Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

  Chapter 66

  Xander: “our ignorance brings us nearer to death”

  A mouse scurrying among the papers in the corner of the sanctuary woke him. Xander groaned and stretched, wondering what time it was. From the reddish light slanting in the window of the abandoned church he concluded it must be sunset.

  Memory trickled back. After he had gotten Andrews away from the shrine of St. Farker's, the two of them had wandered through the streets randomly, on the theory that if they didn't know where they were going, then neither would the Honcho's men.

  “I'm not complaining, mind you,” the priest had said to him, “but how did you know I needed help, and why did you offer it? I gathered you're not Catholic.”

  Stepping over a dead rat, Xander had pondered the question. “I followed you out of pure curiosity, at first,” he said. “But when the soldiers accosted you, I was curious. Why would the Honcho risk offending the Church? And then after I heard what they were after...”

  “So I wasn't the only one who was puzzled by that. They've never shown the slightest interest in the shrine before.”

  “The situation has changed,” Xander told him. “His Excellency and His Holiness were of like opinion until recently. Both were opposed to any use of the Gifts. Their reasons were different, of course; while the official Church policy is that the artifacts in question are demonic, the Honcho just wants to resurrect the technology we had before such things came to this planet. But Martinez has decided to make an exception to his policy, for purely military reasons of expediency.” Seeing uniforms ahead, he drew the priest into an alley with him. “All in all, his decisions are understandable, but what puzzles me is the inconsistency of the Pope. He has been confiscating swizzles and everflames for years, so why didn't his men visit you at the shrine before the Honcho's?”

  “Maybe because there was no need to confiscate our relics because the Church already had them. And the artifacts were not in use, after all.” Andrews coughed. “Or perhaps we were not important enough to attract the Holy Father's attention.”

  “We need to get you off the streets,” said Xander. “When the reinforcements arrive and can't find any working Gifts at the Shrine, they will assume you took them with you. Do you have any suggestions?”

  Andrews shook his head. “Can't go to friends. They'd not thank me for bringing trouble to their doors. Anywhere I'm known to go, they'd be checking. But hold on a second,” he continued, as if another thought occurred to him. “If the relics don't work anymore, maybe they'll give up and leave me alone.”

  Now it was Xander's turn to shake his head. “They won't believe it,” he said. “As far as they know, no one can make a swizzle, let alone stop it from working. They'll assume you just switched fakes for the real ones.”

  “That's another thing,” said the priest. “How did you do that? Make them stop working, I mean.”

  “That's a long story, Father,” Xander had said. “It'll wait until we find you a sanctuary.”

  “A sanctuary?” Andrews snapped his finger. “Of course! Saint Christopher's! That's the ticket! We should go there.”

  Xander frowned. “Sounds like exactly the wrong idea, to me,” he said. “Going to another church would be just as bad as going to friends of yours. It's another logical place for them to look for you.”

  “Not this one,” said Andrews. “It was abandoned, during the Fall. As the cities died from failing infrastructure and they couldn't bring in enough food any more, congregations moved to the outer suburbs, closer to farms. Martinez's grandfather tried to reverse that trend in Dallas when he moved the capital here, but most of the old churches in the city proper are still abandoned. And St. Christopher's isn't that far from here.”

  When he learned that it wasn't that far from the prison, Xander had agreed. Looking back on it now, he wondered if he should have thought of someplace else. They'd managed to wedge the door shut again after breaking in, but still … the convenience of being close to the place of Lester's confinement was overbalanced, in his mind, by the chance that they could be spotted by soldiers going to or from the prison at every change of the watch.

  He should never have let the priest draw him into a discussion of the apparent conflict between theology and technology, alien or otherwise. Andrews had held up his end of the conversation. The priest was nearly Xander's age, and he had apparently put his nose in some non-ecclesiastical books more than once during his service to the Church.

  “From what I've read,” he had confided, “there has often been an uneasy relationship between religion and science. It heated up long before the Tourists came, you know. Hundred of years before that, after people found dinosaur fossils and started carbon-dating things they found themselves opposed by clerics who insisted the Earth, and the entire Universe was created only a few thousand years ago.”

  Xander knew all about this. “I've heard that someone added up the lifetimes stated in the Bible and arrived at a figure of 4004 BC. Later it was adjusted a few thousand years farther back. It's remarkable that they persisted in this assertion in the face of the evidence coming from the radiocarbon dating.”

  The priest smiled sadly. “I think of it as a turf war, myself,” he said. “Both the Church and the scientists were basing their views on unseen forces and events. There were many who felt dismay that the new dogma of Science, with its machines and mathematics that said nothing about how human beings should live, was displacing the old values that had held society together for thousands of years.”

  “Held it together by saying too much about how humans should live,” Xander retorted. “The problem with rule-based societies is that the number of rules tends to grow over time. And then when you add in the idea that even thinking about breaking a rule is, itself a sin, and just as bad as committing the act, well, you soon arrive at a place where a lot of folks wonder if it might not be more expedient to chuck the whole structure, rather than walk around feeling guilty all the time.”

  Andrews nodded. “And yet,” he said, “humans need structure. Our taboos, some would say, make the difference between a society and a jungle. I believe God wants us to live in peace, but I don't think everyone would refrain from violence if there were no structure in place to punish gratuitous mayhem.”

  “I can't argue with that,” said Xander, thinking about Brutus and the farmer's family. “But I have a problem with making the ultimate authority an invisible man in the sky that no one can argue with. Secular governments do as good a job, and without the sense of helpless despair people get from thinking that God wants everything to stay the same...that they have to be virtual slaves of the rich in order to get into Heaven.”

  “It is difficult, sometimes to be content with one's lot,” Andres agreed. “I admit that sometimes I've gone through periods when I thought the Hindu system of reincarnation was more intellectually palatable. In their belief system, everyone gets a turn at being rich and poor, eventually. But then again, there is the depressing feeling that you'll just end up doing things over and over again, with no end in sight. No redemption. No salvation.”

  “The Tourists didn't bring us salvation, that much is certain. Just a different kind of technology. Instead of railing against it, as the Creationists did against carbon dating, we ought to be learning how to make it work for us,” said Xander.

  “And you've learned how to do that?”

  “In some ways. To the uneducated, I'm a wizard. I prefer the term 'psionic engineer' but it might be a while before it catches on, if ever. I haven't made a pact with the Devil to do it, and I firmly believe that we can make the new technology work along with the old to rebuild civilization.” He'd gone on to explain his dream of establishing the school.

  “I can see the value of it,” Andrews told him. “But I think you might be underestimating the difficulties entailed in such an enterprise. Even if you manage to find suitable candidates, funding, and supplies, there is a never-ending horde on this planet that blames the Tourists and their Gi
fts for the current state of affairs. In the light of two hundred years of aftermath from the previous techno-magical performance, they will hardly be sympathetic to the idea of encouraging an encore.”

  Xander, having ventured out in the early morning's light to seek provender, was using a brass offering plate that had seen better days to cook them both a breakfast (or actually a second dinner since they had not slept yet) over an improvised everflame. If the Church considered him an evil person who trafficked with demons, then he had been doing a thorough job of it. In lieu of money, the butcher he had located had traded him a pound of bacon and a few other necessities in exchange for for converting one of the smaller rooms in his house into a walk-in coldbox.

  “What you're forgetting,” he said, “is that the Fall wasn't caused by working of the alien technology, but by its eventual failing after the Tourists left – because of our lack of the very sort of experts my School will provide.”

  Andrews was shoving a couple of pews together to form a makeshift bed. “What I don't understand,” he said after a few moments of grunting, “is why that happened. Couldn't we have learned how to maintain the artifacts they made for us, and avoided the Fall entirely?”

  “No,” Xander had said, turning the bacon over with a stick. “There wasn't anyone who could learn how, back then.”

  “Which leads to my next question. Why are there such people now? What has changed in the last two centuries, that you (and hopefully others) can actually do what the aliens did?”

  “That,” Xander had said, “is the sort of thing that will keep Church officials awake at night. They probably see it as some kind of sign of the approach of the End Times. I could lie to you and say I have no idea. The truth is, I believe that long term exposure to the Gifts has sensitized some individuals to the influences needed to work the magic. Whether this would work for anyone raised in constant proximity to swizzles and everflames or coldboxes, or whether there is some genetic predisposition to the susceptibility, I do not know.”

  “How did you happen to fall into this?” asked Andrews. “Was your father a wizard – sorry, 'parascience technician', or are you the first in your family to discover this about yourself, that you could learn the alien magic?”

  Xander finished cooking the bacon before he answered. He dished it out on two colder offering plates and passed one to Andrews, then stroked the side of the aluminum coaster until the point of brilliance faded away above it. While they waited for the bacon to cool, he spoke. “I was raised in a commune up north, back before they changed the name of the place to the People's Republic of Wyoming. Don't look at me that way, Father. My people weren't revolutionary firebrands. I didn't even know what a communalist was back then. They were descended from a few families of survivalists who moved away from the big cities early on when things began to fall apart.”

  He poked at his bacon to test the temperature. “The adults farmed and hunted. The kids had simpler chores until they were big enough to do stuff like that.”

  He paused, remembering. “The winters up there can be fierce. We used to spend the winters below ground in an old fallout shelter. We probably would have frozen to death if our commune hadn't had a couple of working everflames. One of my jobs was gathering snow to throw in the metal tub suspended over one of them. We never turned that one off all winter, so the snow melted into water that boiled and the steam spread the warmth throughout the shelter.”

  Here Andrews couldn't help interrupting. “Why boil the snow? Wouldn't the everflame have worked as well by itself as a fireplace? Even better, actually, since there'd be no smoke to worry about.”

  “A fair question. It probably would have, if we had turned it high enough. But with Gifts breaking down all over the world, the founders were afraid that running it full-out all the time might make it break down sooner, maybe in the middle of a blizzard.” He checked his bacon again. “And there were more reasons. One of those was, humid air can hold more heat than dry air. It takes a lot of energy to heat up water, you see, so with a little steam in it the air in the shelter held more warmth. Plus it didn't hurt to have hot water all the time if we wanted to boil something or make herb tea. Another reason was the risk of radiation burns. If you turn up an everflame high enough, the little point of red light goes blue and starts putting out some ultraviolet – which can give you sunburn. Higher still, and you start to get what the Ancients called 'x-rays' – and too much of that and you get cancer. So we kept it down in the red, mostly, and boiled the water.”

  “That explains where you got your exposure,” the priest commented. “But how did you find out you were developing a talent?”

  “We were pretty isolated,” Xander said. “By design, because the founders had figured things might get fierce when the cities fell apart. Hungry people can be fairly desperate, until the starvation makes them too weak to hurt anyone. There were other communes we traded with, of course, but most of the time we were on our own, about thirty of us, though the number varied a bit over the years with deaths and births. You've no idea how boring it got sometimes. We had to make our own fun. To amuse myself, I would fiddle, on hot summer days, with the swizzle we used in our well. On cold days, I'd play with the everflame when no one was watching. Did you ever play with the relics in the shrine of St. Farker's?”

  “No,” said Andrews.

  Xander just kept looking at him.

  “Oh, all right,” said Andrews. “Sometimes I used the everflame to boil water for coffee. But I always put it back in the display case.”

  “Then you know how to turn the intensity up and down. Most of the alien tech has a control interface. Back then in Wyoming, I didn't know that term, but I learned it later from books. As you know, you turn an everflame up or down by stroking the rim of the metal disk.”

  “Yes,” said Andrews. “Father Davis, the priest I took over for, he showed me that.”

  “Coldboxes are different,” said Xander. “They usually lack a control, because you want them to stay cold all the time. But swizzles always have one. If you stroke the pipe in the direction of the flow in the swizzle, it turns it up. Stroke it against the current and it slows down. I found that out by watching one of the adults fill a bucket from the well. When no one was around and I was bored, sometimes I'd turn it up high enough to make a fountain. I'd make the water shoot up ten feet in the air just to watch how it broke up into little balls, like raindrops, when it came down. And to cool off on hot days.

  “But one day I was playing with it, making a fountain, and I saw one of the grownups coming over from the vegetable patch with a couple of buckets. Not wanting to get switched, I reached for the swizzle, thinking about stroking it down, and the flow turned down before I touched it.”

  This time when he touched it, the bacon was merely warm to the touch. He fished a piece out of the plate and chewed. “At first I was too relieved that I hadn't been caught to put two and two together. But later I managed to repeat it in a similar circumstance. After that it was only a matter of time before I learned I could turn it up as well as down, without touching it. The rest was just a matter of practice.”

  “What happened?” the priest asked him suddenly.

  “Eh? What do you mean?”

  “Why did you leave Wyoming? Or at least the commune. Was it to find a wife?”

  “No, that might have been a good reason to, but in my case it was simple curiosity. We didn't have a lot of books in the commune, and I wanted to find out more about how the world worked, and what else I could do.”

  They talked through the remainder of the night and well into the next morning, when mutual exhaustion brought pause to these discussions. Xander had fallen asleep sometime before noon, and like a fool, had slept away the afternoon. Now the sun was setting, and he hadn't even checked on poor Lester yet.

  “So,” said Andrews, stretching and yawning as he sat up. “Do you have a plan to get out of the city?”

  “I do. But we need to pick up someone first. I'm sor
ry to tell you this, father, but I didn't come all this way to rescue you. A friend of mine needs help.”

  Andrews was obviously puzzled when the left the abandoned Church, and sought out a smithy. Xander did this by simply following, at a discreet distance, a guardsman leading a horse that had thrown a shoe. When at length he reached the smith, who evidently did a lot of farrier's work in this age of horse travel, the wizard let the guardsman go first, to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

  While the horse was being shod, the priest kept looking at Xander with a face that plainly asked the question, why are we here when your friend needs help? but he left the priest unanswered for the moment, unwilling to talk in front of the strangers. He was coming to the reluctant conclusion that the priest would have to leave with them, and that raised complications he would rather avoid.

  “Now, then,” said the smith, whose name turned out to be Marco, “what can I do for you gentlemen today?”

  Xander looked around the smithy before answering. Seeing the silver dollars change hands had reminded him that he was without currency. “I see you've been making a lot of pipe lately.”

  Marco laughed. “Not making it, exactly. Some of the apartment buildings on the west side of town collapsed years ago in the last great quake. Their swizzles were looted, but there was enough piping left in the wreckage to earn money for the locals who heard I'd pay to take it off their hands.”

  “What do you do with it? Not your usual income, I'd imagine, like making tools, swords and horseshoes.”

  Marco looked left and right. “It's a government contract,” he said. “His Excellency put in an order for a lot of pipe.” He shrugged. “It's too bad the scavengers don't know he'd rather buy it direct from them, than pay me a markup on it. But this way we both profit by it.”

  Xander glanced at the leather bellows that Marco used to crank up his forge to the temperatures needed for some metallurgical operations. “I wouldn't want to put your apprentice out of a job,” he said, “but I might have a proposition for you.”

  The smith pulled a sword out of the forge with a pair of tongs and inspected it before shoving it back into the coals. “What sort of proposition?”

  Xander look at the bellows. The wooden handles attached to the leather pleating were worn from years of pumping air into the forge to heat the coals. The mouth of it was shoved into a pipe that protruded a few inches from the side of the forge. “For a dozen feet of pipe I can replace that bellows of yours with a swizzle that would make it a lot easier to do whatever you want with your forge.”

  The smith frowned at this. “There's plenty more pipe where that came from,” he said, “but I don't do much barter business, only cash. And like I told you, the swizzles that were in those collapsed buildings were looted long ago, and most likely confiscated by the Church. I doubt you can lay your hands on any of them, these days.”

  “Not a problem,” the wizard told him. “As it happens, I can make swizzles.” And he grabbed the bellows and wrenched it out of the pipe.

  Marco scowled, affronted at this cavalier treatment of his equipment, but his expression changed when Xander concentrated on the protruding pipe and they heard a rush of air into the forge. Xander reached out and stroked the pipe outwards, shutting off the inflow before it overheated the sword in the coals. “You can always shove the bellows back in when you're not stoking the forge,” he said. “No one else needs to know you have this.”

  The smith regarded the protruding end of the pipe as Xander showed him how to turn the swizzle flow up and down. The forge roared and then was silent again. “How much pipe did you say you need?”