“Well, not much of them,” he confessed. “I cached most of those memories when I recycled. Mostly I remember two things. One, we didn't find the Meddlers (which you know already because we're still going), and two, we can find out about an upcoming Stop by listening to the trees for impacts.”
He seemed to be about to say one more thing, when suddenly he stiffened and his eyes widened. “I heard one!”
“Really?” She turned her head and pressed an ear to the trunk. “What does it sound like?”
And then she knew, because she heard it too. Pongyong!
“Was that one? Sort of a 'pong-yong' sound?"
“They're not always the same, but yes, that was one. The hull tries to ring like a bell, because the relative speed is pretty high even if it is just a grazing strike...but the various frequency components behave differently in the acoustic waveguide of the trunk. Usually you hear the initial impact and at least one echo.”
She heard another one. PongPongyong. “Was that two echoes?”
“Nope. It was a double impact and an echo. And you know what that means? We're definitely slowing down. If the thrustfield is getting so loose that a pebble can ricochet and hit twice, we must be getting ready to reverse thrust. No doubt about it, now. Nav is preparing to Stop us at another star system.”
He explained in more detail. Suddenly she wished she were in Nav Section. How close were they? Depending on the stellar mass, some stars had wider Oort Clouds than others.
In any event, they might have a million spins or more before they'd be close enough to know more about the inhabitants, if there were any. Right after that thought she mentally scolded herself. Of course there were inhabitants, space-dwelling or planet-dwelling, or Nav would not be slowing for a Stop.
The question was, had they finally found the Meddlers?
Chapter 12
Rochelle: The Sphere
“In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found.”
– The Book of the Law II:3
She screamed in fury and hurled the blue metal sphere across her workroom, making yet another tiny dent in the gold leaf that covered the wall. The sphere, however, survived the impact and bounced back toward her.
It was intolerable! She ruled the lives of millions of residents of southern Cali, but she could not force a stupid artifact to yield its secrets. Like the telepathy-magnifying blue rings, the secret of its magic appeared impenetrable. But at least she could use the rings. The spheres didn't seem to do anything.
But they must have a function! She could sense some hint of magic in the spheres, and would not rest until she learned it. Every secret adds to my power. I will have this one.
She stalked back to the table and snatched up a goblet of wine, heedless of the way her rage-trembling hand spilled scarlet drops like bloody rain on the gray marble floor. Damned Ancients! Her subjects had uncovered written records that spoke of some of the artifacts they called the Gifts, but so far they had found nothing pertaining to the blue spheres. And the writings they had found were hardly more useful. It seemed they'd never learned how to reproduce the alien technology, though incorporating it into existing systems had often been easy enough. Had the aliens, the Tourists, refused to explain? Or had the explanation been beyond human comprehension?
She sneered at that thought. If anyone has shown that these Gifts aren't unknowable, it's me.
She pulled at a bell cord to summon her advisers. They were not complete fools, and even if they couldn't come up with anything she hadn't already thought of herself, she could always kill one to cheer herself up and motivate the others.
While she waited for them she picked up the stupid sphere and replaced it in the bowl on the table with the others. It would have to wait for now. There were far more important matters to be considered to the east and southeast of Cali.
Dawnflower was the first to arrive. Rochelle managed not to roll her eyes at the unfashionable leather skirt and over-complicated hair braiding. Her own hemp cloth robes were far more wearable in the growing warmth of Spring's approach. But the Tribes were known to value tradition over personal comfort. Absurd!
“Your majesty?”
Rochelle lifted a hand, palm toward the woman. “Wait for the others.” Abashed, Dawnflower closed her mouth and nodded.
Next to arrive was Arturo. There was nothing to be said about his hair, because he had none. The torchlight gleamed off his shaved skull. She guessed that he imagined his walking stick to be some sort of weapon. She made a mental note to consider telling him that he really should either limp more, or practice with it more. It was far too obvious from the way he strode that he didn't need it to prop up his aging frame, and she doubted he would last half a minute against the spears of her own guards.
His ridiculous drooping mustache seemed to be getting even longer. At this rate he would trip over it soon. Maybe he'd be needing that walking stick after all.
When he saw Dawnflower already in the workroom ahead of him he quickened his steps to draw alongside of her. He stroked his mustache. “Your Majesty? I was just --”
She held up her hand again, silencing him. “Where are the others?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps they thought you were on your throne when you rang.”
She made a mental note to have her workroom bell changed to a different tone. Lower or higher than the throne room bell? Whatever the foundry had ready.
The far door opened a third time and Renning and Hollander came in. Renning's hair was wet as if he had jumped out of a bath. Hollander's was dry, but her tunic was wrinkled and Rochelle could see crumbs sliding off her pot belly; she had been eating again. Idly Rochelle wondered what had been left behind for the servants to finish off.
The Queen shook her head. “I can see you're all thinking I've gone soft. The next time I ring that bell, the last of you to arrive will be killed.”
She paused to watch Arturo's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. “I'm not in a good mood at the moment, so I would advise you all to be especially interesting today.” She turned to regard Dawnflower as she lifted her goblet and sipped again. “Surprise me.”
Her adviser on the northern Tribes shifted her weight from one foot to the other, betraying her nervousness. “There is no news from the Tribes, Majesty.”
The Queen frowned. “That is not a surprise. Renning, what do you hear from your agents in Francisco?”
Renning was tall but gaunt, as if he was aware that his greater height was a source of irritation to her and sought to offset this liability by starving himself. The thinness of his frame made his head look over-sized; he reminded her of a spoon.
“The Earl has been visited by another coaster from Seattle,” he said. “They say there have been significant developments in China.”
“That's more like it. What kind of developments?”
“They say the war is over. There is a new emperor.” He swallowed. “It's Wu.”
The Queen of Angeles, Rochelle Wu Peña leaned back in her chair, and thought about this. The flow of information across the oceans was meager, but her reports said many things about General Wu. They tied him to the New Shaolin Order and claimed the NSO would rule China.
It looked like Wu would rule China. But was he NSO? Her reports on NSO were even more contradictory than her reports on Wu. It was said to be a religious order, a warrior society, and an occult conspiracy. Any of these might be bad enough in themselves, but in combination...
“Why him, why now? There are many generals and many armies in China. How did his emerge dominant over all the others?”
Renning swallowed again. “It's said he's a sorcerer, Your Majesty. The other armies had no sorcerers, or only had weaker ones.” He paused. “They say he uses swizzle weapons.”
“Does he, now?”
“He does. Not water-pipe sized ones. Big ones, cannon-sized. They make perfect cannons – they need no gunpowder that might get wet or explode prematurely, and they have vari
able range and can shoot anything that fits into the barrel.”
Including bombs, she thought. Since there's no explosion to shoot them out, you can shoot things that would sometimes blow up if you tried to shoot them out of a cannon.
“This all sounds very familiar,” she said. “Didn't you warn me about Rado doing the exact same thing last year?”
“Not exactly, Majesty. I said they could...but apparently Xander chose to defeat the Texan invasion a different way.”
“Why? It seems he could have had a huge advantage. Or did Texas have a sorcerer too?”
“Not that I'm aware of, Majesty.”
“That's the answer. He didn't want to give them ideas.”
She leaned forward. “But Wu faced too many armies in China, so he needed the advantage - he didn't care if they saw the idea. He knew they didn't have the sorcerers to take advantage of it.”
“But how could he have been so sure, majesty?”
“Because the NSO must have most of the sorcerers,” she said, amazed that she had to point this out. “Obviously, he's either NSO or has made a deal with them. If Wu's their choice they're not going to help his enemies. So his side has a monopoly on sorcery.”
Chapter 13
Lester: Patterns of Growth
"Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death."
- Albert Einstein
He was always up before Xander these days, which gave him time to practice before the elder wizard could observe and critique his efforts. Earlier on, Xander had always been up before him but lately he'd seemed to need more rest than usual.
There was a phrase he'd run into in the biology textbook Xander had assigned him. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The basic idea is that a developing fetus retraces its evolutionary footsteps as it passes through growth stages in the womb.
In retrospect, this is obvious. A fertilized egg with its 23 pairs of chromosomes was like the first one-celled organism, with the dense genomic database of the nucleus surrounded by the protoplasm – the nanotech hardware that compiles and executes the DNA source code.
But there is only so much a single-cell can do in terms of absorbing and processing information. The next step in evolution was the confederation of single-cell organisms into multicellular organisms, in which the original egg multiplies by division and differentiates to produce families of cells – tissues – for specialized functions and processes. The tissues can combine to make organs, and the result is a complex organism composed of interlocked cooperating cell-organisms.
Since we have to go from fertilized egg to fully-developed human, we tend to repeat the development that produced the sort of entities that spawned us (after all, not all of our code is original; we have to do most of the same processes other life forms do). The fetus at various stages resembles a worm, a fish, and so on, until it resembles a human.
The reason he was wandering through these thoughts today was something Xander has said to him the other day. What if intelligence continues to evolve past the level of humans? What if we are not the final phase? You could think of some godlike Entity whose ontogeny recapitulates its phylogeny.- that the so-called 'sentient' stage is a penultimate rather than a final one. If we truly were the last incarnation of some developing over-soul, then our life tribulations would be the birth pains of a demigod.
Were the Tourists merely childish gods? Was what happened to us just one of those unfortunate events when some newly-transcendent awareness blunders into contact with a vulnerable civilization?
He didn't know what to think of the Tourists lately. On the one hand they helped wreck our civilization. On the other hand their tech gave us generations of wizards. The Gifts gave and took. They took: they crashed civilization, creating the feudalism that included the war that killed his father. And they gave: they encouraged his own abilities so that he became an apprentice, and he learned enough to avenge the death of his father.
If the future of humans was, as Xander believed, a future in which all humans were slightly magical, then the current situation was obviously only an intermediary phase, in which a few humans manifested the ability to weave metaspace. But the “few” is a changing variable as the system evolves. In that picture we are evolving toward a universe of 100% magical literacy, where the ability to do some simple forms of magic is considered as basic as the ability to read and write.
Well, for a universe where magic = psionic engineering the development of psionic engineers (wizards) is as inevitable as metalworking required the development of blacksmiths.
He picked up an icetorch from the table in one hand, the disc of an everflame in the other, and looked at the metaspace weaves around the two pieces of metal. The weaves were similar in some ways, but different enough so that he could not begin to understand how they could both be working applications of tonespace.
Nathan had definitely not been trying to do anything with tonespace when he made the first icetorch. He'd heard a little about tonespace from Xander, but he'd really been working on solving the swizzle test. Xander had tried to explain that away by telling them how the three known flavors of psionic were closely related.
But if that was the case, why had no one else stumbled upon the icetorch weave? Or at least no one he'd ever heard of.
It seemed to him that there were two factors to be considered here. First, there was the mental image you held in your head to tell your mind what configuration you wanted, what pattern you intended for the metaspace to conform to. But there was a second factor that came into play once you imagined a pattern: upbringing.
Nathan hadn't been exposed to swizzles while growing up, any more than Lester himself had, hence his difficulty with the swizzle weave. But he evidently had been exposed to everflames and tonespace magic during his formative years – which was obvious in retrospect when you knew his father was some kind of tonespace wizard back East. Perhaps if they'd had more everflames back at the inn in Inverness, Lester himself might have stumbled upon the icetorch which he was trying to make a swizzle in a Texas prison.
The conclusion Lester had arrived at was that the mind tended to replicate what it was most familiar with. If Xander had known this, and taught him tonespace first, then he might have been making everflames long before he made a swizzle.
The patterns, the weaves, were obviously important, because without them you couldn't make the artifacts. But the weaves by themselves were not enough, or else everybody would be a wizard. It must take a very lucky combination of exposure and training to make a wizard.
Chapter 14
Kaleb: Leaving Is Returning
“The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders ”
– The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse
He had been dreading this conversation, but now that he had finally screwed up his courage and forced himself to make the trek downstairs, he felt strangely at ease. The decision had been made. All he had to do now was state it.
He raised his hand and knocked on the door, a door as plain as all the others, that said, simply, Wizard.
”Come in, Kaleb.”
He nearly jumped, then told himself Xander must be good at telling his visitors by differences in their knocking. He drew the door open to admit him and entered Xander's quarters. He wasn't as surprised as he could have been to see the old man already had a visitor.
“It's time for me to leave.”
Xander nodded. “I know. I'm surprised you stayed this long. But I'm glad you did.”
Kaleb grimaced. “It was a privilege to attend your School, and part of me wants to stay. But my family...”
“Yes, I know,” said Xander. “It's something you have to do, and I hope we haven't delayed you too long already. We'll miss you.”
Kaleb looked down. “After...what happened...I'm still surprised you let me stay. When I think of how the Queen used me, it makes me sick and ashamed.”
Lester frowned. “All that was d
one to you, not by you. No one blames you for what happened. I bet the whole School would come with you to Angeles if you let them.”
He shook his head. “No, what you're doing here is far to important to risk The School must grow. You can't have your graduates and faculty roaming around when for all we know more students could be on their way here right now.”
They were silent for a minute, mulling that over. He could see that Xander agreed immediately, but Lester was conflicted.
“Will you be coming back?” the old man asked him. Kaleb was glad he didn't add, if you survive, that is.
“I want to,” he said. “But I feel a need to redeem myself. Yes, I know,” he said, holding up a hand when Lester looked about to interrupt, “that you don't blame me for what the Queen got me to do. But I do. So I have to do something about her before I think about coming back.”
“How are you going to get there?” Lester asked.
He shrugged. “I figured there must be a trade caravan heading back that way any day now. I'm sure Trent would agree to take me back, but if not him, there'll be another.”
Xander rose from his seat. “I have a better idea. Come with me downstairs. I want to show you something.”
Lester unfolded from the couch. “I'd better get back upstairs.”
“Oh they can wait,” said Xander. “Come down with us. It was your idea, after all.”
Kaleb looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”
Lester just grinned. “Oh, I'd hate to spoil it.”
They passed out into the corridor and headed down the stairwell. Secretly Kaleb groaned at yet another delay but he couldn't complain, not after all they'd done for him. It was likely, he reflected, that he wouldn't even be alive if Xander hadn't interceded with the Governor.
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 6
