Or maybe it’s the other way around—I have something Loaf doesn’t have. Something Vadesh fears. I have knowledge. I was trained by an expendable, and Loaf was not.
What did Father teach me that Vadesh should fear? Whatever it was, Rigg was not aware of it. Everything Rigg could remember had to do either with trapping animals and surviving in the wilderness, or the training in politics, economics, languages, and history that had enabled him to thrive in Aressa Sessamo. If nearly getting killed a dozen times could count as thriving.
And science. Father had taught him biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. As much as Rigg could absorb. Useless things that suddenly became useful when he was getting tested by leading scholars to determine whether he could have access to the library.
Useless things that suddenly became useful. But Father couldn’t have known that I would face such a board of examiners. Could he?
One thing Father did know, though, was that one day I would face another expendable. If every wallfold contained an expendable like Vadesh and Father himself, and if the jewels somehow allowed their owner to control the Walls and take them down, Father must have taught him what he needed to know to deal with the threat of someone like Vadesh.
But all of Rigg’s language and negotiation skills had to do with humans, and Vadesh wasn’t human. He didn’t want what humans wanted, he didn’t fear what humans feared.
What did he fear? Surely the worst thing had already happened, when all the humans in his wallfold had died. What could Rigg do now that would make Vadesh want to be rid of him?
It was a joke that expendables had to obey humans. Father didn’t obey anybody, and Vadesh only pretended to comply with human commands, when he bothered even to pretend. I have no power over him. No way to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do. Because he knows more than me, I never have enough information to give him a command that he can’t weasel his way out of. Even now, we have only his word that this wagon leads where he says he’s taking us, or that the jewels can even do what he says they do.
And it bothered Rigg more and more that the two jewels that mattered—the ones that Vadesh had identified as controlling the Wall of Vadeshfold and the Wall of Ramfold—were clutched in Loaf’s fist instead of being in the bag with the rest of the jewels. It sounded like nonsense, the idea of the jewels being attuned to anyone who had grown up in the wallfold. That seemed wrong. But it was true that Vadesh must have a set of jewels of his own, and he couldn’t do anything with them or he would have done it, so apparently he did need a human to do whatever he was planning to do.
Where was the lie? More to the point, where was the truth hidden within the lie?
Meanwhile, the wagon began to move so fast that Rigg had no concept of their speed. He didn’t know how to measure it. He knew that he could normally walk a league in about an hour; he could run much faster, but in short bursts. This wagon was going so fast that even the fastest horse couldn’t keep up with it. So as the minutes wore on, the tunnel gradually taking them lower and lower, moving in a nearly straight line, Rigg couldn’t begin to guess how far they had traveled, how many leagues beyond the factory where they had boarded the thing.
Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.
Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn’t any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their faces faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.
Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.
Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.
“It’s a field,” said Vadesh. “A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn’t affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen.”
Oxygen. “So we can breathe.”
“Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we’d suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well.”
He didn’t teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.
“The Wall is a field, too, you said,” Rigg answered.
“Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away.”
“That’s not how it felt to me,” said Rigg.
“Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling,” said Vadesh. “But you’re right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find reasons for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action.”
“But we went through it,” said Loaf.
“You went through it before it was there,” said Vadesh. “Cheating.”
“We went back to get Rigg,” said Loaf. “We brought him out.”
“Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well.”
“So there are different kinds of fields?” asked Rigg.
“Many of them, my young pupil. I can’t believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn’t even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields.”
“I don’t even wish I knew what you’re talking about,” said Loaf. “I just want this thing to stop moving.”
“When we get there. Not much farther.”
“You crashed into this world,” said Rigg.
“There was no moon,” said Vadesh. “And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive.”
“And you worked all this out?” asked Rigg.
“Oh, not me,” said Vadesh. “That’s not what expendables are for. We don’t have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require.”
“So who did?”
“It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they’re made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The field collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode.”
Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. “Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway,” said Rigg.
“Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys,” said Vadesh. “The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why.”
Vadesh didn’t seem to understand that increasing Rigg’s mistrust of his father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that expendables lie. As if he needed more proof of that.