Then one of the council members got up from the table and guards went with him as he walked to a place whose function Rigg recognized. It was the indoor lavatory. And if the councilors were being escorted by guards, it meant that they, too, were in custody.
Rigg could imagine what story was being circulated. The Council was under the “protection” of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Or had he gone farther? Had he announced that it was agents of the Council who had assassinated Flacommo and meant to kill the royals? Had he announced the restoration of Hagia Sessamin as Queen-in-the-Tent?
No, not yet. Because he couldn’t make any announcement about the royals until he could safely accuse the Council of having killed Rigg and Param. It wouldn’t do at all for him to claim they were dead, only to have them turn up somewhere very much alive.
And now Rigg realized that he and Param might not have to fear as extensive a search for them as he had expected. Citizen could hardly tell hundreds of soldiers to be on the lookout for the son and daughter of the queen! Word would spread very quickly—few soldiers were good at keeping their mouths shut. Soon there would be other groups searching for them for other reasons—some to kill one or the other of them, but others to save them, and maybe even some who would want to make Rigg King-in-the-Tent in place of Mother.
A nightmare that Citizen would do his best to avoid. No, he doubtless had relatively few people who knew just whom they were looking for. Even the soldiers who picked up Loaf and Umbo at the rendezvous probably didn’t know why they were wanted, and the ones who waited might have been told to seize anyone who emerged from a hiding place inside the park.
On the street they would be conspicuous only because they were dressed in such high-quality clothing—but even then, both Rigg and Param had no taste for extravagance, so they were dressed rather more simply than most people would think of as royal costumes.
Then, as he sat there, suddenly the path he was looking at slowed down, and as he concentrated on it, he could see a man—a tired old man, stumbling down the tunnel. He tripped and fell. He didn’t get up. He was wounded, Rigg could see that. He hurried down the stairs, keeping his attention centered on the old man.
When he reached him, the old man raised his hands as if to fend off a blow.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Rigg. He spoke in a high, formal language, hoping that this older kind of speech would be intelligible to him. It was.
“Get away and save yourself,” the old man said. “Whoever you are, save yourself. They’re killing everyone.”
Then, as quickly as the man had appeared, he was gone, nothing but a path again. A path that did not end in this spot, so apparently he had gotten up and moved on, back in whatever time he lived in. Whoever “they” were, the ones who were “killing everyone,” it couldn’t have anything to do with the People’s Revolution, since all the paths here in this tunnel were far older than that. Maybe he was a government official from the time before the Sessamoto conquered Aressa and renamed it Aressa Sessamo.
After all the time he had tried and failed to go back in time like this on his own, why had it suddenly happened now?
Stupid, he told himself. Stupid, not to realize at once. I didn’t go back on my own. Umbo can do what he does to me from a distance. Sitting there at that table in the Council House, he’s somehow letting me speed up enough to see the paths as people. He’s signaling me that he can do it from this range.
Umbo wants me to go back along his path and warn him, before he and Loaf get arrested, not to keep the rendezvous.
Does he know that he succeeded in reaching me? Can he feel, at such a distance, that the connection was made? What if he thinks he failed? What if he doesn’t try again?
Rigg ran back up the stairs, stumbling once in the darkness but not even pausing when he scraped his shin on a step. “Param,” he said. “Param, we have to go now.”
Param was almost instantly awake. “Is someone coming?”
“No,” said Rigg. “We’re perfectly safe here. But Umbo is—I told you what we could do, didn’t I? How he can let me go back in time to the paths, to the people—”
“Slow down,” said Param.
“He just did it, from the Council House.”
“He’s there?”
“That’s where General Citizen is holding them. It doesn’t matter, we’re not going there at all. I’m going to intercept them—go to a place where they were before they were arrested, and warn them. Set up a different rendezvous for tonight.”
“But you can’t get them out of the Council House, it’s such a public—”
“No, Param,” said Rigg. “They’ll never get to the Council House.”
“But they’re there,” she said.
“But they won’t be. They never will have been.”
“But you saw them there!” said Param.
“I saw their path,” said Rigg, “and you didn’t see them at all, so it’s not as if we’ll have some horribly false memory. Trust me. I have no idea why it works this way, but it does.”
“So we’ll go and warn them,” said Param, “and so they aren’t arrested. But who’s going to warn us and tell us where the new rendezvous is?”
“We won’t have to, we’ll . . .” But then, as he thought about it, Rigg realized that she might be right. If he stopped Umbo and Loaf from going to the meeting place in the park, then as he and Param fled down the tunnel, he wouldn’t see the soldiers arrest them, and so he wouldn’t know why they weren’t there. No, he’d probably figure it out, but then how would he know where to meet them?
He had to choose a secondary rendezvous that he would think of on his own, a place where he would guess that they might decide to meet with him if for some reason—he wouldn’t know the reason—they failed to keep the rendezvous.
He had simply assumed, until Param spoke up, that after he warned them, he would continue to the new rendezvous and meet them, with a full memory of all that had happened. But Umbo and Loaf had told him about their arguments about this very point—the future person who went back into the past and warned an earlier person not to do something was simply gone, and all that was left of him was the memory of his words. The warners disappeared as the warned ones followed a new path.
At least that’s how it worked when someone went back into the past to warn himself. Maybe when he did what Rigg was doing, and warned someone else, he—the warner—wouldn’t change at all. Maybe he’d continue to the new rendezvous.
Or maybe not.
“It’s making you insane, isn’t it?” said Param.
“I’m a complete fungus-head,” said Rigg.
“Just do what you have to do, and then we’ll know how it works,” she said.
They came out of the secret tunnel through a hidden doorway in the outside wall of a bank. In fact, the final landing had three entrances—one inside the bank building, one inside the vault, and the last one on the street. But Rigg wasn’t interested in stealing money or conducting any bank business. The street entrance was in an alcove, and no one saw them come out.
The light was dazzling, even though there was smoke in the sky.
The smoke stung Rigg’s eyes, and he could see that Param’s were also watering.
“The city is burning,” said Param. “It happens now and then, but the fire brigades get ahead of it and tear down buildings and soak the ruins with water pumped from the Stashik. Everybody knows this, and it’s one of the main things that prevents people from rioting and burning things. And putting out fires is the surest way to stop the riot. Anyone who interferes with the fire brigade will be torn apart by the mob. It’s their homes at stake. Wherever the fire brigades go, the riot is over.”
It made sense—but it brought Rigg a new problem to worry about. What if he sent Umbo and Loaf to a new rendezvous, but it was in a part of town that burned down? It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t burning now. In the changed future, it might be burning.