“That’s the reason I dug it,” said S’Heernoh, again somewhat discomforted. “Or, to be more accurate, the reason I had it dug. I wasn’t close enough to do it myself, so I had to work through—surrogates. The procedure is prohibited except in extreme emergency, so I won’t try to explain it. After you were in the pit I let the emergency healer take care of you, and merely stood guard. And, of course, when it came time to send Aysayn and his warriors after you to that village, I didn’t have to check with the computer to know where you were. I was already following your every movement. ”
“Then that mist upon the Snows was your doing as well,” said I, suddenly seeing the point. “As the device we know as the Snows is a doing of your people, the mist must be the same. ”
“No, it so happens it wasn’t,” said the male, surely aware of my upset upon the point. It had been the mist which had kept me from knowing of the terrible ending which had been Kalir’s, due to the wearing of my life sign. “That mist was caused by the children, it being their belief that you had avoided death till then by being able to check the computer probabilities. They misted the sequence to keep you out of it, which also kept them out, but they couldn’t use it to keep me out when I wasn’t Walking with you. And no, I didn’t know what would happen with your life sign. I don’t get to check the probabilities for any longer than anyone else—the time flow in that sequence is almost as fast as the flow in this place is slow. We’ve discovered that having it that way is best—my people are as human as yours, and if humans are given too long a look at the possibilities of the future, they get the urge to tamper. Despite what I told you about certain happenings being so sure to come about that all branchings lead to it, that still refers only to probability. If everything continues on the way it has been going, the computer is saying, the probability of the event is so high that it’s a virtual certainty. Even before Jalav was born, the probability of her achieving success in her efforts was so high that she was immediately incorporated into the computations of the computer, setting her presence so clearly into the Snows that any Pathfinder was able to see it. Her abilities plus the certainty of my protection against things she couldn’t be expected to cope with did that, but that doesn’t mean her success was totally unavoidable. If she had been accidentally killed in battle—highly unlikely because of her skill—or had fallen off her mount and broken her neck—again, highly unlikely—or had been ended by pure chance, the near-certain probability would have immediately been changed to absolute impossibility. Nothing is set immovably in the future; that’s why the computer deals with certainties only after the event has already happened.”
The male looked closely upon me to be certain I had absorbed his meaning, and indeed did I feel considerably better. It had not been he who had callously contributed to Kalir’s sickening ending, and the hand of the Snows was not wrapped about the throats of those who lived upon my world. No more than a mirror was the device called computer, reflecting the doings of those who lived, and then speaking of what likely would occur by cause of their own efforts. This, to me, was far more acceptable than that the Snows ruled us all, and now there was no need to contemplate the invasion of the White Land.
“Still do I fail to understand,” said Ceralt to S’Heernoh, drawing me back from my thoughts. “For what reason was this wench chosen to overcome all opposition, so surely that the doing was set even before her birth? That it was so is inarguable, for many Pathfinders have seen and reported the thing. And for what reason was it so certain that you would lend her your aid? Is she truly chosen by the gods, and you the guardian set to her protection?”
“Or perhaps she was meant to be yours, and for this reason you guarded her so carefully,” said Mehrayn, something of desperate upset to be heard beneath his calm. “Neither Ceralt nor I were meant to have her, and we the greatest of fools for believing we might.”
“No, no, that’s not it at all,” said S’Heernoh hurriedly, looking from one stricken face to the other. “You’re both wrong—and now I’m going to have to tell you certain things I had hoped to be able to gloss over. Ah well, no sense fighting the inevitable. If it hadn’t come up now, you would have thought of it sooner or later.”
“You must try to understand how really long a time I’ve been here,” said S’Heernoh, once again gazing solely upon me. “A lifetime for my people is much, much longer than a lifetime for yours, even your kin from the Union, because we’ve learned full mind control. When you can heal injuries and illness in yourself, you can also stop and reverse the clogging of your arteries, the thinning of your blood, the wearing out of your organs. Growing old is a disease we don’t let ourselves suffer from—until and unless it’s what we really want. I’ve been here long enough to see your ancestors get cut off from the Union, to see the women who took the power crystals form a protective group that practiced with primitive weapons so that they couldn’t be forced to give up what they’d stolen, and then to see them argue and split into two independent groups; to see men leave the rest of the colony in disgust and build their own city, in anger over the colony’s refusal to go after the crystal-stealing women and force them to return the crystals. The rest of the colony didn’t believe in violence of any sort, and insisted on waiting until the women returned the crystals without being forced to it. By the time others took over who weren’t quite so patient, the crystals and the reason for their return were a foolish memory of fairy tales fit only to be laughed at.
“The women grew to be warriors who called themselves Midanna, after the group named Mida their founders were members of. The men who founded their own city also became warriors, calling themselves Sigurri after their first leader, Sig Uris. Those who were the remaining members of the colony, lacking the ‘purpose’ of the other two groups, merely began spreading out, caring very little about their fellow man. They fought among themselves and cheating became a way of life—and the computer said that if something wasn’t done, the probability of their wiping themselves out was so high that it was a virtual certainty.
“You must understand that if not for that, I wouldn’t have interfered,” said S’Heernoh, now all but begging understanding. “They had to have purpose, something to believe in, something honorable to emulate. I—went down among them, won a wary respect by showing I could be as violent and unethical as they were—then began showing them a better way. It took awhile, but by the time I left there were enough converts to the ethical way of doing things that I knew the concept wouldn’t die out—and neither would the people. After a number of years, they even changed my name by spreading it around word-of-mouth. They called their deity . . . ”
“The Serene Oneness, for S’Heernoh!” I exclaimed, aware of the manner in which Mehrayn—and certainly Ceralt—now looked upon the third male. “S’Heernoh has no meaning, yet Serene Oneness—”
“Yes, that has meaning,” said S’Heernoh with something of a smile, looking toward neither male who looked upon him. “At any rate, once I got myself involved with the people of this world, the computer calculated the possibility of my doing it again, then added me into its calculations. I’d found a great attraction in the women called Midanna, you see, and the computer decided it was only a matter of time before I went to look at them more closely, so to speak. It turned out that the computer was right.”