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

by Matthew Kennedy

  “But it hasn't been a million years since they left! How is it we can learn it?”

  “There are many kinds of evolution,” he said. “There is the evolution of entire species, a slow process that proceeds by random mutations and natural selection. Then there is the evolution of individuals. You won't randomly grow a new leg, but your nervous system sort of evolves, in the sense that your brain starts as a clump of neural tissue in the fetus and grows into a sophisticated brain, with abilities and behavioral patterns like language, shaped by experience. In theory, any of the People could become good hunters, gatherers, technicians, mathematicians, and so on, but in actual fact each person becomes better at some things than others because of what they do as they are growing up and how that influences their brain development.”

  “None of this answers my question.”

  “It turns out that exposure to the Gifts of the Meddlers can stimulate the aptitude for the Ability."

  “When have I been exposed?”

  “All your life. The Ship's thrustfield is an application of the technology of the Meddlers, so you couldn't avoid being exposed to it.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “In the pod I learned how to make a little thrustfield, using the Space of Paths.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It's the first step. You need to practice it immediately to reinforce the experience.” He led her to a pile of wooden tubes, and handed her one. “Put a thrustfield on it.”

  She wanted to ask how, but in her mind's eyes she already saw how, from the dream. Holding the tube in her graspers, she let her mind stretch out from her head to embrace the space in and around the tube. Part of that space, she knew, was the Space of Paths, the potential curvature that controlled trajectories of objects. The basic trick, she knew now from the dream-learning, was to imagine the kind of curvature you wanted.

  The curvature, however, was in a direction she could not see or imagine. But that was fine, because she didn't need to imagine the curvature itself, just the way it would affect objects.

  She imagined a speck of dust or pollen, floating in the air near one end of the tube. In a flat space, she knew it would drift about randomly from collisions with air molecules. But what she wanted it to do was to be sucked into the nearby end of the pipe and accelerated toward the other end.

  But that would only be a single path in the Space of Paths. So, instead, she imagined a ring of dust being sucked into the pipe – a family of paths.

  The tube in her graspers seemed to tug for a moment, as if it were a little Ship trying to move. But only for a moment.

  “I thought I had it,” she said. “But it stopped.”

  “Did you remember to reconnect?”

  She blushed brown. Now she remembered a bit more. It wasn't enough to imagine a path with a beginning and an end. What she needed were continuous paths. Each imaginary particle of dust had to be sucked into the tube, accelerate down to the other end and out...and then curve back around outside the tube to be pulled back in again as it had before. Not a path with a beginning and an end, but a circle, unending.

  She imagined a ring of dust that contracted and passed into the tube, accelerated, exited the far end, then dilated as each particle curved back around to go through again.

  This worked. The tube pulled slightly and kept pulling. She could feel the breeze coming out the other end.

  “Why does it have to be circles? Why do I have to reconnect the output back to the input for it to work?”

  “Two reasons,” he said. “First, because the curvature of space is temporary if it is not reconnected. You can make it bend, but it springs back, like a branch pushed out of your way. This is fine if you only want a momentary effect.” He held out a arm, and one of the wooden tubes in the pile leaped up into his grasp.

  “But that would be no good if you need a continuous effect, like the Ship's thrustfield, so you need to reconnect.”

  “What's the second reason?”

  “To anchor the thrustfield around the tube,” he said. “Even continuous-path patterns will fade quickly unless they are constantly reinforced by you, or anchored in matter.”

  “Why does the tube feel like it's trying to move?”

  “As we move though space, the thrustfield sucks in interstellar gas and shoots it out the back. A wind blowing through a tube, however, doesn't make the tube want to move forward. Our thrustfield makes the ship accelerate forward because of something called conservation of momentum. When the thrustfield is anchored around a physical object, like the Ship, it is as if the gas is part of the Ship. Shooting it out the back makes the Ship move in the other direction.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Before any motion occurs, the system has a total momentum of zero. But if the gas molecules are squirted out the back, that means they've acquired momentum in that direction. So the Ship has to acquire some momentum in the opposite direction, to keep the total momentum at zero.” He added, “It works best near stars where the gas is thicker, but even out between the stars there is some hydrogen drifting about.”

  She dilated and contracted her pupils several times to signal her confusion. “I still don't understand.”

  “Well, you don't have to understand it to use it. Every time you zap your tongue out and snatch a crunchie out of the air as it flies by, your brain has to calculate trajectories and momenta and compute what signals to send your tongue muscles to make it work. But you never have to think about it. It's automatic. If you thought too much, you'd probably miss the crunchie.”

  He regarded the tube in her graspers. “It's the same with making a thrustfield. You don't have to think it into existence. You imagine it, and your brain works out how to make it happen.”

  “Why do people in Nav Section have to learn this, if the thrustfield keeps going by itself once the paths are reconnected?”

  “We all have to learn it. Course correction sometimes requires more than one person managing the thrustfield at the same time, because it's so big."

  “But how do they know where to go, where to aim the Ship?”

  “That's part of another lesson,” he said. “As I said, there is a lot more to learn about the Ability.”

  Chapter 64

  Aria: The Prodigal Son

  “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”

  – Marie Curie

  The nice thing about solid concrete staircases, she mused, is that they don't boom like the hollow wooden ones you could find in even older buildings and single-family homes. As long as she didn't run into her mother's dogs, it was actually possible to zip up and down in the 'scraper without collecting a retinue.

  Sometimes she thought that the axes of power had shifted, that her mother's secular power had been preempted by the metaphysical contamination of Xander's School. Oh, there would probably be an invasion all right, there seemed no doubt about it, but until it actually happened all her mother and her advisers could seem to do was draw up contingency plans and collect recon reports up the wazoo. And meanwhile, the School went on ticking like an Ancient timepiece, the young wizards and the old man poring over artifacts and honing arcane skills. Unlike Kristana, they always seemed to find something important to do, to discover, or to devise.

  And her? She bounced back and forth between tutors and trainers and mandatory attendance at meetings she was fairly sure had been knocked together by the Governor for the real purpose of familiarizing her daughter with the men and women she would someday lead when it was finally her time to step up and be the new Governor.

  She spent a lot of time these days wanting to scream until her head exploded like one of those new water-bombs the smiths were turning out.

  “It's really quite simple,” one of them had explained to her a couple of days ago. “A thin metal shell, pour in some water, pop in an everflame turned off, and weld it shut.”

  “What good is that?”

  “For you and me, no good at all. But you
get this to one of those wizards with one of the new swizzle cannon and you have a lot of hurtin' waiting to happen. Don't ask me how they do it, but I've seen it on the test range. They can reach right into the inside of it somehow, turn the everflame up hot as a forge, and then they trigger the cannon and whoosh! it's up and over into the enemy. All the time the heat from the everflame is boiling the water into live steam, raising the pressure. When it's timed right, the shell lands in a cluster of targets and BLAM! Bursts open shredding them with bits of red hot iron propelled by live steam.”

  “That's horrible!”

  He laughed. “Not as horrible as what their tanks could have done to the Capitol. No, for really horrible you fill it up completely with pure alcohol before you drop the heater in. When it bursts open and hits the air, the booze ignites and anyone who survives the shrapnel becomes a human torch.”

  She shuddered. “I know we have to win the war,” she said, “but fighting like this seems...seems evil. They have no chance at all.”

  He shrugged. “Losing can be horrible, too. If horrible has to happen to someone, I say better them than us. I've heard the Ancients had things that could burn entire cities in seconds. Compared to their things, this is only mildly horrible.”

  Sometimes she wished Texas had conquered them already. From what she'd read in the history books, empires were generally not so bad inside their borders, even if they often had a lot of war out on the edges as they expanded or came up against other empires.

  Enough! She couldn't handle any more horrible details today. So she skipped her gardening, glided down the 'scraper's staircase, slipped by the government office floors and fled to the comforting stench of the stables on the ground floor.

  Her horse greeted her with a nicker when she opened the stall door.

  Aria smiled. “I'll bet you'd love to get out and breathe the spring air today, wouldn't you? Well that makes two of us.”

  The horse nickered again, a little faster and higher-pitched this time.

  “All right, all right, yes I brought you a treat.” She pulled the apple slices out of her pocket and offered them to him on her palm. “You don't know how lucky you are that I saved some of last year's crop in coldboxes. This one's the last. The rest went into making cider, so it's nothing but carrots until the next harvest.”

  The horse seemed to be paying more attention to crunching up the slices than her words. Aria didn't care. It was good to have a listener who didn't interrupt to tell her she was wrong or not trying hard enough to learn her lessons.

  “You're lucky to be down here, you know. Xander's wizards keep getting stranger, and mother's too busy meeting with her officers and trying to plan our defenses to have any time for me.”

  The horse snorted.

  “All right, yes I get some meetings with the officers too, but we both know it's only to get them used to talking to me before I have to be Governor.” She sighed. “And who knows? If Texas beats us this time, it will all have been for nothing, because then I'll never be Governor.”

  Her horse finished the apple slices and gazed at her.

  “Don't look at me like that! If we survive until everyone believes I'm ready, I'll do the job. But sometimes,” she confided, “I wish I was just an ordinary citizen, on my own, even a nobody.”

  “Don't be so hasty,” said a voice behind her. “Being a ruler's not so bad. You can influence the course of events, and not just ride them out like a leaf blown in the wind.”

  She spun, scowling. Even down here, there had to be interruptions! “Oh, you think so, eh? And what would you know about it?”

  “More than most people, as it happens,” said Jeffrey.

  Her eyes widened. “They told me you were coming, but I didn't really believe it.”

  “Sometimes I can barely believe it myself,” he said. “Yet here I am.”

  She shut the stall door. “I'll take you to Mother.”

  “Actually, I'm here to see Xander,” he said. “Can you take me to him, please?”

  She studied him. Had he lost weight? Something seemed different about him. “Are you sure you're the Jeffrey I know? He would never have said 'please'.”

  He laughed. “I'm sure I'm not the Jeffrey you knew. Times and people change. But really, that's not fair. I'm a Texan, not a barbarian.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Is there a difference? Your tanks are still parked across the street.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And the man who brought them here is still frozen in a block of ice in the ground.”

  “True. Do you really want to speak with the man who put him there?”

  “I'll talk to anyone who can help me stop the craziness in my homeland.”

  Chapter 65

  Rochelle: Ups and Downs

  “Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains.”

  – The Book of the Law II:9

  She had solved Xander's old steering problem, for now. The swizzle that roared and pulled her up to the top of the 'scraper in downtown Angeles was bolted into a plate of sheet metal. The plate's four corners were punctured and four wire cables thicker than her thumb of some Ancient alloy that had survived the fall of civilization and the two centuries that followed it are serving as guide wires. They passed through holes in the wooden roof, stabbed right down in the four corners of the little makeshift elevator car and vanished out the holes in the metal plate that served as floor. At their bottom terminus they were anchored to four moorings at street level.

  Most of the elevator car itself was made of wood for lightness. The swizzle itself passed down through the middle of the car and vented through a hole in the floor. No one dared to use the elevator when she was occupied elsewhere, but not because they were afraid of her (which they were). It was because no one else could. When she left she always turned the swizzle back into an inert metal pipe. No one in the city but her could turn it on again.

  She came up with the idea a couple of years ago, and was proud of it, although it was only a month ago that she got around to having it built (the tricky part was getting the crane and the ends of the guide cables up to the roof). She hated the noise from the swizzle, which was cranked up pretty high to haul the elevator up the side of the 'scraper, and probably could have convinced one of the Ancients that someone had built a vertical runway for their “jet airplanes”.

  Actually, it very nearly was. Without the guide cables to anchor it, the elevator would have roared up the side of the 'scraper and tried to launch her into orbit...or flipped over in mid-air and done its best to show her the center of the Earth.

  Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. She didn't accelerate all the way up the side of the building. In a vacuum that would happen (except that in a complete vacuum the swizzle wouldn't do anything), but here in the atmosphere the same air that screamed through the swizzle to provide thrust also limited its upward speed. Since the thrust of the swizzle was constant but the air drag on the boxy elevator as it rocketed upward was determined by its speed as it pushes air out of its way, the two forces eventually balance at what is usually called the terminal velocity – although in this case it refers not to the eventually-constant speed of a object falling in air but the eventually-constant speed of an object rising in air instead. If this bothers you, simple stand on your head until it makes sense, or you pass out. So she quickly reached a constant speed, the 'scraper's windows blurring past in the open back of the elevator.

  This particular 'scraper was the tallest left standing. When the upward-pointing snout of the swizzle clanged into a metal plate at the end of a crane boom, the swizzle field making it seem to clamp onto the plate like a remora latching onto a shark.

  Rochelle stepped through the open back the elevator onto the roof and turned to check it for damage. The wood of the roof had been replaced twice already - the taut guide cables tended to saw at the wood holes they passed through. Maybe I should have the smiths make me a me
tal box instead, she thought. Or at least a metal roof. But the added weight would require even more thrust from its swizzle if she wanted to get up here in a reasonable amount of time, and that meant its screaming would have to be even louder. Wooden boxes were a lot easier to replace than her ears.

  She endured the noise to get up here whenever she really, really needed some time away from her advisers and servants (bringing them up with her would have added too much weight and raised the thrust-noise level as much as a heavy metal box).

  The view was breathtaking. But what she prized most about this 'scraper's rooftop was the privacy and security of it. It was unreachable by stairs (she'd had the top couple of flights destroyed to achieve it) and no human being could possibly make or draw a bow or crossbow that could reach her.

  Does Xander have anything like this? She wondered, gazing at the elevator. Her mind split on that question. Part of her seemed certain he must have come up with something similar years ago. But a more cynical part doubted it. Now that he'd finally got his School going, he probably focused even more than before on the theoretical basis of his magic than practical applications.

  Once she started thinking of him it was always hard to stop, like a sore loose tooth that you poked at with your tongue just to feel the pain that said it was still there. You'd be far better off getting it yanked, but the pain for some people seemed preferable to the finality of having it completely gone.

  Xander was like that for her, emotionally speaking. She'd be far better off forgetting him, letting go for good, but part of her just wouldn't...and now that his School was up and running, maybe that was a good thing, because his students might someday become a problem for her here.

  Had he changed any, over the years? After sixteen years, she still remembered that awful day that came a week after her failed picnic sent her to bed in tears...