Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

One idea in particular now came unbidden into his mind—no doubt embedded there by Father so it would surface at exactly this moment. Father had talked about the “tidal limit” and how, if the millions of rocks and chunks of ice making up the Ring had formed only a few thousand miles farther away, they would have coalesced to form a spherical moon. “A large enough moon would create tides in all the oceans of the world,” he had said. “Life would develop on such a world much faster than on ours, because on a moon-tide world the sea would sweep much farther across low-sloping shores. It’s in soils and pools of water where land and sea and air meet that life begins, and a world with a moon has far, far more of them.”

Had Father been telling him that it was his theory that human beings came from such a world? That life had advanced much faster on the original human world?

“That’s an astronomical and historical question,” Bleht said.

It took Rigg a moment to realize she was not reading his mind and answering his thoughts. Instead she was answering his statement about “maybe another solar system.”

“Don’t you see what this would mean to Father Knosso?” asked Rigg. “He was searching for a way over or through the Wall. He couldn’t find anything in physics or history, but he had found, through the timeline, through your work, the idea that maybe our calendar begins with the arrival of human beings, and all the life they brought with them, as strangers to this world.”

“So what?” asked Bleht.

“Were the Walls here when they arrived? How could any kind of life system evolve on a world where any creature with a higher brain function cannot pass from wallfold to wallfold? Neither the original strain of life nor the one our ancestors brought with them from their world-with-a-moon could have developed on a planet with Walls.”

Bleht thougt about this for a while. So did Olivenko.

It was Olivenko who spoke. “I remember he said, ‘We did it.’ There, looking at the timeline, he said ‘we did it’ and I thought he meant that we—he and I—had just done something. But h

e might have meant that we, the human race, did ‘it’—the making of the Wall.”

“I can see why neither of you will ever be a real scholar,” said Bleht. “You both leap to conclusions.”

“Good scientists always leap to conclusions,” said Rigg. “What makes them scientists is that they doubt those conclusions and try to disprove them. Only when they fail to disprove them do they start to believe them.”

Olivenko nodded. Bleht snorted again. “You sound like you’re quoting someone.”

“I am,” said Rigg. “My father—the one who raised me.”

“Well, while you’re leaping to conclusions, young non-prince,” said Bleht, “explain this: Even if humans could possibly create something like the invisible, impenetrable Walls that surround our wallfold, why would they do it?”

“That,” said Rigg with a smile, “is a historical question.”

A ghost of a smile passed across Bleht’s face, as if to say, Well answered, boy.

“Whatever killed Father Knosso,” said Ovilenko, “was not human.”

“So maybe the Walls divide the world among species?” asked Rigg. “Maybe the home world had also been divided?”

“Maybe the Walls exist to keep a state of war from existing between us and the sea people who killed Father Knosso,” said Ovilenko.

“What a lovely game of guesses you two lads are playing. But it’s not a spectator sport.” Bleht rose to her feet.

Rigg spoke at once, trying to hold her. “Father said that our name for the world is one of the oldest, and every language in the wallfold has a form of it.”

Bleht waited to hear the rest.

“He didn’t tell me what the original language was, but he said the word and then told me it meant ‘Garden.’ I’ve thought of it as Garden ever since.”

“And the significance of this supposed original meaning of the name?”

“Our world—this world—this world with a ring instead of a moon—”

“What’s a moon?” asked Olivenko.

“An invention of astronomers who look into their telescopes and hallucinate,” said Bleht.

“Our world,” persisted Rigg, “is a garden. And the Walls divide it into separate plots, where they grow their separate crops, not allowing them to mix their pollen or germinate their seeds outside the plot where they were planted.”

“Your supposed father taught you that?” asked Bleht.