Orson Card - Pathfinder

But then the switchbacks got narrower, the ramping road gave way to a high-stepped path, and paving stones gave way to carved and weathered rock, with makeshift repairs or detours where some ancient calamity had torn away the original path. Still, it was just possible for someone to carry a burden in both hands up the road, and for a boy like Umbo, bounding down, energized with grief and rage, it would take very little time to reach the bottom.

If Rigg still had his huge bundle of pelts and skins, that would be a problem. Umbo would have plenty of time to get to the village and back again, no doubt with men who would believe his story and who, in their rage, might not listen to Rigg’s version of events.

As it was, if Rigg hurried, he would be at the bottom of Cliff Road and away before Umbo could get back. And unless he or someone else in the village had an ability like Rigg’s, there would be no tracking him. An expert tracker was hard to track, Father had told him, since he knew what signs a fugitive shouldn’t make in the first place.

Father! Rigg felt another pang of grief, as fresh as the first, and tears came into his eyes. How can I live without you? Why couldn’t you hear the groaning of the wood and get out of the way before the tree fell on you? Always so quick, always so perceptive—it’s almost unbelievable that you could ever be so careless.

And I still need you. Who will explain to me what caused time to slow, caused all those people from the past to appear, caused that man to block my way so the boy died?

Tear-filled eyes don’t find a good path. So Rigg stemmed his grief, cleared his eyes, and continued through the woods, looking for the back way to get to Nox’s rooming house.

What training could they have given Ram Odin that would help him when the seven years of tedium ended and it was time for his decision?

The ship’s computer already knew the entire procedure for the fold. The process was far too complicated for a mere pilot to be able to take part in it. Ram’s job was to read and hear the reports of the computers, and then decide whether to go ahead.

But the decision was not an easy or an empty one. As the ship began its strangely twisted acceleration into the fold, data would be generated on a vast scale. The computers would begin their reduplicated analyses and fuzzy predictions of what was happening, what might happen, what would happen during the fold itself.

At any point, Ram could abort the procedure, based on what the computers told him. The computers would generate odds and likelihoods, but Ram was quite aware that the odds were all fiction. It was possible that none of the predictions would resemble the outcome.

And no matter how many times the computers repeated any one prediction, that did not make it the most likely outcome. It might mean nothing more than this: The computers and the software all contained the identical set of false assumptions or built-in flaws that made all prediction worthless.

Ram was an expert pilot, a deep-thinking astronomer and mathematician, his creative faculties well-practiced. Everything that training could do had been done. But it still came down to this: Who was Ram Odin? Would he bet his life and the lives of all the colonists on the unknown leap into a fold in spacetime?

Or would he, in the moment, decide that it was better to use known technology, generate the scoopfield, start harvesting interstellar hydrogen, and drive forward through ninety lightyears of ordinary spacetime?

Ram knew, or thought he knew, what his decision would be. He had said so, many times, during the testing and screening of potential pilots for the mission: Unless there is information from the computers that makes the jump seem recklessly dangerous, I will proceed. Even failure will be enormously valuable—you will see what happens to the ship, you will harvest the monitors that will be trailing behind us, you will know.

But now, seeing the reports, talking to the expendable that sat in the copilot position beside him, Ram realized that there was no such thing as “enough” information, and no way to set aside fear. Oh, his own fear he had mastered. What caused him problems was the vicarious fear for all the people sleeping in their berths; the fear that they would jump into the fold but never come out, or come out in a strange place that was much too far from any planet to make colonization possible.

How did I become the one to make this decision for everyone?

In settled country, even the wildest wood is wound about with paths. Children playing, couples trysting, vagabonds seeking a place to sleep undisturbed. Not to mention the countless practical needs for going into the forest. Mushrooms, snails, nuts, berries—all will bring people across the fields and into the trees.

Running steadily, lungweary, Rigg could still see the most recent paths. He knew which woods should be empty of people, and those were the paths he chose. Several times he had to abandon wild country and strike out across fields or through orchards, but always he knew from the paths which houses were empty, which roads safe to cross.

He came at last to the back approaches to Nox’s rooming house. She kept a large vegetable garden with rows of pole beans, where Rigg crouched to scan the house.

A crowd had already gathered in front of the house. They weren’t a mob—not yet—but Rigg heard their shouted demand that Nox let them search for “that child-murderer.” Because Rigg had taken a roundabout way, Umbo’s version of events had had plenty of time to spread through the village. And it was well known that here was where Father and Rigg always stayed.

Of course Nox let them in. Since Rigg really wasn’t inside, what reason would she have for refusing them, which would invite them to burn the place down?

Rigg couldn’t see the men who searched the house—they were behind walls—yet somehow, in a way that blended into vision but wasn’t actual sight, he could still track the men’s paths through the house. All he could sense was the pace at which new paths appeared, and their position relative to each other and the outside wall of the house.

Yet this was enough for him to know that they were almost frantic in their search. They seemed to run up and down the stairs, and walk all around each room. There was bending, crawling, stretching upward. For all he knew they were slashing open the beds and dumping out trunks.

But of course they found nothing, since their quarry was outside in the bean patch.

And if they widened their search and found him here, they would assume Nox knew he was there. It might go very badly for her.

So as the paths converged again on the front porch, Rigg scampered for the back door and slipped inside the pantry. He dared not go upstairs or to any public room, because the regular residents were there.

From the pantry, Rigg could sense the movement of members of the crowd. They set two men to watch in front and two in back. Several men did indeed search through the garden.

I shouldn’t have come here, thought Rigg. Or I should go back out into the wild and wait for a year and then come back. Maybe I’ll be able to grow some kind of beard by then. Maybe I’ll be taller. Maybe I’ll never come back at all—and never know who my mother is, or find my sister . . .

Why couldn’t Father have simply told him instead of making him come here? But a dying man has the privilege of deciding his own last words, and when to stop talking.

Rigg tried to imagine what it would be like for Nox, when at last she came to the pantry. If he was standing up and looking at her, she was likely to scream; that would draw attention, certainly of the residents, and perhaps of the guards outside. He needed to be sure she remained silent, which meant she should feel neither shocked nor threatened.