Pope Rodrigo nodded. “It sounds workable. Nothing written down, of course.”
Of course, thought the Runt. So you can deny knowing when it finally surfaces.
“That brings up another issue,” said the Honcho. “Does the Church have any confiscated swizzles or everflames that we could … borrow? The more we have the sooner we can begin expanding the territory of my Empire and your Flock.”
The Pope opened his mouth to respond, but he said nothing. There was a sharp whistle and a crack! (Jeffrey could not distinguish which came first) and his body slumped forward.
There was a moment of shocked silence.
A wave of dizziness passed through Jeffrey. What the hell just happened? Then he found his voice.
“I do believe,” he said, “ that our audience is at an end.”
Chapter 15
Lester: “swaddled with darkness”
“All the 'magic' I know,” said Xander, “is accomplished through the use of one or more of pathspace (the space of paths), spinspace (the space of spins), and tonespace (the space of energy). Each of these is the application of infinite-dimensional space in which certain forms are embedded. The forms and their embedding determine all of the available “knots” in n+1 dimensional spacetime. The are like simple machines, such as the inclined plane, the screw, and the lever, which are combined appropriately to form more complex technology.”
“We shall begin with pathspace – the space of paths.”
“That sounds redundant,” said Les. “Having a space of paths sounds a little like having a liquid of wetness.”
“I am the one giving the training,” said Xander. “Therefore we shall use my terminology for the convenience of the instructor. Allow me to explain. In order for an object to move in a path, there must be space for the path to exist in. The space containing all possible paths is therefore called pathspace.
“To use pathspace is to employ a particular way of looking at the world, especially the local region of spacetime. When mind embraces its interaction with space, time and matter, amazing things can be accomplished. Like making or fixing the Gifts of the Tourists.”
“But how do you 'use' pathspace?”
“It is a matter,” said Xander, “of visualizing what path-probabilities you want to emphasize. All paths are potential, of course, but only one path exists at any particular time and position. Every point is a position, therefore the set of configurations is the set of all paths going through all points at all moments on all timelines.”
“I still don't see anything practical in all this.”
“Do you remember how I vanished, back at the inn?”
“I remember that you sent me off for more ale to distract me. I was sure you'd left.”
“It is a thing done with pathspace,” he said. “Do you know how vision works? Bit of light energy the ancients called photons bounce off objects and fly into your eye, where they strike nerves that can detect their presence. You cannot see in total darkness, for there are no visible photons to sense. You also cannot see objects behind walls. I could have hidden myself in a sack, but you and the soldiers would have seen the sack.”
“What I don't understand,” Les told him, “is why you bothered to disappear, if you were going to let them find you eventually and return you to the Governor.”
“What I actually did,” said Xander, ignoring him, “was to alter the pathspace around my body so that the bits of light flew around me instead of bouncing off me. I was still there, in the corner, but no one could see me. I was also in darkness myself, since the photons were avoiding me so I had none to see with.”
“How did you do that?”
“The region of deflection can be woven in several ways. I chose a simple floor-to-ceiling cylinder. Of course, I had to leave the table or distortions would have given me away.”
“And you were blind all the time you were invisible?”
“That's the price for dodging the light. It dodges you right back.” The old wizard put an apple on the table. “Watch,” he said.
After a few moments the apple disappeared. “It is still there,” he remarked, and guided Les until he found himself looking down from above it. And there it was. “This time I used a shorter cylinder, so you can manage to look into it from above. Smaller concealments are easier because there is less imagining work to do to weave the pathspace. Now please sit down again.”
Les resumed his former seated position. After a moment the apple appeared again.
Xander pushed his chair back. “Now you are going to try it. This will be your first bit of the magic.”
“I don't see how I am supposed to be able to affect the pathspace, as you call it.”
“That's a discussion for another time,” Xander told him. “Suffice it to say that when your mind visualizes the way you want it to be, as opposed to the way it is now, there will be an exchange of information between your mind and the universe, and it will have the effect of persuading the manifest pathspace configuration to align itself with what you are imagining. The more that you believe it will work, the more effect you will have on the pathspace.”
Les tried to fathom those sentences. The first was a random stew of words, but at least the second was straightforward, and he saw a problem tight away. “How am I supposed to believe something will happen that I've never done before?”
Xander grinned at that. “That, lad, is the trick of it. I won't lie to you, it will be hard at first. But as you succeed you will find it easier to believe, and your power will get stronger. You've already seen that I can do it. So you do know that it is possible. I learned the same way you are going to learn. The key is the connection between your mind and the universe of configurations, and living around the coldbox and the everflame back at your father's inn has already made it possible – by exposing your mind to it.”
Les tried to concentrate on the apple, imagining a cylinder around it that made the light avoid it. At first nothing seemed to be happening. Grimacing, he tried to let the frustration go and tried again. For a moment the apple became a little transparent – he was seeing through it a little. As soon as he noticed this, however, he was distracted by it and the apple became opaque again. But that didn't matter. He had done it, even though only a little!
“You almost had it,” Xander commented. “It looked like we were seeing through it, because some of the light reflecting off the table behind it was going around the apple and reaching our eyes, as if it wasn't in the way. You see – you can do it. From now on it's just a matter of doing a better job, and then fixing it so it stays invisible when you stop concentrating.”
“How do I do that? Make it stay that way when I'm not working on it?”
“By imagining that it will – visualizing it as permanent. I can't describe it exactly, of course, but that doesn't matter. You'll get the hang of it, without knowing how you are doing it. And when you can do that, well, then we can move on to other things.”
Les was still staring at the apple. “Other things?”
“You'll also learn about spinspace and tonespace. They are handled in a similar way, by visualizing what you want and letting the configuration adjust itself to match. But before you can learn about them, you need to master pathspace. I always begin with teaching pathspace, and the first application is always this cloaking spell.”
“Why?” said Les, looking up from the apple to the wizard's face.
“Because there are people who do not like wizards,” said Xander. “And sometimes even the best of us may need to hide, to stay alive.”
Chapter 16
Peter: “Teach us to care and not to care”
There was no doubt in his mind that it was an assassination. But how? After tense moments and the Runt's droll comment, Peter decided that there had been only one target. But targeted by who? And how had they accomplished it?
His hand was on his sword hilt. Forcing himself to let go of it he sprang to the throne examine Rodrigo's body. He found the hol
e in seconds. The blood made it easy. “Looks like he was shot,” he grunted. “A clean hole in the right temple.”
“That cache of weapons your men found,” said Jeffrey. “Could someone have snuck some out?”
He shook his head. “Even if they had, the old ammo would have been useless. The potions they Ancients used to propel their bullets go bad after only a few decades. And no one has made any like the ones we found in over two hundred years.” He let go of the body and strode over to his left, to what had been Rodrigo's right. What he had taken to be an overly ornamental carved wooden panel was, in fact, a privacy screen that was effectively opaque from a distance but sufficiently perforated to allow observation of the audiences by advisors.
Church personnel. That was a mistake, he decided, that had cost Rodrigo his life.
Jeffrey was approaching. Peter hustled him away from the screen and pushed him flat against a solid wall on the same side of the chamber. “Don't move. Whoever fired from behind there might still be there, or come back. Guards! Someone GET IN HERE!”
A door on the side opened and two men in cardinal red darted in. They skidded to a halt at the sight of Rodrigo's slumped body, blood now draining from the side of his head.
“Someone has killed the Pope!” he said. “Seal up the place and inform the papal guard immediately.” When they just stood there, aghast, he grimaced, spun on his heel and ran for the main entrance at the far end of the chamber.
Chapter 17
Jeffrey: “She gives when our attention is distracted”
After his father left the room, he wondered how safe it was for him to remain there himself. Whatever weapon had slain the Pontiff could be seeking other targets. But none of it made sense! If his father was right about the shelf life of the ancient ammunition, no gun of their manufacture could have done this. He knew from his studies that in even more ancient times, bullets were missiles flung not by hand cannons, but by peltasts, slingers who hurled their projectiles by the use of muscle alone.
But try as he might, he could not make himself believe in a slinger adept enough to throw his rock or lead pellet miraculously through one of the small holes in the perforated screen his father had examined.. No way. Then, how? Someone had done it – and without 'gun powder'.
The two clerics had exited, jabbering to each other in obvious agitation. After they did so, however, another, calmer personage strode in through the same door. He was, like them, dressed in cardinal red, but seemed much younger, hardly older than Jeffrey himself.
“Please come with me, Excellency,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“We do?” Jeffrey scowled. “Who the hell are you? If you want His Excellency, then you're looking for my father. He's the Honcho, not me.”
“For the moment, that is true,” the stranger agreed. “He is the Honcho, as poor Rodrigo was the Pope. But things change, and I should like to speak to you of such changes.”
“You mean, how such changes might be … facilitated?” Jeffrey's eyes narrowed. “You don't seem to be very surprised by Pope Rodrigo's assassination. Almost as if you expected this change.”
“Indeed. Will you follow me to a more private conference room? In a minute or two this chamber is going to be too busy for reasoned discourse.”
“A man was just killed right before my eyes,” he said. “You must pardon me if I appear a little paranoid at the moment. I'm thinking it might be better to remain here until my father returns.”
The man in red smiled. “Better is a relative term, Excellency. The sooner we confer, the better, for Fate is a fickle mistress, and she gives when our attention is distracted. Your presence here today is a gift, and I for one do not intend to be distracted. Forgive me for pointing this out, but I believe we have much in common.”
He stared at the man. “I'm a soldier. You're a cleric. What could we possibly have in common?”
“We're both younger men, Excellency. Men of frustrated ambition, held back by the longevity of older men with power. You are Jeffrey Martinez, who will one day become the Honcho, ruler of the Lone Star Empire. I am Enrique Cardinal Esperanza, and soon I shall be Pope, ruler of the Texan Catholic Church. It is my hope that we will work together on matters of mutual benefit.”
Chapter 18
Lester: “And the blind eye creates”
His practice at the cloaking spell proceeded with unexpected difficulty. The face of Aria intruded often, tempting him to waste time pondering her perfection. Inconvenient. He tried to concentrate on the apple again (which was now diminished by several bites, for he was growing hungry) and once more the image of it faded and almost disappeared. But not completely. And as Xander kept reminding him, “when you need to disappear, only complete success suffices.”
Reminded of the old man, he wondered where Xander went when he left his quarters. Was he off seeking more students? No. He was certain, without knowing how, that the wizard would not run off without warning him.
Restless, he rose from the chair and paced as he considered his situation. There were times when he still suffered from homesickness, but he countered such thoughts by reminding himself that there was opportunity for growth here. All right, so he had been yanked from his sleepy village and replanted in this churning beehive of a building. But within the isolation and the jarring confusion of the Governor's court the could also see a future for himself. A future that was a damn sight better than waiting on tables for Gerrold!
But Drew was still too young to fill his place. How would his mother manage without him?
He shook his head and turned toward the window. Out there, in the slowly decaying streets of the city, where the asphalt of ages baked and cracked under a lingering Summer that, concentrated by reflection from the brooding scrapers, would not yield to Autumn, ordinary people were going about their lives with the certainty of their daily routines.
But his mind resisted routines in this place. Oh, he was diligent in his practice, but not in a regularized way. Something in him balked at the idea of marching off the hours the same way on every day, this now and the other later. Like a plow-horse tilling a field, with no will of its own. Yes, I will practice. I'll learn what I must learn to set my own course.
On impulse, he swiveled to his left and reached out to pluck a book from the hundreds Xander lines his walls with. Questions For Posterity, by Hugh Stevenson, was a volume about the last days of the Ancients, after the Tourists had departed, their database of Earth's genome sequences complete. It was after the adoption of the Gifts as cornerstones of a more efficient infrastructure, but before the collapse of that very infrastructure, due to what Xander had called “the lack of technical support for the Gifts.”
“...and so questions remain long after the objects of those questions have gone. Will the Tourists find actual uses for the genetic sequences they bartered for? Will we ever come to grips with an understanding of how the Gifts actually work? Sometimes, this reporter finds it doubtful. Their operation cannot be doubted, yet contradicts what we thought we knew about the universe. A friend of mine at MIT assures me that there is no such thing as something for nothing. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely converted to other forms such as matter, or concentrated or dispersed.
“But the Gifts of the Tourists deft such reasoning. They have no moving parts, no circuitry, and require no power input. Where is the catch? A swizzle can impart motion to fluids and even pump them uphill: hydroelectric dams no longer require a river for their source of water, merely a lake and a big swizzle to push the water back up after it has fallen and driven the dynamo. But this gives free electricity! It is literally something for nothing.
“Similarly, the everflames that now smelt our ore require no fuel. So where does the heat come from? Is somewhere else cooling off to balance the equations? Are we pulling heat out of the magma inside the Earth? Or from the Sun or other stars?”
He closed the book. Its questions went unanswered, most of them. But at least he now knew the “catch” the Hugh
was referring to – the price to be paid for the use of the Gifts in Earth's . For gifts without knowledge, the price had been the loss of our own wisdom.
It had been hard form him to accept how easily it had happened. He remembered his last argument with the wizard about it. “The Ancients were not fools. The couldn't have been fools, when they accomplished so much before the Tourists arrived. So why didn't they predict the consequences? More to the point, why didn't the Tourists?”
Xander had shrugged, as he often did to such questions. But he tried to explain it. “Imagine you are an ancient explorer in a sailing ship and you meet natives on an island who use stone axes to cut down trees.”
Here Les interrupted. “How do you make an axe out of stone? Smiths use iron for that.”
“You take a couple of hard rocks and use one to chip away at the other one, breaking off chips along one or both sides of one end to make a crude edge, then you tie the sharp rock to the end of a stick. But now you, the explorer arrive and trade the natives pre-made axes with steel blades. What happens?”
“They realize the metal axes are better, and stop shipping stone for axes.”
“And eventually?”
“They forget how to make stone axes.” He thought about it. “And after you sail away, the metal axes eventually rust away and are useless. Now they're back to square one. They have to learn how to make stone axes all over again, because they didn't think that skill was important enough to pass on to their children.”
“Exactly. And so it happens.”
“But they must have known it would! Surely they'd seen that happen to islanders, just as you described! Didn't they realize the same thing could happen to them?”
Xander had shrugged again. “Maybe some did.” he glanced at the window. “Maybe somewhere out there people are still making generators and internal combustion machines. God help us if we run into them, because they'll conquer us easily.”
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