Orson Card - Pathfinder

Param was almost instantly awake. “Is someone coming?”

“No,” said Rigg. “We’re perfectly safe here. But Umbo is—I told you what we could do, didn’t I? How he can let me go back in time to the paths, to the people—”

“Slow down,” said Param.

“He just did it, from the Council House.”

“He’s there ?”

“That’s where General Citizen is holding them. It doesn’t matter, we’re not going there at all. I’m going to intercept them—go to a place where they were before they were arrested, and warn them. Set up a different rendezvous for tonight.”

“But you can’t get them out of the Council House, it’s such a public—”

“No, Param,” said Rigg. “They’ll never get to the Council House.”

“But they’re there,” she said.

“But they won’t be. They never will have been.”

“But you saw them there!” said Param.

“I saw their path,” said Rigg, “and you didn’t see them at all, so it’s not as if we’ll have some horribly false memory. Trust me. I have no idea why it works this way, but it does.”

“So we’ll go and warn them,” said Param, “and so they aren’t arrested. But who’s going to warn us and tell us where the new rendezvous is?”

“We won’t have to, we’ll . . .” But then, as he thought about it, Rigg realized that she might be right. If he stopped Umbo and Loaf from going to the meeting place in the park, then as he and Param fled down the tunnel, he wouldn’t see the soldiers arrest them, and so he wouldn’t know why they weren’t there. No, he’d probably figure it out, but then how would he know where to meet them?

He had to choose a secondary rendezvous that he would think of on his own, a place where he would guess that they might decide to meet with him if for some reason—he wouldn’t know the reason—they failed to keep the rendezvous.

He had simply assumed, until Param spoke up, that after he warned them, he would continue to the new rendezvous and meet them, with a full memory of all that had happened. But Umbo and Loaf had told him about their arguments about this very point—the future person who went back into the past and warned an earlier person not to do something was simply gone, and all that was left of him was the memory of his words. The warners disappeared as the warned ones followed a new path.

At least that’s how it worked when someone went back into the past to warn himself . Maybe when he did what Rigg was doing, and warned someone else, he—the warner—wouldn’t change at all. Maybe he’d continue to the new rendezvous.

Or maybe not.

“It’s making you insane, isn’t it?” said Param.

“I’m a complete fungus-head,” said Rigg.

“Just do what you have to do, and then we’ll know how it works,” she said.

They came out of the secret tunnel through a hidden doorway in the outside wall of a bank. In fact, the final landing had three entrances—one inside the bank building, one inside the vault, and the last one on the street. But Rigg wasn’t interested in stealing money or conducting any bank business. The street entrance was in an alcove, and no one saw them come out.

The light was dazzling, even though there was smoke in the sky.

The smoke stung Rigg’s eyes, and he could see that Param’s were also watering.

“The city is burning,” said Param. “It happens now and then, but the fire brigades get ahead of it and tear down buildings and soak the ruins with water pumped from the Stashik. Everybody knows this, and it’s one of the main things that prevents people from rioting and burning things. And putting out fires is the surest way to stop the riot. Anyone who interferes with the fire brigade will be torn apart by the mob. It’s their homes at stake. Wherever the fire brigades go, the riot is over.”

It made sense—but it brought Rigg a new problem to worry about. What if he sent Umbo and Loaf to a new rendezvous, but it was in a part of town that burned down? It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t burning now . In the changed future, it might be burning.

If it is, we’ll improvise. First I have to find their path.

Fortunately, they had apparently tried to do something at this bank, because their paths were all around here. He easily found where they went back to their lodgings, and from there, without even leaving the alcove, he found their most recent path, the one leading to the aborted rendezvous. That was the path he had to interrupt.

“Come on,” he said to Param.

He could see that she was still tired—her hour of sleep had done little to refresh the weariness in her legs from all the walking, and now he was demanding that she do more.

The riots, fortunately, were happening elsewhere. They could hear shouting mobs, sometimes no more than a street away, but they never saw them, and most people were moving as furtively and quickly as Rigg and Param. Nobody wanted to get caught up in violence—the soldiers, when they attacked a mob, wouldn’t be very particular about making sure that only actual rioters got stabbed or clubbed or sliced to ribbons.

In fifteen minutes, they were at the path—at least six blocks before the park. Rigg could see that at the time they passed by here, they were keeping to the edges of the street. Already, then, the rioting had started, or perhaps just people fleeing because they knew that rioting was going to start. They stayed near the edge, and now Rigg found a hiding place behind a tipped-over cart. He didn’t have to actually see the path—he’d know when Umbo’s influence came over him, and then he could step out to where the path was visible to his eyes as well as his inward senses.

Param sank gratefully to the ground. “I’ll wait here while you do it,” she said.

“We’ll both wait,” said Rigg. “Because I don’t know when Umbo will try to reach me and speed me up again.”

“Wake me when it’s done,” she said. And, once again, she was asleep in moments.

It worried Rigg, how exhausted she got from what was really not that very much walking. What if Citizen’s spies—the few people in this city who knew what Param and Rigg looked like—spotted them, and they had to run? Param used to have recourse to becoming invisible, but now that Mother had told them how slowly she moved, and how to damage her while she could not be seen, invisibility was not going to save her.

If only I could hide her, the way she hid in the secret passages of the house, never having to be invisible, to go into that impossible sectioning of time that made the world race by her while she crept along.

It was getting toward noon. Rigg was beginning to get sleepy himself—this was the time he had trained himself to sleep for three hours in the afternoon, to earn the ability to wake up only five hours after going to bed and have much of the night to work with. But in his years in the forest with Father, he had learned to fight off sleep, when that was necessary, and he did so now.

But not very well, because he twice caught himself waking up. Impossible, because he certainly had not slept. Only he must have. Was it for a second or a minute or an hour? Had Umbo tried again to let him shift in time, and failed because Rigg was asleep?

No. The shadows were exactly as long as they had been before Rigg dozed. Only a moment, then.

He stood. Then sat back down immediately. A few blocks up the street, the vanguard of a mob was scurrying across the intersection—the solo scouts, the people in the mob who appointed themselves to see what was ahead, so the rest could be warned if soldiers were coming.

Please don’t come down this way.

They didn’t—but it was a large mob, and it seemed like it was taking forever for them to get across the street.