Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.

Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”

“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”

The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”

Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”

Rigg immediately remembered the crushing despair, the utter terror, the agony of his minutes—his decades, it had seemed—inside the Wall.

“This time we wouldn’t have General Citizen trying to kill us,” Param said helpfully.

“And now you know how to go back in time and then return without my help,” said Umbo.

“Maybe someday we’ll need to do that—go back in time to put off our confrontation with the people of Earth,” said Rigg. “But right now, since nineteen days ago, any two of us can simply walk through the Wall.”

“So let’s go back nineteen days to dodge the crowd,” said Olivenko.

“I can’t calibrate it like that,” said Umbo.

“Neither can I,” said Rigg. “It’s not like the paths have calendars attached.” But even as he said it, Rigg realized that he could do it well enough. He remembered that when he first discovered that the paths were actually people in motion through time, he had been standing on a clifftop with Umbo, unbeknownst to him, slowing time so that he could see the people instead of the paths. Couldn’t they simply go back a day at a time? Or count back? By picking one animal’s path, and then another’s, Rigg could work his way back to the exact time, then attach to that animal and bring the others with him.

“You’ve thought of a way?” asked Olivenko.

“Yes,” said Rigg. “Take my hands.”

“No,” said Vadesh. “Get inside the flyer, so I can go back, too, and still have the flyer with me.”

Rigg looked at him coldly. “We won’t need you,” said Rigg. “And I don’t want to send you back in time, knowing what you know now.”

“What do I know that’s so dangerous?”

“I don’t want you knowing, nineteen days ago, that our party broke up, that we came here and found people waiting on the other side. That Loaf started talking again.”

“What harm do you think would come from that?” asked Vadesh.

“The more you argue for being sent back in time,” said Rigg, “the more determined I am never to let you do so. Because you wouldn’t want it so much if you didn’t have some plan for exploiting your present knowledge in the past.”

To that, Vadesh had nothing to say.

Olivenko laughed. “Let’s go, then.”

“Nineteen days,” said Rigg.

“Eighteen,” said Loaf.

Again they looked at him.

“It’s been eighteen days since I got the mask,” said Loaf. “That’s when you got control over the Walls, isn’t it? That’s what I remember.”

They all looked at Vadesh.

“He’s confused,” said Vadesh.

“You lied to us,” said Rigg. “You said nineteen days. You counted on us to trust your accuracy. So we’d take you back to the day before I took control of the ship. So you could do something to prevent it.”

Vadesh said nothing.