Pathspace
Page 68
Chapter 68
Lester: “And three trees on the low sky”
This time it was not nearly as terrifying. He kept his eyes open, but that was mainly because he was the one steering his swizzle, not Xander.
The first part, the ascension, was easy. From his experimentation in his cell he had already noted that the flow lines of the pathspace around and through the anchoring pipe did not have to be symmetrical. He had no way of measuring the speed at which the air was being pulled into the front end of the pipe and spewing out the back, but it must be enormous, because he learned, in time to follow Xander, that slight changes in the symmetry of the flow were sufficient to effect course changes. When they were pointed straight up, for example, a shift in the pathspace weave to make a bit more of it come from the Northwest caused the pipe to tilt over and send them moving in that direction instead of straight up or hovering.
Xander, on his own staff, must somehow be controlling both his staff swizzle and the one the other fellow was rising. Lester had not had enough time to get a good look at the other guy yet (and was far too busy mentally now) but the man seemed far too old to be another candidate for apprenticeship. If they all survived this, there would be plenty of time later to find out why he was with them.
Several too-late-launched crossbow bolts arched up vainly toward them and were soon left behind. Following Xander, he swung the pipe northwards and tried not to think about the fact that the only thing between him and death by falling was his own imagination and its tenuous grip on the pathspace pattern around the metal pipe they were hugging.
Eventually he reached a sort of dynamic equilibrium where the flow rate, which he had cranked way up to lift them off the ground, or rather, its component in the vertical direction, was enough to keep them from falling, but not enough to push them any higher. By that time they were already, by his reckoning, several hundred feet in the air and several miles northwest of the prison. The sideways component of their thrust was enough to have them moving faster than any horse could ever gallop, and their weight, most of which was farther back than the middle of the pipe, was enough to keep the flow asymmetry from pulling them into a fully-horizontal flight that would have let them plummet to their deaths.
Having reached this relative state of equilibrium, there was little for him to do except make minor course corrections when exterior wind from the sides tried to push them from their northward direction, so he could at last think about what was happening. He was full of questions, and since there was no chance to ask them of Xander at the moment, he conjured up a mental image of the wizard in his mind and tried to imagine how the old man would answer his questions.
Lester: I've only experienced this once before, so I'm still puzzled how what we're doing could be possible. How does this wind-in-the-pipe get us into the air and push us toward Rado?
Xander: I already told you about the Third Law of Motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action. Since the air in the pipe is being pushed (or pulled) backwards, the pipe is being pushed forwards by conservation of momentum.
Lester: But what's pushing on the air? I know how to make it happen, now, but not what exactly I'm making happen.
Xander: We've talked before about this. Since neither of us is a Tourist, we don't know how they think it works; all we have is the best guess of human scientists. Apparently it has to do with space, time, and consciousness.
Lester: Could you tell me again what they thought?
Xander: That which we call space, or the aether, or, more modernly, the space-time Continuum, is a plenum of all kinds of particles. Most of these are called virtual particles because they appear and disappear again like a weed in the desert. But just as a weed can grow into a bush if you give it enough water, these virtual particles can become real particles if they acquire enough energy to become permanent.
Lester: I remember you saying that once. I don't see the connection between that and pathspace.
Xander: Every particle that exists is not just existing, it's going somewhere. Especially photons, the particles of light, which couldn't stand still if they wanted to. Photons have to move at the speed of light, whereas “ordinary” particles move at some slower speed.
Lester: So?
Xander: Ordinarily, the velocity is uniformly distributed in all directions. In other words, if you looked at a point of space, both the real particles passing through it, and the virtual particles appearing at that point and coming out of it, are moving in all possible directions, rather than concentrating in any particular direction like horses on a road.
Lester: What you seem to be saying is that by configuring pathspace, I'm altering the distribution, herding them in a particular direction – making roads for the horses to follow.
Xander: Exactly!
Lester: This is frustrating. I already knew that's what I'm doing. What I don't understand is how my imagining a road in space persuades the particles to follow that imaginary road. I could imagine another road down there, different than the one our pursuers are following in their losing bid to keep up with us. But if I did that, it would only be in my head. Their horses wouldn't know about my imaginary road or feel compelled to follow it. So why is it any different with these particles you keep talking about? What makes them obey me?
Here the imaginary conversation faltered, because he couldn't remember Xander saying anything that would give any clue as to how he would answer that question. He might as well have asked, why can I make them follow different paths if most people can't? He had heard a partial answer to that question, of course. It had something to do with his being exposed,. over a period of years, to the altered configurations around the everflame and the coldbox back at Gerrold's inn.
But so had his mother and Gerrold, and they'd shown no sign of being able to weave patterns in pathspace.
He had nearly gotten to a state where he could look down without wanting to scream. The toroidal pattern of pathspace was wound up tight inside the pipe, but its flowlines outside the pipe were only bunched together at the entrance in front of him and the exit behind him. It was as if he were in the dough of a donut that had been stretched along its main axis of symmetry into a pipe, but then inflated. The breeze blowing past him was moving only about as fast as they were moving with respect to the ground, which though considerable, was not terrifically fast. From the time they had spent flying already, he judged, as they passed over Wichita Falls, that they were moving at or less than a hundred miles an hour.
That was fast, of course, but not nearly as fast as the air shooting out the back of the swizzle. Since the pipe was tilted over at an angle, and a lot of that air had to be moving downwards, or, as Xander would have said, its velocity had to have a strong component in the downwards direction to keep them in the air. So it was roaring out of the pipe at more than a hundred miles an hour. He was glad it wasn't much more than that; they had none of the stickum Xander used on his staff to get a better grip on it.
As they sped toward Denver in the northwest, the green countryside of East Texas faded to the yellow-white of West Texas, where higher elevations combined with fewer rivers to parch the land into semi-desert. The verdant lawns and cultivated fields were vanishing behind them, decaying to the scrub-dotted waste of the west. It was evidently Xander's plan to more or less follow the Red River, the traditional northern boundary between the Lone Star Empire and Okla, and then turn almost due north when they got to Amarillo.
Before they left the Red River behind, however, he spied Xander and the other stranger coming in for a landing. This would be interesting, because Lester has never landed one of these before. Before he whizzed by the other two, he made his pipe imitate their pipes, deftly reshaping the flowlines so that it turned vertical again, then unwinding the pattern around the pipe enough to let him sink toward the ground in a controlled descent rather than a lethal drop.
By the time his feet kissed the ground the other end of him wanted to do the same thing. Xander and the man with
him had left their swizzles on the bank of the river and gone off their separate ways into the bushes to relieve bladders. Lester's pelvic area had been numbed by the humming vibration of the pipe, but after he dismounted, sensation returned and he found himself a bush.
When he returned, it was time for introductions. This was awkward, for he finally learned that their party's third member was a priest whose name was Father Andrews.