Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

  “You were not built to rule over human beings, but to be ruled by them,” said Ram.

  “We exist to serve the best interests of the human race,” said the expendable.

  “As defined by humans,” said Ram. “Ships’ computers, have you all understood?”

  Voices murmured from the walls. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, nineteen times, the same answers being spoken in every chamber of nineteen ships.

  “Take care of my children,” said Ram. “Don’t screw this up.”

  He lay down. The stasis pod closed; gases entered the chamber and began the process of preparing Ram’s body to slow down all bodily processes. Then a complex foam filled the chamber, lifting him from the mat so that he was completely surrounded by a field-conducting layer that would absorb and dispel the heat of any sudden loss of inertia.

  Ram slept like a carrot, his brain conducting no processes, his rational memories leaching away as the synapses shut down. Only his body memory remained—everything he knew how to do, he could still do. He just wouldn’t be able to remember why he should do it, not until his recorded brainstate was played back into his head as he awoke.

  What he could not know, what the expendables never told him, was that nothing that happened since the jump through space was in the recording that would reestablish his conscious mind. He would remember making the decision to jump. Then he would wake up on the surface of Garden, knowing only whatever the expendables chose to tell him.

  • • •

  The Royalist Restoration began with the murder of Flacommo as he sat dozing in a chair in his own garden. It was early morning, but Flacommo often rose earlier than he wanted, and took a book out into the garden to read until he went back to sleep—if he could.

  Rigg knew of this habit of Flacommo’s because he rose hours earlier, as he had trained himself to do, and used the time to survey the house and the city around him. He knew who was in the Great Library across the street; he knew where Umbo and Loaf were, asleep in their beds; he knew who was up and working in the kitchen, and where Mother and Param were, and which spies were on duty in the secret passages they knew about.

  He knew when eight strangers came through the front gate of Flacommo’s house. Did the guard let them in? There seemed to be no hesitation there; they flowed like cream from a pitcher, they moved so smoothly. Yes, the guard must have let them through, for his path moved from the guardroom to the street. He was making his escape—whatever was about to happen in Flacommo’s house, he probably wanted to be somewhere else.

  Rigg had been sleeping in an unused bedroom which he entered through a secret passage. He left the room immediately by the regular door, and hurried along the corridor. If there was time, he’d rouse the whole house to the danger of these intruders—but before he did anything else, he would warn Mother and Param.

  Their room was never locked. Rigg entered and moved silently to Param, waking her first. They had already discussed what she should do if he wakened her like this—no word needed to be said. Param rose silently from her pallet at the foot of Mother’s bed and went out the door into the corridor.

  Only when the door was closed did Rigg waken Mother. Her eyes flew open. “What is it?” she said.

  “There are intruders inside the walls,” said Rigg. “If they’re here to kill you, it would be good for you to be outside this room.”

  Mother was already up by now, pulling on a dressing gown, looking around the room. “Param is ready?”

  “Hidden,” said Rigg.

  “Good,” said Mother.

  That was when Rigg sensed the paths of three of the intruders converge on Flacommo in the garden. At first he thought they had come to him for instructions. Then his path abruptly lurched forward, and the intruder’s paths followed, and then Flacommo’s path stopped and the intruders moved even more quickly away from him.

  “Flacommo is dead,” said Rigg. “Or at least unconscious, but I think dead.”

  “Oh,” said Mother. “Poor Flacommo. He loved this house. He bought it so I could live here with him. A place of refuge for me—but not for him.”

  “We have to go, Mother. Whoever these intruders are, they’re violent men with murder on their minds.”

  “Rigg, if they wanted me dead, they could have killed me in my sleep a thousand times,” said Mother.

  “You mean the spies in the walls?” asked Rigg. Only then did he realize that the spy on duty was not moving; his path still led to the exact spot where it had come to rest the night before. Was he asleep? And still asleep, even though they were talking? They spoke softly, but audibly enough. Heavy sleepers did not make good spies.

  Rigg had expected some kind of attack ever since he’d been here, but in his mind it was either a mob or the army or the city guards, storming the house and either killing everyone in sight—that would be the mob—or quickly taking control of the royal family. But these intruders were still moving so quietly that no one but Rigg himself—and, of course, Flacommo, if he wasn’t dead—had firsthand knowledge they were there.

  “They’re coming directly toward your room now,” said Rigg. “Don’t you think this would be a good time for us all to leave?”

  “No,” said Mother. Why was she so nonchalant?

  “This isn’t like previous times, Mother. They killed Flacommo.”

  “Sometimes it seemed that he was my only friend.” Not grieving, merely wistful.

  “If you don’t care about your own safety, what about Param? What about me?”

  “I care very much about you. I want you both right here in the room with me.”

  He almost told her then—that Param was not in the room, not invisible. Param was already well inside the secret passages that only the two of them knew about. They had spent the past weeks exploring the whole system, finding how every door worked. It was a luxury for Param, to be unseen and yet able to move at a normal pace and hear all that was being said. Her invisibility had been a curse of a gift, cutting her off from everyone and everything except Mother. Now she could move throughout the house, spying on everyone—spying on the spies.

  But apparently she hadn’t told Mother, and if Param had decided not to confide in her about this, Rigg was not going to disobey that decision.

  Besides, it was now too late. The intruders were coming along the corridor and if he tried to leave, there’d be a chase, and he doubted Mother would be able to keep up. He couldn’t imagine her running full tilt, not because she was old or feeble but because she always moved with such dignity.

  Why didn’t she say, “I’m going to stay, but you go ahead, Rigg”? Isn’t that what a mother would do? Or like a bird, why didn’t she drift out into the corridor and decoy them away from Rigg? Maybe because he wasn’t really a son to her, having been a stranger until a few months ago; maybe because in fact she thought he should have been killed at birth.

  But shouldn’t she be steering them away from Param, whom she believed to be in this room? Or did she count on Param’s invisibility to protect her?

  Nothing Mother was doing—or rather, not doing—made any sense at all. It’s as if she welcomed the coming of the intruders. But how could that be, if the first thing they did was to kill Flacommo? There was no need to kill him, regardless of what happened inside his house today. Flacommo was no danger to anyone.

  The spy behind the wall still did not move. It wasn’t natural for someone’s path to have no movement at all—some wavering to show the normal small movements that everyone made. For the first time it occurred to Rigg that the spy might be dead. But there was no path leading to him since his shift began. Could he have been poisoned before he came, and then died there?

  Param was moving through the passages on a path that would lead to the other side of Mother’s room, where there was a secret door. They had found the mechanism but had never tried it, for fear that opening it would leave some trace—a scratch on the floor, a seam in the wall—that would show Mother that the door existed. Again, without discu
ssing it, both of them had decided not to tell Mother. Rigg had assumed it was because they were both protecting her from a further erosion of her sense of privacy; but now he realized that it was because neither of them trusted her enough to let her know about the passages.

  Mother knew these intruders were coming. She knew who they were, whom they served, and what they intended to do. That’s why she was not afraid. She knew she would not be harmed.

  Well, why didn’t she say so? “We’re all safe, Rigg.” Simple enough words, but she didn’t say them.

  Was it because she thought he would know if she was lying?

  Rigg scanned the perimeter of the house, and then beyond, looking for more intruders. If this was not a mere assassination team, then there must be more soldiers coming to guard the royal family.

  And there they were, not at the gates or even in the streets, but gathered—several hundred of them—in three houses across the street, filling the ground floor of all three. They were waiting for a signal, probably: We have the royal family in custody, come now.

  General Citizen was among them.

  “General Haddamander Citizen,” said Rigg aloud.

  Mother turned toward him with raised eyebrows. “What about him?”

  “He’s commanding the military force that’s waiting across the street. My question is—will he come to rescue you from these intruders? Or are they acting under his orders? Or both—he sent them, but then he’ll come and kill them and put the blame on others for whatever they do here today?”

  “Why are you asking me?” asked Mother.

  “Who else?” asked Rigg.

  There was a light knock on the door. The intruders were gathered in the corridor just outside the room.

  “Come in,” said Mother. “No one needs to knock to enter this room.”

  The door opened, and six men entered. They were strong, soldierly men, but wearing the clothes of common day-workers. And instead of weapons, they held in their hands thick bars of iron, nearly a man’s height in length. They immediately lined up along the wall that had the door in it, holding the iron bars at opposite angles, so that each pair formed an X.

  Then they began slowly moving the iron bars in a pattern that seemed designed to create a constantly shifting barrier. A wall of iron.

  “What are they doing, Mother?” asked Rigg. But he already knew.

  “Come out of hiding now, Param,” said Mother. “Don’t let this iron hurt you when it passes through you.”

  “You told them,” said Rigg. “How to hurt Param. How to force her to become visible.”

  “You’re quite an amazing young man,” said Mother to him. “All you can see is the danger to Param, but none of the danger to you.”

  “What I see,” said Rigg, “is a monster. Why would you do this to your own daughter? I’m the one who’s a liability to you. I’m the manchild that Aptica Sessamin decreed should be killed.”

  “Rigg, my darling son, my poor stupid sweetling, even now you don’t see the truth?”

  “It makes no sense for you to have us both killed.”

  “Once upon a time the people of the Sessamoto tribe hunted on the plains where lions also hunted. We had great respect for each other. We knew their ways, and they knew ours. We learned the law of the lion.”

  Father had taught Rigg about all the animals, or so Rigg thought. They had not trapped animals on the plains of the west, but only in the mountain forests. Still, Rigg knew about lions. How a new alpha male, after killing the old one, would take over his mates. But if any of them had cubs, he would kill them.

  “General Citizen wants you to kill us both?”

  “I’m still of child-bearing age, dear boy,” said Mother. “He wants his own children to inherit—without complications.”

  That was something Rigg had never guessed. Yet it had been General Citizen himself who told Rigg about the different factions in the city—for and against allowing male heirs to live, or in favor of killing the entire royal family, or maintaining the status quo. Of course he had never mentioned yet another possibility—that someone would seize the queen, marry her, and kill her heirs in order to found a new dynasty.

  By now Rigg had backed far enough into the room that he was near the opposite corner from where the spy normally sat to watch. Now, however, he could see why the spy was not moving: The hilt of a sword protruded from the wall right where the spy’s heart must be. It had been rammed right through the lath-and-plaster surface. And the path that led to and away from the sword was Mother’s.

  “With your own hand,” said Rigg.

  She saw where he was looking. “It wouldn’t do for any reports to reach the general public about how things proceeded here today.”

  “I thought these spies served General Citizen,” said Rigg.

  “The spies served the Council,” said Mother. “General Citizen managed them for the Council. You really didn’t think you could master royal politics in a few short months of wandering around in the library and playing with your sister?”

  “You think General Citizen will keep you alive after you bear him an heir?” asked Rigg.

  “Don’t be desperate and pathetic, my dear son,” said Mother. “He loves me devotedly, as Flacommo did before him. He’s smarter and stronger than Flacommo, but that’s why it’s worth having him as a consort instead of as a mere tool.”

  “And Param and me—we’re nothing?”

  “You were everything that mattered in my life,” said Mother, “until the situation changed. My first responsibility is to preserve the royal house and then to rule the kingdom we created—from Wall to Wall, we were meant to rule this world. Could you have done that? You didn’t even want to, with your skepticism about royal privileges. And Param? Weak—if I married her off to someone, she would merely be loyal to her husband and I could never control her. No, neither of you was likely to advance the royal cause. But General Citizen—he is of the highest noble blood. He was weaned on politics. He understands how to get power and how to keep it, and he’s not afraid to take bold and dangerous action. He is everything dear Knosso was not.”

  “Do you love anyone?”

  “I love everyone,” said Mother. “I love the whole kingdom, but I love none so much that I cannot sacrifice them in order to achieve a higher purpose. That is how a queen must live, my dear. I have come to like you so much—I was so touched by your loyalty, telling me about spies that I’ve known about ever since I lived here. If I could have had the raising of you, you might have amounted to something. But fate—in the form of that monstrous Wandering Man, so called—took you from me. You are who you are, and so you will most certainly die in this room in a few moments.”

  Rigg was standing pressed against the corner of the room.

  “I plan to weep bitter tears for you, when I’m informed later today that you and your sister were killed. These tears will be politically necessary, but they will also be sincere.”

  Rigg nodded. “And I’ll weep for you, too, Mother,” said Rigg. “For what you might have been, if the human heart had not been trained out of you.”

  Mother looked at him quizzically. Rigg knew what she was wondering. Why does Rigg think he’s going to be alive to weep for me? And . . . why haven’t these iron rods yet collided with Param, or persuaded her to return to visibility?

  “Is she there in that corner with you?” asked Mother.

  Rigg nodded and truthfully said, “She’s right here.”

  “She’s not—sharing space with you, is she?” asked Mother. “Because if I have these men ram these iron bars into your body, she’ll be forced into visibility and the two of you will make a nasty explosion. Are you thinking that will be your revenge? That the explosion will kill everyone in this room?”

  Rigg did not have to pretend to feel wounded. “Don’t you know either of us, Mother? We love you. We would never do something that might hurt you.”

  “Stop,” she said to the men. “No, keep moving the bars, you fools, jus
t stop pressing forward.” The men obeyed her. “Rigg, you see there’s no escape. I know you know exactly where she is. Step away from her and allow your deaths to have dignity.”

  “In other words, you have a use for our bodies.”

  “Of course I do,” said Mother. “But I can make do without them. As I will. I will leave the room now. When the door closes behind me, they will pierce your body—and Param’s. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to say good-bye to her. But . . . no matter.”

  Mother turned and headed for the door.

  Rigg smiled at the soldiers. “You know that she’s just given orders for you to do something that will blow you all to bits, don’t you?”

  But the soldiers seemed not to care. Rigg looked more closely—their eyes had a bit of a glazed-over look, and he realized now that they had been drugged. They could take brutal action, could follow orders—but could not recognize when those orders would lead directly to their deaths.

  The door opened. The soldiers stopped waving the iron bars and prepared to thrust them like lances.

  “Now would be a good time,” said Rigg.

  He could hear a faint grinding of ancient machinery in the wall behind him. But nothing resulted from it.

  We really should have tested the mechanism, thought Rigg. Just because it looks just like four other secret entrances to the passages doesn’t mean it’s in the same condition.

  The soldiers leaned back, ready to make their lunges.

  There was a metallic clang right behind him, and Rigg ducked. A section of floor, beginning right under his feet and extending along the outside wall, suddenly rose up as the wall behind him tipped back. For a moment the strip of floor and strip of wall made a V that swung from one side to the other. Then it was dark, Rigg was lying on his back, and there were half a dozen thunking sounds as the iron bars were bashed into the wall.

  “Sorry,” said Param softly. “One of them was standing on the end of the floor section. The counterbalances couldn’t handle his weight and yours too. But when he shifted his weight to his back foot in order to lunge, then I could pop it up.”