Visitors

Chapter 5 Burning House

Rigg had planned to make his tour of the wallfolds by himself. He didn’t want to make conversation with anybody, and he didn’t want to have to worry about protecting someone else. Truth to tell, he would have welcomed Umbo. But not the Umbo of today—what he wished for was the Umbo he had set out with years before. Before the rivalry. Though perhaps there was never a time before rivalry—just a time before Rigg knew about it.

What Rigg certainly did not want was to travel with any of the expendables. Even if he thought they could be trusted, he couldn’t get past the fact that they all looked like Father. They all were Father. He had spent his childhood traveling with an expendable. Learning everything from him. It. Subservient to it. Until it pretended to die and thrust him onto this path which was leading… somewhere.

Yet if there was anyone Rigg wanted to travel with less than the expendables, it was Ram Odin. And not just because he had such clear memories of Ram trying to kill him, and even clearer ones of killing Ram Odin himself. It was because Ram Odin already knew far more about the wallfolds than Rigg could possibly learn in a few weeks or even years of wandering. Rigg wanted to come up with his own information. Make up his own mind.

So of course, when the flyer arrived to take him to Yinfold, the farthest of the wallfolds, there was Ram Odin, waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

“You don’t look happy to see me,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m never happy to see you,” said Rigg. “Though I feel safer when I can see you than when I can’t.”

“I’m going with you,” said Ram Odin.

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Are you sure the flyer will go if I don’t approve it?” said Ram Odin.

“Then I won’t use the flyer,” said Rigg, feeling tired already. “Or I’ll just go back in time and use it yesterday. Or last month.”

“Rigg,” said Ram Odin. “Be reasonable. Your goal is to judge all the wallfolds. I’ve been watching them for ten thousand years, off and on. The expendables have been watching continuously.”

“So a fresh pair of eyes might be helpful.”

“I agree,” said Ram Odin. “But don’t throw away our knowledge. We can help make your visits more efficient and effective.”

“You can make sure I see only the things that will support the conclusions you’ve already reached.”

“That’s always a danger, even if I try not to. But you bring your own biases, too. You’re a child of Ramfold. How long before you stop seeing everything through the lens of your experiences there?”

“I’ll never stop seeing things that way. You’re a child of Earth. How long before—”

“Exactly my point. I see things from the perspective of having known another world, where there was no Wall. But do you think because I grew up on Earth, I know Earth?”

“Better than I do.”

“I grew up where I grew up. I knew my neighborhood, my schools. My college, but even then I only knew the other kids I hung out with, the professors I studied with. I visited a few other countries. Studied in them. Learned a foreign language—which is no joke, when you don’t have the Wall to impose all languages into your brain. By the standards of Earth I was widely read and widely traveled. And I have no idea what it’s like to grow up in China or India or Africa or Brazil. Even if I grew up in one of those countries, I’d only know my village, my schools, my friends.”

“Then I’d better stop talking with you and get busy exploring,” said Rigg.

“You traveled down the Stashik River. First without money, trapping animals for meat as long as open country held out. Then with Loaf to guide you and shape your experience on the river and in O. Then as a prisoner so all you saw were your invisible paths. Then closed up in Flacommo’s house and in the library. You had how many hours on the loose in Aressa Sessamo before you made your escape, and then you were in that carriage heading for the Wall. Rigg, how well do you know Ramfold?”

“I know what I know,” said Rigg stubbornly. “I know the things that everybody knows, and I know some things that only I know. You may know the whole history, you may have seen it through all its history while I only know the last fifteen minutes of it, but you didn’t grow up in Ramfold, so you don’t really know it, either.”

“You don’t know Ramfold, Rigg. You know Fall Ford and the forests above Upsheer, and then a quick tour of the river. What do you know about the vast lands on either side? That’s where most of the millions of people of Ramfold live. Village after village. Places where they’ve never heard the language of Aressa Sessamo. Places where even the tax collectors don’t go.”

Rigg sat on the edge of the ramp and put his head in his hands. “And I’ll know even less about the other wallfolds. I get it. But I have to do something.”

“Then do it with me. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut, all right? I’ll try not to shape your perceptions. Yes, I think I know what you’ll learn. But I’ll let you learn it.”

“The best way to do that is not to go with me,” said Rigg.

“I know how dangerous it is,” said Ram Odin, “and you don’t.”

“I’ve dealt with danger before. I think I can get out of ­trouble more easily than anybody in the world, except Umbo. And Noxon.”

“You won’t learn much if you’re always getting out of trouble. And think of what you’ll do by ‘getting out of trouble.’ Suddenly disappear. You think they won’t notice? Word won’t spread? You think that won’t change what people believe about the world?”

“I did a lot of that in Ramfold, and I didn’t change everything.”

“Of course you changed everything! Just because you can’t see what it would have been without all your disappearing and reappearing—that’s all you and Umbo did, over and over, was change things!”

Rigg had to concede the point. “And having you with me will accomplish exactly what?”

“It will keep you from getting thrown out of every village in every wallfold. Are you forgetting that you’re wearing that twitching fungus on your face?”

“I never forget it,” said Rigg. “I’ve seen Noxon.”

“So how do you propose to get past the phase where they stone you and drive you out as a freak?”

“You make it sound like all I’ll find in every wallfold is terrified privicks.”

“All you’ll find is humans responding to a very strange stranger.”

“At least I’ll speak the language like a native.”

“That will make them even crazier, Rigg! In every wallfold except Odinfold and Larfold, people are sharply aware that the only people who speak their language like a native are the people they know. Along comes a stranger with a misshapen face and eyes not quite back into alignment, and he speaks as if he grew up among them—obviously a sorcerer, a witch, a devil!”

“So you’ll be my normal-human companion,” said Rigg.

“Your grandfather,” said Ram Odin.

“It’s not even a lie,” said Rigg, “give or take five hundred generations.”

“If we go into the city, then you suffer from some weird ­country disease. But I don’t think you want to go to the cities—in the few wallfolds that have any real cities.”

“Come on,” said Rigg. “People always form into cities.”

“They do when they can,” said Ram Odin, “but no larger than the economy and the transportation systems can support. In some places, five thousand people is a city. In other places, it doesn’t feel like a city till fifty thousand. Odinfold once had ­cities of twenty million, but we’ve erased those paths through time. At the moment, with about a quarter of a million people Aressa Sessamo is one of the four largest cities on the whole planet of Garden. Most wallfolds have a largest city of no more than fifty thousand.”

“And you think I don’t want to go into them.”

“Because you’ve seen O and you’ve seen Aressa Sessamo. When humans live together in large numbers, they make the same accommodations. They develop the same rules, because only a few rules work. But in hamlets of ten families, villages of fifty households, towns of two hundred households—there’s where really interesting, peculiar customs can grow up because what evolves is exactly what suits the people in that place.”

“You’re already trying to shape my way of looking at other wallfolds,” said Rigg.

“I’m telling you that cities converge on the same kind of system of dealing with anonymity and crowding. But villages diverge and there’s where the really interesting things pop up.”

“Nothing interesting ever ‘popped up’ in Fall Ford.”

“You and Umbo popped up there.”

“You know we were poked into Fall Ford, me as a baby, Umbo as a genetic alteration.”

“But Nox wasn’t. She just grew there. Do you think every village has a Nox?”

Rigg thought about the woman he once believed, or at least hoped, was his mother. She kept a boardinghouse that took in the rare traveler. She cooked meals that people in Fall Ford praised and envied. She was kind and protective.

And she had the ability to create a mental field around her in which she could calm people down. It didn’t reach far, but it certainly was effective. You couldn’t be very angry or very afraid around Nox.

“She’s the mayor of Fall Ford,” said Rigg, realizing it for the first time. “Nobody knows it, but everybody knows it. It wasn’t just when they were coming after me. They always go to Nox.”

“She’s like a drug,” said Ram Odin. “When things made them upset, they’d go to Nox and she helped them feel better. When they were calmed down, they made better decisions. They all knew it, even if they didn’t know it.”

“You don’t know Nox.”

“But Ramex did. And he told me. She’s not the only one. She’s the other direction that human evolution took in Ramfold. We needed timeshapers so we paid more attention to you. But I had Ramex take you to a village that had Nox. A soother. Because you and Umbo were very likely to cause some crazy things to happen. And with Nox around, things couldn’t go too wrong.”

“And the other wallfolds—did they develop people like Nox?”

“I thought you wanted to form your own opinions.”

Rigg rolled his eyes. “So you’ll be my grandfather. That doesn’t explain my face.”

“It puts you under an old man’s protection. Instead of coming in as a lone monster, you come in as an old man’s strange grandson. That solves one problem, but not the big one.”

“That we’ll still be strangers wherever we go.” Rigg heard himself saying “we” and he knew in that moment that he had already decided to bring Ram Odin along. Because it really would be impossible to do this on his own. Oh, he could visit wallfolds alone, and observe people from a distance, but what would he really know about them without hearing them talk? Without seeing how they live? And with this mask on his head, he couldn’t get close enough. He hadn’t thought that through, and Ram Odin had, and so Ram Odin was going to get his way because his way was better.

“We have to have a reason for traveling,” said Ram Odin. “Or they’ll think we’re criminals, or escapees, or wild men, or refugees, or whatever else sets people to wandering. Where did you want to go first?”

“Yinfold,” said Rigg.

“Go to the farthest and work your way back. Makes sense.”

“When we’re traveling in Yinfold, what’s our story?”

“Depends on where in Yinfold. It’s a big place. There are only nineteen wallfolds on two very large continents. Each one is as big as—well, you don’t know Earth, so the comparison—”

“I studied maps and globes of Earth when we were in Odinfold,” said Rigg. “We all did.”

“Each of our wallfolds here is the size of Europe from Poland on westward. The size of India. Han China. I once divided the land masses of Earth into nineteen roughly equal parts and in some of those parts, there was an amazing amount of history. Great empires rising and falling.”

“But not in all.”

“Well, some of them were desert wastelands. Either very cold deserts, or very hot ones. But we have no great deserts in Garden. Only little ones.”

“So all the wallfolds are habitable.”

“When I plotted out where each starship should make landfall, I made sure that every one of them included plenty of well-watered arable land.”

“I get it. Each wallfold is huge and there’s a lot of variation within them.”

“More than you know. And also less. But no, I’ll let you find out.”

Rigg shook his head. “If you’re already dropping hints…”

“Do you have any idea how long it’s been, with no other human to talk to?”

“You have the expendables. I know from experience that they can be lively conversationalists.”

“Walking, talking databanks,” said Ram Odin. “Not people.”

“So in Yinfold, what’s our reason for wandering?”

“They have a lot of traveling healers and soothsayers. People who tell fortunes and then move on before anyone can tell whether their prophecies come true.”

“You’re not going to have me time-shift and come back with true answers, are you?”

“It wouldn’t even work, because foreknowledge would change their behavior so it wouldn’t come true after all, likely as not,” said Ram Odin. “But I’m thinking we make up a whole new category. Something that will actually work, but something they’ve never seen before.”

Even though Yinfold was settled everywhere, there was no trouble finding an uninhabited place to set down the flyer, even quite near to what passed for a city there. Rigg thought of Aressa Sessamo, built up out of a swamp in a river delta. Nearly empty watery land all around it, and yet what land there was, incredibly fertile with the silt of millennia of river floods. Water to carry boats and therefore cargos for trade. A huge natural moat for defense. But it still hadn’t kept out the horse warriors of the Sessamoto.

“This is good land,” said Rigg. “Why is it empty?”

“Good land, bad land,” said Ram Odin. “People gather where other people are, so they can mate readily. That leaves lots of empty places where people can go when they can’t stand the place they’re in, or something goes wrong and they have to leave. A place is settled for five thousand years, and then for the next five thousand years, nobody goes near the place, and yet it’s the same place.”

“There used to be a lot of settlement above Upsheer,” said Rigg. “That’s why they kept building bridges over the falls. But nobody lives there now.”

“They’ll go there again,” said Ram Odin. “Ship, where we’ve just parked the flyer—has this ever been settled land?”

“Three different villages,” said the computer voice in the flyer. “And farmland for twenty percent of the time. Usually, though, it’s lightly wooded, sharply cut terrain, because of the ravines.”

“See how much you’ve already learned about Yinfold?” said Ram Odin.

The first morning, Ram Odin put on a nondescript robe. “I have to go alone and get clothing for you.”

“Wearing that?”

“Trousers never came into fashion here. This robe is really from Untungfold, so it’ll look exotic here. But mostly it looks like money, and that’s the impression I need to give here in town while I buy clothes for you.”

“And then I’ll go with you into town?”

“Town? Why would you go into town? No, I’m getting us clothes to travel through the hamlets eight hundred kilometers from here.”

“Fashions from here will look right that far away?”

“We’re strangers,” said Ram Odin. “Travelers. We have to be dressed exotically. But it has to be clothing that won’t look too strange to any Yinfolder. Please trust me. I’ve made visits like this before. A lot more often when I was younger and still thought…”

“Still thought the differences between places would matter,” Rigg said, completing the sentence for him.

“Still thought,” Ram Odin replied sternly, “that I would learn something useful from seeing for myself. The differences do matter. The differences are the best and most important thing about Garden.”

“Go get me my clothes,” said Rigg.

Because he had given up on getting a completely unbiased view, Rigg read as much as he could about Yinfold while Ram Odin was gone. Hundreds of small kingdoms and princi­palities and duchies and counties and free cities, sometimes coming together into something like nations but mostly not. Some major language groups but so much change over the millennia, and so many holdovers from once-widespread languages, that the language map of Yinfold was chaotic. For interest’s sake, Rigg brought up the language map of Ramfold and found that while it used to be the same there, the few centuries of Sessamid rule had already caused hundreds of languages to die out, especially near the river, to be replaced by the common speech. All very fascinating and yet also predictable. A quick scan of the other wallfolds showed similar language maps and language histories, similar political maps with small political units rising and falling, sometimes coalescing but then collapsing back into chaos again.

Like watching the seashore, thought Rigg. Like sitting on the beach at the gathering place in Larfold and watching the waves, never exactly the same, but never all that different, either. Like watching flames, dancing patterns of red and yellow heat, always shifting, never changing till the fire died.

What did the Visitors see in each of these wallfolds, with their too-brief visits? Of course, they were able to copy all the data from the ships’ computers and the satellites and the expendables, so they had plenty of history—all these maps—to study on the way home to Earth, and plenty to discuss afterward.

But somehow what they saw made them send the Destroyers to wipe out all human life on Garden. Something here made us worthy of death, in their eyes.

Ram Odin came back, not with robes, but with tunics and belts and overcoats. “The weather’s warm but we still wear the coats because we’ll need them later in the year. It’s what unwealthy travelers do, because they don’t want to keep buying new coats every year.”

“I’m looking for the underwear,” said Rigg.

“Are you planning to undress in front of the locals?”

“Shouldn’t I be authentic, just in case?”

“In that case, what’s underwear? Only women wear it, and only now and then.”

Rigg felt the fabric. “Ah. Not woolen. It’s cotton.”

“So you don’t need a protective layer,” said Ram Odin. “Put it on, grandson of mine.”

“It’s awfully clean and new.”

“So maybe they’ll think we must be pretty good at our work, to earn enough to buy new clothes.”

“I want to see the town,” said Rigg. “Just because you tell me they’re all alike…”

“Suit yourself,” said Ram Odin.

So they spent the rest of the day in town. Rigg forgot the name almost as soon as he heard it, because it didn’t matter. It was so much smaller and grubbier than O, the city he knew best, that he lost interest almost at once. He knew that was cultural chauvinism and that he had to avoid such thoughts. And it wasn’t that small. It had three large market squares and they were ­bustling. But the merchandise wasn’t terribly different—Rigg knew the use of every object that he saw for sale—and while the flavors of the foods on offer were spiced differently from any fashion he had tasted in his travels in Ramfold, they were based on familiar ingredients.

When he commented on this, Ram Odin chuckled. “A faulty perception, Rigg. They’ve had ten thousand years to breed all kinds of different fruits and vegetables and to reshape the food animals, too. About a thousand years ago they started breeding rodents to eat. They’ve got pig-sized rats now, about thirty ­varieties, and you just ate a stew blending two kinds.”

“Very tender,” said Rigg. “Huge rats? No wonder the Visitors blow Garden to smithereens.”

“They just burn off the surface,” said Ram Odin. “Hard to smither a planet.”

The flyer carried them that night to the place Ram Odin had chosen to begin their experience as itinerants. They slept in the self-adjusting beds of the flyer and it occurred to Rigg that people from Ram Odin’s world all slept on beds like that, not the rough places Rigg had grown up sleeping. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe such beds were only for the elite, but the elite were the ones who traveled in space so they demanded beds like this. Was this Ram Odin’s whole life? In beds that shaped themselves to fit you?

Yet he came here to make a world—nineteen worlds, as it turned out—where people slept on straw, or on the ground, or on a hundred other kinds of bed. Worlds where people kept ­reinventing everything, but still did the same human tasks. The same animal tasks. Eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, reproducing, sleeping, finding or making food, finding or making shelter, and finally dying. Animal life, with clothing. Animal life, with better explanations for what we do.

All the animals Rigg had trapped and killed and skinned during his years with Father, Rigg had known they were his kin. That they, too, were only hungry or cold, libidinous or sleepy, seeking a way to satisfy whatever need their body made first priority. I used that against them, to lay traps for them because they weren’t clever enough to foresee their danger.

That’s all we are—animals who are better at telling the future, better at understanding causality in the past. We see how things got how they are, or guess at it, and use that information to make better choices for the future. Not good choices, just better ones than the other animals.

He thought of how he made traps of string and sticks and realized: Brains and fingers, that’s what we have.

But then he felt the mattress under him, and the light sheet over him, and thought: Brains and fingers have wrought marvels in these worlds.

They woke and dressed in their tunics and strapped on their walking sandals and made small packs out of the other things Ram Odin had bought—a pot, a ladle, a spoon, two blankets, needles and thread, rope and string, some cheese, some crusty bread, a bit of dried meat—of which rodent Rigg didn’t bother to ask. They hitched the packs onto their shoulders. They weren’t that heavy, but Rigg could tell right away that he would hate the way the pot bounced against his back when he walked. But he also knew that in time he’d get used to it. Or find a way to repack so that the pot didn’t shift so much with each step.

From the flyer it was a two-hour walk to get to a road. Ram Odin called it a road. He called it the King’s Highway, in fact, but it was barely a track.

“Ah, but you can see it clearly, and it goes from the Wall in the northwest to the Wall in the southeast. We’re a hundred kilometers from the northwest Wall, so it’s only a track here. Farther on, it’s wide enough for two coaches to pass. In two cities, it’s paved and four carriages wide.”

They walked along the track till, coming over a rise no different from the past few rises, they saw a cluster of houses and wide, well-cultivated fields. A few of the houses were rather substantial, with two stories; one had three. From the crest of the rise, they could see that there was another, larger village in the shimmering distance. They were in a wide valley now, and a river twisted its way through the level ground. Rigg saw no boats on it.

“No point in boats here,” said Ram Odin. “There are falls not far behind us, and falls again after the lake a few dozen ­kilometers on. They’re not much for fish.”

“Humans need fish.”

“They grow the substitute vegetables,” said Ram Odin. “And by the way, let’s start speaking this language.” He switched to the one they had heard on the streets of the town the day before.

“They speak that here?” asked Rigg, in that language.

“Not at all, but they speak it somewhere in Yinfold and so if someone is hiding in the brush along the edges of the fields, they’ll hear us using a language from this wallfold.”

Sure enough, there were soon children darting out of cover and running down the track ahead of them. “I guess we don’t look too threatening,” said Ram Odin. “If the children are willing to run openly down the road ahead of us.”

“But they still ran.”

“To give news of our coming,” said Ram Odin. “We’re the most exciting thing in days, I’ll wager.”

Rigg remembered life in Fall Ford. The children there noticed the arrival of strangers, but didn’t run to tell. That’s because strangers came several times a week and always went to Nox’s boardinghouse for a meal and news and perhaps a bed. Then they would go up the stair beside the falls into Upsheer Forest, or along the road—much more of a road than this King’s Highway—that ran east and west below the face of Upsheer Cliff, to the other towns that lived in its shadow. He had thought Fall Ford an isolated, sleepy place, but now he saw it as a hub of traffic, compared to this.

Fall Ford was also five times as big. More houses. More tradesmen’s shops. Rigg wondered if they thought of themselves as a village or a town? There was an open square in the middle that might be a weekly market. Or might not. It could simply be the place where they hanged strangers.

Ram Odin was making it a point to nod—but not smile—at the faces peering out of windows. “These aren’t smiley folk,” Ram Odin explained. “In this region, a smile means you’re a liar.”

Rigg noticed that people weren’t peering through cracks in curtains. They were fully visible in open windows. They returned Ram Odin’s solemn nod, some so slightly as to hardly be visible, some sharply, clearly, as if putting a bit of punctuation at the end of an unspoken sentence.

People must have gone out back doors and made their way to the square, because as Ram Odin and Rigg stepped into the open space, so did about twenty people, mostly adult men but some women, coming from behind houses on both sides, but only one man and one woman from the far side, where they hadn’t walked.

“Good morning,” said Ram Odin, glancing at the sun to be sure it wasn’t yet past noon. “We’re hoping to earn a bit of bread and ale in this place, if you find us worthy. And if you have enough work for us, a place to pass the night.”

“That’s what you want,” said the man who had come from the far side of the square. “Why do we want you?” Rigg figured him to be the mayor or headman. He seemed to have authority. Or at least none of the locals thought it out of place that he spoke first.

“What’s wrong with the young one?” asked a woman.

“Two questions deserving of fair answers. May I answer the second one first, seeing how you’re all looking so curious at my grandson here?”

Ram Odin directed his question at the mayor, who gave him one of those sharp nods. It was an answer.

“The boy was a baby, not three days old, when the house caught fire. It was a thatchy roof and the whole thing was ablaze at once. Inside the house, too. My son was screaming in pain, but the mother, my daughter-in-law, she was from a strange folk. My son brought her into the village from afar, and she knew a blessing, I think, because she came to the window and she was also aflame, but the baby wasn’t burning, not a lick. She dropped him out the window. Nobody was close enough to catch him, the house was so hot afire, but the baby didn’t burn even though she did. My son screaming, but her making never a sound.”

So Ram Odin was a storyteller. Rigg saw how the people were spellbound. He also heard how Ram Odin was speaking the local language perfectly, but he was bending the vowels to be a little like the language in the town where they spent yesterday. So he sounded a little foreign, but they could understand every word.

“When the ruin of the house cooled enough to come close, I picked up the baby. Not burnt at all, not even the blanket he was wrapped in. Whatever she was, the boy’s mother was powerful. Not powerful enough to put out the fire, but powerful enough to spare his life.”

“If he didn’t burn, what’s wrong with his face?” asked the same woman as before.

“She kept the flame off him, but not the heat. Couldn’t kill him, but his face melted. I tried to push it back into place as best I could, but you can see I’m no master with clay. Did my best and the boy’s used to it, an’t you, boy?”

Rigg nodded.

“Can’t talk?” asked the mayor.

“Now it’s three questions, and me barely finished with the first,” said Ram Odin. “The boy can talk all right. But he’s shy and he’d rather talk to me, mostly, when meeting strange folk.”

There was a general recoiling at that, some murmurs.

“Oh, now, don’t take me amiss,” said Ram Odin. “I know that in this place, we’re the strange folk. But you’re strange to us, don’t you see, just as we’re strange to you. Only we come here of our own choice, so we mean nothing wrong by it. We hope to serve you, and that brings me to the original question, the first question, Question Prime, the question of questions.”

“What are you good for that we should feed you?” asked the mayor again.

“Well, I’m not good for much. Old but still strong for my age, but that says little. It’s the boy, you see. A bit of the mother’s blood in him. Never got no training and he don’t know no spells, so you’ve nought to fear from him. But he’s got him a way of finding lost things.”

“What things?” demanded the mayor.

“Well, he don’t just happen to find them and then go looking for the owner,” said Ram Odin. “You have to tell him what you lost, and then he finds it, if it’s to be found, or tells you what’s become of it, if he can’t lay hands on it. Doesn’t always work, only about half the time, but here’s what I offer. You give us the meal for trying, and the bed for succeeding.”

“It’s a way to get a meal for nothing,” said the mayor dismissively.

“If you don’t even want us to try, we’ve still got a bit of cheese and bread and meat from yesterday, and we’ll leave right now. I saw another hamlet off in the distance.”

“That’s Stinkville Manor,” said a half-grown lad, and people laughed.

“Don’t like them much,” said the mayor. “They do everything wrong.”

“Then I suppose they’re likelier to have lost things so they’ll have more need of us.” Ram Odin clapped his hand on Rigg’s shoulder. “This is a lucky place, Rigg. They never lost anything they need to find.” He started walking across the square.

But the story had made an impression and most folk seemed disappointed. Then a man, a tall man, stepped into their way. “I lost a thing,” he said.

The mayor looked annoyed but didn’t try to stop the man from talking.

“I went to town a few year back,” he said. “Bought my wife five brass buttons with a bird etched into them, every single one. She sewed them into the back of her blouse, but now one’s gone missing.”

“Must be I bent over and it popped off, that’s all,” said his wife, who seemed reluctant to step forward.

“Cost me a bit,” said the man. “I’d like that button back.”

“That’s not hard, is it?” Ram Odin asked Rigg.

Rigg had already marked the woman’s path. Could see which buildings in town she had visited most, and most recently. He already had a good guess where the button was, and why she didn’t want it looked for. But she couldn’t admit that she didn’t want it found.

“Where was she when they was last sure the button was on the blouse?” Rigg asked softly. He pitched his voice so only Ram Odin and the people nearest them could hear, but that meant somebody could hear him, so he tried to do the same thing with his vowels that Ram Odin had done. So they might seem to come from the same place.

“How can I remember?” the woman said. “I didn’t even notice it was gone, till Bak noticed it.”

“But you would have known when you put it on, so you know the day,” said an older woman. Might it be her mother? From the way the women looked at each other, Rigg thought it was likely. And yes, sure enough their paths converged some years ago at another house. And that was where Bak’s wife’s path began.

“May I know your name?” asked Rigg.

“What do you need names for? No names!” said the mayor. “Ain’t going to have no witchery on folk here!”

“Might help me find the button,” Rigg murmured, “but it don’t matter.”

“Her name’s Jobo,” said Bak. “Everybody knows that.”

The mayor glared at him, but Bak only had eyes for Rigg.

“She had it at breakfast five days ago,” said Bak. “And at supper she didn’t. Don’t know where she went all day because we all was out haying. Second day of haying.”

“I didn’t feel well,” said Jobo. “I stayed home to rest.”

“Then he’ll find the button in our house,” said Bak to her gently.

To Rigg, it sounded as if he loved her. Very tender to her. But it also sounded as if he was going to find out about that button. Five days ago, and it still troubled him.

“You already looked?” asked Ram Odin.

“Turned the place upside down and shook it,” said Bak. Several people laughed. The man had a way with words and people liked him. “But buttons can get themselves into places. I know how that is. Button flies off, goes into a place and won’t come out.”

It dawned on Rigg that the mayor might be the bossy one, and maybe the richest one. But if people had their pick, they liked Bak more than they liked the mayor, and the mayor knew it. If Bak wanted these strangers to look for that button, the mayor knew better than to try to interfere.

And sure enough, the mayor shook his head. “They won’t find it cause there’s no such thing as magical finding, but if you want to feed them you do it.”

Since that was clearly what Bak already meant to do, all the mayor did was turn Bak’s intention into the mayor’s command. And everybody knew it. The mayor walked away and Bak reached out a hand to them.

“Come to my house. Sit at my table for the noonday meal. That’s where I last saw the button on her blouse, if that’s a help to you. And you’ll see how she does in the kitchen, fixing up the food, if that helps you.”

“Oh, so I have to do the work?” asked Jobo. “My button, my loss, but I have to fix up their noonses?”

“I know where the bread is,” said Bak, “and I can boil eggs.”

“I don’t want you cooking in my kitchen!” snapped Jobo. “I married the clumsiest oaf in the village, and I’m not having you breaking eggs all over everything.”

“Fixing to boil them is all,” said Bak mildly.

But Rigg saw how the people didn’t much like her, and liked him fine. Her snapping at him was a shame to herself, but not to Bak, because clearly none of the folk thought he deserved it. They kept their silence though. It was between woman and man, how they talked to each other.

Rigg and Ram Odin followed to a good-sized house. Not a poor family. It was a house they had passed. Rigg could see Jobo’s path going in and out, as also Bak’s. And children, but they must be grown because the paths went away and didn’t come back.

“Children still living here?” asked Ram Odin. “Big house like this.”

“My parents had seven that lived,” said Bak. “We had two. The boy went off to seek his fortune, poor lad, and the girl married out. I fear they didn’t like it here.”

Rigg wondered if it was marital squabbling that drove them away, or simply wanderlust. Or, in the girl’s case, maybe love.

“Think the boy found it?” asked Ram Odin. “His fortune?”

“If he has, he didn’t come back yet to share it,” said Bak.

His wife made a glottal stop to show exasperation. “He’s only two years gone,” she said to him.

“A year to get a fortune, a year to waste it, and then come home,” said Bak. “I expect him any day.”

“I’m going to see our daughter one of these days,” said Jobo. “Her husband writes twice a year.”

“She’s afar off?” asked Rigg.

“As far as an honest girl could go,” said Jobo mournfully. “Three villages yonder.” She pointed toward the south. Apparently the fourth village that direction would only lure dishonest girls. Ram Odin had been right. Their world was small.

During lunch, Ram Odin kept them entertained with lies about life on the road. Maybe some of the stories were from Ram Odin’s earlier life, or maybe they were well-known tales from Earth. They were all new to Rigg, but he also didn’t care, because he was tracing all Jobo’s movements.

In the old days, he could only see paths, until Umbo slowed down time—or sped up his perceptions, they had never really decided about that. But “seeing paths” wasn’t the right term, because he could do it with his eyes closed, and could examine the paths behind him, or beyond walls.

Now, with the facemask, he could speed up his own perceptions, with more precision than was possible with Umbo’s help. The paths were never truly paths now, if he looked at them aright, but a continuous blurred shape of the person moving about. And if he sped himself up more, the blurs became the person clearly doing whatever it was he did at that hour, of that day, in that place.

So he knew that as soon as the hamlet was emptied out, Jobo slipped along behind the houses till she came to the ­mayor’s house, and went in through the back door. She found the mayor waiting for her in his own upstairs bedroom—she seemed to know the way—and that was where all her buttons popped off in his eagerness. Afterward, she stayed to sew them all back on again, but there were only four. The mayor was all over that room, trying to find where the fifth button had bounced.

Rigg closed his eyes and slowed things down—or sped himself up—even more. Now they barely moved, but he could see the buttons pop off one by one. The ones they found easily. And that fifth one. It took a bounce under the wardrobe and must have lodged on some slat or in some corner because it didn’t hit the floor again. Looking under the wardrobe wouldn’t help. Even sliding it out, unless you tipped it or hit it to dislodge the button.

Well, Bak’s worst suspicions were certainly confirmed, and if Rigg found the button in the mayor’s house—well, that would only be possible if the mayor let him in.

But if I make for his house, he’ll bar me from it. That won’t help—Bak will only be all the more certain that his wife and the mayor were up to something.

Ram Odin must have guessed as much as Rigg now knew, because he was telling the story of a woman caught in adultery who had to wear a red letter on her clothing, always, the first letter of “adultery” in the language of the place, only when she died, the letter was also a scar on her chest, as if the letter had burned its way into her heart.

“Burning is right,” said Bak. “A woman who does that sin when she’s married and a mother, she’s burning down her own house.”

“It’s a terrible thing and nobody does it anymore,” said Jobo hotly.

“Only ten years since it was done.”

“In Stinkville, not here,” said Jobo.

“Well, that’s why they burned her up in her own house in Stinkville, and not here.”

“Is Stinkville really the name of the place?” asked Rigg. Thinking, meanwhile, That’s your punishment for adultery? To burn down the house with the woman inside?

“Well they don’t call it that,” said Jobo. “And they have a choice name for us, too, you may be sure.”

“What do you call this hamlet?” asked Rigg.

“Not everything has a name,” said Bak.

“We call it home,” said Jobo. “And I hate talk about evil old customs like house burning.”

“It always made a kind of sense to me,” said Bak. “His wife sleeps with another man, the husband’s house is already destroyed and his wife is already dead to him. Burning down the house just makes it real to everybody.”

“They don’t burn down the house around adulterous men.”

Bak merely looked puzzled. “Why would they? He’s not going to get pregnant with another bird’s egg!”

“You hear how he quotes foolish old sayings!” said Jobo hotly. “Everybody thinks he’s so nice, but he’s got a cold temper, cold but deep and it never stops till he’s satisfied.”

She was afraid of him. He bore her tongue well enough, but if he thought he had suffered real injury, he’d seek justice. That’s what she feared, and that was what she was trying to impress on Rigg. Just in case he actually was a finder.

Rigg knew he couldn’t find the button or the consequences would be terrible. Or at least he couldn’t openly find it where it was.

“After lunch, can I lie down and let the finding happen?” asked Rigg.

“He needs to be all alone, except for me,” said Ram Odin.

Including you, you old weasel, thought Rigg. But he didn’t dare to contradict him—if they ever disputed each other’s story, it would cast doubt upon all.

So a half hour later, they were shut up together in a room with a nice bed, by local standards, and Rigg explained in a soft voice where the button was.

“Don’t want to see this house burn down,” said Ram Odin.

“Not going to,” said Rigg. “I’ll get the button and find it somewhere else. Excuse me for a minute.”

He took off his sandals—they were noisy on the wood floors—and jumped back in time to the middle of the night. Sure enough, there was Jobo asleep in the bed, but not Bak. He must be sleeping somewhere else in the house.

Rigg crept softly from the room, out of the house—through an open window so he didn’t have to open the door—and along behind houses, following the same path that Jobo had used on haying day. He got up right behind the mayor’s house and then latched on to Jobo’s path as she left on that day. In an instant it was daytime, and Jobo was rushing away, the gap in her blouse showing skin between the bottom button and the three at the top. She had closed the door carefully, but Rigg knew the mayor would soon give up his continuing button search. Sure enough, the front door of the house soon opened and the mayor went out that way.

Now Rigg could go in and find the button. The house was empty and there was no one to hear him open the door and go up the stairs.

He felt around under the wardrobe. He could feel the slats underneath and knew that the button must be resting atop one of them. But he couldn’t twist his hand around to find it.

Can’t go tipping the wardrobe. What if it fell over? It’s a heavy piece of furniture.

So Rigg sighed and watched the scene from haying day four times, until he knew exactly where the button bounced. Then he positioned his hand to catch the button and jumped back about an hour to the exact moment—got it!—and shifted right back to when the house was empty. He was there so fleetingly, thanks to the quick reflexes that the facemask gave him, that even if the mayor’s mind hadn’t been on other things, he would only have seen him for an eyeblink. And Jobo’s back was to him.

Holding the button in his hand, Rigg wondered, not for the first time, if the reason the button never made a sound and came to rest on the floor under the wardrobe was that Rigg had caught it. But he hadn’t caught it until it already turned up missing.

That was where thinking about the changes they made always led—to the edge of paradoxical madness. They had long since agreed that nothing was circular. Things couldn’t cause themselves. So the button really had been lodged up there, ­setting in motion this entire dilemma, and now it wasn’t there, but only because Rigg, at the end of the chain of events, had gone back to fetch it.

He went out the back door, closed it carefully, and then jumped back to the night he arrived at the mayor’s house. Now, in dark of night, he walked to the main street and followed the many paths out beyond the town toward the hayfields. He knew that because that’s where everyone’s paths had gone on haying day. He picked a stone beside the track and pushed the button under it so it wasn’t visible at all, but still might believably have bounced there.

Then he walked back to Bak’s and Jobo’s house, climbed in the window, and went back up to Jobo’s room. On the way he saw that Bak was sleeping in one of the children’s bedrooms. His son’s bedroom. The door was closed; Rigg saw him only by his path. But he could see, with his path-sense, that Bak slept little. Could see him lying there staring at the ceiling. Maybe not right now, but for long hours of the night, tonight and the other nights since the button was missed and he left Jobo’s bed.

And there was Jobo, faithless woman. Rigg, with his knowledge of all people’s paths, knew well enough how common, and how uncommon, such actions were. More common in the city, less common in small villages, where everyone was known and it was hard to do anything unseen. It really took some ingenuity for Jobo and the mayor to betray their spouses here. And it had only happened twice, two months apart—Rigg knew that. Perhaps after this, never again.

Rigg jumped forward to the time right after he left Ram Odin.

“Got it?” Ram Odin asked.

“Moved it to where I’m going to find it,” said Rigg. “Took a bit of maneuvering.”

“So you’re going to help the conspirators get away with it,” said Ram Odin.

“This time.”

“I’m glad you confined yourself to retrieving the button,” said Ram Odin.

“What else could I have done?”

“You could have spooked her so she ran away before she got to his house,” said Ram Odin. “You could have gone back to the first time they caught each other’s eye and plotted this sort of thing.”

“Should I have?”

“If you did, we’d have a devil of a time explaining what we’re doing in this room, where no one invited us because nobody lost a button.”

“If I had Umbo’s talent,” said Rigg, “I could have appeared to us on the road and warned us away from this village.”

“I thought the facemask let you do everything Umbo does,” said Ram Odin.

“No,” said Rigg. “Not even close. He can speed up his own perceptions, so time seems to go slower, and he can speed up other people’s. He did that to me—that’s how I first learned that all these paths were really people. The facemask does it for me now—but it can’t speed up anybody else’s perceptions. And that business with just appearing to people? That’s Umbo. I latch on to a person’s path and there I am. He sends a message somehow. He’s the really powerful one, if he only learned to master it, but who can help him? What he does, nobody else does.”

“But once he gives a warning, doesn’t he have to be sure to give that same warning when he gets to that point in the future?” asked Ram.

“Hasn’t an expendable explained that to you?” asked Rigg. “Because of Umbo’s warning, we never get to that point in the future. It doesn’t exist. Everything that happened down that road—the network of cause and effect—it’s gone. It never happens.”

“So he never sends the message,” said Ram Odin, shaking his head.

“I remember thinking the same way,” said Rigg. “But what we’ve learned by experience is that an effect can’t undo its own cause. So the old future just disappears. Never happens. And I can never time-shift to a lost time because it leaves no paths in our past.”

“So why didn’t you just disappear when you warned yourself—or I should say, warned Noxon?”

“Because I didn’t warn Noxon. I’m not Umbo. I couldn’t just appear, I came. The moment I changed the course of events, Noxon would no longer become the me who had killed you. But that wouldn’t erase me—because I had caused the change in Noxon’s path, so I had to remain.”

“I hope I’m not the only one to whom this makes no sense.”

“It’s causality. Conservation of causality. Umbo’s messages can cause things in the past to change in such a way that it destroys the future in which he sends those messages. Like the messages from the Odinfold time-senders—because they’re sending an object, not going themselves. But a shifter like me and Noxon and Umbo, too, when he actually travels—I can’t go to the past and change it and destroy myself, because I am the causer, still in that past, persisting into the change I made. It makes sense, really.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Ram Odin. “But if you think you understand it, that’s good enough for me.”

They rested a little while on the lumpy bed—the master bed of the house, the best bed, thought Rigg—long enough to make it convincing. Then they came back out of the room. “I know where the button is,” said Rigg. “Let’s go get it.”

Jobo looked like she was barely containing her terror, but at this point she dared say nothing. Still, Rigg wasn’t cruel. “You must have forgotten when you went out toward the hayers. I don’t know if you were feeling better and thought to join them, and then changed your mind, or maybe you were just going to see if they were coming back.”

“I never went out of the house,” said Jobo, too fervently.

“You were ill,” said Ram Odin. “You might not remember. It might seem to you to be part of a dream. But if Rigg says he knows where it is, then he knows.”

The fear drained from her face, but what replaced it was not relief, but the same contempt she showed when she was sniping at Bak. She thinks I’m a fraud, thought Rigg. Well, let her think that. “Let’s go get it,” said Rigg. “It has to be you that finds it.”

“Why me?” asked Jobo. “I don’t think I went out there, so why should I go looking where I never was?”

“We learned a good time ago,” said Ram Odin, “that if Rigg’s the one as picks up whatever was lost, then folks will whisper that he had it all along, that he stole it in the first place. So he won’t come near it. You’ll find it.”

“I won’t.”

“But not for lack of trying,” said Bak softly. “You will try, because it’s very important to find that button. I paid good money for it in town. Because my wife should have brass buttons instead of common wooden ones.”

“I should never have nagged you for those foolish buttons.”

“They were the desire of your heart. And you were proud of them,” said Bak. “I try to get you your heart’s desire, when it’s within my reach.”

And in those words Rigg heard a lifetime’s tragedy. He didn’t know what it was, not without looking. But there was something Jobo had longed for that Bak could not obtain for her. More children than two, perhaps? Or something else unguessed. Rigg could follow the paths back and see the whole story, but he’d found out enough of their secrets for now.

The moment they came out of the house together, the four of them, other people came out of their houses. They were quiet in this hamlet—Rigg didn’t hear anyone shouting, though he did see children scampering a bit in the back way behind the houses. But it was pretty much the whole town following them, he could see by the paths. Only a few stay-at-homes—mothers with babies, old people sleeping in the middle of the day. The fieldwork of this place was over for the year, but it was not yet winter. They had been working at the preparatory tasks—cheesing, smoking meat, sausaging, repairing harnesses, making rope, remaking loose chairs, rehanging doors with a catch in them. Whatever work there was, that they could do for themselves, they had been doing. But they set it aside for this. For Jobo’s missing button. And Rigg wondered how many of them were coming along just for curiosity, to see if Rigg and Ram Odin were fakes, and how many because they knew perfectly well, or guessed rightly enough, where that button had been lost, and wanted to see if there’d be a housefire today.

Rigg made a show of groping through the air with his eyes closed, though of course he could see his own path from the night before and knew exactly where the button was. He also knew that no other path led near the place since he had put it there, so no one had found it or moved it since then.

Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he whirled and pointed to the exact point where he could see his own path bending over the stone. “There,” he said. “It bounced and lodged itself under a stone about this big.”

“Oh, really,” said Jobo.

“Will you look, or should I?” asked Bak softly. “I think the boy is telling the truth, or he thinks he is. Don’t you hope he’s right? Wouldn’t it be good to find that button here in the road?”

Jobo set her lips and marched to the place. She saw the rock—it was the only one “about this big” at that spot. Instead of bending, she only nudged it over with her foot.

Then she cried out and bent over, reaching for the button.

And then, because sometimes the universe conspired to make things work out perfectly, the wooden button she had sewn into the place of the missing brass one popped right off the blouse. Because she had bent over so far. Popped right off.

Jobo cried out and held up the button for all to see. Bak, though, moved behind his wife and carefully gathered the edges of the blouse together so no skin showed. Rigg had never seen a man so relieved and happy.

“I must have—I thought it was a dream,” said Jobo. “Like you said, I thought I was only dreaming that I came to see if you were coming back, only you weren’t, and then I felt very faint and I bent over all the way, to hang my head and get blood back into it, and that’s when it must have popped off. Oh, how could I have thought it was only a dream, when here’s the button to prove that it was real!”

Everyone was listening to her in her rapture, watching Bak in his joy. But Rigg had already seen how Ram Odin had moved over to stand beside the mayor and murmur something softly that no one else could hear.

The mayor heard, and gave a short sharp nod, and then moved away to join the crowd. Ram Odin came back to Rigg.

“You said to him…” Rigg prompted.

“I said, ‘We saved you this time, but if you ever do it again, I promise you that two houses will burn.’”

“Which would happen how?”

“That’s for him to worry about. To watch his own wife and maybe be a little more attentive to her. Or maybe he fears the second house would be some other mistress he’s taken in this village. I have no idea. But it sounded very menacing and fine, didn’t it?”

“So what have we learned here? Burning up adulterous women in their own house? This children’s news service? The way the best man in town is not the mayor, but everyone knows which one is best and the mayor can’t touch him?”

“All of that,” said Ram Odin, “and we still have supper tonight, and a bed to sleep in. Though I imagine we’ll be downstairs now in the boy’s and girl’s bedrooms, because I think that Bak will be in Jobo’s bed again.”

“How did you know?”

“I saw that the boy’s bed had been slept in, and the girl’s not, and Jobo’s bed in the room with us was the only one big enough for two. It isn’t calculus. It’s barely arithmetic.”

“So you see paths too.”

“Of a kind. In my way.”

And now the attention turned back to them, and suddenly people were crowding around them. But oddly enough, nobody had anything to find, except a child who had buried a favorite doll, and Rigg easily pointed to the place under a shade tree where the child had knelt for a time a year ago. The doll was there, half-rotted away, but now the children had far more reason to rejoice than over a brass button. Finder of Lost Toys! How his fame would spread.