“I know everything I need to know already,” Rigg always said. “You teach me all kinds of strange things that have nothing to do with the way we live. Why do I need to know about astronomy or banking or all these languages you make me speak? I find the paths of animals, we trap them, we sell the furs, and I know how to do every bit of it.”
To which Father always replied, “See how ignorant you are? You don’t even know why you need to know the things you don’t know yet.”
“So tell me,” said Rigg.
“I would, but you’re too ignorant to understand the reasons why your ignorance is a fatal disease. I have to educate you before you’ll understand why it was worth the bother trying to tan your brain.” That’s what he called their schooling sessions: tanning Rigg’s brain.
Today they were following the trail of an elusive pench, whose pelt was worth ten otters, because penchfur was so thick and the colors so vibrant. During a brief lull in Father’s endless teaching, during which he was presumably trying to come up with another problem for Rigg to work out in his head (“If a board fence is nine hands high and a hundred and twenty yards long, how many feet of four-inch slat will you need to buy from the lumbermill, knowing that the slats come in twenty- and fourteen-hand lengths?” Answer: “What good is a nine-hand-high slat fence? Any animal worth keeping inside it can climb it or jump over it or knock it down.” Then a knuckle on the back of his head and he had to come up with the real answer), Rigg started talking about nothing at all.
“I love autumn,” said Rigg. “I know it means winter is coming, but winter is the reason why people need our furs so I can’t feel bad about that. It’s the colors of the leaves before they fall, and the crunching of the fallen leaves underfoot. The whole world is different.”
“The whole world?” asked Father. “Don’t you know that on the southern half of the world, it isn’t even autumn?”
“Yes, I know that,” said Rigg.
“And even in our hemisphere, near the tropics it’s never autumn and leaves don’t fall, except high in the mountains, like here. And in the far north there are no trees, just tundra and ice, so leaves don’t fall. The whole world! You mean the tiny little wedge of the world that you’ve seen with your own ignorant eyes.”
“That’s all the world I’ve seen,” said Rigg. “If I’m ignorant of the rest, that’s your fault.”
“You aren’t ignorant of the rest, you just haven’t seen it. I’ve certainly told you about it.”
“Oh, yes, Father, I have all kinds of memorized lists in my head, but here’s my question: How do you know all these things about parts of the world we can never ever see because they’re outside the Wall?”
Father shrugged. “I know everything.”
“A certain teacher once told me that the only truly stupid man is the one who doesn’t know he’s ignorant.” Rigg loved this game, partly because Father eventually got impatient with it and told him to shut up, which would mean Rigg had won.
“I know that I know everything because there are no questions to which I don’t know the answer.”
“Excellent,” said Rigg. “So answer this question: Do you know the answers to the questions you haven’t thought of yet?”
“I’ve thought of all the questions,” said Father.
“That only means you’ve stopped trying to think of new ones.”
“There are no new questions.”
“Father, what will I ask you next?”
Father huffed. “All questions about the future are moot. I know all the answers that are knowable.”
“That’s what I thought. Your claim to know everything was empty brag.”
“Careful how you speak to your father and teacher.”
“I chose my words with the utmost precision,” said Rigg, echoing a phrase that Father often used. “Information only matters if it helps us make correct guesses about the future.” Rigg ran into a low-hanging branch. This happened rather often. He had to keep his gaze upward, because the pench had moved from branch to branch. “The pench crossed the stream,” he said. Then he clambered down the bank.
Vaulting over a stream did not interrupt the conversation. “Since you can’t know which information you’ll need in the future, you need to know everything about the past. Which I do,” said Father.
“You know all the kinds of weather you’ve seen,” said Rigg, “but it doesn’t mean you know what weather we’ll have next week, or if there’ll be a kind of weather you never saw before. I think you’re very nearly as ignorant as I am.”
“Shut up,” said Father.
I win, said Rigg silently.
A few minutes later, the trail of the pench went up into the air and kept going out of sight. “An eagle got him,” Rigg said sadly. “It happened before we even started following his path. It was in the past, so no doubt you knew it all along.”
Father didn’t bother to answer, but let Rigg lead them back up the bank and through the woods to where Rigg first spotted the pench’s trail. “You know how to lay the traps almost as well as I do,” said Father. “So you go do it, and then come find me.”
“I can’t find you,” said Rigg. “You know I can’t.”
“I don’t know any such thing, because no one can know a false thing, one can only believe it with certainty until it is contradicted.”
“I can’t see your path,” said Rigg, “because you’re my father.”
“It’s true that I’m your father, and it’s true you can’t see my path, but why do you assume that there’s a causal connection between them?”
“Well, it can’t go the other way—you can’t be my father because I can’t see your path.”
“Do you have any other fathers?”
“No.”
“Do you know of any other pathfinder like you?”
“No.”
“Therefore you can’t test to see if you can’t see the paths of your other fathers, because you don’t have any. And you can’t ask other pathfinders whether they can find their fathers’ paths, because you don’t know any. So you have no evidence one way or another about what causes you not to be able to see my path.”
“Can I go to bed now?” asked Rigg. “I’m already too tired to go on.”
“Poor feeble brain,” said Father. “But how it could wear out I don’t know, considering you don’t use it. How will you find me? By following my path with your eyes and your brain instead of this extraordinary ability of yours. You’ll see where I leave footprints, where I break branches.”
“But you don’t leave footprints if you don’t want to, and you never break branches unless you want to,” said Rigg.
“Ah,” said Father. “You’re more observant than I thought. But since I told you to find me after the traps are set, doesn’t it stand to reason that I will make it possible for you to do it, by leaving footprints and breaking branches?”
“Make sure you fart frequently, too,” Rigg suggested. “Then I can track you with my nose.”
“Bring me a nice switch to beat you with when you come,” said Father. “Now go and do your work before the day gets too warm.”
“What will you be doing?”
“The thing that I need to do,” said Father. “When you need to know what that is, I’ll tell you.”
And they parted.
Rigg set the traps carefully, because he knew this was a test. Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn’t learned it.
I wish I could have a day, just a single day, without tests or lessons or punishments. A day to be myself, instead of being Father’s project to make me into a great man. I don’t want to be great. I just want to be Rigg.
Even taking great care with the traps, leaving them in each beast’s most common path, it didn’t take that long to set them all. Rigg stopped to drink, and then to empty his bladder and bowel and wipe his butt with leaves—another reason to be grateful for the autumn. Then Rigg backtracked his own trail to the place where he and Father parted.