duplicating what Umbo’s gift had done. He could imagine that Umbo’s need to duplicate Rigg’s gift, by locating a person in the past in order to focus on him, was sidestepped by choosing someone whose location had been known to him and who remained in the same spot for a considerable length of time. In such cases, Rigg’s vision of paths would be unnecessary to Umbo, or at least less necessary.
But Rigg had seen the paths his whole life, had learned to distinguish between them and identify a particular path and follow it through time-always knowing in which direction it flowed, though he could never explain to Father how he knew-and yet he had never once suspected that the path was actually the rapid blur of the person himself endlessly repeating his movements. Not until Umbo’s gift had opened his eyes.
So now Rigg knew the truth behind what he had always known-where the long-past people and animals had gone. He even had a clear sense of which paths were older and which newer, which were of men or of women, which were of adults or of children, just as he could tell which species and gender and age of animal had made a certain path. He conceived this information as colors, thickness, intensity, texture, as if it were sight, but he knew now that he was gleaning information from the paths that sight alone could never have given him. At some level he was penetrating the paths and “seeing” who it was-though of course sight had nothing to do with it.
Well, not nothing. He could sense paths that lay behind hills or walls-he could sense paths, for instance, far outside the bounds of the little cabin that served as his prison. The paths were mostly just a blur to him in the darkness, and with his eyes closed they were like an indistinct haze-but they were there, and he could sense them, and with concentration could achieve some kind of clarity. He could see as they were made the movements of the men on board the boat, even though the paths quickly receded upriver as the boat drifted down, which helped him make sense of the sounds he heard. All this depended little on what his eyes could see.
But his eyes gave him context for what he was seeing. He knew which wall of the cabin he was seeing these paths through, and remembering the general layout of the boat, he was able to understand what he sensed. The paths that crossed the gap over the Stashi Falls in midair, many rods out from the falls, still passed from side to side of the canyon cliffs, so Father’s explanation of the falls’ having eroded the edge in and down, and of bridges once having spanned the gap, made sense to Rigg.
On the river, though, the paths were far more confusing, because all the movements of people-except the rare swimmers and waders-had taken place on boats or bridges that had long since disappeared. A path would suddenly rise up into the air and pass overhead; others made strange looping motions; it was a mind-numbing tangle, when the ladder or mast a man had climbed was no longer there. Add to that the fact that in the delta, the river had changed course so many times that paths ran in every conceivable direction and bore little relation to the present channel, and Rigg could hardly be blamed for not being able to pick out one path and make it slow down (or himself speed up) to see the person making it.
The worst problem he faced, however, was that he had no idea what Umbo had done. They had decided by reason alone that Umbo must be speeding up Rigg’s perceptions so he could see faster, so to speak. But nothing about the experience had felt to Rigg as if he were actually speeding up. In fact, he had felt nothing at all, so he could hardly figure out how to replicate the feeling. All that had happened was that what once had been a path now became a blur of human motion, and by concentrating closely on one target he could make it resolve into a person and visually slow him or her. And that was eyesight.
Or was it?
Rigg thought back to his experience at the falls, lying on the rock. Hadn’t he seen the man with his eyes? He had certainly touched him with his body when he knocked him from the rock! Yet there had been a different quality to his seeing, compared to the way he saw the rock itself, and Umbo’s brother Kyokay. As Father had taught him much about the workings of human brains, Rigg now imagined that the rocks and water and sky and Kyokay were coming into his brain the normal way, through his eyes; but the man who fell had come into his brain a different way, not through his eyes. Instead his brain had interpreted it as vision and laid it over what his eyes showed him. It had been fitted into his vision-which, now that he thought about it, was what Rigg always did with the information his path-sense gave him.
But this did not help him in any way to discover how Umbo had changed him-or the paths, or time itself-so that a path that had seemed to Rigg like a smooth ribbon became instead a blur of a rapidly moving person. Nor could Rigg make any progress by concentrating hard, squinching up his face, or trying to juice up some emotion.
He even tried, in a few insane experiments, to try to walk beside and keep pace with a path that he knew must be a person, in hopes of being able to see a human shape. He even ran with one for a moment, but of course crashed into the wall and caused a guard to open the door, though by then Rigg had contrived to pick up his chair so he could ruefully explain, “I fell asleep and the chair fell over,” which the guard had no way of knowing was not true. In any event, the guard was forbidden to speak-all he could do was either go back out and shut the door, or waken General Citizen to come investigate. He chose the easier path and merely closed and rebarred the door.
Rigg even spent time philosophizing about what his and Umbo’s experiences proved about the nature of time. For instance: The paths did not follow the present contours of the land; they remained exactly where they were regardless of how the land changed beneath them-or the water, or buildings, or vehicles.
Yet Rigg knew that the world was a spheroid planet with a ring of debris around it that raced through its orbit, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther from the sun, like the unsteady path of a drunken man. The sun itself did not hold still, but moved through a huge sea of stars, orbiting the center of the galaxy, while the galaxy itself drifted through space. So if the world had shifted a vast distance since these people first moved along its surface, why didn’t the paths remain out in space where they had been made, instead of staying with this world wherever it roamed?
The passage of living creatures was preserved in paths that were tied, not to the absolute locations of those creatures in space, but to their position relative to the center of planet Garden. Their paths continued to pass through exactly the same spot above the rotating world.
To Rigg, this meant that living things had a firm connection to the planet itself, and not just to the surface to which gravity pressed them. Time remembered the movements of all things which lived, but it kept the record engraved in exact relation to the center of gravity of the planet on which they dwelt, keeping their original relationship to each other as they stretched over the surface of the world.
Why time should be tied to gravity he did not know, but clearly it was. Rigg wondered all kinds of things, in his solitude-why, for instance, their movements were not preserved in relation to the sun, whose gravity was so powerful that it controlled Garden and kept it from whirling off into space; or whether, if a man could fly between worlds the way he sailed across rivers and seas, he would leave any kind of path behind him, or if his path would flex and bend between one world and the next? It was a strange kind of imagining, and he could imagine Loaf telling him it was a complete waste of time to wonder about such things, since men couldn’t fly and certainly couldn’t fly between planets. For Father had taught Rigg from childhood on that there is no thought that is not worth thinking, but that all ideas might be examined logically to see if they meant anything useful. Admittedly, Rigg had no idea now why thoughts about traveling between worlds and the persistence of paths on the voyage might be useful, but it was a pleasure to think them, and since pleasures were few and far between these days, he would take those he had and enjoy them.
Besides, thinking about travel between worlds kept him from brooding about what awaited him in Aressa Sessamo.
For that was his other project, and he could never get away from it for long. What did he know? What could he learn from the information he already had?
General Citizen had talked about various parties in Aressa Sessamo-the royalists divided into camps between followers of the female succession and those who yearned for a return to the male, and supporters of the People’s Revolution, though if Citizen had told the truth, there were those who didn’t so much support the Revolution as oppose the female succession.
Citizen seemed to be satisfied that Rigg really was the long-lost son of Hagia Sessamin and her husband Knosso Sissamik, so that whatever someone thought about royalty-or males of the royal line, of which Rigg was presumably the only living specimen-they would think about Rigg.
But Rigg couldn’t even be sure which party he was under the control of now. If Citizen really was of the male- royal party, then he was in the hands of one who might exploit him in service of a monarchical restoration. But if Citizen was testing him by pretending to be of that party, then he might be in the hands of either a true servant of
