“I guess not. From what I've read in my father's history books, throughout history the Jews have been too busy worrying about other people to be fighting among themselves much.”
“You mind if I join you?” A stranger stood next to the table with his own tray.
Kareef frowned into his oatmeal. Nathan sympathized; he would rather have continued their sharing without an observer. But to refuse might draw attention to their talk. “Of course. I'm Nathan, and this is Kareef.”
“I know,” the man said. “Xander told me about you.” He set down his try and offered his hand to them. “I'm Jeffrey, a new student at the School. You must have been been studying when I arrived yesterday.”
Nathan clasped hands with him. “Then he must have told you I'm from New Israel and Kareef's from the Dixie Emirates. So, Jeffrey...what country sent you to spy on the Xander School?”
Jeffrey almost dropped his tray. He set it down with elaborate casualness. “I'm from Texas,” he said. “But they didn't send me. It was the Pope, in my case.”
Now they were both staring at him. “But I've heard the Church condemns magic!” said Nathan.
“They do...or at least they used to.” He shrugged. “It's a long story.”
Chapter 74
Lobsang: Wrestling With Intentions
“Those who overcome others have strength
Those who overcome themselves are powerful”
– The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse
The journey from Deseret to Angeles seemed to take forever, but that was because of the terrain. At first he'd followed the old highway 15 of the Ancients heading southwest, but soon he'd had to go off-road to search for water. Even with the thermodyne to cool the interior of the car in the desert sun and to warm it in the chilly nights, he had a constant problem trying to ward off dehydration. In moister air, the thermodyne could be used as a slow source of water, by letting it frost up in cooling mode and then just turning it off and letting the frost melt into a canteen. But there was hardly any moisture in the air now, so he had to take some time each day hunting for water.
Even when he managed to find it, he couldn't trust it. Condensed out of the air, it would have been pure and safe. But from the ground, sucked up with a swizzle? After a brief bout of dysentery laid him up in a copse of trees for days, too weak to steer, he wised up and spent time boiling the water he found, which delayed him even more, so a trip that should have taken a couple of days (if he'd been able to drive at night) took him closer to three weeks.
When he finally caught sight of Las Vegas, he knew he was finally getting close. There were some scary-looking people moving about the ruins of the city, so he cranked up the everwheel weave on the rear axle and careened though the place as quickly as he could manage without skidding into one of the hulking carcasses of casinos. A hail of arrows bounced off the car's exterior, but the riders who gave chase soon gave it up as a lost cause when they realized their horses couldn't possibly keep up with him.
That night Xander contacted him with the telepathy ring. No one had bothered to coin a name for the artifact yet.
Lobsang, it's Xander. Still alive, are you?
He set the canteen down and screwed the top back on. Yes, but maybe that's because I haven't gotten to Angeles yet.
He sensed surprise through the mental link that connected them. Really? I would have thought you'd be there by now.
He explained about the dysentery and the challenge of warding off dehydration while avoiding a repetition of the illness. I'm nearly there now. Should arrive tomorrow or the next day.
And then what? Xander asked.
I'm still deciding, he sent. It depends on my family. If they're still alive, we can talk.
Xander didn't ask about the alternative. Do what you need to do, and good luck, wizard.
The mental contact ended.
I'm not the one who needs luck, he thought. He wants me to do it. If they're gone, then it's her or me. And if she turns out to be stronger, it'll only buy her a little time. He'll come after her himself, eventually.
Sleep would not come. The image of poor Kurt screaming down the stairwell like some fiery meteor haunted him. He tried to take comfort in the idea that his actions had been controlled. She made me do it. But that did not erase the image. Her hypnotic control could only justify so much.
Is that why I'm doing this? Trying to atone? Can one violent act redeem me from the guilt of another?
He told himself that self-defense was a perfectly acceptable reason for killing. If it came to a death match between him and Rochelle, no one would blame him for killing her to save his own life.
But that's drivel, isn't it? I'm forcing this confrontation. If one of us dies it will be because I insisted upon the battle. I could avoid all of it by turning the car around and going back to Denver.
Except that wouldn't save my family. No, she's forcing this fight. I wouldn't be here on the Cali border if she'd left my family out of it. I wouldn't have gone to Rado. I'd still be sitting in her library, warming tea water over an everflame and reading old books.
To pass the time while he waited for drowsiness, he imagined a discussion between Xander and Lester about his situation.
Lester: This isn't what we're training for. I thought it was about rebuilding civilization, not molding human weapons.
Xander: Did you really think local warlords would all just bow down and accept that there are things bigger than themselves? Selfishness is all very well for the purposes of self-preservation, but it's no basis for a better future.
Lester: What about Jeffrey? Even after you killed his father, Jeffrey was still willing to make peace.
Xander: And see where it got him. He could have been the new Honcho and molded events. Instead, he's a vagabond begging sanctuary.
Lester: What are you saying? That he should have carried on his father's invasion? Either he'd be dead, or we would. It's the same scenario you're letting Lobsang march into.
Xander: He's better trained than she was when she left.
Lester: She left you sixteen years ago! Do you really think she's learned nothing new in all that time?
And so on. He wondered how accurate his little simulation was. Did Lester care about his life that much? Could Xander be that tough-minded when it come to a former apprentice – and a female one, to boot?
The real question I have to ask myself, he thought, is: will I be able to do it, to go through with killing her? She can kill. I've mopped up the blood enough times that I'm not likely to forget that. But can I?
As long as she's alive, Rochelle will be a threat to any developing wizards in her region of influence. I don't see any way to change her mind about that. If I don't act, I'll be failing not just my family, but the whole country.
And if I do kill her, unless it's in self-defense, then I'm becoming just like her.
Chapter 75
Rainsong: Spin Practice
“The man who can't dance says the band can't play.”
– Guinean Proverb
She had no idea where mentor went when he was not with her. This time, when she awoke, she did not see him in the sleep-learn chamber when she climbed out of the pod.
Well, she didn't need to wait for him, did she? Her memories of the dream were still fresh, and she wasted no time in putting her new knowledge of the Space of Spins into practice. This chamber, like the one in which she had absorbed the Space of Paths memsphere, had no trees or soil, and no food, but she ignored that for the time begin and touched a patch on the gray metal wall, a spot smoother and shinier than the rest of the surface.
She'd learned, before her Mentor appeared to begin her Nav Section training, that for some reason the surfaces of her graspers adhered more naturally to smooth surfaces than to rougher ones. Mentor had said something about contact forces that eluded her, but she remembered the cause of her question, and the smoother patch must be smoother on purpose.
When she pressed her grasper against the smoother patch she stuck to it, s
ure enough. Pressing it and moving her arm made a section of the wall slide sink in and slid behind the rest, revealing a storage chamber. Inside several objects beckoned, surely placed there for Ability practice.
The first object she pulled out looked like a flat silvery disk with a orange spiral on each side, and conical projections from its center. She set it down on the floor and remembered the part of the dream where she had sensed the intrinsic spin of space and gathered it into an object to concentrate it. As she retraced the mental steps from the dream, the disk began to turn and balanced on the bottom protrusion.
She blinked, startled, as the orange spiral on the spinning disk seemed to converge on the center of the disk Concentrating, she imagined flipping the spin, and the disk slowed to a stop, teetered, and then began to turn in the opposite direction, the spiral now seeming to expand outward from the center of rotation.
“I see you're making progress. Excellent.”
She jumped, startled. “I didn't see you come in. Yes, using the Space of Spins seems easy, so far.”
He settled down next to her and watched it spin. “After you get past the preliminaries, you'll find the next part much more difficult.”
“Which part?”
“Combining the Space of Spins with the Space of Paths so that your view forward through the far-seer doesn't show you a world of spinning starfields.”
“But the memsphere dream didn't show me how to do that!” she complained.
“I know. There are two ways to do it, the hard way and the impossible way. The hard way is to twist the light paths.” he reached out with a grasper and stopped the top from spinning. “When you can do that, you can make this spiral seem to move without the disk moving."
“What's the impossible way?”
“To learn how to make the starfield stop spinning in your head. To alter the way your mind processes the information.”
“That sounds easier than twisting the light paths.”
“Oh, it is,” he agreed. “All you have to do is sit in front of the far-seer for about twenty thousand spins."
“Just sit and watch? How does that solve the problem?”
“The brain is an amazing thing,” he said. “Not only does it process information all the time, but it can actually manage to change the way it processes information.”
“I don't understand.”
“It all goes back to early experiments in brain function,” he said. “One of the researchers wondered if the brain could adapt to altered input, so he got experimental subjects to wear prisms in front of their eyes that turned the image their brain received upside down. And do you know what happened? After a period of time roughly equal to twenty thousand of our spins, they began seeing right side up again.”
“They took off the prisms? I don't blame them.”
“No. that was the amazing thing. They started seeing normally while still wearing them. “
“But you said the prisms inverted the images.”
“They did. But their brains learned how to invert them again, making them right side up.”
“How?”
“Who knows? But they were used to doing it already, it seems. The lens in each of your eyes casts an upside-down image on its retina. Always has. So the brain takes that information and turns it right side up. The point is, their brains learned, in a mere twenty thousand spins, to either invert it again or to stop inverting it, no one seems to know which. Either way, they were seeing normally again, even with the prisms on.”
“So you're saying if I just watch the spinning starfields that long, my brain will learn how to correct for the rotation and they will seem to stop spinning? That sounds easy. Why did you call that the impossible way?”
“Because the correction becomes constant. When the subjects took off their upside-down prisms, their brains were still inverting the image, so ordinary sights were now upside down for them.”
He paused. “When some of the People in Nav Section tried this with the spinning starfields, it worked all right. After twenty thousand spins they could look through the far-seers and see apparently stationary starfields.” He took a breath. “But when they went off-duty and looked at other things, everything was spinning around in the opposite direction – because they brains were still applying the correction they had developed. It took another twenty thousand spins of not looking through the far-seers before their vision returned to normal and they could move around without getting dizzy.”
“So that is the easy and the impossible way?”
“Yes,” he said. “It's easy in terms of adjusting to the spinning...but impossible in terms of the rest of your life when you're not on watch.”
She felt like banging her head against a tree. “So I have to learn the hard way instead.”
“Yes. It's harder to learn, but when you learn it, you'll be twisting the paths, not changing how your brain processes the information. Then you won't go crazy when you go off-duty.”
Suddenly she experienced a revelation. “That's why someone painted the spirals on the disks!”
“It is. They have two functions, actually. The spirals give you visual feedback so you can see when you're making them spin faster, but the more important use of them is to help you learn how to twist the light paths from them to your eyes.”
So she set to work practicing that. Soon Mentor had to remind her to take breaks to eat, sleep and exercise herself in the trees. It was slow going at first, and she was tempted to just sit and stare at the spinning stars. But she remembered what Mentor had said and forced herself to avoid the easy way, the way that was also impossible.
Chapter 76
Jeffrey: Instruction Begins
“The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.”
– Napoléon Bonaparte
Once he got over his surprise at seeing a New Israelite and a Muslim from the Emirates sharing a breakfast table, he had to pause and wonder why he had been so surprised. Clearly, Xander wanted to unite divided groups of humanity with his School just as Kristana wanted to unite them with diplomacy. It had never occurred to him before that a school could do that.
“Do you really believe the Pope is going to change Church policy on the Gifts and abilities related to them?” Kareef asked.
Jeffrey followed the darker-hued Muslim and dumped his tray, bowl and utensils on a counter. “How else can I explain it? They didn't just give me sanctuary, they deliberately exposed me to a roomful of Gifts and encouraged me to spend time with them. And then they brought me to the outskirts of Denver. Clearly, they were delivering me to Xander for training.”
“And sending him a message,” Nathan added. “Letting him know that massive exposure could nurture abilities even in adults.”
“That's the weird thing,” Jeffrey told them. “I mean, being able to train anyone, even soldiers or farmers instead of only a few talented candidates, well, that's a massive advantage any country would have over countries that don't know about the effect of heavy exposure. So why didn't they keep it to themselves? All I can figure is, they expect me to get trained and them come back to train wizards for them in Texas.”
“I wonder how Xander will feel about that,” said Kareef, as he held open the stairwell door. “I'm told the only reason Rado stopped the last invasion was they had wizards and Texas didn't. Why would he give up that advantage?”
“I think I know the answer to that,” said Jeffrey. “He trusts me not to help Texas invade my fiancee's country. I'm engaged to Aria, the Governor's daughter.” They stared at him and absorbed that. Why is my robe white, but yours are gray? Did they run out of gray ones?”
“Because you're a student,” Nathan informed him. “Students wear white, graduated wizards like Kareef and me wear gray, and Xander wears black.”
Now it was his turn to stare, especially at Nathan, clearly still in his mid-teens. “Graduated? Already?”
“We were the first class,” Kareef explained. “The long
er the School stays in existence, the more I imagine there will be for students to have to master before they're officially approved as wizards. Nathan and I were lucky. All we had to learn was pathspace, spinspace, and tonespace. If we learn more, the course will undoubtedly get longer.”
He must have looked as confused as he felt, because Kareef explained it for him. “Pathspace is what makes a swizzle. A spinspace weave makes the everwheel, and tonespace, well, that's what you use to make an everflame or a coldbox.”
“You can also use it to make an icetorch or a thermodyne, Nathan added.
“I've never heard of either of those.”
“You will," Nathan assured him. “They're new. We invented them. Well, discovered them, really, but either way Xander said he'd never seen them before either.”
“Tell me more about those spaces you mentioned.”
He half expected them to clam up and see what Xander decided to disclose to him, but they didn't, maybe because they all had a long climb ahead of them up to the School floors and talking helped pass the time during the dreary repetition of ascending the steps.
“In the old days,” Nathan said, “almost nobody could do what Xander calls 'psionic engineering' and other people just call magic. They had words for it but they didn't help.”
“Unhelpful words?”
“Yes. Moving objects without touching them was something for which they had three descriptions. It was called psychokinesis ('mind-movement'), telekinesis ('distance movement') or just 'mind over matter'. But those words didn't help anyone learn how to do it. They were merely descriptive, like saying water is wet because it has the property of wetness.”
“And now you use different words?”
“Xander does. And they seem to help. It's hard to explain how the mind can push matter around, so we don't even try. Mind over matter is a useless phrase.”
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 30
