Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

Chapter 18

  Lester: “And the blind eye creates”

  His practice at the cloaking spell proceeded with unexpected difficulty. The face of Aria intruded often, tempting him to waste time pondering her perfection. Inconvenient. He tried to concentrate on the apple again (which was now diminished by several bites, for he was growing hungry) and once more the image of it faded and almost disappeared. But not completely. And as Xander kept reminding him, “when you need to disappear, only complete success suffices.”

  Reminded of the old man, he wondered where Xander went when he left his quarters. Was he off seeking more students? No. He was certain, without knowing how, that the wizard would not run off without warning him.

  Restless, he rose from the chair and paced as he considered his situation. There were times when he still suffered from homesickness, but he countered such thoughts by reminding himself that there was opportunity for growth here. All right, so he had been yanked from his sleepy village and replanted in this churning beehive of a building. But within the isolation and the jarring confusion of the Governor's court he could also see a future for himself. A future that was a damn sight better than waiting on tables for Gerrold!

  But Drew was still too young to fill his place. How would his mother manage without him?

  He shook his head and turned toward the window. Out there, in the slowly decaying streets of the city, where the asphalt of ages baked and cracked under a lingering summer that, concentrated by reflection from the brooding scrapers, would not yield to Autumn, ordinary people were going about their lives with the certainty of their daily routines.

  But his mind resisted routines in this place. Oh, he was diligent in his practice, but not in a regularized way. Something in him balked at the idea of marching off the hours the same way on every day, this now and the other later. Like a plow-horse tilling a field, with no will of its own. Yes, I will practice. I'll learn what I must learn to set my own course.

  On impulse, he swiveled to his left and reached out to pluck a book from the hundreds Xander lined his walls with. Questions For Posterity, by Hugh Stevenson, was a volume about the last days of the Ancients, after the Tourists had departed, their database of Earth's genome sequences complete. It was after the adoption of the Gifts as cornerstones of a more efficient infrastructure, but before the collapse of that very infrastructure, due to what Xander had called “the lack of technical support for the Gifts.”

  “...and so questions remain long after the objects of those questions have gone. Will the Tourists find actual uses for the genetic sequences they bartered for? Will we ever come to grips with an understanding of how the Gifts actually work? Sometimes, this reporter finds it doubtful. Their operation cannot be doubted, yet contradicts what we thought we knew about the universe. A friend of mine at MIT assures me that there is no such thing as something for nothing. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely converted to other forms such as matter, or concentrated or dispersed.

  “But the Gifts of the Tourists defy such reasoning. They have no moving parts, no circuitry, and require no power input. Where is the catch? A swizzle can impart motion to fluids and even pump them uphill: hydroelectric dams no longer require a river for their source of water, merely a lake and a big swizzle to push the water back up after it has fallen and driven the dynamo. But this gives free electricity! It is literally something for nothing.

  “Similarly, the everflames that now smelt our ore require no fuel. So where does the heat come from? Is somewhere else cooling off to balance the equations? Are we pulling heat out of the magma inside the Earth? Or from the Sun or other stars?”

  He closed the book. Its questions went unanswered, most of them. But at least he now knew the “catch” that Hugh was referring to – the price to be paid for the use of the Gifts. For gifts without knowledge, the price had been the loss of our own wisdom.

  It had been hard form him to accept how easily it had happened. He remembered his last argument with the wizard about it. “The Ancients were not fools. They couldn't have been fools, when they accomplished so much before the Tourists arrived. So why didn't they predict the consequences? More to the point, why didn't the Tourists?”

  Xander had shrugged, as he often did to such questions. But he tried to explain it. “Imagine you are an ancient explorer in a sailing ship and you meet natives on an island who use stone axes to cut down trees.”

  Here Lester interrupted. “How do you make an axe out of stone? Smiths use iron for that.”

  “You take a couple of hard rocks and use one to chip away at the other one, breaking off chips along one or both sides of one end to make a crude edge, then you tie the sharp rock to the end of a stick. But now you, the explorer, arrive and trade the natives pre-made axes with steel blades. What happens?”

  “They realize the metal axes are better, and stop chipping stone for axes.”

  “And eventually?”

  “They forget how to make stone axes.” He thought about it. “And after you sail away, the metal axes eventually rust away and are useless. Now they're back to square one. They have to learn how to make stone axes all over again, because they didn't think that skill was important enough to pass on to their children.”

  “Exactly. And so it happens.”

  “But they must have known it would! Surely they'd seen that happen to islanders, just as you described! Didn't they realize the same thing could happen to them?”

  Xander had shrugged again. “Maybe some did.” He glanced at the window. “Maybe somewhere out there people are still making generators and internal combustion machines. God help us if we run into them, because they'll conquer us easily.”

  Lester put the book back on the shelf where he found it. But if we develop an effective technology first, he thought, we'll be the ones doing the conquering. And that's what Xander is hoping to set in motion. A hybrid technology, like the Ancients adopted, but this time with technicians who can keep it going: wizards.

  And I can have a place in this plan if I seize the opportunity.

  Right. He sat himself down again and devoted himself to the apple. There was something missing in his attempts. He had been imagining the photons as moving around the apple instead of hitting it, and that resulted in a partial transparency. But he must be doing it wrong. He must be barking up the wrong tree, or heading down the wrong path.

  Suddenly it came to him. He had been thinking about the photons, not about the pathspace. Maybe that was his mistake. Instead of imagining all the bits of light zooming around the apple and not hitting it, he should be imagining the path as a thing-in-itself, like the road through Inverness, that existed all the time, not merely when a coach was rolling down it.

  He had to lay out the road in his mind, and then the light would follow it. Concentrate on the road, not the coaches. The pathspace. The space of paths.

  This time he imagined a rectangular region on his face. Then he moved the rectangle toward the apple, tracing out innumerable paths in the intervening space that glowed in his mind's eye. As his rectangle neared the apply, he split it like opening window curtains and swept the sides around the apple, tracing out glowing paths around it that remained when the rectangle had passed it.

  And the apple disappeared! He slid back his chair and got up, moving slowly lest he break his concentration. The apple stayed gone. He let his mind relax, and the apple was still gone. The pathspace configuration he had managed was persisting!

  He experimented, walking around the table. When he reached a position a quarter of the way around the table the apple reappeared. Damn it! He moved back to his chair, and it disappeared again. What?

  Walking completely around the table, he saw that the apple was invisible from his original position and directly across from it. Evidently the pathspace was bidirectional. Once he had established the pattern, it hid the apple along that line of sight from either side. But not sideways to it. All right, so he needed more practice. But he was finally getting the hang of it.
What he had now would be pretty good, if he were hiding in a corner of a room, or directly in front of someone. It was better than nothing.

  Now the next questions were: how long would it last, and how could he stop it if he wanted the apple completely visible again, from all sides?

  Hmm. First he tried to make the invisibility complete. And he succeeded, but only in a tedious way, by using eight patches of pathspace, deflecting around the apple from the eight major directions of the compass. This worked. There was enough overlap that the apple was now invisible from all directions around the table.

  But not from all directions in space, as he found by leaning over the table and looking down. So he eliminated that too, but visualizing a circular patch of pathspace cross-section descending on the apple from above and splitting around it.

  He frowned at all the work involved, doubting that in an emergency he would have the time for so elaborate an imagining. All those patches took too long. But at least he was finally getting complete invisibility.

  Now for the next step. To the right of the window a door opened into an inner room. He had not discovered this the first night, because he'd fallen asleep on the wizard's couch. But there had been ample time after that to explore the confines of his quarters. One of the things he found, when he did so, was that the inner room contained a full-length mirror, the first he had ever seen. At first he was astonished at the luxury, then amused at Xander's vanity.

  Now he blushed to remember those mistakes. By now, he knew Xander didn't care much how he looked. The mirror was for invisibility practice.

  When the wizard told him this, he almost laughed in his face. “You don't need a mirror! You already told me that when your shield is in place, you're left in darkness because the light can't reach your eyes anymore.”

  “Yes,” Xander replied. “But what if I wanted to shield someone else, behind me – and without taking my eyes off the enemy in front of me? How would I practice that?”

  Abashed, Lester had to admit it made perfect sense. Once more, he reminded himself never to ridicule something the wizard told him without thinking a lot first.

  He stood in front of the mirror now, concentrating. First things first. This time he tried to imagine eight man-sized rectangles of pathspace converging on his position, only to split around him and continue on.

  As he had expected, his first attempt at this was only partially successful. The view in front of him went black, as did the view to the right. But to his left light still poured in. The same applied to the view behind him.

  He let the hot wave of anger wash over him and pass on. There was no use holding onto it. Then he spent the next hour or so practicing each of the eight cardinal directions of the compass by itself, until he satisfied himself that he could do all of them equally well.

  By this time he was wet with perspiration – and starving. He took a break and visited the bathroom to get some cold water. He was rather proud of the fact that he'd worked out how to control the spigots on the sink all by himself, once he'd gotten used to the fact that one of them eventually produced hot water. There must be an everflame rigged to heat a water tank somewhere up near the roof, he reasoned.

  After he managed to stop sweating, he opened Xander's coldbox. The old rascal had all the conveniences of an inn here – except a stove, and he needed none since he had at least one portable everflame and they delivered meals to his door anyway, presumably to keep him from wandering. He found some cooked mutton. Did they raise sheep on one or more floors of the scraper? He had to admit that the Governor's palace was even better than the castles in the storybooks. It was as if someone had taken an entire village, complete with some farmland, and stacked it up vertically like a pile of pancakes. And all you had to defend was the ground floor.

  Back to the mirror. This time he tried imagining the patches in pairs, beginning with his left and right sides. After he could do any of the four opposing pairs in his eight directions, he tried to do two pair at once, left-right and forward-backward.

  His first attempt at this was pretty good. Darkness on four sides, and only slivers of light on the diagonals. He kept at it, alternating between the regular and the diagonal four-axis configurations for the next hour.

  Another break to rinse off sweat and grab a snack followed this. Then he went back to trying all eight directions at once. Right away he had problems. It seemed that he had real difficulties tracing out of all that pathspace at once. He wasn't exactly sure why. It had not seemed that hard to do one, two or even four directions, but he just couldn't seem to get all eight.

  Then he had an inspiration, and split it into two groups of four, the regular four and the diagonal four, and doing it in two steps instead of all at once. This succeeded! It was slower than doing only one, two, or four, but faster than doing all eight one at a time.

  Now for the hard part. It was time to try something Xander hadn't mentioned: trying to stay shielded while walking. He wasn't sure how to do this, and wanted to try to work it out on his own to impress Xander.

  First he backed up all the way to the wall opposite the mirror, making sure the straight line path to the mirror was free of clutter he might otherwise trip over, when he couldn't see in the forward direction. Then he concentrated and formed a forward shield, leaving the other seven directions visible.

  Now here was the trick he hadn't figured out. How could he make the shield move forward with him – so that it was always blocking him from view as he proceeded toward the mirror? He was a little nervous about what it might do to him to walk right through the shield. How would the pathspace affect the matter of his body?

  There was no way to tell. Finally he gritted his teeth, screwed up his courage, and extended the tip of one pinkie through the shield. Apart from a slight tingling, he felt nothing, and it didn't chop off the finger as he had feared it might.

  It proved to be too much for him to make the shield move smoothly with him, so he hit upon a compromise. As he walked forward, nearing the shield, he made a new one in front of it and dispersed the first one. Encouraged by the success of this, he continued the process, making and dissolving six shields in all before he bumped into the mirror. Hastily, he dispersed the sixth shield, realizing it was outside the building. Idiot!

  He spent the next hour practicing this, first walking forward, then side-stepping to the left and right. At the end of this he was sweating and starving again. He hoped that this was like lifting weights, and that soon it would be less draining. Otherwise he was going to have to carry a gallon of water and a bag of food with him whenever he used it in actual situations.

  From now on, he resolved, he would practice this every day until it was effortless.