Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“No, there’s no point in your asking, and no, I have prepared nothing different to what I prepared for Loaf.”

“So you did prepare it for Loaf.”

“I prepared it for whoever chose to accept it,” said Vadesh.

“Loaf took it to save me.”

“He chose to be a hero. Who was I to refuse to allow him to play the role?”

“But you weren’t going to force it on me?” said Rigg. He found that hard to believe.

“I don’t force anyone to do anything,” said Vadesh. “I explain and let them decide for themselves.”

“You didn’t explain anything to Loaf,” said Rigg.

“He didn’t give me time.”

Rigg searched back in his memory. Did Loaf really cause the facemask to leap onto his body, or did Vadesh flip it up into place? Human memory was so unreliable. As soon as Rigg tried to imagine either scenario, each seemed equally real and equally false.

“Did you bring a flyer, or were you going to carry me to the starship?” asked Rigg.

“Do you want a flyer? You merely asked me to meet you.”

Rigg shook his head. “Bring the flyer and take me there. Or don’t, and I’ll walk. I enjoy solitude and I know my way around a forest.”

Of course the flyer was close by—expendables could move faster than humans, but not fast enough to get to the Wall without using a flyer, not in the amount of time Rigg had given Vadesh to comply with his orders.

“Why did you decide on my poor primitive facemask instead of those wonderful Companions of the Larfolders?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg did not answer.

“Are you going to leave me in suspense?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg wanted to retort, Why would a machine feel suspense? But instead he did not answer at all. Why should he pretend that the normal human courtesies applied in a conversation between a man and a machine? Especially when the man was the one who supposedly commanded all the ships and expendables.

Man! Rigg inwardly grimaced at his own vanity. How I strut. I’m not a man, I’m a boy, trying to do a man’s job.

Or commit a monstrous crime.

One or the other.

The flight was without incident. They landed, not at the city, where they would need to take the high-speed tram through the mountain, but at a structure inside the crater made by the ancient impact when the starship collided with Garden. Then there was an elevator ride down to the starship far below.

But they crossed the same bridge from the wall of the stone chamber to the outside door in the starship’s side. All the starships dwelt inside an identical wound in the stone of the world, because all those wounds had been shaped by the forcefield that protected the starship and its passengers from all the effects of collision and sudden changes in inertia.

Rigg followed Vadesh carefully, trying to be aware of any new hazards, trying to notice all kinds of things he had overlooked before.

But the main thing Rigg searched for was the path of Ram Odin.

It was surprisingly easy to find, now that he knew it might exist. It was the oldest path in the starship. It was also the newest. It led again and again from the control room to the stasis chambers and then to the revival room and then back to the control room

.

But in the past eleven thousand years, Ram Odin had not left the starship. Not since he crossed through the Wall from Ramfold.

Interesting. The Ram Odin that had been on the Vadeshfold copy of the starship had been killed by his expendable. And yet his path was here in the ship. A path markedly older than the already ancient passage of Ram Odin from Ramfold into Vadeshfold.

For a moment, Rigg wondered if that meant that the Ram Odin of this starship had not been killed; maybe all of them had lived, the way the Ram Odin of Odinfold had lived.