“Well Xander's been wanting to get it started for a long time, so I'm sure he must have a plan. I'm surprised it didn't start years ago.”
“Well, he's been trying to get started for years.'
“What stopped him?”
“His apprentices kept getting killed,” said Lester. “That's why the invisibility weave is the first pathspace 'spell' he teaches. They never lasted long enough for him to be able to find more students for them to teach...until me.”
“He's lucky to have you.”
“I think you have that backwards. We're lucky enough to be a part of something important. I didn't always think so. You should have heard how much I complained last year when he was kidnapping me to be his apprentice.”
“What made you stop complaining?”
“I managed to figure out some of it for myself, without Xander,” he said. “While I was in prison. That's where I finally made a swizzle. I proved to myself that I could make one of the Gifts. After that I realized that humanity dropped the ball two hundred years ago but we can pick it up again.”
“How?”
“A wizard is a professional like a blacksmith or a scribe or an engineer. Just as we need blacksmiths to work with metal, and scribes to work with documents, and doctors to work with bodies, and musicians to shape music, so we need wizard to weave metaspace - to work magic. Wizards will be part of the fabric of civilization just as farmers and blacksmiths are.”
Chapter 45
Kaleb: the equality of the poor
“Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.”
– Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way, by Lao Tse
He found he had mixed feelings about the People's Republic of Wyoming, when Trent's caravan passed through it and stopped to water horses and deliver a consignment, mainly of seeds for the Spring planting.
Usually, everywhere he had been in Californ, and even in Deseret, you could spot the relatively rich, those whose fortunes fared better than their countrymen, by the cut of their clothes, the quality of their horses, and the size of their dwellings. The poor might laugh as loud, and drink as much, perhaps even more than the well-to-do, but they drank at separate tables, and when they spilled their ale it spilled on courser cloth. The rich, though they might have more cause to celebrate, quaffed more carefully, and spilled less on their finer raiment.
In Wyoming, however, he could not see any signs of such a division of classes, try though he might. But this wasn't because the people were all equally rich. Instead, they were all equally poor. There were no special tables for gentry, for wealthy landowners, because there were no such people.
“They live a different way here,” Trent confided. “Their farms and ranches are all owned and operated by collectives, from the largest farm to the smallest freehold.” He swallowed a bit of apple and gulped down his ale. “All run by committee, they are.”
Kaleb sipped his glass of water. “I would think that makes for efficient administration of resources,” he said. “And superior stewardship, without the selfishness that comes from the usual concentration of wealth into a few families.”
“Aye, you would think that,” Trent agreed. “The old 'from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs', eh? Always sounds good.” He belched. “Never works.”
“Why not? Sounds like a very noble plan to me.”
Trent picked his teeth with the point of a dagger. “Yes,” he spat. “Very noble. Except people are rarely as noble as their ideals. Few want to work harder than others just because they can. And fewer are willing to take less food than others just because they ain't starving. So it all breaks down, soon enough.” he took another bite out of his apple.
“But surely, those committees you mentioned...”
“The biggest, smartest committee in the world can't change human nature,” said Trent. “They'd take even more than the regular workers, except they've got layers of committees above them. And they all send representatives off to Cheyenne, to the Worker's Congress that oversees the whole sorry country.”
“I can see that happening at first,” said Kaleb, “but what about the next generation? How do they keep them from changing the whole setup?”
“By lettin' 'em go,” said Trent. “Oh they have the usual number of kids, but there's usually plenty of malcontents who don't fancy following the ass end of a plow horse the rest of their lives. They go splitsky, some to the East, some South into Rado, and the elders let 'em go. Keeps the population manageable so's they don't have to decrease everybody's shares of food and whatnot.”
“Is that why they're staring at me?” Suddenly he was uncomfortably aware that his simple librarian's clothes from Angeles were a bit better than what everyone around them were wearing.
“Well...that and the fact that they don't see a lot of folks who look like you around here.”
He blinked. He was a long way from Graumann's.
Chapter 46
Lester: more briefing
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
– Albert Einstein
Two dinners later, Xander closed the door after Carolyn left and nodded to Lester. “She's coming along.”
“And so you owe me another lesson in spinspace.”
“That is so.” Xander went off into the Artifacts room and came back with a box of objects. “You've already seen the spinometer,” he said, placing it on the table. “While I'm getting set up I want you to get it up to five rpms.”
Lester groaned. “The visualization you gave me last time, of gathering spin, focusing it, well, that works as far as it goes. The problem is then it feels like I've used up all the spin. How do I get more out of it?”
“Every variation visualization has its own advantages and disadvantages. Focusing gives precision. Now you have to work on abundance.”
“Abundance?”
“What you have to work with is limited only by your imagination. Instead of visualizing spin as being a rare collectible resource that you can gather in, try imagining it as omnipresent, and not normally noticed because it is mostly balanced.
“All matter is made up of spinning particles. Spin isn't something you have to collect – it's built in. All you have to do is imagine some of it flipping the way you want to tip the balance and you can have as much spin as you want. You've been telling the space you expect it to run out of spin so it does. Tell it the opposite, that you expect it to have abundance in spin, tappable at your will.”
“How can I expect it to have an abundance of spin?”
“Because it's full of matter, and matter is made of spinning particles. All matter is constantly in motion, and part of that motion is spin.”
When he changed his visualization the effectiveness increased by an order of magnitude. Instead of straining to get 1 rpm, he could get 5rpm without much effort.
“That's very good. I still sense that you are hitting some imaginary limits, but it is very good.”
“What's so good about achieving 5rpm?”
“On the small scale you could make a clock that never needs to be wound. On the large scale, who knows?”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“A handful of water has over 1022 water molecules. That's a lot of spin. Every water molecule in it has a nucleus with nucleon spins and an electron shell with electrons with their spins. And the molecule itself has spin.”
“You're saying there is spin all around me.”
“All around you, all the time, yes.”
“Then why don't I see it?'
“Because it's usually present in equal and balanced amounts. In empty space, the balance is almost perfect, but when there is matter present it is more complicated.”
He considered that. “What do you mean by complicated?'
“Well, if we think of tops spinning on a floor, there are only two directions for the spin axis – up and down. If you turn a t
op on its side it rolls away. But the atoms in a chunk of iron are not laid out flat like the planks or tiles in a floor...so the spin axes can point in any direction. This means that even when you have unpaired, unbalanced spin present it might not add up to anything detectable because the random orientations don't mesh with each other to combine forces. But you can change that.”
Xander picked up a couple of short metal cylinders the size of his fingers. “These are iron. In its natural, unordered state, iron tends to have many tiny regions where the spins line up with each other called 'domains'. Each area adds a little bit of strength to the spinspace but since the individual domains are not coordinated their grouped spins point in random directions.”
His words reminded Lester of the history of nations after the Tourists left – the way they had shattered into tiny city-states and little kingdoms all going their separate ways.
Xander put the little iron rods on the table and took out a sheet of paper and a small vial of what looked like black sand. “These are iron filings, so light that spinspace forces can move them easily. We can use them to measure its effects.” he sprinkled some of the iron dust on a sheet of paper and held it over the two rods. Nothing happened.
He put the paper to one side, holding it carefully so as not to spill the iron filings. “Now I am going to use spinspace to order the iron in one of the rods.” He picked up one of them and held it so that it pointed at floor and ceiling. His fingers curled around the cylinder and his thumb pointed at the ceiling while he concentrated.
Then he placed it back down on the table. The other rod rolled over against it with a click. “Once you order the iron like this, it attracts other iron and we call this magnetism.” He pulled the rods apart and then he picked up the paper and held it over the ordered cylinder and tapped the edge of the paper. The iron filings bunched up into two separate masses. “You can see that the particles of iron are most attracted to the ends of the ordered rod. We call these ends magnetic poles.” He set the paper down again. “If you put this rod on a piece of wood and floated it in water, it would behave like a compass needle. One end would point north, which we call the north-seeking pole or just the north magnetic pole. Very handy for navigating.”
“But why does it point North? How does it know where North is? Is there a lot of iron north of us?”
“Good question.” Xander picked up the other rod. “Now I'm going to magnetize this one too.” He held it like he had the first one for a few moments, then picked up the other one and handed both of them to Lester.
“Now hold them near each other and tell me what you notice.”
Lester brought the two rods together and felt their attraction trying to pull them into contact. “They still attract each other, but a little stronger, I think.”
“Yes. Now turn one around and try again.”
This time it was different. When he rotated one of the rods and moved it near the other, it twisted in his hand, as if trying to turn back around to its previous orientation.
Xander showed him a little N engraved near one end of each rod. “North-seeking poles don't attract each other. They try to stay away from other north poles, but they are attracted to the other end, the South pole.”
Lester experimented and saw that the wizard was correct. The N ends did not want to be close to each other; he could feel them trying to push his hands apart. But when he reversed one of the rods, that repulsion vanished and the marked and unmarked ends tried to pull his hands together.
Suddenly he had an insight: compasses work because the Earth itself is a magnetized! “The Earth is a magnet!” he blurted.
Xander beamed. “Exactly,” he said. “The Earth has a lot of iron inside it, and there is enough coordination in the unpaired electron spins in the iron to make the Earth a giant magnet, with north and south magnetic poles. A tiny needle, magnetized and floated on water or oil allows us to sense which direction is North even during the blackest night when you can't navigate by the stars.”
Lester realized something that seemed wrong. “But if the north-seeking pole of a magnet is attracted to the south pole of other magnets...then the Earth has to actually have a South magnetic pole to the North of us!”
Xander grinned. “True,” he said. “This is where the terminology of the Ancients breaks down, I'm afraid. They learned compass needles point north before they learned about north and south magnetic poles, so they kept calling what the compasses pointed to the North magnetic pole of the Earth, even though they knew it was incorrect.”
He saw another problem. “But how did they make compasses when they had no wizards to order the spinspace of the iron?'
“Another good question,” said Xander he reached into the box and drew out a sewing needle. “This is unmagnetized at the moment.” He proved it by holding it near the piles of iron dust on the paper, which were not attracted to it. “Now we're going to make it a little magnet. There are four known ways to do this.'
“Four?”
“Yes. “You saw me use my mind to order the spinspace. That's the new way, that the Ancients didn't know.'
“What are the other three methods?”
“One way I can't show you today uses the electricity of the Ancients. If you wrap a coil of wire around the needle and send an electric current through the wire, the coil will be like a magnet, with a north and a south pole, and it will influence the spins in the needle and magnetize it.”
“Is that how the Ancients made compasses?”
“No, not originally. Magnets were discovered before electricity. There are naturally-occurring magnetic ores, and some were discovered in Magnesia, which is where magnets and magnetism get their names.”
“Wait a minute. “You said that in iron the spins are normally random. How could the Ancients have just found natural magnets lying around?”
“Because you can use one magnet to magnetize another piece of iron. As you realized a minute ago, the Earth is a magnet. So the magnetism of the Earth can make this needle into a little magnet, if you lay it down pointing north and south. That's the third way. Of course, it will take some time. But the Earth is patient. Any chunk of iron left in the Earth's magnetic field long enough will acquire its own magnetism, because its electrons are not locked in place and it's easier for the unpaired spins to line up with the Earth's field than to work against it.”
“But what's the fourth way, the way they actually made their compass needles?”
“I don't know how they discovered this,” said Xander. “The science textbooks Kristana scavenged for me don't say how they learned it. But the books did tell me how to do it. Any one can do this, not just wizards.” He picked up the needle in his left hand and one of the rod magnets in his right hand, and began stroking the north pole of the rod over the needle, always going in the same direction, as if he were brushing someone's hair. “You can use any magnet to comb the spins of a piece of magnetizable metal, like straightening hair. I'm doing the same thing the Earth would do if we just laid the needle down pointing north and south.”
“But you said that was a slow process. Why is you doing it...any faster than the Earth doing it?”
“Because the Earth's field is weak,” said Xander. “The earth is a big magnet but its strength is spread out over a large area. This rod magnet has a stronger field near its poles than the Earth's field, and it's closer than the north pole of the earth, which also helps.” He stopped stroking the needle and held it over one of the piles of iron filings on the paper. Some of the iron sand jumped up and stuck to the tip of the needle. “All the Ancients needed was a chunk of iron ore called 'magnetite', that had been magnetized by the Earth's field, and they could make as many compass needles as they wanted.”
“So nobody needs wizards to make magnets or compasses,” Lester said.
“No,” said Xander, “they don't, as long as they just want a compass needle and have a chunk of magnetic ore to comb it with. But no one can make very large or strong magnets anymore without
a wizard, because we don't have the electricity to do it.”
“But if we had electricity...”
“Then we wouldn't need wizard to make magnets,” the older wizard finished for him. “True. But mankind would still need us, because you can't use electricity to make a swizzle or an everflame.”
“No, but we can still use hand pumps for water, and burn firewood to stay warm without swizzles and everflames.”
“We can,” Xander agreed. “But as our population grows we'll end up cutting down all the forests, the way the Ancients were doing before the Tourists arrived. Trees are much more useful to build houses with. Once you use some wood to build a house you don't have to do it all over again. If you use that wood for firewood, however, you burn it up and just have to cut down and burn more and more to keep a house warm.”
“But we can just grow more trees.”
“Of course. But it takes years to grow a tree, and only hours to burn it up. Right now, that's not a problem, because our population is a lot less than it used to be. But as civilization arises again, we'll be able to feed and support more and more people. If we're not careful we'll be back where the Ancients were, cutting down all their forests and filling the atmosphere with smoke. We need everflames to avoid that, and for that we'll need a lot of wizards to make 'em.”
Once again Lester was reminded of the scope of Xander's ambitions for the School. If they succeeded, there would be more wizards, making more Gifts. Then, more people would be exposed to the swizzles and everflames and coldboxes, leading to even more wizards. They could literally change the world!
Chapter 47
Kaleb: arrival
“Therefor the Master acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.”
Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) Page 15
