“But she'll try to stop him.” Kaleb put his hands on the table. “She won't give up trying to keep him from making more wizards. Another reason I have to go back. Even if...” He swallowed. “Even if she's killed my family by now, I still have to go back and stop her from sending someone else. I owe it to all of you.”
Nathan pulled up a chair and joined him at the table. “Is that what this is all about? Some kind of penance? I'm sure Xander doesn't expect you to do that, to go up against her by yourself.”
“Actually, you're wrong. I discussed it with him and he said I can go if I really want to. If it's that important to me.”
“Why?”
“Because it's not just about me and my redemption. If I can stop her, then you could get more students from Angeles. Once I'm back there I can find some more people with the potential to be wizards.”
“Well, there's that,” Nathan conceded. “I hadn't thought of that. If she found them first, I guess the Queen would eliminate them.”
“Or send them here with more rings, if she has more. And there's another thing. I might be able to start influencing Cali to join Kristana's Union of States.”
Nathan frowned. “I think it would take more than one wizard to do something like that. Cali's a big country, from what I hear.”
“True. But I have to do something. Because of my weakness, a man died. She used me to do that. I can't let it end there.”
Kaleb swung his gaze back to Nathan, who was frightened by the hardness he saw in them.
“She wanted me to kill,” said Kaleb. “To kill more than just one man.” His eyes narrowed even further. “And when I get back to Angeles...she just might get her wish.”
Chapter 10
Xander: Complications
“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
– Winston Churchill
It was getting harder to get out of bed in the morning. Was it because they were making progress? Or because the progress seemed so slow when measured against the enormity of the undertaking? Either that, or he was getting sicker.
We're not out of the woods yet. A single catastrophe or battle could wipe out the little group of wizards I've fostered. The job is not yet done. Seedlings do not make a forest. Not yet.
He was tempted to just lie there. Would it make any difference if he slept another hour, another day? Lester grew stronger every day. The lad needed more seasoning, but life would take care of that. He seemed to have finally gotten the point of all of this. He understood a little of what they were trying to achieve. The rest was mere details.
Xander rolled over on his side and looked up through the window at the sky over Denver. All his eyes could see was endless blue and popcorn clouds, but behind the dome of Atlas he could still imagine the myriad stars out there, waiting.
I am Moses, and the stars are the Promised Land, he thought, surprising himself with such self-pity. We will venture out among them again, but when I say 'we' I mean humans, not myself.
Stupid to whine about what could not be changed. Did Leonardo Da Vinci whine that he had no engine powerful enough to make his helicopter fly? Did Babbage whine that he had no electricity to power his Difference Engine? They saw that wonders were coming, wonders they would never witness with their own eyes, but only with the eyes of their imaginations.
His imagination showed him ships that would sail the skies. His inner eyes gazed upon meetings with minds from other star systems, upon vast constructions hanging in the asteroid belt, of a coming abundance of energy and raw materials that would enrich all humans. But this was not yet guaranteed. They could still fail.
Get out of bed you lazy ass! Get up and get back to building the future you will never see.
He rolled out of bed and onto his feet. Hands that now trembled, sometimes, reached out for a fresh robe.
He wished he could wake up next to Kristana. Come to that, he wished he could spend every waking hour with her. But she had to be Governor, and he had to be a schoolmaster for young sorcerers. Aria was not yet ready for the burden of ruling, and Lester was not yet wise enough to make all the decisions that needed to be made for the school to grow and thrive.
The pain in his arm seemed a little worse today. He opened the coldbox and took a swig from the bottle of willow bark water Daniels had given him. Did the doctor suspect? If so, he was keeping it to himself.
Xander took up his staff and leaned on it a little, steadying himself, and then began his exercises. He wrapped pathspace around himself and released it, vanishing and reappearing as the light streaming in the window deflected around him and then didn't. He pulled books out of the wall shelves with bursts of pathspace alteration, made them whirl and twirl with deft weaves of spinspace, and then realigned them and slid them back into the empty slots among their fellows. He kept this up until the effort of concentration made him begin to sweat, then combined three kinds of metaspace to make blasts and eddies of cold air that whipped at his robe and dried his perspiration.
Not bad for an old fool. I've still got it. Or at least some of it, he mused, as his gaze fell upon the blue ring on the table.
The ring mocked him. Obviously it was an artifact, and still retained much of its power from the days of the Ancients. Some Tourist, some alien had put a metaspace weave on it over two hundred years ago. If he could penetrate its mystery, even more wonders, more possibilities would open up for everyone.
In fact, it might be the most important discovery of all, for all he knew. Oh, he had many artifacts in his collection now, scrounged from ruins first by the General's men, and then Kristana's. Undoubtedly there were many more secrets to be pried from these ghosts of the past, in time. If he had the time...
But at least one function of the ring was evident: it could connect minds across vast differences. The Queen of Angeles had used it to whisper her hypnotic commands to Kaleb from over a thousand miles away. And who knew what else? Had she been able to see though his eyes, too, to better direct her attacks?
Sometimes it was hard to resist the urge to slip the ring on and have a little chat with Queen Rochelle. He wanted so badly to tell her what he thought about what she had done to the poor guy. Every day he could see how Kaleb was trying not to be crushed by the burden of guilt and anger he was carrying. When the boy was lucky, his seething rage completely eclipsed his fears for the lives of his relatives that she may already have liquidated. But rage is a harsh substitute for hope.
The only thing that held Xander back from wearing that ring was the hope that Kaleb's people were still alive – the fact that so far Rochelle did not know for certain what had happened. She might guess that Kaleb had been killed or captured, but she couldn't be sure. Perhaps, she might think, he had succeeded but had also died in the aftermath.
Her uncertainty just might be the only thing keeping her hostages alive. If they were still alive. So he held back, and tried to study the weave on the ring by every means short of wearing it. Kaleb had been only too happy to let him keep it in his quarters, and thus avoid his own temptations.
Xander leaned the staff against the wall and seated himself at the table to try again. Closing his eyes, he let his mind expand outside his head to enfold the space around the ring, trying to taste it with his senses.
He could almost see it in his mind. Part of the space around the ring seemed to curve off in some unseen direction. It was not the simple warping of gravity. The dimple in spacetime made by the mass of the metal would be too faint for him to even sense, though he could imagine it. But this was something new. Not the curve of a gravity well, that gentle distortion in pathspace that affected other masses and their trajectories. Not the concentration of spin that a spinspace weave would make, or the re-apportioning of energy concentrations that marked a weave in tonespace, either. Something fundamentally different.
Gods! He could almost make it out, but as always its nature eluded him. A thought came to him: we should be raising our children around all of these t
hese artifacts – incorporating them into toys for babies. If he had grown up around rings like this, he could be making them now. Think of the possibilities! Rulers could talk out their differences without emissaries or diplomats. Researchers could collaborate without leaving their workshops.
Well, maybe someday that could come to pass. But not today. Make yourself useful, old man! Reluctantly, he opened his eyes, grabbed his staff and headed for the door. Any day now, Kaleb would be gone to face his destiny. He owed it to the lad to see he grew as strong as possible before that confrontation.
First, though, he had to look in on Kristana. As important as it was to try to ensure Kaleb's survival, the treaty she'd been negotiating with the ambassadors from the East was far more important in its potential benefits.
Kristana was not in her quarters. Had he really slept that late? Xander hurried to the audience chamber and knew from the voices leaking out of the closed door that no one had waited for a mere court wizard. He nodded to the guards as they swung it open for him.
“..is the nature of agreements that they can be changed, if necessary. Ah, Xander, so good of you to finally join us.”
She sounds a little annoyed with me. With an effort of will he made himself slow down and stride toward the conference table with a more dignified pace. “Forgive me, Excellency, but I must have overslept. I didn't realize you would be at it this early.”
She eyed him. “Progress is a good thing, Xander, but sometimes it can lead to inconvenient complications.”
What was she talking about? Part of him wanted to project a silent question at her, but they had agreed not to use the mind-to-mind speaking in the presence of others, except in emergencies. It might cause unwanted questions. “Excellency, I confess you have me at a disadvantage,” he said, joining her, Isaac, and Qusay at the long table. She sat in the middle of one side, with them across from her, so he seated himself at one end, to one side since he was not a ruler or an ambassador. “What complications?”
She glanced sideways at him. “You know I've been working on a trade agreement with the Emirates and New Israel regarding swizzles, everwheels and everflames. I thought it was only logical that each of our three nations could provide what their wizards were best at making. And now your students have gone and complicated things with this new thing we're calling an icetorch.”
That explained her annoyance. “Technically, they're now my faculty instead of my students, Excellency, but you're right. Nathan's invention of the icetorch weave is certainly an unexpected development. When you began working on the trade agreement I had no idea this would happen.”
Qusay's eyes were actually twinkling. “I was ready to hurry off to the Emirs with the agreement, once we had the final copy. But now, I must admit, I'm tempted to procrastinate in case your wizards come up with something else.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “I'm afraid there already is something else, Qusay.” From the inside of his robe he produced a short length of pipe. “My son brought me this the other day. It is a combination of icetorch and swizzle so that you can blow heated or cooled air in any direction you please, instead of just letting hot air rise and cold air fall.”
He showed them all how to control it, stroking around the circumference of the pipe's middle it to make the end so hot it glowed red or so cold it dripped fog, then stroked down the length of the pipe to make the cold air blow out the end of the pipe. “It's a wonderful solution for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.”
Kristana shook her head in amazed consternation. “What do you call it?”
Isaac shrugged. “I was going to let Nathan name it, but perhaps we can come up with a term before he thinks of one he likes. I'm open to suggestions.”
“It will make a lot of people happy,” said Qusay, “but what do you call something that can become hot or cold? When you say you have an everflame or a coldbox people know exactly what it does. But this combines bits of both.”
Three faces frowned in concentration, but Xander spoke up before any of them. “I have a suggestion. The ancients had something they used to control their heating and cooling devices, something they called a thermostat. You set it at a desired temperature, and it made the heater turn on if it was too cold or the cooler turn on if it was too hot. Its purpose was to try to make a room thermodynamically static, unchanging.”
“But this does the opposite,” Kristana objected.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “So I propose we call it the thermodyne instead. Something you can use to dynamically change the temperature – to make a room get colder or hotter.”
There was no dissent. “And now,” Kristana reminded them, “the real question is how this changes the trade agreement.”
Qusay looked thoughtful. “Did you say it was a combination of two 'weaves' – the icetorch and the swizzle?”
“Yes,” Isaac said. “He's still working on perfecting his grasp of the swizzle weave, I'm afraid. Somebody else did that part.”
“Well, then, I see no problem. New Israel can concentrate on making icetorches and everflames and Rado can make swizzles and turn some of the icetorches into thermodynes.”
Kristana bit her lip. “Ambassador, our intent was to include all three nations.”
Qusay smiled. “Naturally. The Dixie Emirates will have the honor of providing the everwheels we'll all need to cart the goods around.”
Chapter 11
Rainsong: Listening to the Trees
“Knowledge without wisdom is like water in the sand.”
– Guinean Proverb
She found him clinging to the trunk of an Aratus tree with all four graspers, the side of his head pressed against the bark. Carver spent a lot of time in the trees, she knew. His clan gave more importance than most to their genetic heritage, which she found both backwards and charming.
Even “down” here near the outer hull, the spin of the Ship produced only a fraction of the gravity of Homeworld, so it was no trouble at all for her to leap twenty arm lengths up onto the trunk and shimmy up near him. “What are you doing?”
“Listening.” He didn't open his eyes.
“To a tree? Is this some religious ritual?”
Now his eyes did open, and he stared at her. “No, silly. The trunk is hollow. It functions as an acoustic waveguide. Sounds you can't hear, normally, resonate in it like a song pipe.”
Okay, odd and interesting. “What kind of sounds? Can you hear it growing?”
He did the slow blink that meant stupid question. “No one can hear the trees growing. Not even a Monitor.” An iridescent Crunchy hummed by, and his tongue lashed out and snagged the insect deftly. After chewing and swallowing, he continued. “I'm listening for impacts.”
Sometimes getting complete answers from Carver was like trying to squeeze water out of a river-rock. She exhaled a sigh that made her nose-flaps quiver. “What kind of impacts?”
“Oort Cloud dust, mainly various kinds of ices.”
She knew that Carver had chosen to carry some specialized knowledge over into this body. Elders usually advised against it, because too much baggage inhibited new insights. “New lives, new insights” they would drone. But Carver was one of those who rarely followed advice.
His eyes had closed again. She darted her tongue out and slapped him lightly between his shoulders, to remind him that she was still there. “Can you please explain better, using words I know?”
He opened his eyes again. “Around every star, far outside the inner planets, there's a vast region occupied by planetesimals and ice fragments called the Oort Cloud. If they glance off the inner or outer hull there's a sound you can hear in the Aratus trees if you happen to be listening at the time of impact.”
Her eyes irised down to pinpoints to let him know she was getting irritated. “That doesn't sound right. The drive deflects things like that through the Center.” She might not be in Nav Section, but she knew as well as anyone that the Ship's thrustfield made matter out in front of it come together and
accelerate down the center of the vast, spinning cylinder of hull. It was what made the ship go forward, after all.
“You sound like one of the priests chanting when you recite facts like that,” he mocked. “What they don't tell you is that the drive isn't always that tight. When we get near a star the Monitors loosen up the thrustfield to prepare for deceleration. When they do that some of the dust and ice fragments can graze the inner hull, where some of the taller trees have grown tall enough to press against the light-makers. Then the hollow trunk resonates to the sound and you can hear it if you're quiet and press against the trunk.”
“You mean, you're trying to hear us slowing down?”
“Exactly.”
She bobbed her head to show confusion. “Why not just ask someone in Nav Section? There's always someone on watch.”
Now his eyes narrowed. “You know I can't do that. Ever since the rebellion, when some of us tried to turn the ship around, the front of the Ship's been walled off. You can't even see anyone in Nav – not unless you've been selected to incarnate as one of them in your current cycle.”
She cocked her head. “Can't you contact them with one of the link patches? That's what they're for, you know.”
Now he did that arrogant-patience slow blink again. “They don't answer their link patches except in emergencies. Haven't in a long time, hundreds of cycles. So I listen to the trees.”
“And it works? You've heard impacts from the slowing down before?” As soon as she said it, she realized it was another dumb question. Carver had little patience for the nonsense games some of the People invented to pass the time.
He regarded her. “Several times.”
Her eyes dilated wide open. “You remember that? You remember several Stops?” He was finally getting more interesting now.
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 5
