Pathspace
Page 53
Chapter 53
Lester: “where three dreams cross”
After Jeffrey left and closed the door behind him, Lester laid the metal tube on the floor of his cell and contemplated it, trying to decide what he should do. Doing nothing was not an option.
He could refuse to cooperate, of course, but that would lead to his death at the hands of the Church executioners and wouldn't help Rado. It would be a gesture of defiance and nothing more, a pointless death that would accomplish nothing for him, nothing for the Governor, and something for the TCC (the discouragement of inquiry).
He could cooperate with the Honcho: find a way to make whatever the ruler of Texas needed. This would prolong his life, at the cost of endangering his countrymen. He had a feeling that the Honcho's desires were connected with his aim to expand the Empire. He did not believe the Honcho was a monster, but it was clear that if he were willing to trade a human life for something, that something must be something he desperately needed for his dreams of conquest.
Lester couldn't accept sacrificing himself for nothing, but he would despise himself if he aided a tyrant. There had to be a third way. And it had to involve escape for him, because he couldn't do anything to help Rado from inside this cell.
While he thought these thoughts, he tossed the tube from hand to hand, feeling its weight, its solidity. Yet it was probably lighter than that apple he had seen Xander make float from his hand back to the table. He had no idea how the wizard had done that, but he knew that it could be done. Perhaps he would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how.
For now, he had to get to work on trying to make a swizzle. He had no doubt that the Honcho would not wait forever before consigning him to the merciless arms of the Church.
Everybody who knew anything about swizzles knew that they sucked in one end and blew out the other. Another way of saying this was that in the middle, the working fluid moved in one direction. Air, water, or whatever was in front of that motion was pushed out of the way, and similarly the motion pulled more in at the back to make up for what was lost going out the front.
No matter how he tried, however, he could not make the tube work by imagining the air in the middle moving along the axis of the tube. There was more to it than that. If his hand could somehow fit inside the tube, pushing it forward would do the trick, but only once, and then somehow he would have to get his hand back into its original position in the middle of the tube. Simply moving it backwards would negate the progress achieved – he'd push the air in the other direction.
A rotor pump could get around this difficulty, he knew, by putting a sort of waterwheel in the middle of the tube, where the wheel would be turned by an external crank and its paddles would push the air forward, rather than the reverse that happened in a miller's waterfall. But somehow he had to accomplish that without altering the shape of the tube or installing a wheel. Somehow the motion had to be continuous, and in only one direction.
He tried mentally pushing, mentally pulling, mentally squeezing the tube, and nothing worked. He was still at it when he heard a key in the door and the guard brought him dinner: a crust of bread, a cup of water, and a dubious-looking sausage.
The guard, whose named he learned was Patrick, was a grizzled old veteran whose career was plainly winding down, to be assigned this duty. He liked being a prison guard about as much as Lester liked being in prison. After he swung open the door and put the wooden tray on the floor, he pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from behind an ear and lit it from the torch he was holding with his other hand.
“That's a stupid habit,” Lester told him.
Patrick grinned a half-sneer at him. “Not as stupid as being in a prison cell,” he said. He took a long drag of smoke into his lungs without coughing, stared into Lester's eyes, and with studied indifference, blew a smoke ring at him. Then he turned with a laugh and took his leave.
Lester stared at the smoke ring and stopped breathing, afraid to disturb it. After a moment, the gust from the slammed door struck it and it unraveled into wispy fragments. But he could still see it in his mind's eye. It was a collection of circular paths. The particles of smoke had gone round and round, not spreading out aimlessly, but following a rigid pattern.
And in the center of that pattern all of the particle of smoke had been moving forward. They moved forward together as a circle, then the circle expanded, turned around, came back together, and moved forward again, over and over.
It was exactly the configuration of pathspace he had been looking for.
He ignored his supper and picked up the tube again. What he needed was a longer version of the smoke ring – a doughnut stretched to look like a cylinder, curving back on itself.
He had been going at it all wrong! He'd been thinking linearly, imagining pushing the air in one direction down the length of the tube, when what he needed was for the air to go around the tube, like threads through the holes in a shirt button. Through and out the front and around and back in the back and through again. The unidirectional lines he'd been imagining inside the tube were only the straightest part of a path that curved around on itself.
He visualized a circle of air in the center of the tube. Pictured it moving forward, tracing out a straight pathspace until it emerged, than spilling out over the end of the tube and curving back down the outside before curving back into the rear of the tub and returning to its previous position.
To see this better in his mind he held the tube with one end facing him, a few inches away. The circle tracing out the stretched smoke-ring path came toward him, curled back, slid away, bent in, entered the back, and came toward him again. Over and over again he imagined the pathspace, making the configuration clear in his mind, setting his intention and his expectation of it – trying to reshape the pathspace near the tube.
And he began to feel a breeze blowing in his face.
His heart raced. It was working! Not very strongly, but it was working! All by himself, he'd made a weak swizzle. He'd solved the puzzle, learned how to make one of the Gifts of the Tourists. Now all he had to do was make it stronger, and learn how to control it.