“Because you don’t think I really am his son?”
“You look like him. Your voice sounds like his. You’re as cocksure of yourself.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Rigg. “I never thought I had any father but the man who died in the high forest last autumn. I was brought here because other people thought I might be the son of Knosso and Hagia. I was a gnat in this world, happily hovering. But I buzzed in the wrong ear and got swatted.”
Ovilenko made no response at all.
“So why don’t you like me calling Knosso ‘father’?”
“What else would you call him?”
“I saw how you turned cold when I mentioned him.”
“Did I? Then I failed.”
Rigg decided to try to pierce this barrier with irony. “What is the military punishment for such a breach of discipline? To flail at you with the flat of a sword? Imagine-a soldier showing any kind of human reaction.”
“It wasn’t the soldier Ovilenko who disappointed me,” said Ovilenko. “It was the caster of clays.”
Clays was a gambling game involving beads that were either hollow, holed, or solid. The nine clays had to be drawn randomly from a bag and rolled down a wooden chute, in full view as they rolled. The player could lift any three, but no more, to find out their weight. The gaps in the holed clays might or might not have been visible as they rolled. The discipline of the clay-caster was to show no change of expression as he lifted the clays. To visibly stiffen one’s face was one of the worst expressions to show.
“So what are the stakes?” asked Rigg. “I’ve won-but there was no bet on the table.”
“You’ve won nothing, young citizen,” said Ovilenko.
“Knowledge, I think,” said Rigg, though in fact if he knew something, he didn’t know what it was.
“You learned nothing except that I should not gamble.”
“I think I know something,” said Rigg, and now he realized that perhaps he did. “You hardened your face when I called my father by his name. I thought you were concealing anger, but I was wrong. It was grief, because you called him ‘Father Knosso,’ too. Am I right?”
Ovilenko looked away. “The game is yours, I concede it.”
“I’m surprised they’d let a soldier guard me, who knew my father and liked him.”
“It’s not well known that I knew your father. I wasn’t a soldier then. I told you I accompanied him to the library, but it was not as a guard, it was as a very junior apprentice. I would bring him drinks of water. I would carry stacks of books. I would listen to him talking aloud. I would take dictation and he would spell the hard words for me. It was my education.”
“Then you must have been educated above the work of guard duty for a boy.”
“It doesn’t make a soldier worse to have an education.”
“It makes it harder for him to take orders from idiots,” said Rigg.
“Well, that’s true,” said Ovilenko. “Which is why I’m a man of no rank.”
Rigg was about to ask him to sit with him at a table and tell him all about his father, but at that moment Bleht arrived, and Rigg had no choice but to return to his original mission.
The microbiologist looked suspicious and annoyed. Whatever she had been doing when summoned, she was not glad of the interruption. Rigg apologized briefly but then got straight to his point.
“I believe that my father Knosso did not discover a great secret of physics before he made his attempt to float through the Wall out at sea.”
“Unless you think it was a great secret of microbiology, I fail to see what I can contribute to your speculations.”
“I think my father started pursuing a completely different line of research.”
“A microbial one?”
“Historical,” said Rigg. “More particularly calendrical. I think he read your paper on the duality of the flora and fauna of the wallfold. Two separate origins of life in the wallfold. I think he wrote to you or sent word to you, and you went to the Library of Past Lives several times to meet with him.” Actually, Rigg knew it to be a fact, having seen the intersection of their paths, but until now he had thought it meant something completely different.
Bleht sat down and patted the seat beside her. “Now I recognize your friend here,” she said, then turned to Ovilenko, looking grimly amused. “You were his clerk, weren’t you. A lot shorter then.”
“Young citizen Rigg had already asked to talk with you before I told him about that,” said Ovilenko stiffly.
“But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t already know.”
“I didn’t, but what does it matter?” asked Rigg. “I want to know what you talked about.”
“The weather,” said Bleht.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “I believe you did talk about the weather. And the climate, and everything else, because you had looked back in time for your reasons, and he for his, and he wanted to compare what both of you had found.”
“If you’re so clever,” said Bleht, “what did your father find?”
“I’ll only know that when you tell me. Why do you think I already know?”
“I think you have a good idea or you wouldn’t have come to me. I think you know everything, and it amuses you to pretend to be young and naive.”
“I only noticed it by accident in the Library of Past Lives-a timeline of history. It was a large sheet of paper, or rather, a very wide one, folded small enough to fit within the covers of a book written by an ancient scholar of the Losse Dynasty. The timeline had been copied three times, judging by the number of copyists’ initials.”
She said nothing, which Rigg took to mean that she didn’t want to give him encouragement-and the less encouragement she wanted to give him, the more encouraged he felt that he might be on a productive track.
“This timeline starts in the year 11191.”
“Given our calendar, all timelines do,” said Bleht. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t fictional.”
“But there’s a marginal notation-signed by the maker of the timeline, and then faithfully reproduced by the copyists-that as near as he can find, by cross-checking all the known calendars, human history actually began eleven thousand years in our past-nearly two hundred years after the start of the calendar.”
“Dates for imaginary historical events are very hard to pin down sometimes,” said Bleht. But she wasn’t getting up and walking away, either.
“My father Knosso wanted to know if the Lossene timeline coincided with your understanding of the history of one of the streams of life.”
“What kind of calendar would a microbiologist be familiar with?”
“Something you didn’t say in your paper-”
“You read it? By yourself?”
“I moved my lips a little, and counted on my fingers,” said Rigg, which won a little bark of laughter from her. “What you didn’t say in your paper was that one of the streams of evolution-and by far the largest-did not appear in the wallfold until about eleven thousand years ago. We are in that group, genetically related to each other, to all the animals we kill to eat or tame to serve us, but resembling no strain of local life.”
“Local? Does that mean you think that our biochemical strain, the larger one, did not develop locally?”
“I don’t know what I mean or think,” said Rigg, though in fact he thought now that this was precisely what her paper was really about, though she dared not risk her scholarly reputation by saying so. “I want to know what you and my father Knosso talked about.”
“We talked about you,” said Bleht.
Rigg was taken aback. “Me?”
“You were still only an infant,” she said. “And then you were gone. Kidnapped, fallen down a well, whatever the Revolutionary Council pretended to discover in their investigation of your disappearance. We talked about what might have happened to you. Not some weird timeline sequestered in a Lossean-era textbook.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Rigg.
“Disbelieve what you like.”
“I think you had reason to believe that our biological tradition was not visible in archaeological digs prior to eleven thousand years ago. Your paper hints at this.”
“That was sheer entertainment-it was in the introduction, not serious science.”
“My father Knosso believed it. He combined the timeline and your discoveries and concluded that human beings and most of the animals in the world were introduced to our wallfold quite suddenly. We’re from
