Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“You can call me whatever you like,” said Father. Or Ramex. “Do you expect me to call you Noxon instead of Rigg?”

“I wish you would. I once was Rigg, back when we spent so many years together, but I’ve been Noxon for months now and I need to make that identity completely my own.”

“As you wish,” said Ramex.

Father would never have said that, so this was the obedient expendable, not the domineering tutor.

It took very little time to reach the starship in Ramfold. Noxon watched out the windows and then on the screen that showed what was passing directly under and a little ahead of the flyer. They passed over Upsheer right at the falls. He barely caught a glimpse of the handful of buildings that made up Fall Ford. He couldn’t see the stairway but he did see the broken-off nubs of the most recent of the bridges over the top of the falls. The others had long since crumbled away, becoming boulders in the pool at the base of the falls, and eventually becoming ever smaller rocks and stones as one rock broke another.

“You didn’t want to linger, did you?” asked Father. “Stop by and say a fond farewell to Nox? I think she’d be flattered that you took her name.”

“I think she’d be annoyed. And with this thing on my face, I doubt she’d believe that I’m me.”

“She would if I told her to.”

“She’d be alarmed to see you back from the dead.”

“Less alarmed than you might think,” said Father. “I think she has some idea of my seeming immortality. I’m not sure if she believed your story.”

“If she had thought I was lying—”

“She would never have protected you, I know. But there’s a difference between believing in your honesty and believing in the factuality of the story you were telling. If you believed it, then it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t necessarily the truth, either.”

“I don’t want to stop in and see her.”

“I think the flyer would have been hard to conceal from prying eyes,” said Father. “But I do miss the old village.”

“No you don’t,” said Noxon. “You just pretend to have feelings like a human being.”

?

??I have much nicer feelings than most.”

“I’m sure,” said Noxon.

He had wandered for years through the forest on the plateau of the starship’s crater. Now it seemed small. They passed over it so quickly, and then straight down the shaft to the starship itself.

The starship of Ramfold was no different from any other. Except for a difference that only Rigg and Noxon could see. This one had Ram Odin’s continuous path. Not the Ram Odin that was with Rigg, touring the world right now—that was the Ram of Odinfold. No, these paths were of the Ram Odin who had ordered the expendables to kill all the others, and then brought out his colonists when the land was habitable again. This was the Ram Odin who had married, had children who then had children of their own, and so on until that time-traveling gene had made its way into the embryo that grew up to be Noxon.

That Ram’s path was all over the inside of the starship, but it was very, very old.

There were several iterations of more recent paths, too—the Ram Odin of Odinfold had visited here now and then over the years. But Noxon could see the faint but detectable differences between the paths of the two Ram Odins. They had begun to diverge once the copies had been made, and now Noxon could tell them apart with only a moment’s hesitation, and not just because the Ram of Odinfold had all the recent paths.

Noxon went right to work, finding the very oldest path. It began in the pilot’s seat in the small control room—just like the room where Rigg had come to stop Noxon from killing Ram Odin before Ram Odin could come and kill him.

But it could not begin in the pilot’s seat. “He wasn’t born here, in that chair.”

“But he arrived here that way. You know your paths are tied to the surface of the planet, not to any vehicle.”

“Then I’ve failed before I even began.”

“You don’t know that,” said Father. “You don’t know anything about what the paths do when the starship is not on a planet’s surface. Besides, what you’re seeing may not be the ship’s arrival here. It might be the moment when the ship passed through the fold. Ram Odin was sitting in that chair for that, too.”

“If I could see a path for you, I might be able to tell.”

“But the facemask lets you see more than the mere path. Look closely. Even if you can’t see me, you can see whether he’s talking to me.”

Noxon looked. “He’s talking to you in all the paths. Talking to you seems to have been his main activity.”