Lester put the book back on the shelf where he found it. But if we develop an effective technology first, he thought, we'll be the ones doing the conquering. And that's what Xander is hoping to set in motion. A hybrid technology, like the Ancients adopted, but this time with technicians who can keep it going: wizards.
And I can have a place in this plan if I seize the opportunity.
Right. He sat himself down again and devoted himself to the apple. There was something missing in his attempts. He had been imagining the photons as moving around the apple instead of hitting it, and that resulted in a partial transparency. But he must be doing it wrong. He must be barking up the wrong tree, or heading down the wrong path...
Suddenly it came to him. He had been thinking about the photons, not about the pathspace. Maybe that was his mistake. Instead of imagining all the bits of light zooming around the apple and not hitting it, he should be imagining the path as a thing-in-itself, like the road through Inverness, that existed all the time, not merely when a coach was rolling down it.
He had to lay out the road in his mind, and then the light would follow it. Concentrate on the road, not the coaches. The pathspace. The space of paths.
This time he imagined a rectangular region on his face. Then he moved the rectangle toward the apple, tracing out innumerable paths in the intervening space that glowed in his mind's eye. As his rectangle neared the apply, he split is like opening window curtains and swept the sides around the apple, tracing out glowing paths around it that remained when the rectangle had passed it.
And the apple disappeared! He slid back his chair and got up, moving slowly lest he break his concentration. The apple stayed gone. He let his mind relax, and the apple was still gone. The pathspace configuration he had managed was persisting!
He experimented, walking around the table. When he reached a position a quarter of the way around the table the apple reappeared. Damn it! He moved back to his chair, and it disappeared again. What?
Walking completely around the table, he saw that the apple was invisible from his original position and directly across from it. Evidently the pathspace was bidirectional. Once he had established the pattern, it hid the apple along that line of sight from either side. But not sideways to it. All right, so he needed more practice. But he was finally getting the hang of it. What he had now would be pretty good, if he were hiding in a corner of a room, or directly in front of someone. It was better than nothing.
Now the next questions were: how long would it last, and how could he stop it if he wanted the apple completely visible again, from all sides?
Hmm. First he tried to make the invisibility complete. And he succeeded, but only in a tedious way, by using eight patches of pathspace, deflecting around the apple from the eight major directions of the compass. This worked. There was enough overlap that the apple was no invisible from all directions around the table.
But not from all directions in space, as he found by leaning over the table and looking down. So he eliminated that too, but visualizing a circular patch of pathspace cross-section descending on the apple from above and splitting around it.
He frowned at all the work involved, doubting that in an emergency he would have the time for so elaborate an imagining. All those patches took too long. But at least he was finally getting complete invisibility.
Now for the next step. To the right of the window a door opened into an inner room. He had not discovered this the first night, because he'd fallen asleep on the wizard's couch. But there had been ample time after that to explore the confines of his quarters. And one of the things he found, when he did so, was that the inner room contained a full-length mirror, the first he had ever seen. At first he was astonished at the luxury, then amused at Xander's vanity.
Now he blushed to remember those mistakes. By now he knew Xander didn't care much how he looked. The mirror was for invisibility practice.
When the wizard told him this, he almost laughed in his face. “You don't need a mirror! You already told me that when your shield is in place, you're left in darkness because the light can't reach your eyes anymore.”
“Yes,” Xander replied. “But what if I wanted to shield someone else, behind me – and without taking my eyes off the enemy in front of me? How would I practice that?”
Abashed, Les had to admit it made perfect sense. Once more he reminded himself never to ridicule something the wizard told him without thinking a lot first.
He stood in front of the mirror now, concentrating. First things first. This time he tried to imagine eight man-sized rectangles of pathspace converging on his position, only to split around him and continue on.
As he had expected, his first attempt at this was only partially successful. The view in front of him went black, as did the view to the right. But to his left light still poured in. The same applied to the view behind him.
He let the hot wave of anger wash over him and pass on. There was no use holding onto it. Then he spent the next hour or so practicing each of the eight cardinal directions oft the compass by itself, until he satisfied himself that he could do all of them equally well.
By this time he was wet with perspiration – and starving. He took a break and visited the bathroom to get some cold water. He was rather proud of the fact that he'd worked out how to control the spigots on the sink all by himself, once he'd gotten used to the fact that one of them eventually produced hot water. There must be an everflame rigged to heat a water tank somewhere up near the roof, he reasoned.
After he managed to stop sweating, he opened Xander's coldbox (the old rascal had all the conveniences of an Inn here – except a stove, and he needed none since he had at least one portable everflame and they delivered meals to his door anyway, presumably to keep him from wandering) and found some cooked mutton. Did they raise sheep on one more more floors of the scraper? He had to admit that the Governor's palace was even better than the castles in the storybooks. It was as if someone had taken an entire village, complete with some farmland, and stacked it up vertically like a pile of pancakes. And all you had to defend was the ground floor.
Back to the mirror. This time he tried imagining the patches in pairs, beginning with his left and right sides. After he could do any of the four opposing pairs in his eight directions, he tried to do two pair at once, left-right and forward-backward.
His first attempt at this was pretty good. Darkness on four sides, and only slivers of light on the diagonals. He kept at it, alternating between the regular and the diagonal four-axis configurations for the next hour.
Another break to rinse off sweat and grab a snack followed this. Then he went back to trying all eight directions at once. Right away he had problems. It seemed that he had real difficulties tracing out of all that pathspace at once. He wasn't exactly sure why. It had not seemed that hard to do one, two or even four directions, but he just couldn't seem to get all eight.
Then he had an inspiration, and split it into two groups of four, the regular four and the diagonal four, and doing it in two steps instead of all at once. This succeeded! It was slower than doing only one, two, or four, but faster than doing all eight one at a time.
Now for the hard part. It was time to try something Xander hadn't mentioned: trying to stay shielded while walking. He wasn't sure how to do this, and wanted to try to work it out on his own to impress Xander.
First he backed up all the way to the wall opposite the mirror, making sure the straight line path to the mirror was free of clutter he might otherwise trip over, when he couldn't see in the forward direction. Then he concentrated and formed a forward shield, leaving the other seven directions visible.
Now here was the trick he hadn't figured out. How could he make the shield move forward with him – so that it was always blocking him from view as he proceeded toward the mirror? He was a little nervous about what it might do to him to walk right through the shield. How would the pathspace affect the matter of his body?
There was no way to te
ll. Finally he gritted his teeth, screwed up his courage, and extended the tip of one pinkie through the shield. Apart from a slight tingling, he felt nothing, and it didn't chop off the finger as he had feared it might. Right.
It proved to be too much for him to make the shield move smoothly with him, so he hit upon a compromise. As he walked forward, nearing the shield, he made a new one in front of it and dispersed the first one. Encouraged by the success of this, he continued the process, making and dissolving six shields in all before he bumped into the mirror. Hastily, he dispersed the sixth shield, realizing it was outside the building. Idiot!
He spent the next hour practicing this, first walking forward, then side-stepping with the mirror to his left or his right. At the and of this he was sweating and starving again. He hoped that this was like lifting weights, and that soon it would be less draining. Otherwise he was going to have to carry a gallon of water and a bag of food with him whenever he used it in actual situations.
From now on, he resolved, he would practice this every day until it was effortless.
Chapter 19
Peter: “Impatient to assume the world”
When he opened the door to the library, he found Jeffrey hunched over an old book. “What are you reading?” he asked. Immediately he regretted the question, for two reasons. He was interrupting something he wished he saw the boy doing more often. The other reason was that his question might actually prompt an answer, and he would rather discuss something else at the moment.
“It's a textbook on neurophysiology, the Atkern & Williams Second Edition.”
Before he could stop himself, the Honcho had to ask: “Why on Earth are you reading that? You're not in training to become a physician.”
“It was prompted by something someone mentioned to me the other day,” was the vague response. “Did you know the human body is neither a dictatorship nor a democracy … but a combination of the two?”
Peter pulled up a chair, already regretting this thread of conversation. There was no avoiding his next question, even though he felt manipulated by his curiosity. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I was mulling over that old phrase we sometimes use, the 'body politic', and wondered if the structure of governments tried over the last few thousand years had ever included anything similar to what we can observe in the human body,” he said, looking up from the book. “For example, it's undeniable the there are cells in the brain that send messages to our muscles telling them when to contract more or less so that we can walk and talk and so on. That would appear to be a top-down control structure, like a monarchy where the ruler tells the army to move or the diplomats to communicate.”
Now he really didn't like this thread of conversation. Philosophy was all fine and good for abstract things like the good and the true, he supposed, but it was better to work with what existed in the real world than to ponder whether it was the best system or not. “That sounds like monarchies are the best system, then, because we know it already works for our bodies. Your brain doesn't let your foot tell it what to do.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You see, while there may be cells in the brain that tell each of our muscles what to do, there isn't any one cell in the brain that tells all the other brain cells what to do. To follow your analogy, obviously we can't let the army or the diplomats tell the government what to do, just as I don't let my foot make my decisions for me. But the part of me that decides where I'm going to walk isn't a single cell – that decision is made cooperatively by my entire brain. Just as in the old United States, the decision to go to war was supposed to not be made by the President or the generals, but by Congress. By a lot of people agreeing that it was the right thing to do.”
The Honcho shifted in his chair. “I see what you're saying,” he said. “Constitutional democracies are closer to the brain-body relationship in that a lot of agreement, consensus, has to be reached before marching orders are sent down to the army or the diplomats. Is sounds great on paper.” He paused for effect. “But son, there's a reason why the old United States broke up into all the countries we have on the continent now. While consensus makes sense theoretically, it's inherently a less efficient form of government. You have to crowd a bunch of people into a room and let them argue it all out before you can do anything. When a crisis comes, that might be – and was – too slow to get the job done. It takes too long to react to rapidly changing circumstances and situations.”
“Yes,” Jeffrey said, although his facial expression was saying the opposite, “but you handle that by delegating local decisions to regional governors and commanders in the field on-site wherever there are localized problems.”
Peter shook his head at that. “That kind of patchwork government lasts, for a while. But sooner or later regional differences lead to a breakup.” He scratched the side of his nose. “It happened once in the so-called Civil War, and only after years of bloodshed was the federal government able to force the seceding states to come back into the Union. When the growing chaos of the Fall, after the Tourists left, began to affect so many critical local systems, it was inevitable that local troops would rally around local governments, and force a de facto breakup of the Union, as each region tried to maintain order in the absence of coordinated Federal support.”
“But not all regions reverted to pre-Democracy forms of government,” his son pointed out. “There's the People's Republic of Wyoming, with their Congress of Workers, up North. And I've heard that – “
“I didn't come here to discuss the Communalists,” he interrupted. “I'm glad that you're thinking about government, but I think it's high time you got some more practical experience.”
Now his son looked wary. “What do you mean?”
The sight and sentence warmed him. Now I've got you asking the questions. “I want you to take a small force North and do some scouting. “
Jeffrey frowned at that. “Why me? You have lieutenants for that.”
“Precisely why I need you to do this. Someday you'll be in charge, and those lieutenants will be generals. They won't like taking orders from someone without much military experience, so by then you have to have some. It's time to start. Report to Brutus at the local LS Army HQ.” The Runt opened his mouth to say something, but Peter wasn't finished. “You'll be second in command under him, so the troops won't dare give you a lot of shit about your inexperience.”
Jeffrey closed the book and stood up, but he was still frowning. “What are we supposed to look for?”
“The best way to invade Rado. Get as close to their border as you can, and test their defenses without starting anything major. You can burn a few farms to get their attention, but no sacking any large settlements yet.”
“What happens if we meet resistance? I mean, what do we do if we run into a patrol of Rado military?”
“I'm not sending you to start a war. Not yet. Keep that in mind.” The Honcho slid his chair back with a squeak and stood.. He regarded his son. “But if you do run into them, and they insist on engaging you, well, kill them, of course. As long as you don't let any escape to tell what happened, it'll just mean we won't have as many to eliminate later.”
Chapter 20
Kristana: “applause of all or the love of none”
“Send him in,” she said. She glanced at another report, shook her head, and dropped it on top of a stack of outgoing papers. This would be as unpleasant as the previous interviews had been, no doubt. Why wouldn't he let it go?
Ludlow strode in and planted himself in front of her desk. The Governor stared down at another report. She could feel him bristling even across the dozen feet that separated them. It wasn't from being made to wait, however.
She shuffled the report to the OUT pile and regarded him. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Ludlow?”
At least he got straight to the point. “I hear he's taken on another apprentice. Why wasn't I notified?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe your position here entitles you to a voice i
n the matter? I don't tell the Army when I hire a new tutor for Aria.”
He scowled. “Not the point. He doesn't need another apprentice. I'm still here. He should be teaching me. Otherwise, the time he spent on me is like money thrown down a well.”
“He would not disagree with that analysis,” she said. “But he has his reasons.”
“Makes no sense at all. Unless he's only pretending to train a replacement.” Ludlow's eyes shifted to the pile of documents in front of her. She bet he wished he could read upside down.
“I thought we both knew he is not looking for a mere replacement,” she said. “He has no plans of retiring. Surely you know that. His long term goal remains the same.”
Ludlow snorted. “You mean his school for wizards? That was never a practical plan. The candidates are too few and far between to ever get it started.”
She studied him. “Is that your opinion?”
“Isn't it obvious? Even the Tourists must have known that few of us would ever learn their technology, otherwise they would have tried the same thing. Xander isn't a fool. He's using that as an excuse to stay here and exploit you as a resource.”
“I'm afraid you lost me there,” she said. “As the only real wizard in Rado he is a valuable resource for me. How do you think he's exploiting his position here?”
At the words “only real wizard” he flinched, and she realized her choice of words had been insensitive. The poor fellow still nursed ambitions in that area. But she had agreed with Xander's decision to discontinue Ludlow's training (not that he required her consent). She liked to think she had learned how to tell who could become a Commander in her army and who could not, and she had to assume that Xander was at least as capable within his own specialization.
Pathspace: The Space of Paths Page 9
