Pathfinder

  He came into the little room off the kitchen where Loaf and Leaky must have eaten their private meal—late, as always, after the guests were served—and found no one there and the room dark, except for the flickering light from the kitchen fire.

  Only then, imagining where Leaky and Loaf would have sat, did he realize just how many holes there were in his plan. Because even though he himself was not present for dinner, it is absolutely certain that if they had received his message—the one he was preparing to slip into the recent past and give them now—they would have come up to his bedroom and wakened him and told him of the success of it.

  Unless I told them to let me sleep uninterrupted till morning. That’s what my message should be—to go to sleep as normal and not waken me till morning!

  Satisfied now that he had resolved the contradictions, Umbo closed the doors to the room and, keeping his voice low, put himself into the trance of quickening. “Don’t waken me till morning, please,” he whispered entreatingly to the empty chair where Leaky usually sat. Then he spoke again, but with the trance shallower, or so he hoped. And again and again. At no point did he see any trace or flicker of Loaf and Leaky, or hear a speck of answer, but he resolutely tried to do it at every level of trance, thinking that perhaps the depth of the trance determined how far back he would go in time.

  Exhausted and stupid from lack of sleep and long concentration, he was whispering now from hoarseness rather than a desire to be quiet. He hit on the idea of varying the message a little so that he’d remember which level of trance had been seen by them, but then gave up on it because how could he remember how “deep” the trance was at the time of a given message?

  Even when he thought he was done and resolved to go back upstairs, he did not. Instead he sat down in his own place at the table and rubbed his eyes and knew, without knowing why or how, that he had failed. He had only been talking to himself.

  Sitting there, drifting near sleep, yet still trying to quicken himself, he fell into an even deeper quickening—or dreamed he did—and this time when he spoke his message, talking across the table to his two friends, he reached out his hands and dreamed—or was it a dream?—that he felt their hands in his, and their voices assuring him that they would comply with his wishes.

  “Then come back here after dark,” he said, “and bring me back up to bed, because I’m so very tired.” Whereupon he closed his eyes and fell, not into a deeper trance, but into such a deep sleep that he slumped forward and slept with his head on his arms.

  Then he awoke to Leaky shaking him gently and saying, “Wake up, Umbo, go upstairs to your bed, why would you sleep sitting at table?”

  For a moment Umbo thought this meant his dream was true. “You came as I asked!” said Umbo—his voice still a hoarse whisper.

  “Listen to the croaking of a frog!” said Leaky with delight. “You poor thing, you really are sick, at least a cold, all full of mucus and snot, which is what happens when you come downstairs and fall asleep in a cooling house with no blanket and hardly a stitch on.”

  There had been no message received, none at all.

  I’ll just have to try again, he thought.

  But the next night he tried nothing at all. He had spent the day working, not on reaching back in time, but rather on helping Loaf repair things around the inn, and fetch things from the weekly market that were needed to feed the guests, and whatever other errands were needed, anything to keep himself awake, since he had slept so little the night before.

  Almost as soon as he had eaten, he went upstairs and dropped off to sleep immediately.

  Again he was woken by Leaky’s hands shaking him.

  No. Leaky’s and Loaf’s hands. They were in his room and it was still the same night, because there was the noise of guests in the common room, singing songs with bad harmonies and voices lubricated by ale.

  “You did it!” said Loaf. “You appeared at our table, sitting there, reaching out your hands! We took your hands boy.”

  Umbo felt a glow of satisfaction. “What did I say? Didn’t I tell you not to waken me?”

  “No, you said we must waken you and send you upstairs to bed.”

  “No he didn’t,” said Leaky.

  “But since you were already here—well, we thought you were, so we came upstairs to check, and couldn’t help waking you and telling you that it worked!”

  But it hadn’t worked. “I left that message last night. That’s why I was sitting at the kitchen table. So I didn’t go into the past at all, I went into the future. Tonight. Last night I left the message that you got tonight.” In despair Umbo rolled over in bed and faced the wall.

  “You stupid little fool,” said Loaf, not without affection. “You think that’s failure? What do we care, right now at least, whether you go into the future or the past. So you went a few hours into the future? You shifted yourself into another time at all!”

  Come to think of it, once Loaf had put it that way, it was an encouraging sign. “All right,” said Umbo, rolling onto his back but keeping his eyes closed. “Because you saw me sitting at the table, and you touched my hands, I know exactly which of my tries actually worked. It was different from the others. I was numb from lack of sleep, I was so deep in my trance I felt lost, felt like I might never find my way back. I couldn’t tell when I crossed the boundary from that into sleep. But all the other times accomplished nothing.”

  “Unless we’re going to keep running into ghosts of you giving us foolish messages for the rest of our lives,” said Leaky.

  “I must learn how to push the messages into the past—and just the right amount of time, too.”

  Loaf chuckled. “You’re not even awake. But tomorrow, let’s keep you sending messages until you start going in the right direction. Or maybe you can pick a spot to write messages in the dirt.”

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” said Umbo. “You couldn’t even hear my voice, am I right? All you did was see me.”

  “And hold your hands,” said Leaky. “Didn’t you feel us hold your hands?”

  “Yes, I did,” admitted Umbo. “And I could smell the kitchen.”

  “Of course you could,” said Loaf. “You were in the kitchen.”

  “I mean I could smell the dinner as if it was fresh. I remember that now, from what I thought was a dream.”

  “We know you can scratch a message in the dirt, Umbo,” said Loaf, “because you were able to dig up a certain bag that was buried in dirt, and then cover the place again so it betrayed no disturbance.”

  “What bag are you talking about?” asked Leaky.

  “The bag of jewels,” said Loaf. “When Rigg was arrested, we went back and got it. Only Umbo, here, had apparently come back from the future to raid my little hiding place and take the biggest jewel out of the bag.”

  “Anyone could have taken it,” said Leaky.

  “Anyone in their right mind would have taken the whole bag,” said Loaf.

  “I can’t have done it,” said Umbo miserably. “I’m only traveling in time to reach into the future. Which is useless, since we’re all going to end up in the future anyway.”

  “All those stories of ghosts,” said Leaky. “They’re probably just somebody like you. They’re walking around in a house when they’re so tired they accidentally fall into this quickening you’re talking about, and they inadvertently leave behind an image of themselves—or even the reality of themselves, since there can be touching and smelling—which pushes them into the future so that people many decades from now will see this ghost going about its business. Maybe they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

  “If they do it like me,” said Umbo, “they know what they’re doing.”

  “Oh, so now you know what you’re doing?” asked Loaf. “Weren’t you the one who thought he was pushing messages back into the past, but they were really getting misdelivered into the future?”

  “Let me go back to sleep,” said Umbo. “I’m so tired I could die.”

  “B
ut remember this when you’re going back to sleep, Umbo,” said Loaf. “You really did it. You really shifted yourself through time.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I,” said Umbo. And then he was gone and dreaming again, but this time of his brother standing at the edge of the falls.

  He felt this urgent question building inside the part of him that knew it was a dream: Why can’t I also go back and save my brother’s life? If I can save Rigg’s money, doesn’t it mean I can go and speak to Kyokay and save him before he goes out to the falls?

  Maybe I did, he thought as he drifted back to sleep yet again. Maybe I did, only years from now, when I’m grown. Maybe I’m the man that Rigg thought he was pushing or at least letting fall from the cliff.

  Impossible.

  If only.

  He slept again.

  CHAPTER 12

  In Irons

  The expendable and the computers worked out the math as best they could in only an hour or two. “If your extravagant and unverifiable guesses happen to be right,” said the expendable, “then yes, the stuttering of spacetime might have allowed all nineteen versions of this ship to pass through the fold to eleven thousand years in the past, but with just enough time elapsed between passages that they wouldn’t overlap and therefore wouldn’t necessarily annihilate each other.”

  “So there might be not just one, but nineteen versions of this ship and all its crew and equipment, including your charming selves, and me, the pilot, proceeding toward the target planet in order to colonize it.”

  “Or not,” said the expendable.

  “Oh, but it’s too delicious not to be true.”

  “Metaphorical flavor doesn’t influence reality,” said the expendable.

  “But the elegance of reality has a metaphorical flavor,” said Ram.

  “Suppose you’re right,” said the expendable. “So what?”

  “So I’ll feel better as I spend the rest of my life doing nothing meaningful.”

  “You’ll have time to read all those books you never got around to reading.”

  “I think I won’t have time to do anything at all,” said Ram. “I think I will only live until we reach the place where this ship was constructed. Only the structure we now see around us is moving backward through time. When we come to the place where it was built, it will be unbuilt around us.”

  “So we’ll get off.”

  “How?” asked Ram. “We would have to get into a shuttle that would take us back to the surface of Earth. But there are no shuttles moving our direction in time.”

  “There aren’t any stars moving our direction,” said the expendable, “and yet we still see them.”

  “What an interesting quandary,” said Ram. “By all means, stick around and see what happens.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll continue this voyage until I find a way to send a message to the versions of myself that cross the fold into the past and have to deal with their nineteenfold replication.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” asked the expendable.

  “Carve it into the metal of the ship somewhere that I’ll be sure to find it, but not until after I come through the fold.”

  “No matter where you decide to carve it,” said the expendable, “the fact that it wasn’t already there when you arrive to start carving it proves that you cannot do anything to change objects that are moving in the ordinary direction of time.”

  “I know,” said Ram. “That’s why you’re going to do it.”

  “That changes nothing.”

  “With your eyes closed,” said Ram. “So you can’t see in advance the proof that it didn’t work.”

  • • •

  Rigg and Shouter, clamped together at ankles and wrists, sat side by side on two stools in the pilot’s cabin as the boat made its way down the river. The current was carrying them, so there were no steady surges from the polemen. Instead, the boat would yaw to one side or the other as the polemen shoved them away from some obstacle—a bar, a bank, an island, another boat. Able to see nothing, Rigg and Shouter could make no preparation for these changes of direction, and so they sat constantly braced, trying to avoid lurching into each other or falling off the stools.

  For the first several hours, Shouter said nothing, which did not bother Rigg—he was practiced in holding his tongue and forcing the other to speak first. And judging from the raw hatred Rigg could see and feel in the rigidity of Shouter’s body and facial expression, the beat of his pulse, the heat coming from him despite his being soaking wet, when Shouter spoke it was not going to be nice.

  But it might be informative. General Citizen was practiced in self-control, revealing only what he chose, most of the time; Shouter, judging from his nickname, had no schooling in self-control—except, perhaps, in front of a superior officer; if he didn’t have that skill, he would never have become an officer. Still, Rigg might learn more about General Citizen, perhaps get an idea of which things Citizen had said were true. He might also stumble upon some information that would help him figure out a way to escape from custody, if he decided that’s what he wanted to do. And perhaps he could turn Shouter into an ally, or at least a tool.

  Food was brought to them and placed on a table in front of them—but too far away for them to reach it without either pulling the table toward themselves or their stools toward the table. Rigg reached forward with his left hand and pulled slightly on the table. Then he held his hand there, waiting for Shouter to do the same on the other side.

  He could see that it truly pained Shouter to have to cooperate with him, but in due time he must have seen the necessity of it, for he reached out his right hand and together, they drew the table toward themselves, so now the bowls of barley soup were within comfortable reach.

  Rigg reached with his left hand to take the spoon from the right side of the bowl. Shouter did the same with his right.

  “This is going to be clumsy,” said Rigg. “I’m right-handed. Using a spoon with my left hand on a boat that’s prone to yaw, I might spill.”

  Since Rigg could plainly see that Shouter was left-handed, he was deliberately giving Shouter an opening to say that he was at the same disadvantage. Instead, Shouter grimly set about bringing dribbling spoonfuls to his mouth, spilling a little onto the table and his lap.

  Rigg had spent considerable time with Father practicing to be as ambidextrous as possible—able to shoot a bow, clean and skin an animal, and write smoothly and legibly with either hand. He could have eaten without dribbling, but instead he matched Shouter spill for spill.

  “I don’t think it’s an accident they bound your left hand to my right,” said Rigg. “To make us both clumsier.”

  Shouter didn’t even look at him.

  As they both kept eating, Rigg spoke between bites. “For what it’s worth, my friends and I had no idea we were going to be arrested today, and whatever they did to put you in the water, I wasn’t part of it.”

  Shouter turned to gaze at him with furious eyes, but still refused to speak. That was all right—he had made contact and it was just a matter of time.

  “So you don’t hate me because you’re wet, you hate me because of who I’m supposed to be. Just so you know, I’m not claiming to be anybody but myself.”

  Shouter gave a single bark of a laugh.

  “The only parent I knew was my father, who raised me mostly in the forests. He died several months ago, and left—”

  “Spare me,” said Shouter. “How many times do you think that story is going to work?”

  “As often as the truth works.”

  “I’m here to kill you,” said Shouter.

  Rigg felt a thrill of fear run through his body. Shouter meant it. Well, that was certainly useful information.

  “All right then,” said Rigg. “I can’t stop you.”

  “You can’t even slow me down.”

  Rigg waited.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Not here,” said Shouter. “Not in t
his room. Then they’d have to have a trial and execute me, and it would become public. Stories would spread about how a soldier under General Citizen’s command murdered the rightful King-in-the-Tent. It would be as bad as leaving you alive.”

  “So the general has given you orders to—”

  “Fool,” said Shouter. “Do you think I need orders in order to see my duty and do it?”

  Rigg thought again of the hatred on the man’s face. “This isn’t about duty.”

  Shouter said nothing for a long while. Then: “Killing you is more than a duty. But the manner will be dutiful.”

  “Just for my own interest,” said Rigg, “are you killing me because you think I really am the Sessamekesh? Or because you think I’m an imposter?”

  “Just for your own interest,” said Shouter, “it doesn’t matter.”

  “But your hatred for me—does it spring from a love of the royal family or a loathing for them?”

  “If you’re truly royal or if you’re an imposter, your purposes can only be served by restoring the royal family to power.”

  “Your hatred of the royals is personal.”

  “My great-grandfather was a very rich and powerful trader. Someone accused him of putting on airs as if he were nobility—the crime was sumptuary presumption. Trying to pass as a lord. Wearing the clothes of a lord. Assuming the dignities of a lord.”

  “That was a crime?” asked Rigg.

  “Not a mere crime. Each charge was a count of treason. Under the monarchy, it was law that everyone must stay in his class. Merchants cannot become armiger, armigers cannot become noble, and nobles could not aspire to the monarchy. If my great-grandfather had been accused of dressing as a warrior, bearing arms, the penalty would have been a steep fine and house arrest for a year. But he was charged with dressing as a noble, which would have jumped him up two ranks. The penalty was the same as if he had attempted to murder the queen.”