Am I defending myself when nobody has challenged me? Probably. But will the expendable conclude from this that I’m deceiving him? Probably not. Humans always defend themselves when they think they might be wrong. And anyone about to receive a facemask who doesn’t wonder if his decision is wrong must be an idiot.
“In other words, I was right,” said Vadesh. “But it’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to admit it. Ego plays such a strong role in the self-deceptions of human beings.”
“With a facemask, will my self-deception be even more effective?” asked Rigg.
“Oh yes,” said Vadesh. “But so will your ability to see right through your own self-deceptions.”
Even now, knowing what he knew, suspecting what he suspected, Rigg couldn’t help feeling a closeness to Vadesh, especially when he talked in conundrums and paradoxes the way Father always did.
He also felt as much loathing for Vadesh as ever.
Any human who is guided by his emotions is a fool, thought Rigg. Because we can feel absurdly opposite things at the same time.
“Did you bring a facemask to me?” asked Rigg.
“No,” said Vadesh. “You don’t want to take on the struggle for dominance here, where there is so much outside stimulation to distract you. You’d be swallowed up.”
“You found that out by seeing people go mad?”
“Of course,” said Vadesh. “There’s such a steep price for failure.”
“But you never pay it,” said Rigg.
“I’m a machine,” said Vadesh. “And the Pinocchio story is absurd. Machines don’t want to be real boys. Real boys are so corruptible, so easily distracted, deceived, killed.”
“And no one deceives you?”
“Many think they do,” said Vadesh. “And I pretend that they’ve succeeded.”
“So you’re the deceiver.”
“We’re all deceivers, Rigg Sessamekesh,” said Vadesh. “I’m just better at it.”
“So is there any point in my asking you whether you have prepared a facemask for me that will be too powerful for me to master?”
“No, there’s no point in your asking, and no, I have prepared nothing different to what I prepared for Loaf.”
“So you did prepare it for Loaf.”
“I prepared it for whoever chose to accept it,” said Vadesh.
“Loaf took it to save me.”
“He chose to be a hero. Who was I to refuse to allow him to play the role?”
“But you weren’t going to force it on me?” said Rigg. He found that hard to believe.
“I don’t force anyone to do anything,” said Vadesh. “I explain and let them decide for themselves.”
“You didn’t explain anything to Loaf,” said Rigg.
“He didn’t give me time.”
Rigg searched back in his memory. Did Loaf really cause the facemask to leap onto his body, or did Vadesh flip it up into place? Human memory was so unreliable. As soon as Rigg tried to imagine either scenario, each seemed equally real and equally false.
“Did you bring a flyer, or were you going to carry me to the starship?” asked Rigg.
“Do you want a flyer? You merely asked me to meet you.”
Rigg shook his head. “Bring the flyer and take me there. Or don’t, and I’ll walk. I enjoy solitude and I know my way around a forest.”
Of course the flyer was close by—expendables could move faster than humans, but not fast enough to get to the Wall without using a flyer, not in the amount of time Rigg had given Vadesh to comply with his orders.
“Why did you decide on my poor primitive facemask instead of those wonderful Companions of the Larfolders?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg did not answer.
“Are you going to leave me in suspense?” asked Vadesh.
Rigg wanted to retort, Why would a machine feel suspense? But instead he did not answer at all. Why should he pretend that the normal human courtesies applied in a conversation between a man and a machine? Especially when the man was the one who supposedly commanded all the ships and expendables.
Man! Rigg inwardly grimaced at his own vanity. How I strut. I’m not a man, I’m a boy, trying to do a man’s job.
Or commit a monstrous crime.
One or the other.
The flight was without incident. They landed, not at the city, where they would need to take the high-speed tram through the mountain, but at a structure inside the crater made by the ancient impact when the starship collided with Garden. Then there was an elevator ride down to the starship far below.
But they crossed the same bridge from the wall of the stone chamber to the outside door in the starship’s side. All the starships dwelt inside an identical wound in the stone of the world, because all those wounds had been shaped by the forcefield that protected the starship and its passengers from all the effects of collision and sudden changes in inertia.
Rigg followed Vadesh carefully, trying to be aware of any new hazards, trying to notice all kinds of things he had overlooked before.
But the main thing Rigg searched for was the path of Ram Odin.
It was surprisingly easy to find, now that he knew it might exist. It was the oldest path in the starship. It was also the newest. It led again and again from the control room to the stasis chambers and then to the revival room and then back to the control room.
But in the past eleven thousand years, Ram Odin had not left the starship. Not since he crossed through the Wall from Ramfold.
Interesting. The Ram Odin that had been on the Vadeshfold copy of the starship had been killed by his expendable. And yet his path was here in the ship. A path markedly older than the already ancient passage of Ram Odin from Ramfold into Vadeshfold.
For a moment, Rigg wondered if that meant that the Ram Odin of this starship had not been killed; maybe all of them had lived, the way the Ram Odin of Odinfold had lived.
But no. That most ancient path moved throughout the ship, and then abruptly ended in the control room a few decades before another version of Ram Odin came through the Wall.
Thus Rigg learned the answer to a question that had bothered both him and Umbo ever since they learned about the starships. Paths were tied to the gravity of planets, and moved through space with the world where the paths were laid down. But when people were in space, their paths stayed with the ship transporting them. Unlike boat passengers on the Stashik River, whose paths stayed in the same position relative to the river, and not with the boats, the path of Ram Odin during the starship’s voyage stayed with the starship, even after the ship impacted with the planet’s surface.
I can see it all, thought Rigg. When the time comes, I can watch Vadeshex murder the Ram Odin of this starship.
But no. Being there as an observer would be hard to conceal from the expendable, who would then know there were such things as time-shifting humans from the future. It might cause the expendable—all the expendables—to behave differently. It might utterly change the course of history.
It couldn’t erase Rigg, of course—he and Umbo had settled that long ago. The agents of time change could not be undone by the shifts they themselves caused. They called it the “conservation of causality,” like the conservation of matter and energy. As causers, they had to remain in existence, even if the future they came from was otherwise erased.
But I’m not the only one whose existence I need to protect.
Rigg followed Vadesh to the revival chamber. “I need to do it here in case you have an adverse physical reaction,” Vadesh explained. “Loaf was robust and needed no life support. You might need to be sustained during your struggle for control.”
“When will you know if I’ve failed?”
“I’ll know,” said Vadesh.
“Tell me the symptoms that will lead you to that conclusion,” said Rigg.
Vadesh said nothing.
“I think I gave you a command.”
“I don’t have an answer,” said Vadesh. “I don’t know the symptoms that would lead to that conclusion, because you’re only the second person to receive one of this particular genotype of facemask, and the first one did not fail.”