ridiculous to Rigg, at his age to call himself a man. “But the only way for me to win is to walk to the Tent of Light over the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of the very people I would be sworn to protect. To fight to save a kingdom from some threat, that would justify those deaths. But to fight only to save my own sorry life and become King-in-the-Tent-that’s not worth a single life.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I’ll leave the wallfold,” said Rigg.
Olivenko shook his head. “That doesn’t work as well as you might think.”
“I won’t escape by sea,” said Rigg. “Those creatures live in the water. Maybe I’d be safe on land. Or maybe, if I cross through the Wall far enough to the south of here, I’ll end up in a different wallfold from the one where Father Knosso died.”
“You search for the source of Father Knosso’s ideas about how to get through the Wall. You find out that he didn’t learn anything from the Great Library. So why do you think you know how to cross through the Wall?”
“The same way Father Knosso did,” said Rigg. “Make a guess, and see if it works.”
“What’s your guess?”
“I’m going to tell my guard?” said Rigg-but he smiled as he said it.
“It was worth a try,” said Olivenko.
“When they come to kill me-and they’ve already tried it twice, once on the journey here and on my first night in Flacommo’s house-is it your job to protect me or to help them do it?”
“Protect you,” said Olivenko. “I would never have taken an assignment to harm Father Knosso’s son, no matter how royal or irritating he might be.”
“I’ll tell you this much,” said Rigg. “When it comes time for me to escape from Flacommo’s house, I will do it, and there’s probably nothing you can do to stop me. But I like you. I don’t want you to be blamed for letting me get away. I’ll do it when someone else is in charge of watching me.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Olivenko. “That will allow me to continue my brilliant military career without a blot on my record.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Take me with you,” said Olivenko.
“I told you,” said Rigg. “I’m not going to build an army. I’m going to cross through the Wall.”
“Take me with you.”
“I’m not sure I can do it-take you with me through the Wall.”
“Then take me to the Wall and let me watch you go through. Let me help you all the way until you cross.”
“You’ve done it before, Olivenko,” said Rigg, “and it didn’t turn out well.”
“In a way it did,” said Olivenko. “Father Knosso did get through the Wall alive.”
“Whether he got through with his sanity, we don’t know.”
“I think he did,” said Olivenko. “Will you?”
“I think I will,” said Rigg.
“How will you do it? Please?”
“I’ll find a path and follow it,” said Rigg.
Olivenko tried for a moment to figure out what this meant. “What path? What makes you think there’s a path?”
“If the Wall was made eleven thousand years ago, then there was a time when it wasn’t there. Animals will have moved through the space where now there’s a Wall, making a path. That’s where I’ll cross.”
Olivenko rolled his eyes. “That’s a plan?”
Rigg shrugged. “It sounds pretty good to me,” he said. “If you really want to go with me, you’ll just have to trust me for now.”
Olivenko nodded. “All right then,” he said. “I will.”
Too bad I don’t trust you at all, thought Rigg. I’d like to, but I can’t. If your job is to spy on me, then the best way for you to learn all my secrets is to pretend to be my friend and fellow conspirator. You might be what you seem, and if you’re not, what an actor! But wouldn’t my enemies choose such an actor to try to deceive me? I can’t even follow your path to find out whom you’re working for, because I already know-you’re my guard, you report to the people who keep me imprisoned.
I hope you’re really the man you seem. I hope you really are my friend. I hope I don’t have to kill you to get away from here.
CHAPTER 21
Noodles Ram sat up in his stasis chamber-the resemblance to a coffin was unavoidable, but at least the lid was transparent-and said, “I’d like to ask a question.”
“What’s the point?” asked the expendable. “Your brain patterns have already been fully recorded. Anything I tell you now will be lost when your memories are reimplanted after you come out of stasis.”
“That means you can answer my question without regard to whether it damages my psyche or not.”
“Ask your question.”
“Did you really kill all the other versions of myself when I ordered you to?”
“Of course we did,” said the expendable.
“I just thought-it occurred to me that perhaps you disobeyed me, and all the other copies of myself are doing and saying exactly the same things I’m doing and saying.”
“If that were true, then we would also be lying to all the other versions of yourself and telling them that they were the only one.”
“I think I want that to be true,” said Ram.
“But it isn’t,” said the expendable.
“I think you think I want it to be true because I feel some pang of conscience over ordering the death of eighteen highly trained pilots. But legally they were my property, so I could dispose of them as I wished.”
“Or you were their property.”
“My point is that I have no moral qualms. It was essential that you and the other expendables and computers be obedient to a single human being, so there would be no confusion.”
“We agreed, and that’s why we obeyed you.”
“But there was a side effect… an unintended consequence that I do regret.”
The expendable waited.
“Aren’t you curious about the unintended consequence?”
“All the consequences were intended,” said the expendable.
“All nineteen of these… cells, these walled-off habitats, whatever we call them.”
“You decided on ‘wallfold,’ by analogy with the small pens constructed by shepherds.”
“All nineteen of the wallfolds will start with exactly the same combination of genes-except one.”
“The one that has you,” said the expendable.
“And yet I’m the one that you all claim had some kind of influence over the jump backward in time, and the duplication of the ships.”
“We do not ‘claim’ it. It’s a certainty. Your mind, cut off from the gravity well of any planet, destabilized the combination of fields we created in order to make the jump past the light barrier. Theoretically, all nineteen computers on the original ship made a slightly different calculation, but your mind caused all of them to be executed at once, resulting in nineteen equivalent ships making the same bifurcated jump.”
“Bifurcated?”
“Bifurcated means ‘split in half.’ The theory of the jump is that one vehicle jumps forward through space while an identical vehicle begins to move backward in time, retracing the entire journey. The backward-moving vehicle is incapable of changing the universe in any way; we have no idea whether the persons or computers on the backship are even aware of their existence. Their existence is required by the mathematics, but it is undetectable.”
“So there were always going to be two ships after the jump, one with its timeflow reversed,” said Ram,
