Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  “And our blankets,” said Umbo. “I suppose we might as well wait here another day. Unless we go steal our own stuff while we’re taking a bath.”

  “And then hope we don’t notice it? Is that your plan? Because if somebody had stolen our stuff last night we would have noticed.”

  “But we didn’t!”

  “Because we didn’t come in and steal our stuff while we were bathing. Umbo! Think!”

  Umbo did try to think it through, but as far as he could tell it might go either way. It was hard to get a grasp on the rules of this time traveling thing.

  They ended up sleeping in a much more expensive place closer in to the city. The room was smaller, the bed was smaller, the fleas were more numerous, and the food was worse. The next morning they returned to the boardinghouse only an hour after they left. The landlady was incredulous.

  “The lines were too long,” said Loaf.

  “But you came all this way! And where’s your lunch?”

  “We ate it,” said Umbo.

  “But you just ate a huge breakfast. Huge!”

  It had been huge. And delicious.

  “We have to go on to Aressa Sessamo,” said Loaf. “We don’t have a day to waste in line just to see the inside of a big building.”

  Umbo smiled his sweetest smile. “Would you fix us another lunch? For us to eat for supper on the road?”

  “You’ll just eat it the minute you get out of here,” she said.

  “Maybe,” said Loaf, “but we’ll pay for it, too.”

  She agreed, but huffed her whole way through making it, and as they left her house they could hear her muttering—because she meant them to hear—“greedy, gluttonous people eat everything and save nothing for the future.”

  Don’t tell us about the future, ma’am, thought Umbo. If we’re in the future and want something we don’t have, we can just go back into the past and get it. Of course, then we can’t get all the way back to the present, so we’ll have to do everything twice.

  CHAPTER 19

  Aressa Sessamo

  “We have a plan for dividing the new world—which you still have not named—into nineteen cells,” said the expendable.

  Ram looked at the holographic globe, rotated it several times, and said, “So you exclude the three smaller continents.”

  “We thought those could remain as preserves for the original biota of this unnamed planet.”

  “Call the planet ‘Garden,’ since you want a name. Though who’ll ever use it but us, I have no idea.”

  “The colonists will say ‘back on Earth’ and ‘here on Garden,’” said the expendable. “You may be interested to know that not one of the expendables or the ships’ computers predicted your choice of ‘Garden.’ The front-runner was ‘Ram,’ but some of us thought you were too modest for that.”

  “It’s not a matter of modesty. I intend to live with these people—or at least one ship’s worth of them—and it would lead to ridicule and loss of face for me to try to make them call the world by my name.”

  “That was my reasoning. But I now have the advantage of continued association with you, which the others lack.”

  “I never imagined the expendables were given to wagering.”

  “There are no stakes. It’s merely a matter of testing our predictive algorithms.”

  “The divisions of the two larger continents look fine to me. I assume they all contain adequate resources.”

  “Adequate for what?”

  “For . . . human life.”

  “Breathable air, potable water, arable soil, and survivable weather seemed to us to be all that was needed.”

  “I was thinking of iron, coal . . .”

  “This planet has no fossil fuels. Lacking a moon to create serious tides, Garden was much slower in developing life. Right now it is in the lush phase of plant growth, and its atmosphere has three times the carbon dioxide of Earth. In a few hundred million years, it would have had fossil fuels—except that of course we’ll put an end to that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because humans probably cannot digest the local flora and fauna. The chance of all the proteins being left-handed like those of Earth is probably fifty-fifty, and the chance of finding all the essential amino acids within the correct handedness is quite small. We need to establish Earth flora and fauna so that humans can flourish here.”

  “Are you seriously proposing to wipe out all the existing flora and fauna on the two continents we’re using?”

  “We intend to arrive on the planet in such a way as to wipe out all surface life, or as much of it as we can. That was the plan from the beginning, whether it was explained to you or not.”

  “So the three small continents—”

  “We will re-seed them with Garden’s native life forms after the extinction event. Here are the main steps of the plan: First, we visit the surface of Garden to make as complete a collection as possible of native life forms. Then we crash the ships into the planet at an angle and speed calculated to make the necessary changes, including mass extinction. Then we wait for the atmosphere to return to a breathable state, and re-seed the planet. Sometime before two hundred years are up, the human colonists, including you, will be wakened from stasis and brought out onto the surface of Garden to begin colonization.”

  “Extinction event. Our coming is meant to be a disaster?”

  “Those are the instructions we were given. It will be much easier to engineer the whole thing with nineteen ships to work with instead of one.”

  “What are the other ‘necessary changes’?”

  “As you can see, Garden has no moon. It must have captured a sizeable asteroid, but it was inside the Roche limit, which is why there is a ring. This provides noticeable and continuous illumination at night, so nocturnal fauna will thrive, but the only tides are solar.”

  “We’re going to make a moon?”

  “I thought you disliked being ridiculous.”

  “Then what are you getting at?”

  “Without a substantial moon to slow down Garden’s rate of rotation, days are only 17.335 hours long. This is below the tolerance limits of the human biological clock. The rotation of the planet must be slowed to allow days of no less than twenty hours, preferably 22 to 26. The original plan called for bombarding the planet with asteroids at the right speed and angle, but with nineteen ships, we can achieve the desired slowing of Garden’s rotation rate by bringing in all the ships at the same time, at the correct angle against the direction of spin, and at enough speed to compensate for the smaller mass.”

  “You’re going to crash the ships into the surface.”

  “The orbiting units, which contain duplicate computers and databases, will be evenly spaced in geosynchronous orbit. But the main body of each ship will impact the planet at an angle opposed to the direction of rotation, yes.”

  “Pulverizing us and making lovely little craters.”

  “The same fields that allow us to block collisions with interstellar objects will completely protect the ships. In fact, we will form the collision fields in exactly the right size and shape to pulverize just enough of Garden’s crust to block out all sunlight for several decades, while allowing a complete return to full sunlight within two hundred years.”

  “We’re an ecological disaster.”

  “Exactly,” said the expendable. “The goal was to establish human life on another world, orbiting another sun, so that the human race could not be destroyed by a single cataclysm.”

  “So we’re doing to the native life of Garden exactly what we’re trying to keep from happening to us?”

  “Garden has no detectable sentient life. If on our visit to the surface we find sentient life, then we will return to the ships and search for another world or worlds.”

  “I had no idea we planned to be so ruthless.”

  “It was not publicized or even discussed with the political arm of the colonization program. Ruthlessness was necessary but wins no votes.”

>   “But this is not our world, to treat however we want!”

  “Visiting here as students of an alien evolutionary tradition would not be either cost-effective or, ultimately, successful. We would inevitably contaminate Garden or, worse yet, become contaminated and bring potentially deadly Gardenian life forms back to Earth. The three continental preserves will be sufficient to allow biologists to study alien life at some point in the future. And if you really thought we could colonize this world without making it ‘ours,’ you’d be far too naive to command this expedition.”

  “I . . . didn’t realize . . .”

  “You didn’t think about it at all,” said the expendable. “The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species’ most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.”

  “And you aren’t morally blind?”

  “We see the moral ironies very clearly. We simply don’t care.”

  • • •

  To Umbo, it seemed to take forever to fully enter Aressa Sessamo. There were no city walls. They walked along causeways in marshland of the delta. The causeways broadened and had occasional buildings on either side; many of these wide raised areas joined together and finally the land as far as they could see in every direction was raised to that level. More and more buildings arose; villages gave way to towns, and the towns came together to be a city.

  “When will we get to Aressa Sessamo?” asked Umbo at last.

  Loaf laughed at him. “We’ve been in it for hours.”

  “But it’s nothing, it’s a jumble,” said Umbo. “Where did it start?”

  “Where it’s water or marsh, that’s not the city; where it’s raised roads and buildings, that’s the city.”

  “No great walls?”

  “What good are walls in a city that might flood at any time? Winter storms pounding great waves against the city from the north. Spring floods drowning the city from the rivers in the south. They’d eat out the foundations of any stone wall. Look at the houses—they’re all built on stilts. Like herons’ legs.”

  “But it’s the capital,” said Umbo.

  “And the parts that should be protected, are,” said Loaf. “Though garrison duty in Aressa is just about the worst thing you can do to an army. Put them here for a year and they’re worthless in the field—you have to start their training almost from the beginning.”

  Umbo tuned out Loaf’s words whenever he talked about army life. Umbo had no intention of ever being in any kind of army, or even being on the same side as one.

  When they entered O for the first time, their goal had been to be noticed without looking like they wanted to be noticed. They had to establish the idea that Rigg was a rich boy who was used to commanding a group of attendants. Now, entering Aressa Sessamo, they had the opposite goal—to go unnoticed, without looking like they didn’t want to be seen. They had no idea whether their escape from the boat was the end of any interest in them from the army or the Revolutionary Council; for all they knew, there were soldiers searching for them even now.

  But it seemed unlikely to Umbo. They had mattered only because they were traveling with the prince. Now that they were just a man and boy coming into the city together, they were of no interest to anyone. Which Umbo found more than a little irritating. If I’m not with Rigg, I don’t matter? But when he said this to Loaf, the man only laughed. “Rigg only matters when he’s with Rigg—and see what it got him! He can’t get away from ‘Rigg’ the prince, because it’s him! We’re the lucky ones, believe me.”

  They walked and walked, at times passing through marshy areas or over bridges that looked as if they went on forever—but then they’d pass a stand of trees and realize that they had merely skirted a densely populated section to avoid the traffic, and soon they’d be right back into the thick of things.

  In O, the common language of the river had prevailed. Rigg’s lofty diction was unusual. Umbo had expected that in the capital everyone would speak the way Rigg had talked when he was trying to get the jewel sold. Instead, not only was the river tongue spoken with every kind of accent, but also there were other languages. Umbo had heard of the idea of other languages, of course, but he had never heard one spoken, and at first it baffled him and frightened him.

  “What are they talking about?” Umbo asked Loaf. “I can’t understand them.”

  Loaf named a language; Umbo instantly forgot the name. “It’s spoken in the east, not far from the Wall,” Loaf explained.

  “But why?” asked Umbo. “Why don’t they just speak Common so people can understand them?”

  “People do understand them,” said Loaf. “Just not you. Who would ever learn a language nobody speaks? The thing’s impossible.”

  And when Loaf told him that there were hundreds of known languages within the wallfold, each of them spoken by thousands of people, Umbo laughed out loud.

  “Why are you laughing?” asked Loaf amiably.

  “Because they sound funny,” said Umbo. “And because even the people who want to make themselves so ridiculous as to speak an unknown tongue can’t agree on what tongue to use!”

  “Before they were conquered by the Sessamoto, why should the people of other nations have learned to speak the language of another? What we call Common is just the trading language of the Stashik River. Everyone speaks some version of it because it makes business easier. But it’s not the language Leaky and I learned when we were growing up.”

  “Say something in your language, then,” said Umbo, his curiosity stirred.

  “Mm eh keuno oidionectopafala,” said Loaf.

  “What did that mean?”

  “If it could be said in Common, I wouldn’t need to say it in Mo’onohonoi.”

  “It was really obscene, wasn’t it,” said Umbo.

  “If you spoke my language, you would have had to kill me,” said Loaf.

  “Why don’t you and Leaky ever speak Mohononono or whatever it is at home?”

  “Sometimes we do. But nobody speaks it where we live, and when you speak a language around people who don’t speak it, they usually assume you’re saying something you don’t want them to hear, so it annoys them.”

  For a while, passing through a neighborhood market near a six-road crossroads with a well, the noise was so great they couldn’t hear each other, and conversation died. It seemed that every stall competed with every other for how much noise and stink they could raise, and all the mules and oxen and horses and asses could only be controlled by screaming long strings of extraordinarily offensive language. Even the beggars had given up competing with the noise—they jumped up and down in order to attract attention. They looked like ebbecks in tall grass, they jumped so high, and Umbo was tempted to give one of them a ping for his athletic ability. But Loaf clapped a hand on Umbo’s arm to stop him from reaching for it.

  Loaf leaned down so his mouth was directly at Umbo’s ear, and shouted, “If you give anything, a boy your size will be rolled, trampled, stripped, and skinned in five seconds.”

  It was late in the day when they came to a section of the city with wider paved streets and larger buildings made of better materials, where mounted police kept some kind of order. People were more nicely dressed, and there was far less noise—but this also meant that Loaf’s and Umbo’s clothing marked them as being out of place.

  “We don’t belong here,” said Umbo.

  “Exactly,” said Loaf. Whereupon he took Umbo by the hand and walked right up to one of the mounted policemen. “Sir,” he said, “my son and I are new in the city and looking for lodging. This is surely not the place where we’ll find what we can afford—can you tell me where we might . . .”

  But the policeman, after looking them both slowly up and down, gave his horse some kind of invisible command and the horse clopped on, its iron shoes ringing on the cobblestones.

  “I guess he doesn’t like giving directions,” said Umbo.r />
  “Oh, I didn’t expect him to speak to us,” said Loaf. “By asking him directions, I proved that I really was from out of town, and a harmless idiot on top of it. If I was up to no good, I’d never have walked right up to him, especially not with my second-story boy in tow.”

  “Second-story boy?”

  “That’s what he had to assume we were at first—a burglar, with you as the boy I lift up to balconies or roofs so you can squirm in through some chimney or skylight or vent and then come down and let me into the house.”

  “He couldn’t have thought we were father and son?”

  “In this neighborhood? Dressed as we are? I think not!”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “Because this is the kind of neighborhood where they might keep the royals. We have to get near enough to Rigg, if he’s still alive, that he can see our paths. Isn’t that what he does? You said he could see the paths even through walls.”

  “I didn’t even think of that,” said Umbo.

  “Well, what did you think? That we could ask where they keep the royals and then go and chat with Rigg?”

  “I thought that the Revolutionary Council allowed common citizens to go look at the royals and take things away from them and stuff.”

  “Yes, yes, but not any common citizen. And not just any old time, either. It’s only when they want to humiliate the royals or make some kind of political point or warning. And we wouldn’t be the ‘common citizens’ they’d send.”

  “So it’s all for show.”

  “Government is all show, when it isn’t murder in the dark,” said Loaf. “Or soldiers in the open.”

  Instead of going back toward safer neighborhoods—safer for poor people, that is—Loaf was leading them through ever richer streets. Now the houses were each as wide as ten buildings in an ordinary part of town, and no windows looked out on the street at all, except perhaps on third stories.

  “Do they all live in darkness?” asked Umbo.