Orson Card - Pathfinder

“And the lesson in equine behavior,” said Param.

Rigg chuckled at their ironic humor as Vadesh led them away from the Wall, toward a not-so-distant line of trees. But he noticed that Vadesh made no comment on their jests, and a thought occurred to him. “Vadesh,” he said, “your references to the world where humans came from, and teaching us a saying from twelve thousand years ago. Is there some reason why we might need to know about Earth?”

“Yes,” said Vadesh.

“And what is that reason?” asked Rigg.

Vadesh said nothing.

“Does your silence mean that you don’t know?” asked Rigg. “Or that you just don’t want to tell us?”

“I cannot predict the answer to your question with anything approaching accuracy or certainty. But you will need to know many things about Earth, and you will need to know them soon.”

“Why?” asked Rigg.

“Why what?”

“Why will we need to know many things about Earth, and why will we need to know them soon?”

“Because they are coming,” said Vadesh.

“Who is coming?” asked Param.

“People from Earth.”

“When?” demanded Loaf.

“I don’t know,” said Vadesh.

“What will they do when they get here?” asked Umbo.

“I don’t know,” said Vadesh.

“Well, what can they do?” asked Rigg.

Vadesh paused. “There are billions of correct answers to that question,” said Vadesh. “In the interests of time, I will prioritize them.”

“Good,” said Rigg. “What is the most important thing they can do?”

“They can blast this world into oblivion, killing every living thing upon it.”

“Why would they want to do that?” asked Olivenko. “What have we ever done to them ?”

“I was asked what they can do, not what they will do. And before you ask, I do not know what they will do. There are billions of answers to the first question, but there is no answer at all to the second. That is the future, and it’s a place where even the five of you can’t go, except slowly, a day at a time, like everyone else.”

“Here’s the water,” said Rigg. “It looks good. Let’s fill up the water bags, and drink.”

Neil F. Comins didn’t know he was helping me with this novel when he wrote What If the Earth Had Two Moons?: And Nine Other Thought-Provoking Speculations on the Solar System , but I thank him anyway. His book is the reason why the planet Garden has a ring instead of a moon, and why I had the nineteen ships strike the planet the way they do. He is not responsible, however, for the things I made up that are not possible within the limits of known science.

The games with time travel that I play in this book are in deliberate defiance of the consensus rules of science fictional time travel. I decided that I was not going to avoid paradox, I was going to embrace it, adopting a rule set in which it is causality that controls reality, regardless of where it occurs on the timeline. After all, if we can postulate folding space in order to jump from one location to another instantaneously, why not fold time? And if we can retrace a path through space, why not retrace it through time?

One of the difficulties in explaining the events in this novel is that no point-of-view character ever has the full picture, which means I had no choice but to hope that readers would make the connections themselves. For those who are still confused, here’s a brief explanation of what “really” happened: When Ram’s ship entered the fold in space, the nineteen computers on board generated nineteen separate calculations, which created nineteen separate sets of fields. These interacted with Ram’s own mind, and Ram’s own strange ability with time caused each of those fields to be separately effective. That is, the jump was made nineteen times, creating nineteen copies of the ship going forward and nineteen copies going backward.

The nineteen ships going backward tied themselves to the original one ship that made the voyage out to the point of the fold. Because they were going backward in time, they were unable to affect or be affected by the forward-moving universe in any way. In essence, they used the same space as each other without affecting each other.

The backward-moving Rams began their existence at the exact moment when the jump was made. On the other hand, the nineteen forward-moving Rams not only popped into existence in the space near the planet Garden in nineteen separate locations (so they did not explode by trying to occupy the same space at the same time), but also they did so 11,191 years before the jump was made.

To observers on Earth, the light-and-heat signature of Ram’s ship simply disappeared. This told them, not that the ship was successful in reaching its destination, but that the ship was successful in jumping out of its position in space. Because of lightspeed, it would have taken 31 years before observers could see the same light-and-heat signature pop into existence near Garden (if they were visible at all at such a distance), so the human observers could do nothing but keep rechecking their math and physics theories and hypotheses to decide whether they judged the jump to be successful.

In the next book, we will discover that they made new calculations that improved their theory; thus they learned to make ships that could handle the jump without duplicating the ship for each set of calculations. They worked out a theory that mathematically required a backward-moving ship to be created for each jump, but realized that its existence could be ignored since it could affect nothing.

They did not know of Ram’s abilities, however, and so had no notion that the ship(s) that made it through that first jump had popped up, not in the “present,” but 11,191 years earlier (31 lightyears from Earth times 19 squared). So they have no idea that humans have existed on Garden, not just the few years since Ram’s ship made its jump, but eleven thousand years. Indeed, they expect to find that the colony has not actually been established, since the expendables and ship’s computers should still be preparing to establish Earthborn life on Garden.

I am grateful to my first readers, who had their own time-travel problems. Most of my books I write very quickly, all in a rush, so there’s rarely more than a day or two between chapters. This time, because of the weirdness of the story and the need to keep inventing new characters and situations along the road, the writing of the book was spread out over six months, with weeks between chapters. This made it very difficult for them to maintain continuity, yet they did a splendid job. My wife, Kristine, is always the first reader of everything; she was joined in this endeavor by Erin and Phillip Absher, and by Kathryn H. Kidd.

My editor, Anica Rissi, gave this manuscript a close reading while it was still under construction; thanks to her, many contradictions and continuity errors that had eluded the notice of me and my first readers were caught and fixed almost at once. I am grateful for her comments and suggestions, all of which were valuable and led to substantial improvements in this complicated story. And I’m glad of Stephanie Evans’s excellent job of copy-editing, always difficult with a writer as quirky and self-willed, not to mention as easily distracted, as me.

This book is dedicated to my agent, Barbara Bova, who passed away before I finished writing it. She never read it, but the book would not exist without her impetus. My thanks to her husband, Ben Bova (the editor who first bought a science fiction story from me back in 1976), and her son, Ken Bova, who together have kept her agency (and her network of foreign-rights agents) functioning smoothly.