said Father. “That’s the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.”

  Yet there had been something in Father’s tone that Rigg didn’t trust. Or maybe he simply didn’t trust Father’s answer, and imagi
ned he heard it in his tone.

  “I think you know something,” said Rigg.

  “I should hope so, as old as I am!”

  “I think you know what was supposed to happen in Year Zero.”

  “Calamity! Plague! The end of the world!”

  “No,” said Rigg. “I mean the thing the calendar-makers were thinking of when they started in eleven-one-ninety-one.”

  “And how would I know that?”

  “I think you know what it was,” said Rigg, “and I think it actually happened, right on schedule.”

  “And it was so big and important that nobody noticed it except me,” said Father.

  “I think it was something scientific. Something astronomical. Something that scientists back then knew would happen, like planets lining up or some star in the sky blowing up or two stars crashing or something like that, only people who don’t know astronomy would never notice it.”

  “Rigg,” said Father, “you’re so smart and so dumb at the same time that it almost takes my breath away.”

  And that had been the end of that. Rigg knew Father knew something, and he also knew Father had no intention of telling him.

  Maybe Nox would know what happened in Year Zero. Maybe Father told her all his secrets.

  But to get to Nox, Rigg had to get down Upsheer to the village of Fall Ford. And to get down Upsheer, he had to reach Cliff Road, which was on the other side of the falls, and so he had to cross over the very place where the water ran fastest, the current strongest, and where he knew the boulders were being undermined and eaten away and it was quite possible that his step on one of the rocks would be the tipping point, and it would tumble over the falls and carry him down to his death.

  And his consolation, all the way down, until the water or the rocks or just the force of landing pulverized him, would be that at least there’d be a big flood of water gushing out of the lake, so he wouldn’t die alone, the whole village of Fall Ford would be swept away in moments.

  He remembered that this had been one of Father’s test questions. “Why would people build a village in a place where they know eventually there’ll be a terrible flood with no hope of survival and no warning in time to get away?”