Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“Why do you think?”

“Because when the cliffs formed”—Rigg was not going to give up on his idea—“they knew that something else was going to happen 11,191 years later?”

“Well, we reached Year Zero when you were three. Did anything happen?”

“Lots of things happened,” said Rigg. “A whole year’s worth of things.”

“But anything worth remembering? Anything worth building your whole calendar around?”

“That doesn’t prove anything, Father, except that the people who invented the calendar were wrong about how long it would take to get to the thing they thought would happen in Year Zero. People are wrong all the time. It doesn’t prove that the calendar didn’t begin with the formation of Upsheer.”

“Good thinking,” said Father, “but, of course, wrong. And why are you wrong?”

“Because I don’t have enough information,” said Rigg. It was always because he didn’t have enough information.

“There’s never enough information,” said Father. “That’s the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.”

Yet there had been something in Father’s tone that Rigg didn’t trust. Or maybe he simply didn’t trust Father’s answer, and imagi

ned he heard it in his tone.

“I think you know something,” said Rigg.

“I should hope so, as old as I am!”

“I think you know what was supposed to happen in Year Zero.”

“Calamity! Plague! The end of the world!”

“No,” said Rigg. “I mean the thing the calendar-makers were thinking of when they started in eleven-one-ninety-one.”

“And how would I know that?”

“I think you know what it was,” said Rigg, “and I think it actually happened, right on schedule.”

“And it was so big and important that nobody noticed it except me,” said Father.

“I think it was something scientific. Something astronomical. Something that scientists back then knew would happen, like planets lining up or some star in the sky blowing up or two stars crashing or something like that, only people who don’t know astronomy would never notice it.”

“Rigg,” said Father, “you’re so smart and so dumb at the same time that it almost takes my breath away.”

And that had been the end of that. Rigg knew Father knew something, and he also knew Father had no intention of telling him.

Maybe Nox would know what happened in Year Zero. Maybe Father told her all his secrets.

But to get to Nox, Rigg had to get down Upsheer to the village of Fall Ford. And to get down Upsheer, he had to reach Cliff Road, which was on the other side of the falls, and so he had to cross over the very place where the water ran fastest, the current strongest, and where he knew the boulders were being undermined and eaten away and it was quite possible that his step on one of the rocks would be the tipping point, and it would tumble over the falls and carry him down to his death.

And his consolation, all the way down, until the water or the rocks or just the force of landing pulverized him, would be that at least there’d be a big flood of water gushing out of the lake, so he wouldn’t die alone, the whole village of Fall Ford would be swept away in moments.

He remembered that this had been one of Father’s test questions. “Why would people build a village in a place where they know eventually there’ll be a terrible flood with no hope of survival and no warning in time to get away?”

“Because people forget,” Rigg answered Father.

“That’s right, Rigg. People forget. But you and I, Rigg—we don’t forget, do we?”

But Rigg knew that it wasn’t true. He couldn’t remember a lot of things.

He remembered the route across the rocks. But he didn’t trust that memory. He always checked it again when he got to the starting place, just above the surface of the lake.