“That reminds me. When are you going to enchant the tanks we got from Texas with your spinspace, so they can help defend Rado?”
He exhaled through his nose. “Soon. We could do it tomorrow, but there's a problem we need to solve first.”
“Another problem in your School?”
“No.” He sighed. “It's the control interface problem.”
She pulled back a little and stared into his face, as if she though he was kidding her. “The what problem?"
“Control interface.” He took a breath. “Do you really want to hear about it.”
She pulled him closer again and kissed his shoulder. “If it's a problem that bothers you, then of course I want to hear about it. What's a control interface?”
“Jargon from the old books, sorry. You know how a swizzle or an everflame can be turned on and off? Well, most of the Gifts that I know about have some way to control them. The one exception is the coldboxes. The coldbox weave generally is an all-or-nothing effect, because you don't want people accidentally turning them down or off and letting food spoil.”
“So with everwheels the spinspace can be turned on and off. Why is that a problem?”
“It isn't, or it isn't necessarily a problem,” he said.
She stepped back and just looked at him again. “Can you be a little clearer than that?”
He stroked his beard. “I could put a spinspace weave on the wheels of a tank and make them move, inside the treads. That's not hard. The problem is the driver. If the driver is a wizard, he can reach out with his mind and control the weave and make the tank go faster or slower.”
He paused and sighed, staring out over the city again. “But if the driver isn't a wizard, he won't be able to start it rolling, or if it's already moving, to make it stop. That's the problem.”
“What about the 'control interface' you mentioned?”
“Anyone can turn an everflame up or down. You don't have to be a wizard for that, once it's made. All you have to do is reach out and stroke the side of the disk. Anyone can do it.”
“So why couldn't anyone control the everwheels in a tank powered by spinspace?”
He grimaced. “Because when you're sitting inside the tank, steering it, the wheels are out of reach. It's not a problem for wizards – we can reach right through the armor plate and affect the weave with our minds. But for anyone else, it makes it impossible for the driver to affect the everwheel spell. They'd have to drive around in circles until they got a wizard to stop the tank for them.”
“Ah,” she said. “So what are you going to do?”
“I don't know yet,” he admitted. But the Ancients must have solved the problem, or else the Tourists showed them how to solve it...because the records show they were using everwheel-powered vehicles for nearly a century before they started to fail. And they had no wizards at all.”
“Then there is a solution and you'll find it.”
“I hope so,” he muttered.
“You worry too much,” she told him. “Why don't you come downstairs with me and let me take your mind off it for a while?”
He smiled. “I can resist anything but temptation, as the Ancient Oscar Wilde used to say.” He took her hand, reached out with his other hand to lift his staff from where he had leaned it against the railing, and allowed her to lead him back to the stairwell.
As they descended she changed the subject. “What's next with your School?”
“More students,” he said. “We need to get more students. The graduates can help teach now, but we have to attract more candidates. I was hoping more would show up by now, but they haven't. We might have to do something soon to get the word out.”
“Are you sure that's the right way to get them?”
Now it was his turn to be puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“From what I hear,” she said, “You've been lucky so far. People have just showed up randomly and they all had the talent. But if you spread the word and get more to show up, a lot of them are bound to be disappointed, aren't they? Most people can't become wizards.”
“You're right. It's more of a sure thing if we find them before asking them to come, like Lester did with Carolyn.”
He started coughing, and they paused on a landing until the fit passed. He could see she was looking concerned as she watched him. Maybe I should tell her. It didn't feel right to keep secrets from her. But this was a problem she couldn't help with, and all it would do is add to her worries.
“Well, then,” she continued, “It seems to me what you need to do is the same as what Roberto did.”
He just stared at her. “The General? What are you talking about?”
“Remember how you met him? How we used to travel around Rado, talking about his Dream and building his followers? You need to do something like that. Send a few of your graduates out to travel the country and talk about the School. They could hand out the everflames and swizzles they've been making for practice too.”
“Your soldiers could distribute them."
“Yes, but they can't check people for the talent like your wizards can,” she said. “Just think, you might find more people who have no idea they could be wizards, like Lester did with Carolyn. And at the same time you'd be helping people by giving them things they need, things made by the School. Hell, every village inn and town hall should have a thermodyne or two, in case there's a blizzard.”
“That's not a bad idea,” he said.
“And,” she said, “every time people use the everflame or swizzle or thermodyne we give them it would help remind them of the School.”
“Not to mention it would sow the seeds for a new generation of people with the talent,” he said. “It's a great idea. We'll do it.” he stopped and kissed her again. “Maybe you should be running the School instead of me.”
“Don't even think about it,” she growled. “I have enough trouble with my advisers and troops, without trying to herd a flock of wizards. That's your department.”
He laughed. “All right. Point taken. But you'll have to have your people help me renovate and convert more of the old vehicles. If we're going to do this, we might as well do it in style. I'd imagine nothing will get the rumors spreading more than folks seeing wagons roll up without horses puling 'em.”
“Just talk to my blacksmiths. I'll have my men out scavenging the old buildings for more vehicles to convert.”
They were passing the school floors now. A landing door opened below them and Nathan and Kareef pounded up the stairs to intercept them. “We did it!” said Nathan. “Well, Kareef did it. But I helped.”
“Wait a second and catch your breath,” Xander advised him. He looked at Kareef. “Did what?”
“We figured out the blue metal spheres,” said Kareef. “Are you ready for this? They're records of the Ancients. They store experiences.”
Chapter 30
Kristana: Dare to Dream
“Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”
– Golda Meir
She looked from Kareef's face to Xander's and then back to the dark-skinned graduate from the Emirates.
Xander seemed surprised, then skeptical. “How did you decide that?”
“I know what you're going to say,” said Kareef. “That it's impossible. That no one can store an experience.”
“Actually, said Xander, “I was going to say we store experiences all the time – in our own heads. But a human brain is not the same thing as a ball of metal. We try to preserve memories in books, and if someone reads my description of an experience they can imagine it. But that's an imperfect process, because words are imperfect. The odds of someone reading what I wrote and imagining it exactly the same as I perceived it are pretty slim.”
Something occurred to her, a hint of an old memory. “I remember reading that the Ancients had ways of recording sound and even pictures on on reels of magnetic tape. Could this be related to that?”
“I don't see how,” Xander said. That was done using the electricity of the Ancients, and there nothing like that here, just a ball of metal. How do you store experiences in that without some way of generating power?”
Nathan cleared his throat. “There's another possibility.”
All eyes swiveled to him.
“My father has a lot of old books,” he said. “Some of them are full of what he calls nonsense, but he can't bear to throw them away, because our ancestors were in the publishing business. Books are sacred to him.”
“And rightly so,” said Xander. “Brains can forget, but paper remembers.”
“Well I read an odd book one day that claimed our memories are not stored inside our heads.”
“I can see why he called it nonsense,” Kristana remarked.
“The book talked about some things that had puzzled the scientists for a long time. One of these things is the fact that our memories do not appear to be stored in any particular location. A person can suffer damage to their brain that destroys a significant amount of it, and yet still have their memories intact. Another thing was the fact that researchers had found you can trigger memories by stimulating part of the brain with electricity.”
“That doesn't sound very strange,” said Xander.
“Maybe not. But the thing is it didn't seem to matter where they poked their wires in. Anywhere they stimulated, it could trigger a memory of a sight, a sound, a smell. But it was all over the brain, not in a particular region.
“I still don't see the connection to the metal spheres,” Xander said. “They have no electricity.”
“You're right. But here's the thing. The author of the book claimed that ancient occult traditions say every event that happens is stored in something called the Akashic Record. He claimed that the AR was an intrinsic part of space, and that our brains somehow accessed it when we retrieved our memories.”
“Sounds like superstition to me. They just didn't understand how brains work, so they made up an explanation.”
“Yes, maybe, but consider this. What if --”
“I'm sorry but it sounds like your father was right. A book full of nonsense. If my memories were somehow written on space, or some aspect of space, how would we keep them separate? What makes me remember my life and not yours? Anyone can pick up a book or walk past a sign.”
“Good point,” said Nathan. ”Obviously there is some unique connection, a link to the record of your experiences that you have that I don't. I have my own link to my experiences and you carry the link to yours. So everyone remembers, but we all remember our own lives. If my brain gets stimulated, by some incoming information that relates to an experience, or by a little electricity, the link becomes active and I remember something.”
His eyes seemed to be looking at something far away. “But what if you could store it? The link, I mean. What if a metaspace weave could copy that link and store it? Then, if someone else interacted with it, they could access that link and experience the same memory – the memory in the Akashic Record that the link leads to.”
His eyes came back into focus and he stared at Xander. “I think that's what the blue spheres do. The weave on them must be pretty important, because they used good metal to anchor it. I think the Tourists made these spheres so the Ancients could store their experiences – store them perfectly. Not as words on a page, where they can be misinterpreted or the paper can rot away, but in a weave, pointing to the indestructible record in the Akashic Record.”
“Anything is possible,” said Xander. “But do you have any evidence that this theory of yours is true?”
Nathan smiled and looked at Kareef. “You want to tell him? It was your discovery.”
Kareef locked gazes with Xander. “When I went to bed tonight,” he said, “I was trying to figure out the sphere and getting nowhere. I lay back and tried to set it on the table but it started to roll off, so I shoved it under my pillow. And when I fell asleep, I dreamed that I was back in the time of the Ancients!”
“Is that all? I'm afraid it sounds like you were thinking about them when you went to sleep and you just dreamed about it. Doesn't prove anything.”
“I had the same thought,” said Kareef. “But the dream seemed so real. It was so intense that I woke up. I tried to talk to Nathan about it, but he was tired. Then I had an idea. I stuck the sphere under his pillow and let his go back to sleep.”
“And I had the same dream!” Nathan breathed. “Exactly the same.”
“Because he told you about it”
“No, that's just it,” said Kareef. “I didn't. But when he woke up again a few minutes ago we compared notes. And it was the same.”
“But we've all been around these spheres and nothing happened before,” Xander objected. “Why now?”
“I remember reading a chapter in my psychology textbook,” said Nathan. “It claimed that dreams are the brain's way of processing memories. It said something called brain wave tracings could show when a person started to dream, because the waves changed to signal the onset of dreaming.” He stared at Xander and Kristana. “Maybe the memspheres only work if your head is near them when you start dreaming. That's why it never happened to us before.”
“Memspheres?”
“It's Kareef's name for them. I like it, and, besides, I already got to name the icetorch weave, so it's only fair.”
Xander glanced at the darker wizard. “It's a good name, if that's what they really do. But I don't think you're really proved it yet.”
Kareef grinned as if he were ready for that. He pulled a blueish sphere from a pocket of his gray robe, and a folded piece of paper. “Why don't you stick this under your pillow and see what happens?”
“But you've already got me thinking about the Ancients,” said Xander. “If I dream about them, it doesn't prove anything. It'll just be my brain concocting a dream to process the memory of you telling me about your dreams. Like what probably happened to Nathan.”
“Nice try,” said Kareef, handing him the sphere and the paper. “But I've written things down on this page that I haven't told you. If you have a dream – without reading it first – and then you look at it and see descriptions of things you just dreamed about, then what?”
Xander pocketed the sphere and the page without unfolding it. “Then I'll have only two options. I could believe either that you can see the future, and not just any future but the future of my dreaming brain - which is pretty damn unlikely unless you're some kind of prophet - or that you're right.”
Nathan and Kareef smiled at each other. “We'll talk to you in the morning,” said Kareef. “But I already know what you're going to say.”
After they left she looked into Xander's face. Now he was showing signs of annoyance. “What's the matter? Don't you believe them?”
Xander growled. “The problem is, I think I do believe them. They have no reason to make up something like this.”
“So why the growl? Are you angry that they figured it out and you didn't?”
“No,” he said. “I'm really hoping they're right. It would be an important discovery. Maybe our most important one.”
“Then what's bothering you?”
He tried to growl again, but it turned into a sad chuckle.
“It's going to be hard for me to fall asleep now.”
Chapter 31
Enrique: Compromising For God
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.”
– Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
He who walked in the shoes of the Fisherman lit a candle from the fireplace, strode to the corner of his bedroom and opened his walk-in closet. He reached out with his free hand to part the hanging clothes in front and slipped through them to the back of the closet, where he opened a concealed door whose existence only one other human being knew about. He stepped into another corridor. Unlike the known corridors of th
e Vatican Dallas, this one had no torches, and he cupped his free hand in front of the candle to shield it from the created breeze as he strode forward.
Theoretically he was inside one of the foundation walls of the inner keep. It had been intended as a bolt hole in case of attack, but the government of the Lone Star Empire had proved to be more stable than anticipated, and the Vatican had never been attacked. The bolt-hole was therefore re-purposed. Where previously it had led to a concealed exit, now it led to an underground room covered by a garden.
It was no longer an escape. It was now a place where the Pope could go and literally disappear from the map. Normally, in a complex as large as the American Vatican was becoming, there would be maps and if he went missing they could always organize a search.
But this room wasn't on any map. No one would think to search here for him, for no one save he and one other knew of its existence. Here he could enjoy that most satisfying of indulgences: to be where no one could possibly interrupt you no matter how much they wanted to.
He stepped to a mirror on the wall and ran his hand down the side of the frame. The surface of the mirror seemed to ripple and then the glass seemed to vanish as if it were an open window. The face of Marcus appeared. He'd probably been waiting for contact. Enrique resisted the impulse to step through the portal.
“How is he?”
“Restless, your Holiness. Which is only to be expected.”
“Does he have any idea why he's there?”
“No, Holiness. I'm sure His Excellency believes we are merely offering him sanctuary in his time of need.”
“Is he making any progress?”
“Not that I've seen yet, Holiness. But the early stages are often missed. So far we can only hope.”
“Right. Do you still think this was a bad idea?”
“Not as bad as what we expect from the junta.”
“Well, there's that. Until next time, then.” He ran his hand up the side of the frame, and the portal became a mirror again.
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 12
