“How do you know you can trust me? How do you know I'm someone you want in Nav Section?”
“Because you've been here before.”
“How do you know who to keep out?”
“We know, and the Monitors know, the names of the mutineers, just as we know your name, and the names of those who can be trusted. The mutineers will never be assigned to Nav Section. We need them to keep the environment of the Ship in balance, but they will never get the chance to interfere with the Mission. Now it is time for you to sleep, and learn.”
“Who started it? The mutiny, I mean.”
“One of us named Carver.”
Chapter 60
Jeffrey: Parallel Plans
“A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.”
– Napoléon Bonaparte
After all this time in the cart's false bottom, the sunlight was both pain and joy. He blinked back ambivalent tears and grabbed the hand that helped him from his wooden tomb on wheels. “Is that you, Marcus? Hard to believe you're not in your monk robes.”
“Yes, Excellency. Now that we're in Rado it seemed prudent to change. Ecclesiastical attire attracts more attention in countries where it is, shall we say, not as common.”
Jeffrey followed him around to the front seat and the driver got the horse started again. “You might as well call me Jeffrey. No one likes a Honcho here, and, besides, you've earned it, don't you think?”
“As you wish...Jeffrey.”
“How far are we from Denver?”
“We should be there before nightfall.”
“What are you planning to do after you drop me off?"
“Brother Victor and I will be staying overnight with friends, and tomorrow we start back to the monastery.”
“Do you have a lot of safe houses in Denver?”
“I'm sure you don't want to know that. Do you?”
“No, you're right. But if Xander turns me down...”
“If for any reason you cannot stay, we will be driving past the governor's building tomorrow morning. You can come back with us, and other arrangements will be made.”
They rode for a while in silence punctuated by the sound of the horse's hooves on the road. He recognized more and more landmarks as they drew nearer to the city. Had it been only a couple of months since he'd ridden this same road in a tank?
“I won't forget the help the Church has given me, but I still can't help wondering why.”
“Don't you believe His Holiness and the Church would be happier in a more stable Texas?”
“I guess. But you didn't have to expose me to your cache of Gifts for that. You could have just sent me straight here, instead of the monastery.”
“We could have, yes. But then you would have arrived as a homeless supplicant, begging for help.”
“Isn't that exactly what I am?”
“Maybe. But now you also have something Xander wants more than anything else.”
“What's that?”
“A new student. We both know he wants to train as many wizards as he can. And knowledge is power. Don't you think you need all you can get, to reclaim your throne?
“And what does the Church get from this?”
“We get someone we can work with on the throne. And you've shown us something: anyone can become a wizard. That information is worth a lot. You needn't feel you owe us anything.”
“Really? You're not going to use my gratitude – guilt me into helping you?”
“We've helped each other. The next step is up to you."
He pondered that as they approached the city. What was his next step? When they'd left the monastery to come here it had all seemed simple: see how much he could learn. But how could he afford to take the time for that? Even if he could become a wizard, he couldn't see how that would help him against an entire army. The junta wouldn't just give up and fade away because he could do a few tricks like make a swizzle or start an everwheel turning.
He looked at Marcus. “Why would the Church want to know if anyone can become a wizard? His Holiness was ready to burn Lester at the stake!”
“So I heard,” said Marcus. “I also heard you and your father showed up to try to prevent it.”
He looked away for a moment. “We don't execute prisoners without a fair trial. My point is, why would the Church want to make wizards? Are they finally changing their policy? Last I heard they considered all this stuff demonic.”
“I think we both know the Tourists weren't demons.”
Jeffrey turned back to him. “That's not an answer.”
“No, it isn't,” said Marcus, unperturbed. He remained silent for a moment. “You're right. The policy is changing. The Church will be rephrasing their opinion. Being able to control or make a swizzle is a gift, like artistic talent or a knack for engineering. Such gifts come from God, not from rebellious spirits or fallen angels.”
Jeffrey eyed him. “Somehow I knew you'd say something like that. You're right, a swizzle is no more evil than a lever or a pulley. It makes sense to change the policy. The real question is, why is it changing now?”
“You didn't hear this from me,” Marcus said, “but it's come to our attention that other countries have wizards. It's not just Xander in Rado. The Emirates have them, and we're pretty sure New Israel does, too. And I need hardly remind you about the Queen of Angeles.”
Jeffrey's face darkened. “She killed my uncle.”
“We're aware of that. Do you see my point?”
“Yes. Outlawing wizards is like forbidding the Army to have crossbows. Leaves us vulnerable to countries that don't.” He exhaled. “If His Holiness had realized this a few months ago Lester could have helped Texas. Instead he drove him away.”
Marcus nodded. “Those in authority often fear change. They try to hold back the tide, until they realize it's inevitable. Don't make the same mistake.”
That gave him something to think about for a few miles. Sometimes you have to give up and embrace change. But to mean anything, change has to be sustainable.
There's something I'm not seeing, he thought. The Church is going to change its policy, because they're afraid of the advantage, the military advantage, that wizards will give our enemies. But how do they expect to get them? Marcus is no wizard. He's like me. He knows how to use a swizzle, and because of his exposure to their hoarded artifacts, he could become a wizard if he were trained. I bet he wishes he were the one going to Xander, instead of me.
Even if Xander teaches me, I can't become one of his faculty at the school. He'll know I have to go back. Given that, why would he agree to teach me?
I can't let the junta win. Anything that gives me an edge, however slight, could make the difference between a predatory Empire and the one I'd prefer to lead.
The Pope's not just doing me a favor. Remember that. He has his own agenda. I ought to be able to work it out from what I know, and what I know he knows.
He knows Texas needs wizards to survive against countries that already have them.
He now knows I can become a wizard.
He knows the only place I can have a chance of becoming a wizard is Denver. The Queen of Angeles isn't training anyone who might challenge her rule, and the Emirates are not going to help a rival country acquire wizards. The only person I know who even might teach me is Xander.
First conclusion: from the moment the junta made its move and forced me to seek sanctuary, Pope Ricky has been maneuvering me toward becoming Xander's student. I just didn't see it coming because of the old policy against alien magic. But even back then, he was planning to change the policy, wasn't he?
But Ricky also knew he wouldn't stay on at the school.
He was being sent to Xander, but expected to return.
Jeffrey shook his head. Am I ever going to be choosing my own path? Do the puppet strings ever come off? “I should have seen this coming.”
Marcus watched him, waiting for him to say it.
“When he hears about the change in policy,
Xander's going to think you want him to come to Texas, to train wizards for us. What else would he think? But he won't leave Rado.”
Marcus just smiled and let him finish.
“It's me, isn't it? You want me to come back and train wizards for Texas. And it will make your change of policy easier to sell, won't it? The Church always says rulers are chosen by God. If the Honcho becomes a wizard, then God must not have a problem with it.”
A yellow shape came into view behind them. The driver stopped the cart, forcing the coach with its faded letters spelling out SCHOOL BUS to a halt behind it.
“Godspeed, Jeffrey,” said Marcus, grinning. “With any luck, the next time we meet, I'll be calling you 'Your Excellency' again.”
Jeffrey shook his hand and climbed down to go over to the coach's door. “Can you give me a ride into Denver?”
Clem opened the coach door.. “I don't see why not. We're almost there anyway.” He squinted. “You look familiar.”
“I plan to be,” said Jeffrey.
Chapter 61
Feather: Gifts From the Sky
“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.”
– Dakota Saying
She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other in the snow that came almost up to her knees. This was a crazy plan, and she knew it. But so crazy that by the time Ludlow could make himself believe she was actually doing it, she'd be either dead or out of Cali.
And then what? She stumbled on a rock hidden under the snow and fell on her hands and knees. The Healstone rolled out of her herb bag and made a neat hole in the snow, but she reached in frantically and scooped it up. She struggled to her feet, shoving it back in the bag as she straightened.
She shook her arms and swatted at her clothes and stamped her feet to shake off the snow before her body heat could melt it. The last thing she needed in this cold was to get wet.
She listened, but all she heard was the wind. What would he do when he realized she'd escaped? Was the Grandmother even alive now? Was her own mother?
One foot in front of the other. Walking away from her past, and toward her future, one step at a time.
After a while she could trust her legs to keep moving, and she let herself think of other things. The first thing that surfaced, like a beaver coming out of the water to breathe, was the Healstone itself. Where had it come from?
The name 'Healstone' seemed silly, for one thing. She'd held it in her hands, and knew for certain it wasn't a stone. Like a rock out of the sunlight, it was cool to the touch, but there was no mistaking the fact that it was metal. She knew the difference, because her people had very little metal. A few pieces of jewelry, perhaps, and a few frying pans they'd traded for, some time in the past. But their arrowheads were chipped from flint, and they ground their herbs and acorns with granite, worn smooth by generations of use. They fashioned their clothing from leather, sewn with think strips of rawhide with bone needles.
She remembered asking the Grandmother about this. “Why do the men from the coast have things we don't?”
The Grandmother had looked at the Healstone glowing faintly in its depression of the Shrine. “We have things they don't have.”
“You know what I mean. When they make a fire, they don't have to wrap a bowstring around a stick and drill into a piece of wood. They strike sparks from flint with a piece of metal. They even have metal in their clothes!”
The Grandmother had closed her eyes. “Long ago, our people were the only people in this land. When the white men came, though, they came to stay. They had weapons and medicine stronger than ours, and eventually we saw it was useless to fight them, so peace finally came and we shared the land with them. We began to do many things the same way they did.”
“Then why do we have no metal tools, no metal weapons?”
The Grandmother had sighed. “One day, the people from the sky came to our world. The white men were afraid, for they remembered how they had taken much of our land, and thought the Sky People would treat them as they had treated us. But they were wrong. The Sky People did not want land."
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to understand our plants, our animals, our bugs and fish. The white men traded with the Sky People gave them what they could, and received gifts in return.” She nodded at the softly glowing Healstone. That was one of their gifts.”
That still doesn't explain why the men from the coast have metal and we don't, she thought.
“Their gifts made the white men happy. They replaced many of their machines with the gifts from the sky. And do you know what happened when the Sky people went away?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, at first. Our ancestors were living as the white men lived, and they used the gifts too. But then the gifts of the Sky people began to die. The cities of the white men began to have trouble. And so our ancestors left the cities and went back to the forests. We took up the ancient ways, the ways without metal. And we have been living this way ever since.”
“Do the white men have Healstones?”
“I do not know. Each kind of gift that the Sky People gave had its own time to die, as the life of a tree can be longer than the life of a man. There might be other Healstones out there, among the white men.” The Grandmother looked at her. “But maybe not. If the men from the coast had Healstones, then why have they been seeking ours for so long?”
“Is that why ours is hidden in the cave of the Shrine?”
“Yes.” The Grandmother had shifted her position. “We'd better hope they never find it. If our people had only one bow, all the hunters would covet it. If this is truly the only Healstone left in this land, then men will kill to have it.”
Have they killed you, Grandmother? Feather felt water on her cheek, and wiped it away with her hand. The cold, the wind must be making her eyes water.
One foot, in front of the other. Again and again.
Chapter 62
Rochelle: Intolerable Mysteries
“There is a light before thine eyes, o prophet, a light undesired, most desirable.”
– The Book of the Law II:61
It's one thing to know the potential for a relationship when you meet someone new. It's another to act on that knowledge; to risk the time and energy it takes to get to know a person.
Most of us act on conscious or unconscious energy budgets. Away from cities, where the population density is low, it is a pleasure to meet a new person. Inside the cities, where the population density is high, one can encounter so many strangers every day that all your time and energy would be consumed if you stopped to meet them all. There is no ethical obligation to do that.
These thoughts were a sad consolation to Rochelle as she picked up a blue metal sphere. The resemblance of its metal to that of the blue rings implied that the weave on it was similar to the ring weave.
The rings allowed her to send her thoughts to her operatives no matter how far away they were. She sent one with Kaleb to control him at a distance at Xander's school.
Something had gone wrong there, and she'd lost contact. She could do without one ring...but what had happened?
Yes, the rings let her send her thoughts. And the blue spheres seemed related, yet unlike the rings they were no help at all reaching operatives mentally at a distance.
The spheres did not make her smarter. They did not help her solve problems faster. They did not facilitate hypnotic trance induction. They did not amplify PK.
By now she had a long list of the things the spheres did not do. But no list of things they could do.
If the spheres hadn't had that damned blue glint she would have accepted that they might be ornamental. But that blue weave baffled her. She wanted to be able to replace lost rings, but trying to lean the blue weave was like groping with her eyes shut. At the rate she was going it might take her forever to grasp it well enough to make her own rings.
She pressed the metal ba
ll against her left temple and tried to think of a way to suck its coolness into her head and drive the headache away. So far her uses of the blue metal spheres were: you can juggle them, they hold paper down, and they're something cool to press against your head.
Chapter 63
Rainsong: The Space of Paths
“To have two eyes can be cause for pride; but to have one eye is better than to have none.”
– Guinean Proverb
The sleep-learn pod door opened and she blinked in the sudden brightness as her Mentor helped her out. She didn't feel any different, but her mind was still digesting all of the new experiences. “That was a lot to take in.”
He rolled his eyes in opposite direction to indicate amusement. “A lot? That was only the first in a series of steps.”
“You mean there's more?”
“Quite a bit. Do you have any questions?”
She mulled over her response. So many questions! She blurted one out at random. “How do we store information in the memspheres? I don't remember anything in the learn-dreams about them.”
“No, that's something you learn later.”
Another thought occurred to her. “If learning the Ability is this easy, why did our civilization fall when the Meddlers left?”
“It wasn't always this easy,” he told her. “At the time the Meddlers left our system, none of the People could learn the Ability. There were no memspheres that told us how.”
“Then why is it so easy now?”
“We believe the Meddlers are a species far older than us. The Ability may be natural for them now, but it may have taken them a million years to evolve an aptitude for it.”
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 24
