Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  “I remember the sound. More of a hiss than a whistle.”

  “It's the sound a thin swizzle makes when it's moving a lot of air. Don't you see? It moves whatever's in it. If there's air or water in it, the swizzle moves it. If there's a rock or a bullet in there, it moves too. Make it move fast enough and you've got a gun that doesn't need gunpowder.”

  The Honcho had been about to stand up, but at this he sat down again. “So someone in the Church has access to swizzles, and they're using them as guns.” He thought about that. What else do they know that they're not sharing with me?

  “For all we know,” said Jeffrey, “they have their own wizards who can make swizzles.”

  “I thought only the Tourists could do that,” he objected. “If humans could do things like that, civilization would never have fallen. Things would have kept working.”

  “Well,” said Jeffrey, “maybe some humans can. That wizard's staff, it looked like it was nothing but a stick until it started shooting red-hot coals at us. He must have had the swizzle inside it. But who ever heard of a swizzle covered with wood? From what I've read, they were used underground, where groundwater would rot the wood, and inside pipes and ventilation shafts where no one could see them. You know what? I think he made it himself. It's too bad your banger killed him. One wizard like that could make you a thousand swizzle guns.”

  Yes, he thought. Too bad. But we do have his apprentice.

  There was a knock on the door. “Yes?”

  “Sir, His Holiness is here.”

  “Already? Very well, show him into the meeting room. I'll be there in a minute.”

  He looked at the Runt, seeing potential for maybe the first time. “What you've just told me is useful,” he said. “I think you should sit in on this meeting. But don't say anything, just listen to what he says and tell me what you think afterwards.”

  For the first time that day, his son actually smiled. “I can do that,” he said.

  Chapter 45

  Xander: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

  He opened his eyes. He was in the doctor's rooms, not in his own bed.

  Aria sat by the bed. “How long was I asleep?” he asked.

  She consulted the hourglass on the table. “About six hours. It's the middle of the afternoon. How do you feel?”

  “Beat up. Have you heard from Lester?”

  “No,” she said. “It looks like the escaped Texas men took him back with them.”

  “Damn it!” He tried to rise from the bed.

  She pushed him back down flat with one hand. “Don't even try,” she said. “We're not even finished with the transfusion yet.”

  He craned his neck and saw the IV stand by the bed. There was a half-full plastic bag of blood there, its tubing carrying blood into his left arm. “Ah,” he said. He looked back at Aria. “You look pale.”

  “I'm not surprised,” she said. “It is my blood, after all. Or was, until I got back a half hour ago. You're lucky the outpost had a fast horse for couriers. You lost a lot of blood and the doctor said mine was the only kind in the building that wouldn't kill you.”

  He frowned at that. “I'm sure he could have found someone else. There's probably – “

  “Shut up,” she said cheerfully. “And you're welcome. No, there was nobody else. He had dozens of volunteers, but when he mixed a drop of yours and theirs, they all clumped. Mine was the only blood that didn't.” Now she frowned. “It's strange, because mother's clumped too. But mine was fine. Something about A, B, and O and positive and negative. Anyway, you should be fine now.”

  “I didn't think I was bleeding that much,” he said. “I made it all the way back here, after all. I was just having trouble breathing.”

  “You had a punctured lung,” she informed him. “The arrow missed your heart but it went right through a lung. The bandages stopped you from making a mess but you were still bleeding into the collapsed lung. Doctor Daniels had to swizzle that blood out of the lung and then reverse the swizzle to re-inflate the lung for you.”

  “Good thinking,” he said. “But where did he find a swizzle small enough for that?”

  “We broke the little fountain you made for me last year. You remember? I only had to add a little water once every week or so to make up for evaporation. I'm sorry we had to break it, but I knew there had to be a little swizzle in there. And there was.”

  “Tell him to keep it,” he said. “I'll make you another one.” But what are we going to do about Lester? “Ask the doctor to come in for a moment, will you? I need to speak to him in private”

  “Fine,” she said. “I guess you don't need me, now that you have my blood.”

  Daniels didn't smile. “What do you want? You're not my only patient, you know.”

  “Has she figured it out yet?”

  To the doctor's credit, he didn't pretend not to understand. “No,” he said. “But if she gets curious it isn't that hard to work out from the explanations in the old biology textbooks. Why haven't you told her?”

  “Only you and I, and of course the Governor, know this. I'd like to keep it that way.”

  Daniels just looked at him. “Don't you think she deserves to know who her father is?”

  Xander sighed, which was a mistake, because it hurt to do that now. “But that's just the point,” he said. “She thinks she already knows. All her life she's thought the General was her father. How can I take that away from her? He was a great man. If he'd lived a couple more months, he would have been her father.”

  “I thought you, of all people, cared about the truth,” said Daniels.

  “There's nothing I care about more,” said Xander, “except her happiness. And of course, the Governor's reputation. A kind and innocent girl's feelings, a hard-working ruler trying to hold everything together, and the security of Rado are more important than the paternal pride of an old wizard, don't you think?”

  Daniels looked at him. “I think,” he said, “that this is an old story with a bad ending. Secrets are like infected wounds. The sooner you let out the pus, the sooner the healing can begin. Better to leave her with the memory of a father who admitted the truth, than to let her recall you as a man who thought she was dumb enough to be fooled forever. Think about it.”

  “I will. But in the meantime, you won't tell her, will you?”

  “I'll leave that to you. Try not to need any more of her blood.”

  Chapter 46

  Lester: “We think of the key, each in his prison”

  After the Honcho left Lester paced the cell, not knowing what to think. The ruler had not seemed nearly as bad as he had expected, but then, he wasn't facing him with weapons on a battlefield. Perhaps he had a decent side, but that didn't change anything. He still had to find a way out of here before they found a way to use him against Rado.

  What was it Xander had said? “A real wizard wouldn't need a key. All ordinary locks are just collections of moving parts. And anything that can move can be controlled with pathspace. ”

  He'd already justified Xander's choosing him as an apprentice by learning the invisibility trick. But the wizard was gone. It was up to him now. He'd have to stake the next step by himself.

  The Honcho had left him a wooden cup, but taken the metal pitcher with him when he left. He drank the water remaining in it and set the cup on the floor. Then he tried to imagine what it was to be that cup. It looked motionless, but according to Xander, it wasn't. It was spinning with the Earth, as he was, and orbiting the sun as the Earth was. So it wasn't a matter of getting it to move. It was already moving. What he needed to do was to make small changes in the path it was already on.

  He concentrated, reaching out with him mind. This would be a challenge, he knew. This time he wasn't just trying to deflect the weightless particles of light that Xander had called photons.. He was trying to deflect the massive particles that made up the wood in the cup.

  Which shouldn't have made any difference, since he wasn't trying to lift or push t
hem – all he was trying to do was reshape the path they were following. But it was different. Photons were easy to guide. They had no rest mass. Once a photon was created, Xander had once told him, the particle flew away at the speed of light without needing any time at all to accelerate. No rest mass meant changing the photon's direction was effortless. Ordinary matter, on the other hand, was less reasonable. Photons were like little arrows flying through the air. A wind could blow arrows from their target, and it was similarly easy to reshape the paths of photons.

  Ordinary matter, however, was move like a rock rolling across a plain. Mere wind would have little effect on it. The sun was millions of miles away. Only the fact that it was also millions of times as heavy as the Earth allowed it to reshape the pathspace around it enough to keep the Earth's path bending around it in an orbit.

  But that line of thought got him nowhere. He was not the sun. He did not have the weight that would be necessary to bend the cup's path by sheer brute force.

  So what had Xander meant? He concentrated on the cup and imagines the pathspace bending around it. Nothing happened for a second, and then the cup began to fade away.

  Frustrated, he stopped what he was doing. The cup stopped fading. But it remained transparent. Some, but not all, of the light was bending around the cup, so that he could see the floor behind it. But that didn't help him to move the cup. No progress.

  Or was it? Suddenly he had a ridiculous idea that he had to try.

  Pathspace, Zander had told him, was the space of all paths. Not just the ones he could imagine. It included directions he could not even sense.

  He stood in front of the door to the cell and reached out with his mind to embrace the pathspace and imagine a new configuration...

  And the door began to fade! He stopped, and the effect remained. The door was now transparent. He knew it was there, but he could see out into the hall, as if it were made of glass.

  By using pathspace, he could see through things. Evidently, matter did not occupy all of the dimensions of space. No matter how solid an object looked, even a wall, there were paths that went around it in unseen directions.

  Now this was progress. All by himself, he had found a way to do something Xander had not even hinted at. His surge of pride soured, however, when he wished he could tell the wizard and then remembered that he couldn't , because the old man was dead.

  Move past that, he told himself. He tried to imagine what Xander would have told him if he were here right now. Forget the past. It can't help you or hurt you. Concentrate on the present.

  He still had to find a way out of this cell. He looked at the door. It was still transparent. After a moment he realized what was bothering him about that. Why was it that sunlight was blocked by a roof, it there were paths, somewhere, around the roof? He decided that sunlight, after traveling so far from its source, had to be moving in a straight line. Hardly any of the photons were able to wiggle around a roof, in the normal pathspace configuration.

  But he could change that. And now he could see when a guard was coming. This was already an advantage: he could practice his skills without being caught at it.

  Chapter 47

  Enrique: “And I who am here dissembled”

  A nameless attendant darted forward to replenish his snifter. He smiled a thanks to the man and returned his attention to the Honcho. “Yes,” he said, “quite smooth. They're doing marvelous things with springs and things these days. But you don't need us to tell you that, your Excellency. We're sure your new imperial coach is even better.”

  The Honcho smiled. “The craftsman are always improving their craft,” he agreed. “I'm sure one day their artifice will rival the best that the Ancients contented themselves with.”

  Enrique nodded, but in his own mind he heard disagreement and agreement both to this statement. Part of him heard it with gladness, hungry for the luxuries the Ancients had known: medicines to cure and prevent disease, music captured and recorded in patterns of obedient lightning, and machines that conveyed images and sound across the world, making face to face meetings redundant and far-flung empires and enterprises sustainable. Yet part of him regretted the incessant need to improve the state of technical prowess. It always led to disdain for religions such as his own based upon the pronouncements of primitives. When today's advances make last week's best work seem inadequate, how will the words of men who lived a thousand years ago be viewed, but irrelevant? No one fears the god of thunder once lightning rods are put in place.

  He sipped the Balcones from the snifter, taking care not to show his amusement at sipping whiskey from a brandy snifter. According to his sources, the pseudo-cognac produced in Californ was more appropriate for such full-bodied glasses than the Texas-made whiskey. It was more aromatic, for one thing. According to records he had seen, actual cognac, no longer available in the Americas since the collapse of civilization, had been produced according to amazingly rigid laws and procedures. Only certain grapes, grown in certain areas, could be used, the fermented juice then double-distilled in copper alembics, and aged at least two years in Limousin oak barrels before sale to the public.

  Californ “cognac”, which he obtained through his unofficial sources was, by all accounts, a fair imitation of the original, although of course the grapes were grown there, and not in the same soils and climate found in old France. Likewise the oak in which it was aged was not Limousin oak. Nevertheless, it was made from grapes, as the Texas whiskey was not, and was aged in oaken barrels. It was popular in Mexico. It also had a lower alcohol content than whiskey. He kept that in mind as he sipped Peter's rye. Peter and his son, by contrast, appeared to toss the stuff down as if long used to surviving and coping with its effects.

  “But I am certain,” Peter was saying, “that you did not come to compare conveyances. We do appreciate the honor of your presence, Holiness, but is there something we need to discuss?”

  Enrique set his snifter down. “Indeed there is, your Excellency.” He was surprised at the Honcho's formality, given their earlier familiarity, but presumed that it was for the benefit of the Runt. “You remember that earlier, you mentioned a certain cache of confiscated materials which could prove to be of assistance to your efforts to expand the borders of your dominion.”

  “Yes,” said the Honcho. “As I recall, your Holiness, you stated that the objects in question, being under Papal ban, could not possibly be examined or utilized. Did I misunderstand you, or has something come to light which could modify that situation?”

  Enrique smiled and shrugged. “It is possible that we overstated the case. While the so-called 'gifts' of the Tourists have been proscribed as a matter of Church law, that proscription was never actually an infallible proclamation, since it was a matter of mortal opinion among the College of Cardinals, and not, in actual fact, an article of divinely received wisdom. It is therefore possible that exceptions could be made, in situations of need, given appropriate caution and conditions.”

  The Honcho leaned forward a little. “Interestingly put, Holiness. And how might these conditions be satisfied? I trust you have something in mind, something that Texas could do for you and the Church in return for granting us access?”

  “It is possible,” he admitted, “that some quid pro quo could be agreed. But I must warn you, Excellency, that even within the Church, there are practicalities to be considered. In order to satisfy...certain elements...we might have to ask for something you might be as reluctant to relinquish as we are to let these demonic tools fall into human hands.”

  “I see,” said the Honcho. “I have heard it said that a compromise is an agreement in which neither party is happy, yet both are satisfied. I already know that you would be unhappy to set the precedent of letting the Empire make industrial-scale use of swizzles and everflames from your storehouse. Tell me, Excellency, what is it you fear will make me equally unhappy? How can we trade our miseries for the betterment of both of us?”

  Enrique took another sip of the whiskey from his
snifter before he answered. It wasn't bad stuff, even if it wasn't Californ cognac. “Excellency,” he said, “I have heard that you have recently acquired a new prisoner. A wizard, in fact. Are my sources correct?”

  Peter glanced at Jeffrey. The frown on the Runt's face was transparent, and spoke as loud as words. How does this guy know about the prisoner? You're not going to turn him over, are you?

  “Nearly correct, Holiness. I must congratulate you on your sources, but they have not got it quite right. The young man in question is a mere apprentice. I believe his teacher was, regrettably, terminated in the fracas which led to his capture.”

  “Nevertheless,” Enrique responded, “he is a practitioner of the forbidden arts, is he not?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” admitted the Honcho. “But hardly a powerful one. He is, after all, our prisoner, unable to escape from his cell, let alone threaten either our security or that of the Church.”

  “Are you certain of that? Granted, if he is young he probably knows less than the older wizard. But he might surprise you. Were he to escape, it would not speak well of your security.”

  “True. What is your interest in him? Are you hoping to convert him? I can see how it would be helpful to the Church if you were to persuade him to change, and tell others that he has seen the error of his ways.”

  “Perhaps,” Enrique conceded. But we both know that his status as an apprentice, in itself, is proof that the people in Rado are trying to raise more wizards. We both know such people are dangerous. I'm told the older wizard captured a group of your scouts all by himself.”

  “So what are you suggesting, Holiness?”