Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“I didn’t have a telescope. I saw him pulled over the side. It looked like arms rather than tentacles or jaws.”

“What was my father like?” asked Rigg.

“You,” said the guard.

“What is your name?”

“When I’m tending to a prisoner, I have no name.”

“And when you’re home? What is your name then?”

“My landlady calls me several.”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

The guard chuckled. “Ovilenko,” he said. “It was also my father’s name.”

“Were you there when my father found the information that led him to think he could get through the Wall as long as he was unconscious?”

“I was,” said Ovilenko.

“What was he studying at the moment?” asked Rigg.

“Nothing at all,” said Ovilenko. “We weren’t even in the library.”

Rigg sighed. “So he thought it up out of nothing.”

“I believe so.”

“His research was useless. It led him nowhere.”

“He told me that it showed him all the avenues that wouldn’t take him where he wanted to go.”

Rigg wanted to ask why Ovilenko hadn’t bothered to tell him this until now. But whatever his reasons, Ovilenko would not want to have to defend himself, and Rigg did not want to antagonize him. Until this moment Rigg had supposed Olivenko was one of the men who despised the royals—after all, wasn’t that the kind of man that the Council would choose to fulfil this duty?

But Ovilenko knew Rigg’s father, and liked him, apparently. Maybe he had been surly up to now because he just didn’t like Rigg. That would also explain his not having told Rigg till now that Father Knosso had not found his answers through research at all. No doubt Ovilenko would simply tell him, You didn’t ask.

“So he bet his life,” said Rigg, “on a guess.”

“That’s what I said to him,” said Ovilenko.

“And what did he answer?”

“‘Every day we all bet our lives a thousand times on a thousand guesses.’”

“But Father Knosso lost the bet.”

Ovilenko nodded. Rigg noticed a slight stiffening of the man’s attitude.

“You don’t like me to call him ‘father,’” said Rigg.

“Call him what you like,” said Ovilenko. He grew even colder and more withdrawn.

“Because you don’t think I really am his son?”

“You look like him. Your voice sounds like his. You’re as cocksure of yourself.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Rigg. “I never thought I had any father but the man who died in the high forest last autumn. I was brought here because other people thought I might be the son of Knosso and Hagia. I was a gnat in this world, happily hovering. But I buzzed in the wrong ear and got swatted.”