Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3)

by Matthew Kennedy

  “The doctor can wait. This is important.”

  “So are you,” Lester shot back. “To a lot of people. And that cough sounds like it's getting worse. If there's anything the doctor can do about it, best we get him to do it – and sooner rather than later. Will you come willingly, or do I have to tell the Governor?”

  Xander glared at him. I should have left you in Inverness, he thought. But he managed not to say it. Even as angry as he felt about wasting time and risking Kristana finding out about his condition, he knew growling at Lester wouldn't help. But damn it, why wouldn't anyone leave him alone? There was work to be done! Important work.

  “All right. But I have to fetch something from the storeroom first.”

  Chapter 39

  Daniels: The Truth Inside

  “Make a habit of two things: to help; or at least to do no harm.”

  – Hippocrates of Kos

  He hummed to himself, peering into the culture. Incredible! How had the scientists of the Ancients gotten by without this? He'd never read of anything like it. Did that mean descriptions hadn't survived the chaos after the fall, when people used books and magazines for kindling in the winter? Or had they never thought to ask the Tourists for this kind of artifact?

  The sound of the door opening behind him jolted him out of his musings. Straightening up, he swung the metal ring up by pushing on the rod that hinged to his new medical diadem, and saw Lester almost drag Xander into his clinic. From the look on his face, Xander wanted to smack the kid, but he had his staff in one hand and a bag of something in his other hand.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  Xander stared at the top of his head. “What's that?”

  “Don't let him distract you, Doc,” Lester said quickly. He turned to the older wizard. “It's something I helped him make, with the smith's help. A smaller version of the see-through.”

  “He's being too modest,” Daniels told Xander. “It also magnifies what I see. Very handy. I can watch an active culture without uncovering the Petri dish. Makes it possible to --”

  “Later,” Lester cut in. “Something's up with Xander and he's been trying to hide it from us. You're going to need the bigger see-through to check him out.”

  He could see Xander wasn't following this, so Daniels stepped over to and then behind the larger artifact a few feet away from his work table that looked like an oval full-body mirror. With no glass in it. Xander's brow furrowed, then Daniels could see the old man's eyebrows shoot up in surprise, then settle.

  “Ah. Yes, I recognize the weave. He told me that -”

  “Xander, stop,” Lester said. “We can discuss it after he has a look at you...and inside you.”

  The court wizard glared at Lester. “This is private. I don't want one word of whatever he finds, if anything, leaking out to anyone and getting them worried.”

  Lester rolled his eyes. “I'll be right outside,” he gritted, and stepped out into the stairwell, closing the door behind him. His meaning was clear to Daniels; he didn't even have to say it: you're not going to duck out of this, old man.

  After he shut the door Daniels regarded Xander. “No, I won't tell Kristana what I find,” he told him. “Doctor-patient confidentiality. I swore the Oath, same as my father before me. But she knows something's up, wizard. You can't keep her in the dark forever.”

  “Let's get this over with,” Xander growled.

  Daniels stepped out from behind the see-through, impressed that the old man hadn't reacted as Kristana had to the sight of his clothes and skin vanishing. “Your turn. Step behind the see-through, please.”

  Xander grimaced. “You need a better name than that,” he said. “Something a little more scientific.”

  “I've been giving it some thought,” Daniels said. “The Ancients had the telescope for seeing far away, and the microscope for seeing tiny things. “I was thinking of calling this the thruscope. Or maybe the L-scope, to name it after Lester.”

  “Thruscope,” Xander grunted. “He's too impressed with himself as it is.”

  As Xander stepped forward his robe and skin melted away and finally, his rib cage came into view, then faded.

  And there it was. He inhaled sharply, even though he had been more than half expecting it. That ugly growth up near the top of the wizard's lung on the right side, just below where the air pathway divided into the left and right sides. I'm doing what no one has ever done. Looking right at a tumor in real time. Not even the still x-ray images and high-tech scans of the Ancients could let them do this!

  “Well, now I know why you've been coughing.”

  “You can see a cold?”

  “I guess I should be impressed that you can make stupid jokes with a tumor in your lung. You knew, didn't you?”

  “I was pretty sure,” Xander admitted. “I've had coughs before, but this felt different.”

  “Why didn't you come to me sooner?”

  Xander stepped out of the focus of the thruscope and pulled a pipe out of his robe. He pretended to inspect the bowl. “Because I had things to do...and because there's really not much you can do for me, is there?”

  Daniels opened his mouth to bark at the old fool for his pipe, but what came out was “You're right, damn it. If I had the machines of the Ancients, you might have a chance. As it is, I could try to cut it out, but I'll be honest with you, at your age, with my primitive gear and skills, you'd be lucky to survive the operation.”

  Xander collapsed into a chair. Looking at Kristana's court wizard, Daniels could only imagine how the man felt. After decades of striving, to finally have his School up and running, producing wizards, and then, to be struck down by cellular rebellion in his own body, before the magic-tech revolution he was fostering could produce the advances that could save him.

  He waited for the despair, the anger, the railing at Fate.

  But all Xander said was “I need more time.”

  Daniels sighed. “Three hundred years ago, I would have at least been able to slow its progress. But not now.”

  Xander looked up at him. “How?”

  “The Ancients had poisons called antibiotics, produced in chemical factories. They called it 'chemotherapy'. It was rough on the body, often making people lose their hair and feel sick all the time. But sometimes it extended their lives for years, and even, in some cases, killed enough of the cancer cells for their body to beat it and go into remission.”

  Xander pursed his lips. “It'll be a long time before we have chemists who can make that kind of stuff. Anything else?”

  Daniels shrugged. “Well, they also used focused beams of radiation to try to kill the tumors but not the surrounding tissue.”

  Xander exhaled. “I think that's what got me into this mess. Radiation, not smoking.”

  Daniels pulls a chair over and sat down facing him. “Don't tell me you've been fooling around with radioactive metals, like the ones the Ancients used to make their bombs.”

  “Not exactly, but something like that..” Xander told him of how he distracted a driver and disabled a tank from Texas after the lead tank fell into his tank pit. “I was kind of in a hurry, and the coins that I converted into everflames and tossed down the hatch of the tank were cranked up so high, they must have been putting out some x-ray and gamma rays as well as heat and light.” He coughed. “If Lester hadn't killed the bastard, Brutus would probably have come down with cancer of some kind too.”

  “It's probably a combination of things,” Daniels told him. “I'd bet the radiation was just the last straw. Has Lester had any problems?”

  “No. He was on the other side of the turret. The steel and tank armor probably shielded him.”

  “You don't know that for sure.” Another thought struck him. “Christ, Xander! The tank is still a death trap, isn't it?”

  “Yep. That's why I didn't let anyone try to move it.”

  “So you're going to jet it just sit there cooking?”

  Xander seemed about to growl, but then he sighe
d. “I'm open to suggestions. Got any ideas?”

  “You could shut down the everflames. I've heard you can do that from a distance.”

  Xander grimaced. “Yes but I still have to see them...” His voice trailed off.

  Daniels knew a man getting an idea when he saw one. “What?” Then he realized the wizard was looking at the thruscope. “Hold on! X-rays and gamma radiation are like light. If you used one of those to see inside the tank, you'd also be letting the radiation out – right at you.”

  “Only from a distance, and only until I turned them off.” Xander put the pipe back in a pocket of his black robe. “And I can do things with the pathspace weave that you can't...like extend the range.”

  “I still think you'd cook your eyeballs, not to mention your brain. We'll find some other way.”

  “Doctor, the radiation has already doomed me, and it's my fault it's there. I'll deal with it. But not today.” He grabbed the bag and stood up. Things inside the bag clicked against each other. “Because I've got something more important to do up at the School.”

  Daniels frowned. More important? “What's in the bag?”

  “The past,” said Xander, heading for the door. “And the future.” He shut the door behind him.

  Daniels just shook his head. I'm going to miss that crazy old man.

  Chapter 40

  Esteban: Pencil Work

  “...and what was written was upright.”

  – Ecclesiastes 12:10

  At times, his concentration on the task at hand wavered, drifting back to contemplate the writing instrument in his hand, an artifact of the Ancients with no magic save perhaps for the fact of its sheer existence. Look at it! A wooden shaft, bound at one end by a thin metal band that held the rubber 'eraser'. Inside the core of the wood, an even slimmer cylinder of graphite. No ink dripping from a worn quill nib, no dipping into ink pots. It could write on any dry surface except the glass in the window. He had no idea where the Governor's minions had found the cache of these priceless pencils, but wasn't it appropriate that the contents of some ancient “school supplies” store had found their way up here to the Xander School?

  His eyebrows lowered in focus as he employed a decryption he had never expected to use – a purely mechanical process, but a single slip could force him to start over. He could not let that happen. Not after Divine providence had made this very act of translation possible when it might not have been.

  In a way, he'd hoped that translating the coded message would prove impossible. And it very nearly had – because decrypting the 64 x 64 grid of letters required using the first 64 books of the Bible. But it had to be the Catholic bible. If he tried to use a Protestant one, the message would have remained gibberish, because during that period of Ancient history known as the Reformation, a man named Martin Luther had decided to toss out 7 books of the version approved by Rome to make his own version of the Bible for Protestants.

  Without those seven books, the decryption would fail. He would have ended up using the wrong books after Nehemiah, skipping Tobit and Judith and the other five not included by Luther. Fortunately, the presence of Father Andrews had caused Xander to locate a Catholic Bible for him, which Esteban had borrowed.

  This code went back over a century, from a time after they had lost touch with the old Vatican in Rome and before the New Vatican moved across the Texas border into Dallas. Accounts differed on whether it had been created by the Pontiff himself or by his cardinals, but as far as Esteban knew, the code had never been broken by the enemies of the Church, and was just as simple in principal (though tedious in execution) as it had been in those early days.

  He had heard that in the days of the Ancients, there were powerful machines that could crack most codes by sheer brute force of trying billions of variations until one yielded intelligible plain text. Perhaps, with the use of electronic slaves such as those to perform the unimaginable drudgery for them, the Ancients could have cracked this code. But the infrastructure crashed and civilization fell, ending the Age of Computers, so it was now extremely unlikely that anyone not privy to the secret of the code would ever be able to unravel it by brute force efforts.

  He sighed and worked the pencil on a fresh sheet of paper, completing step one of the decryption, which was a simple inversion of the ciphertext matrix of letters, producing a new grid of 64 x 64 letters, in which the letter in row 1, column 2, for example, now stood in row 64, column 63:

  (row, column) → (65-row, 65-column)

  Fortunately, they way he did it, one row at a time, filling in the stage-two matrix, there was little chance that he would transpose a letter into the wrong row.

  There. The original ciphertext was now upside-down and backwards. Now on to stage three. The little table was getting crowded, what with two sheets of paper on it now, the stage-one ciphertext and the second-stage matrix he had just finished writing. He put the two pages on Lobsang's empty bed and laid another blank page to the right of the stage-two sheet.

  The door opened and Lester stuck his head in. He took in the scene and blinked. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Solving a puzzle. What's up?”

  “Xander wants us all in the main room. He says there's a new project for us, an important one.”

  Esteban stood up and followed him out the door. What else could he do? Anything else would have raised too many questions. And truth be told...he was kind of relieved that he still didn't know what the message said.

  Chapter 41

  Xander: The Scientific Method

  “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

  – Winston Churchill

  He trudged up the stairs, staff in his right hand, the bag that clicked, every time it moved, in his left. The staircase seemed to be getting longer every day – extending, like one of those telescopes the Ancients used centuries ago. He shook his head at the extravagance of the ancient design: nested tubes of metal just so that it could be collapsed to fit into a smaller space. When they had gotten serious with their 'scopes, and turned them toward the heavens, they'd finally settled for a more permanent mounting. But that was a different design, using curved mirrors instead of lenses to spread the pathspace of the light for magnification, bouncing images of the stars and planets back and forth inside the tube before they encountered an eyeball.

  Your mind is drifting again, old man. He stopped on the last landing to get through another coughing fit, and catch his breath, then marched up the last flight of steps and opened the door.

  Six gray-robed figures sat waiting for him in a semicircle of cushions. Well, they'd had plenty of time to assemble.

  He wanted to grin when he saw the seventh spot, the empty cushion between Nathan and Carolyn. Another thing that separates us from the lower animals, he thought. Lions and bears might have had preferred spots to curl up in, but they would never have deliberately left a gap where Lobsang used to sit.

  “Some of you know this already,” he began, “but last night Kareef made an important discovery. It's hard to believe, but Nathan and I verified it.”

  “Is it something to do with tonespace?” Carolyn asked. “Some new kind of weave, like Nathan's icetorch?”

  “Yes and no. It's a weave, all right, but not one we know how to make yet. But Kareef discovered what it does, and it's an incredibly important discovery, so I'll let him tell you.”

  Kareef glanced to his left and right. “We all know about the blue ring the Queen of Angeles gave to Lobsang. It let her communicate with him mentally, all the way from Cali. So we know the blush tint on the ring has something to do with thoughts, right? The artifacts Xander has, that the Governor's men have been scavenging for him, include a number of blue metal spheres.”

  He paused to take a breath. “We had no idea what those sphere did, but after we found out what Lobsang's ring did, it seemed logical that the spheres might be some kind of communication artifact too. That's what Xander thought.
When he passed them out yesterday, he was hoping we could figure out how to make them work.”

  He met their eyes again. “They're not for communicating. But they do involve thoughts. The sphere are records. They store thoughts and experiences – and the one I had contains the experiences of an Ancient, someone who lived over two hundred years ago!”

  Xander watched their faces as Kareef explained how he had discovered that fact. Surprise changed to skepticism, then changed again, to wonder.

  “...and that's when I told Xander,” he concluded. “And got him to see for himself.”

  “Thank you, Kareef,” Xander said. He eyed the recent graduates while he tried to find the right words to continue. “I wanted you all to hear this from him, and not just because it was his discovery. I want you all to note how he discovered it.”

  “By falling asleep?” said Esteban.

  “No. I mean his methodology. It's so important that the Ancients used to call it the Scientific Method. I want you all to understand it, because, in a way, you are all all going to be scientists, creating a new science I'll call psionics, but that most people will just think of as a kind of magic.

  “It begins with an observation,” he told them. “A science is an organized body of knowledge about some part of the world around us. The Ancients had many sciences. Biology was the science of living things. It's name comes from an old word that meant life. Geology was another science.”

  “From an ancient word for rock?” Carolyn asked. “I read somewhere that geologists studied rock formations.”

  “Actually,” said Xander, “it's from an ancient word for Earth, which is why maps can be used to express geography. But you have the basic idea right. A lot of the Ancient names for sciences ended in '-ology' which meant 'the study of' or 'the words about' because logos meant 'word'. There are exceptions: physics is the study of matter, energy, and motion, and chemistry is the study of how different kinds of matter combine and behave.