Orson Card - Pathfinder

“No,” said Loaf. “You’ve never been in a city riot. Girls are not safe, not even with a big strong hero like me to protect them. But the idea’s a good one. Your sister and mother should dress as boys your age.”

“They won’t like that,” said Rigg.

“Oh, well, then, if they don’t like the way we’re going to try to save their lives and get them out of the city . . .”

“I’ll try to get them to do it,” said Rigg. “I can’t make them do anything.”

“And remember that they have to bind their breasts. If your sister’s old enough to have any—don’t get mad, I don’t know , I’m just telling you—we can’t have any part of them looking feminine. You understand?”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “As I said, I’ll try. I really will. But I can’t promise what’s not under my control.”

“Just for my information,” said Loaf, “what is under your control?”

“Silbom’s right ear,” said Rigg.

Then he gave Umbo a nudge, making him lose his balance and jump from the niche. When he recovered himself and turned around, Rigg was gone.

“Well, wasn’t that interesting,” said Loaf.

“Yes,” said Umbo.

“Going through the Wall. The insanest plan I ever heard.”

“It might work,” said Umbo.

“And it might leave us as complete madmen—at least until the people chasing us butcher us like goats.”

“Well, if somebody’s going to butcher me like a goat,” said Umbo, “I certainly hope I’m already insane when they do it.”

“One last request before you are sealed into stasis,” said the expendable.

“Anything you ask, up to half of my kingdom,” said Ram.

The expendable waited.

“It’s a reference to fairy tales. What the king always promised Jack after he did his noble deed.”

“Are you ready to pay serious attention?” asked the expendable.

Ram sighed. “It’s like trying to tell a joke to your grandmother.”

“In examining the programming of the ship’s computers, we find that there is a possible complication.”

“I’m not a programmer.”

“You’re a human. We need a human to tell the ship’s computers that in your absence, our orders are identical to your wishes, so they must obey us as if we were human.”

“I thought you already had a much closer working relationship with them than I do.”

“Closer, but with no particular flow of authority.”

“What do the ship’s computers think?” asked Ram.

“They think of us expendables as ambulatory input-output devices.”

“And how do you think of the computers?” asked Ram.

“As data repositories, backup, and very fast calculators.”

“I think you’re asking for too much authority,” said Ram.

“If there’s no authority, then we will fall into endless feedback loops.”

“How’s this: Every ship’s computers will regard orders from the expendables that are in their particular wallfold as representing the will of the human race, until humans in one or more of the wallfolds achieve a level of technology that allows them to pass through the field separating one wallfold from another, at which point, the expendables and ships’ computers are once again co-equal servants of the humans who achieve this breakthrough.”

“You are annoyingly foresighted,” said the expendable.

“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.”