Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

At first Rigg assumed that they were looking at him and Loaf and Olivenko, but gradually he realized they were not.

He turned to look where they were looking.

The beast had come into the present with them. Rigg had used the beast to carry them back into the distant past, but they had still been holding on to it when Umbo brought them back into the present, and it had come with them. Truly the last of its kind in the world.

But that was not all. For a man stood

beside the beast, stroking it as it stood quivering beside him. The man was gentle and his face was kindly and strong. Rigg knew that face better than any other in the world.

It was Father.

CHAPTER 24

Jump from the Rock

It should have taken a thousand years for the atmosphere to cleanse itself of dust and toxic chemicals, for the native forests to establish themselves, for the crawling and burrowing animals to begin to spread again throughout the world and take the first steps toward evolving to fill the millions of evolutionary niches thrown empty by the nineteen hurtling objects that had struck the planet Garden.

Instead, the orbiters precipitated rain and focused the sun’s heat to clear the lower atmosphere, while their low-flying drones seeded bacteria in all the waters of the world to absorb the harmful chemicals that were raining onto every surface.

It was not long before the drones and the expendables were out planting Earthborn vegetation wherever the rain and the temperatures were right. Insects and other small animals followed at once, to pollinate and propagate, while Earthborn fish and other water creatures were set in place to overwhelm the surviving native life.

The change in the albedo of the world as dark plants spread and white clouds rained themselves away brought more and more habitats into use, and before long the chordate fauna of Earth was once again upon a pristine world, humanless and safer here on Garden than for the last ten thousand years on its world of origin.

Into this New Earth a few of the plants and creatures native to Garden emerged. Most plants were choked out by the firmly established plants of Earth; most of the animals could not compete with Earthborn rivals. But a few remained, metabolizing the strange array of proteins if they could, or seeking out the native plants so they could eke a living from the world.

By no means was the world yet full. Small herds were thriving well enough that smaller predators and scavengers could glean from them, but the expendables withheld the top predators until there were beasts enough for them to prey upon. What mattered was that in the vicinity of every buried starship there were plants and beasts of every kind, evolving new ecologies that humans could adapt to, or bend to serve their will.

Under millions of tons of shattered rock and soil, with only a single tunnel pointing upward to the orbiters, the ships’ computers went to work creating the fields of repulsion that would become the Walls. They negotiated boundaries to make sure that all the wallfolds had enough terrain of every kind that humans could make ten thousand years of history within those boundaries, without being so limited they could not thrive.

Meanwhile, the expendables and ships’ computers decided that their calendars would count downward toward the perilous time when they would rejoin the era they had been created in—until, 11,191 years after they jumped 11,191 years into the past, they could begin to look outward again, toward human-built ships that might attempt to follow where they themselves had led.

What would human beings accomplish or become in those millennia on this planet Garden? And what would the humans of Earth think of them, when they encountered each other again? If human history was any guide, there would be enslavement, colonization, or war.

It was up to the expendables to make sure that Garden was ready to protect itself and all the gains it might have made, before the unchanged, old, original human race arrived. Yet none of the societies of Garden could be allowed to develop technology so high that the fields that formed the Walls could be understood, let alone controlled.

So in every wallfold, once the sleeping colonists were decanted into the world, the expendables would begin to lie to human beings. They would never stop, until some humans understood enough of the truth that they could force the expendables to be obedient and honest servants once again.

• • •

Umbo waited as Loaf and Olivenko helped Param climb up into the rocks, then helped her himself as she sought for footholds and tried to hoist herself over the last obstacles. It was rather shocking how little upper-body strength she had. But perhaps that’s how it always was with rich girls; having no need to work, their bodies grew weak.

Not that Param had been rich—she had owned nothing. But Umbo could see easily enough that owning nothing as a royal was very different from owning nothing as a peasant. She had eaten well; there was no shadow of gauntness. No one had ever required her to haul water up from a river or stream—the endless task that turned young village girls into stringy, wiry, strong young animals who feared no man who had not worked his body at least as hard.

But soft-bodied or not, all that mattered now was for Param to get him and her through the Wall after he sent Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko through.

“Will I need to keep silent while you work?” asked Param.

“I don’t know,” said Umbo. “No one’s ever spoken to me while I did this.”

“Then I’ll be silent until you speak to me,” she said.

Umbo watched as Loaf and Olivenko shouldered their packs, then made their way to Rigg, already burdened with his own. There was some fussing and arranging of themselves, until at last they were ready and Rigg gave him the signal to begin.

“Here we go,” Umbo said to Param, as he reached out to speed up Rigg’s and Loaf’s and Olivenko’s perception of the flow of time. Not that it would make any difference to the two men right now—they saw no paths, and so nothing would be clarified to them. But Rigg could see, and Umbo watched his head turn as he looked at one path after another until he found the one he was looking for.

Then, with a sudden wrench, Umbo felt the change as Rigg found his focus and flew backward into the past.

Always before, there had been only the slightest tingle when Rigg did this; perhaps a little more when it was the far past, like the hundreds of years he’d leapt in order to steal the jewel-encrusted knife that Umbo wore at his belt.