Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (51 page)

“So you keep the facemasks in stasis,” said Rigg. “Like the voyagers in flight.”

“Someone’s been researching the starship,” said Vadesh.

“Yes, Umbo. And then he talked about what he learned.”

“Stasis and revival work almost identically for humans and facemasks, which is not a surprise, since these facemasks have been genetically designed for compatibility with humans.”

“Please get my facemask,” said Rigg. “Now.”

Vadesh left the room at once, and returned within the minute. “This one is as healthy as any other.”

“Then let’s . . .”

Rigg didn’t get to say “do it,” because the facemask flew out of the basin containing it. Did Vadesh fling it, or did the facemask somehow propel itself? Or had Rigg, without realizing it, bowed his head over the basin to look inside? He had only a split second to contemplate this question, and then there was agony and panic as his face was covered, his breath choked off, and tendrils inserted themselves with brutal irresistibility into his nostrils, his mouth, his ears and, most painful and frightening of all, his eyes.

This is irrevocable, he thought. My eyes are gone.

Then the tendrils reached through otic and optic nerves into his brain and the struggle began.

It was not like a tug of war. Not like a wrestling match. It was more like being lost in a maze. He could sense that his body was feeling things. Doing things. Yet he could not find his body, could not find the way to control his body.

It was as if the maze were constantly being changed so that
nothing was in the same place twice, and barriers popped up where there had been no barriers before.

Pains came and went. His body needed to urinate. Then it did. It got up and walked, but not at Rigg’s command. It acted for its own reasons.

No, not its own reasons. The facemask’s reasons.

A rush of rejection swept over him; the feeling of hostility Rigg had seen in the faces of the people of Fall Ford when they gathered outside Nox’s house, intending to kill him in punishment for the death of Umbo’s little brother, whom Rigg had tried so hard to save. It was as if the facemask knew such a memory was there, and now used it to overwhelm Rigg with feelings and memories from his own past.

Rigg decided that this sudden emotional rush came because the facemask recognized that Rigg had somehow attempted to assert control over his own body. When it got up and moved at the facemask’s command, there had been no resistance from Rigg. But Rigg’s
thought
that his body was moving at the facemask’s command must have felt, to the facemask, like resistance.

My thoughts are my weapons in this war. What did Loaf say? Something about its being pointless to try to give orders to his own body, at first anyway. So the resistance is in my thoughts. In making my brain hold the thoughts I put there, and not letting them be swept away in the feelings and desires the facemask forces on me.

Easy enough to think this thought; hard to hold on to it when every desire of his body cried out for his attention.

It was like the Wall. Only instead of anguish and despair,
what threatened to overwhelm him was thirst and hunger and lust, the urges of elimination, the inchoate yearnings of an adolescent boy.

In the end of this silent war, it turned out that the vulnerability of the facemask came from the sheer sameness of its weaponry. Once Rigg was swept by all the desires of his body, over and over, he began simply to get used to them, and through it all his mind remained his own, and it held the thoughts he reached for.

He opened his eyes.

He knew that what was opening were not his eyes at all, but the new eyes created by the facemask. But it was his nerves that controlled them, his brain that received and interpreted the signals from those eyes.

Whatever the facemask was, it was now part of himself.

Did that mean the facemask had failed?

No, it meant that the facemask was broken to his will, like a horse to its rider; it was still itself, and its needs would still be met. It would be alive. It would reproduce and continue, which was the goal of every kind of life. The native fauna of Garden was alive in this facemask, and had become a part of Rigg. It was Rigg’s servant, yes, but Rigg would now see the world through its eyes, and its needs and desires would form a part of his decision-making. It would not die until he died; he would never remove it; it had found a home embedded in his flesh.

But I am still Rigg Sessamekesh.

No. Not Sessamekesh. Simply Rigg. Rigg the pathfinder. Rigg the man of Garden. Rigg the keeper of the ships’ logs.

His eyes were open. He saw the entire room at once. He
wondered how long he had been trapped in the struggle for control and without even trying to calculate, he knew: seventy hours and thirty-two minutes. In that time he had drunk water that Vadesh had brought, but it had been the facemask that made his body drink. Now he looked at Vadesh, who stood nearby, and said, “I’ll have more water now.”

“I’d suggest cleaning yourself as well,” said Vadesh.

“All in due time,” said Rigg.

“Welcome back.”

“Thank you.”

But already Rigg was testing something else: He was finding out what the facemask had done with the paths.

Immediately his mind was flooded with information. He almost lost himself in it, for the onslaught was as great as anything the facemask had thrown at him before.

He saw every nearby path, but not as a path. He saw each path as a person. He knew their faces, he knew where they had come from. Without conscious effort, he knew the whole path of each life, from beginning to end.

There is no way my mind can hold so much information about each of these people. Yet when he looked for it, there it was.

There was Ram Odin, again and again, path after path. Going into stasis, coming out. Into stasis, out again. Sitting in the control room making decisions, giving orders. As he was doing now.

And there was Ram Odin, eleven thousand, two hundred two years ago—how clear the time was now, without thought or calculation or uncertainty.

And Rigg knew another number: His age. With all his skipping around in time, he should have been confused, for he had repeated several stretches of time because of going back, to live them over again. This was the year in which Rigg had turned fourteen, but he had lived through nearly a year in Odinfold before going back again, so he was sixteen now, regardless of what the calendar year might be.

But there were other tests he needed to perform. For instance, while Rigg could connect to any path in the past and go to it, he could not rebound into the future without Umbo anchoring him there.

Did he still have that limitation?

It was simple enough to test it. He slid a half-meter to the right, and then jumped a minute back in time.

Then he shifted forward. It was a sensation he had felt many times, when Umbo pulled him back, but now he could make it happen as an act of will.

When he went back in time, he could see himself sitting beside him; when he jumped forward again, that self was gone, because he returned to the exact moment when he had jumped back in time. He could go back, then rebound himself.

Another test yet to perform. Could he move forward the way Param did, slicing time and skipping over bits of it? He had felt that sensation, too, when he held her hand and she sliced her way into the future at a speed much faster than the natural world.

Now, because he had the facemask’s enhancements to his brain, his body, he could slice his way forward. Slowly at first, the time differential very slight. But then more rapidly.

Vadesh came into the room, holding a carafe of water. He did not see Rigg.

Rigg waited until Vadesh went outside to see where he had gone, before he stopped slicing time. He did not want Vadesh to know that he could duplicate Param’s ability. Let him think that Rigg had shifted backward and then returned, and that’s why he was gone. Let Vadesh think that Rigg had only an enhanced version of abilities that he had possessed already.

Rigg went to the door and found Vadesh walking in the corridor. “There you are,” Rigg said. “I’m so thirsty.”

Vadesh hurried with the carafe. He said nothing about Rigg’s absence. And if Rigg had really been gone into the past, and then returned, he wouldn’t know that Vadesh had come into the room in his absence. So he simply drank the offered water.

There was one more ability to look for, and this was one that he had never directly experienced: The ability of the Odinfolder mice to move an object in both space and time. He had no idea how it would feel to do it. He had never even seen it done, though he had seen its effects—the metal cylinder in Param’s exploded throat; the knife that he took from the sheath at the waist of a passerby.

Rigg did not make the conscious decision to use Vadesh as the object he would attempt to transport. He simply felt the will to move something and Vadesh was near at hand, Vadesh was the thing that Rigg was looking at, and so Vadesh moved. Only a finger’s width, but he moved without passing through the intervening space. One moment he was a meter and fourteen centimeters away, and in the very same moment he shifted
to a meter and fifteen centimeters away, plus a quarter of a centimeter to the right.

It had been so smooth that Vadesh didn’t even change his stride, and if he noticed the difference in his location he gave no sign of it.

He must have thought through what giving a facemask to me
might
mean, and so he’s looking for signs of what I can do now, and how I’ve changed.

“Well, Vadesh,” said Rigg, “don’t you think it’s time I met Ram Odin?”

Vadesh turned to him. “Of course,” he said. “I assume you already know the way?”

“I’ve seen him walk the route a hundred times,” said Rigg.

“Should I come with you?”

If I say no, will Ram Odin suspect something of my intention? “Whatever Ram Odin tells you to do,” said Rigg, “is what you’ll do, and nothing I say can change it.”

“He leaves it up to you, as the keeper of the logs,” said Vadesh.

“Then come with me,” said Rigg, “and let’s meet the master of this ship, and of all the ships.”

Rigg led the way, reveling in the total awareness that the facemask delivered to him. He could sense all the paths he was passing through, experiencing them as people; yet their presence didn’t interfere at all with his ordinary light-based vision, which now had extraordinary clarity. He could see each fleck of dust in the air, the whole surface of the walls and floor and ceiling, and yet none of them distracted him from his purpose. It was as if he was now joined with an autistic mind, hyper-aware of detail, and
a normal human mind with its ability to focus on one thing and let all other things fade to unnoticeability. He was aware of all things and focused on one thing at the same time.

And why not? He was two minds at once, an alien beast and a human, both functioning at peak effectiveness.

Ram Odin was an old man. Rigg saw every crease in the skin of his face, every wattle of his neck, the sparseness of hair, the droop of eyelids. There was a pallor to him. He was a man who needed to be outdoors, and had not been.

“I have a proposition for you,” said Ram Odin. “Now that you’ve joined with the most interesting native creature of this world.”

“I was just about to say the same thing to you,” said Rigg. “After greeting you as the founder of our world.”

“All the colonists were founders,” said Ram.

Rigg walked around the control consoles; Ram swiveled in his floating seat to stay facing him.

“But you were the one,” said Rigg. “The one who shaped the world while they were all asleep.”

“Come here and stand with me,” said Ram. “I want you to see my view of things, from this console. I want you to see the world through the orbiters’ eyes. If they can be said to have eyes.”

Rigg could sense tension in the man. Old and weary as he was, he was on edge right now.

He is afraid of me, thought Rigg. He made me, and yet he’s afraid of what I’ll do.

Rigg did as Ram requested, and came between two console stations to stand beside Ram Odin’s chair.

“Here,” said Ram, pointing at a three-dimensional display, a
view from space of the ring of cliffs, the forests, the crater that marked where the starship had entered the crust of the planet in this wallfold. “I think of you as something like a son—you don’t mind if I think of you that way, do you? I’ve longed to show this view to a son of mine. Look how we can zoom in closer to see.”

As he spoke, he made the image larger, as if they were plunging downward in a flyer.

Rigg knew that this move was designed to draw his full attention to the display, and it worked. He was, as a human, fully engaged in the bright moving object that attracted him.

But as a facemask, he was also completely aware of the knife in Ram Odin’s hand, the hand that was darting forward to plunge it into Rigg’s kidney.

Rigg, by himself, could never have dodged the blow.

But Rigg-with-a-facemask easily slid to one side, whirled, caught the hand, and twisted it, forcing the knife free.

The knife dropped, but Rigg, quicker than thought, had his hand under it. He had planned to use the jeweled knife that he and Umbo had obtained on that first deliberate trip into the past. But since Ram Odin had so thoughtfully provided a different weapon, it would be ungrateful of Rigg to refuse it.

In the very moment he caught Ram Odin’s knife, Rigg shifted half an hour back in time, to a moment when Ram was focused on the display in a different console, one that put his back to Rigg. That was precisely why Rigg had chosen that moment in Ram Odin’s path.

Ram Odin had not equipped himself with a facemask. He was not aware of Rigg’s silent appearance directly behind him.

You have not yet tried to kill me, Ram Odin, but you will, and so I kill you first.

He flashed his hand forward. Because of the speed and accuracy of the thrust—for the facemask had not yet had the time to build up Rigg’s physical strength enough to make a difference—the knife easily passed between the ribs of Ram Odin’s back and pierced his heart. A little flicking motion and both ventricles of Ram Odin’s heart were split open. The blood of his arteries ceased to pulse. He slumped over and, without time even to utter a sound, he died.