Ovilenko made no response at all.
“So why don’t you like me calling Knosso ‘father’?”
“What else would you call him?”
“I saw how you turned cold when I mentioned him.”
“Did I? Then I failed.”
Rigg decided to try to pierce this barrier with irony. “What is the military punishment for such a breach of discipline? To flail at you with the flat of a sword? Imagine—a soldier showing any kind of human reaction.”
“It wasn’t the soldier Ovilenko who disa
ppointed me,” said Ovilenko. “It was the caster of clays.”
Clays was a gambling game involving beads that were either hollow, holed, or solid. The nine clays had to be drawn randomly from a bag and rolled down a wooden chute, in full view as they rolled. The player could lift any three, but no more, to find out their weight. The gaps in the holed clays might or might not have been visible as they rolled. The discipline of the clay-caster was to show no change of expression as he lifted the clays. To visibly stiffen one’s face was one of the worst expressions to show.
“So what are the stakes?” asked Rigg. “I’ve won—but there was no bet on the table.”
“You’ve won nothing, young citizen,” said Ovilenko.
“Knowledge, I think,” said Rigg, though in fact if he knew something, he didn’t know what it was.
“You learned nothing except that I should not gamble.”
“I think I know something,” said Rigg, and now he realized that perhaps he did. “You hardened your face when I called my father by his name. I thought you were concealing anger, but I was wrong. It was grief, because you called him ‘Father Knosso,’ too. Am I right?”
Ovilenko looked away. “The game is yours, I concede it.”
“I’m surprised they’d let a soldier guard me, who knew my father and liked him.”
“It’s not well known that I knew your father. I wasn’t a soldier then. I told you I accompanied him to the library, but it was not as a guard, it was as a very junior apprentice. I would bring him drinks of water. I would carry stacks of books. I would listen to him talking aloud. I would take dictation and he would spell the hard words for me. It was my education.”
“Then you must have been educated above the work of guard duty for a boy.”
“It doesn’t make a soldier worse to have an education.”
“It makes it harder for him to take orders from idiots,” said Rigg.
“Well, that’s true,” said Ovilenko. “Which is why I’m a man of no rank.”
Rigg was about to ask him to sit with him at a table and tell him all about his father, but at that moment Bleht arrived, and Rigg had no choice but to return to his original mission.
The microbiologist looked suspicious and annoyed. Whatever she had been doing when summoned, she was not glad of the interruption. Rigg apologized briefly but then got straight to his point.
“I believe that my father Knosso did not discover a great secret of physics before he made his attempt to float through the Wall out at sea.”
“Unless you think it was a great secret of microbiology, I fail to see what I can contribute to your speculations.”
“I think my father started pursuing a completely different line of research.”
“A microbial one?”
“Historical,” said Rigg. “More particularly calendrical. I think he read your paper on the duality of the flora and fauna of the wallfold. Two separate origins of life in the wallfold. I think he wrote to you or sent word to you, and you went to the Library of Past Lives several times to meet with him.” Actually, Rigg knew it to be a fact, having seen the intersection of their paths, but until now he had thought it meant something completely different.
Bleht sat down and patted the seat beside her. “Now I recognize your friend here,” she said, then turned to Ovilenko, looking grimly amused. “You were his clerk, weren’t you. A lot shorter then.”
“Young citizen Rigg had already asked to talk with you before I told him about that,” said Ovilenko stiffly.