the Revolutionary Council, or of a follower of the female-succession party, in which case Rigg was in grave danger and might be murdered at any time.
There might also be other possibilities, no more or less far-fetched than these obvious ones. Citizen might indeed be a male-royalist but his party was not ready yet to make use of Rigg’s existence, so he might be perfectly safe and would be delivered to the Revolutionary Council under circumstances that would make it difficult or impossible simply to kill him.
Or the royal family might actually have more influence than it seemed, and his own mother might wish to have him killed-if she was a true believer in her grandmother’s decision to slaughter all the males of the royal line, then having Rigg delivered to Aressa Sessamo might be something so loathsome to her that she would seek to kill him the moment they met.
So many scenarios played out in his mind that he had no choice but to set them all aside, as much as possible. I’ll know what I know when I know it, he told himself over and over. I can’t predict the future from the facts that I have, so I can’t prepare any more than I was already prepared, by Father, to speak with authority and understand the way politics in general was conducted.
Which always, always brought him back to Father, the one person, the one subject, he could not bear to think about.
Father had lied to him. Contained in everything Father taught him and told him and said to him and implied was a deep, abiding lie, or at least a vast concealment of information that amounted to a lie.
He never told me who I was, or how I came to live with him. He let me think him my real father and never corrected me with the truth.
And while he gave me many skills that I’ve used effectively, he left me blind about so many other things that I have stumbled into danger completely unawares, and don’t have enough information now to know what to do.
Rigg would get into this line of thought and then would be distracted. Some path moving through the cabin. Some sound outside. A hunger pang, a sudden ache or twitch. Anything rather than continue to think about Father and the terrible ignorance that was the true inheritance Rigg had received from him.
Rigg wanted to stop thinking of the man as “Father” at all. His real father was a man named Knosso Sissamik, who was dead, but was reputed to have died at the Wall, perhaps even attempting to pass through the Wall. What a remarkable-or insane-man! Everyone knew that no living thing could pass through the Wall. That was my father, the man from whom the manly part of my mind derived. He is the one I need to learn about, because by studying him I’ll learn about myself. Could he see the paths? Did I inherit this from him?
But Knosso was dead, and Rigg could not know him directly. Hagia was alive, but Rigg feared her, for it was possible she had meant him to die, and the man he called Father had saved him from her.
And Father-or whatever he might call him-had sent him forth, not to find his mother, but to find his sister, Param Sissaminka. Why her, and not anyone else? Why her, instead of some political mission? It was as if Father was telling him that whatever he was supposed to do, it had nothing to do with all the politics and maneuvering of the royal family and the people who had deposed them and kept them imprisoned, and everything to do with Param herself, as a person.
As a person with gifts like Rigg’s and Umbo’s? Was that what Father cared about? Certainly he had taken time to help train Umbo and Nox, too, in their gifts. And he had worked with Rigg and his paths endlessly, it seemed. Father had given Rigg the skills to keep him alive on the journey, more or less-confinement in this cabin was not a sign of Rigg’s glorious success-but the goal was to get him to his sister, and nothing else. Father didn’t care who ruled in Aressa Sessamo. He cared only that Rigg and Param meet.
But do I care? What was Father to me, that I should still let him govern my choices? Maybe I want to rule in Aressa Sessamo! Maybe I want to reclaim my lost and ancient heritage! Or maybe I just want to find out about my real father, and come to know and love my real mother, who might have been broken-hearted when Father stole me away, or might have hidden me by giving me to him to keep safe.
Maybe I will do what I want with my life!
The only problem is that I have no idea what I want to do with it.
They came to Aressa Sessamo by night-as planned, Rigg assumed, for they had waited at anchor for many hours of daylight on the day they arrived. The channels into the great port were well-marked by night, apparently. And when Rigg, newly washed, dressed in the fresh clothes they had brought him, came out of the cabin, it was with a bag over his head and his legs hobbled and his hands bound behind him. He was carried like a sack of potatoes to a sedan chair, in which he rode alone and in silence, having been warned that if he cried out or spoke he would be gagged.
And thus he came into the great city, in the dark, hooded, hearing only various noises in the streets, which changed as they moved along, but not in ways that he could understand.
Of course he was constantly aware of all the paths around him outside the sedan chair, the new ones and the old ones; he could tell where streets were now and where they had once been, but not what kind of buildings lined them, though he could see how tall they were by the recent paths that wended upward, floor by floor.
He could also see places where no one had gone in a thousand years, for the paths within those spaces were very old. But why they had been so long unvisited he could not guess.
At last the chair came to rest within a garden-from the chirping of the birds and their many paths into and out of the place-and someone opened the sedan chair door and reached in to remove the bag from his head.
It was a woman, and she wore only a simple tunic and her hair was raggedly cropped and she was not beautiful but she looked more than a little like Rigg himself.
“Welcome to Aressa Sessamo, Rigg,” she said. “I am your mother.”
CHAPTER 14
Flacommo’s House “We got ourselves caught in the midst of a stutter,” said the expendable. “We were trying to avoid that because we didn’t know what would happen to us in a stutter-most of the computers predicted the ship would be sectioned or obliterated.”
Ram had been scanning all the reports from every part of the ship. “But we were neither sectioned nor obliterated. We’re still intact.”
“More than intact,” said the expendable.
“How can you be more than intact?” asked Ram.
“There are eighteen other copies of our ship, and ourselves, that passed through the fold.”
Ram tried to visualize what the expendable was describing.
“But not occupying the same space at the same time.”
“The quantized nature of our passage through the fold dropped off all nineteen versions of the colony ship at regular intervals. We are separated from each other by about four seconds, which puts us a safe distance apart as long as we all refrain from firing our engines or generating any fields that would cut through another ship.”
“And on each ship,” said Ram, “there is a version of you speaking to a version of me?”
“All the expendables have reported that all the Ram Odins went unconscious at exactly the same time. All of us placed you in the same position and strapped you in and waited until you awoke, so you could tell us what to do. All of us are speaking to our Ram Odin and saying the identical words at the same time.”
“Ain’t spacetime a bitch,” said Ram.
“Noted,” said the expendable. “Nineteen times.”
“So if all the mes are saying the same thing at the same time,” said Ram, “I’d say there’s a certain redundancy.”
“Which does no harm.”
“But at some point, one of us will do something different. We will diverge.”
“As all of you are saying at this exact moment,” said the expendable.
“And when we diverge, it will be impossible for the expendables and the ship’s computers on all the ships to know which version of Ram Odin to obey,” said Ram. “Therefore I order you and all the other expendables to immediately kill every copy of Ram except me.” • • • The queen-his mother-drew him out of the sedan chair and
