Pathspace
Page 46
Chapter 46
Lester: “We think of the key, each in his prison”
After the Honcho left, Lester paced the cell, not knowing what to think. The ruler had not seemed nearly as bad as he had expected, but then, he wasn't facing him with weapons on a battlefield. Perhaps he had a decent side, but that didn't change anything. He still had to find a way out of here before they found a way to use him against Rado.
What was it Xander had said? “A real wizard wouldn't need a key. All ordinary locks are just collections of moving parts. And anything that can move can be controlled with pathspace.”
He'd already justified Xander's choosing him as an apprentice by learning the invisibility trick. But the wizard was gone. It was up to him now. He'd have to take the next step by himself.
The Honcho had left him a wooden cup, but taken the metal pitcher with him when he left. He drank the water remaining in it and set the cup on the floor. Then he tried to imagine what it was to be that cup. It looked motionless, but according to Xander, it wasn't. It was spinning with the Earth, as he was, and orbiting the sun as the Earth was. So it wasn't a matter of getting it to move. It was already moving. What he needed to do was to make small changes in the path it was already on.
He concentrated, reaching out with his mind. This would be a challenge, he knew. This time he wasn't just trying to deflect the weightless particles of light that Xander had called photons. He was trying to deflect the massive particles that made up the wood in the cup.
Which shouldn't have made any difference, since he wasn't trying to lift or push them – all he was trying to do was reshape the path they were following. But it was different. Photons were easy to guide. They had no rest mass. Once a photon was created, Xander had once told him, the particle flew away at the speed of light without needing any time at all to accelerate. No rest mass meant changing the photon's direction was effortless. Ordinary matter, on the other hand, was less reasonable. Photons were like little arrows flying through the air. A wind could blow arrows from their target, and it was similarly easy to reshape the paths of photons.
Ordinary matter, however, was more like a rock rolling across a plain. Mere wind would have little effect on it. The sun was millions of miles away. Only the fact that it was also millions of times as heavy as the Earth allowed it to reshape the pathspace around it enough to keep the Earth's path bending around it in an orbit.
But that line of thought got him nowhere. He was not the sun. He did not have the weight that would be necessary to bend the cup's path by sheer brute force.
So what had Xander meant? He concentrated on the cup and imagined the pathspace bending around it. Nothing happened for a second, and then the cup began to fade away.
Frustrated, he stopped what he was doing. The cup stopped fading. But it remained transparent. Some, but not all, of the light was bending around the cup, so that he could see the floor behind it. But that didn't help him to move the cup. No progress.
Or was it? Suddenly he had a ridiculous idea that he had to try.
Pathspace, Xander had told him, was the space of all paths. Not just the ones he could imagine. It included directions he could not even sense.
He stood in front of the door to the cell and reached out with his mind to embrace the pathspace and imagine a new configuration.
And the door began to fade! He stopped, and the effect remained. The door was now transparent. He knew it was there, but he could see out into the hall, as if it were made of glass.
By using pathspace, he could see through things. Evidently, matter did not occupy all of the dimensions of space. No matter how solid an object looked, even a wall, there were paths that went around it in unseen directions.
Now this was progress. All by himself, he had found a way to do something Xander had not even hinted at. His surge of pride soured, however, when he wished he could tell the wizard and then remembered that he couldn't, because the old man was dead.
Move past that, he told himself. He tried to imagine what Xander would have told him if he were here right now. Forget the past. It can't help you or hurt you. Concentrate on the present.
He still had to find a way out of this cell. He looked at the door. It was still transparent. After a moment he realized what was bothering him about that. Why was it that sunlight was blocked by a roof, it there were paths, somewhere, around the roof? He decided that sunlight, after traveling so far from its source, had to be moving in a straight line. Hardly any of the photons were able to wiggle around a roof, in the normal pathspace configuration.
But he could change that. And now he could see when a guard was coming. This was already an advantage: he could practice his skills without being caught at it.