tell them to Rigg, couldn’t she? “Why do you call him Good Teacher instead of using his name?”
“It was the only name I had for him.”
“But his parents wouldn’t have given him a name like that,” said Rigg.
“I’ve had guests stay here who had names stranger than that-given to them by their parents. I had a man whose first name was Captain, and one whose first name was Doctor, and a woman whose first name was Princess. But if you want a different name for your father, try the one he used in that paper-Wandering Man. That’s the name he went by in this place, before I started calling him Good Teacher. Or Wallwatcher, or Golden Man.”
“Those are names from legends,” said Rigg.
“I’ve heard people call your father by such names. They took it seriously enough, even if he laughed. Names come and go. They get attached to you, and then you lose them, and they get attached to someone else. Now let me concentrate on making this bread. If I don’t pay attention to it, it goes ill.”
It wasn’t much, but she had just told him more information about Father than he had ever heard from the man himself.
It was still three hours before sundown when he set off.
“Thank you,” he said, taking leave of her at the back door.
“For what?” she said dismissively.
“For lending me money you couldn’t afford,” said Rigg. “For making bread for me. For saving my life from the mob.”
She sighed. “Your father knew I would do all that,” she said. “Just as he knew you’d have the brains to find a way here without getting yourself caught and killed.”
“Father didn’t know I was going to try to save a stupid boy on Stashi Falls.”
“Are you sure of that?” asked Nox. “Your father knew a lot of things he shouldn’t have been able to know.”
“If he knew the future,” said Rigg, “he could have dodged the damn tree.” And after that, Rigg couldn’t think of anything else to say, and Nox seemed eager to get back inside the kitchen, because she had a whole supper to prepare for her guests, so he turned and left.
CHAPTER 4
Shrine of the Wandering Saint “How did I ever become the one to make this decision for everyone?” Ram asked aloud.
“You spent six years winning your way through the testing process,” said the expendable.
“What I meant was, Why is this choice being left up to one human being, who cannot possibly have enough information to decide?”
“You can always leave it up to me,” said the expendable.
That was the failsafe: If Ram died, or froze up, or had a crippling injury, or refused to decide, any of the expendables was prepared to take over and make the decision.
“If it were your decision,” asked Ram, “what would you decide?”
“You know I’m not allowed to answer that, Ram,” said the expendable. “Either you make the decision or you turn it over to me. But you must not ask me what I would decide. That would add an irrelevant and complicating factor to your decision. Will you choose the opposite in order to assert the difference between humans and expendables? Or follow me blindly, and then blame the expendables, on which you have no choice but to rely, if anything goes wrong?”
“I know,” said Ram.
“I know you know,” said the expendable, “and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let’s just assume the dot dot dot.”
Ram chuckled. The expendables had learned that Ram enjoyed a little sarcasm now and then, so as part of their responsibility to maintain his mental health, they all used the same degree of sarcasm in their conversations with him.
“How long do I have before I have to make the decision?”
“You can decide any time, Ram,” said the expendable.
“But there has to be a point of no return. When I either miss the fold or plunge into it.”
“Wouldn’t that be convenient,” said the expendable. “If you just wait long enough, the decision gets taken out of your hands. You will not be informed of any default decision or point of no return, because that might influence your decision.”
“The data are so ambivalent,” said Ram.
“The data have no valents, take no sides, lean in no direction, Ram,” said the expendable. “The computers do their calculations and report their findings.”
“But what do I make of the fact that all nineteen computers have such different predictions?”
“You celebrate the fact that reality is even more fuzzy than the logic algorithms in the software.”
“Whoop-de-do,” said Ram.
“What?”
“I’m celebrating.”
“Was that irony or loss of mental function?” asked the expendable.
“Was that a rhetorical question, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?”
“I have no confidence in you, Ram,” said the expendable.
“Well, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Ram wasn’t quite sure he had made the decision even as he reached over and poked his finger into the yes- option box on the computer’s display. Then it was done, and he was sure.
“So that’s it?” asked the expendable.
“Final decision,” said Ram. “And it’s the right one.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because live or die, we’ll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don’t make the jump, we’ll learn nothing, have no new options.”
“A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions.”
“Shut up,” said Ram.
The expendable laughed. That laugh-it was one of the reasons why the expendables made such good company. Even knowing that it was programmed into the expendable to laugh at just such a moment, and for just this long, tapering off in just such a way, did not keep Ram from feeling the warmth of acceptance that laughter of this kind brought to primates of the genus homo. • • • Rigg scanned for recent paths as he walked briskly through fields and woods. No one could hide from him. If someone had moved within the last day or two his path would be intense, and if in the last hour or so, it would be downright vivid. So if someone had set up an ambush for him, he would see by what route they had approached their hiding place, and he could avoid them.
So within a few hundred yards of Nox’s rooming house, Rigg went between a couple of buildings and stepped into the road. The whole course of the ancient highway from Upsheer to the old imperial capital at Aressa Sessamo was packed with hundreds of thousand of paths, but most of them were old and faded, left over from ancient times when there was a great city atop Upsheer, and Fall Ford had been a sprawling metropolis at its foot. These days the paths were in the hundreds per year instead of thousands.
Rigg’s heart was full of Father’s death now, and the death of the boy at the falls just this morning, and the strange man from the past. Rigg could not keep his mind on any one of them. Instead, with a kind of franticness his thoughts would skip from one to another. Father!-but the horror of seeing the boy’s hand, knowing it would slip away-and the man clutching at him, dragging Rigg toward the edge.
Father wouldn’t let me see him, dying with a tree pressing on him, so I wouldn’t have to live with the memory. Now I’ve seen something nearly as awful to haunt my dreams.
He was rounding a bend when he saw it-a very recent path of someone crossing the road, scrambling up an
