Pathspace
Page 74
Chapter 74
Lester: “And time yet for a hundred indecisions”
Lester put down the book he had been reading, a book about ancient motorized armies led by a man with an abbreviated mustache. “If the Honcho has anything like the stuff in here, we're in big trouble.”
Xander took a bite from an apple and chewed before answering. “Try not to worry. Powered vehicles could be an advantage, certainly. But he's never used them before. If he succeeds in Rado, the experience will make it easier on him as he continues to expand his Empire. But he won't.”
“What makes you so sure of that? We've got some cannon that have to be hauled around by teams of horses, taking forever to position and move. He's going to have guns that roll around by themselves wherever he wants to take them!”
The old wizard ate more apple. “We're going to have some surprises for him,” he said. “And the thing with technology is, the more complicated it is, the more things there are to go wrong with it. For example, all it takes to stop a car is a potato.”
Lester stared at him. “What?”
The engines of the Ancients,” Xander informed him. “require an exhaust for the burned fuel vapor as well as an intake for air. Block either one, and the engine won't run. Shove a potato in the exhaust pipe of one of the old automobiles and it's useless, unable to vent the exhaust.”
“You're planning to run around behind his vehicles with a bag of potatoes?”
“No. It was just an example. You'd be surprised how easy it is to disable high-tech systems with low-tech meddling. The more complex a system, the more weaknesses it has. The process with more steps has more places in which it can fail – or be made to fail.”
“Then how does nature succeed? Aren't biological processes more complicated than anything humans have ever built?”
Xander finished the apple. He picked a seed out of its core and showed it to Lester in his hand.. “Actually, pieces of nature fail all the time. See this seed? It could become an apple tree, and make thousands of more apples. But it can fail. It can fail because of drought, disease, overcrowding, lightning, fire, floods....or simply because it never ends up in the ground.” He picked out the rest of the core's seeds and tucked them into a pocket of his robe. “Parts of nature fail all the time. But the entirety of nature, by which I mean life on Earth, it goes on year after year.”
“Could all of it fail, like our civilization crashed after the Tourists left?”
“Oh, certainly. The Sun could get too hot or too cold, or asteroids could hit us and render the entire globe lifeless. But the difference between nature and Civilization is, it doesn't need people to make it work. We've forgotten how to build computers, but seeds never forget how to become trees.”
Xander tossed the empty apple core into a box by the table where they threw food scraps to save them for composting in Aria's garden. He rose from his chair and reached for his staff. “Its time for us to help prepare for the invasion.”
Lester pried himself out of his own chair. “Aren't the Governor's officers doing that already?”
Xander smiled without sadly. “They think they are,” he said. “But we're going to need more than they can come up with. To stop the Honcho, we're going to need more than horses and arrows this time. Swords won't stop his tanks.”
“But we don't have our own tanks, or fuel. How do we beat him?”
“By being smarter. By using what we do have that he doesn't.”
After that the old wizard fell silent until they reached the armorer's smithy near the ground floor. Unsure of their destination, Lester finally understood when he heard the ringing of a hammer on iron. By then he'd already figured out what Xander meant. What did they have that the Honcho didn't? Magic.
But what good would that be? He could lift a rook or a pawn into the air, but he was pretty sure that he couldn't flip over a tank with his pathspace. He doubted Xander could either.
The head smith, was adjusting the swizzle on the side of his forge as they entered, his strong hands stroking the pipe, fine tuning the temperature of the coals. He looked up at the sound of the door. “Ah, there you are,” he grunted. “Wondered when you'd be by.” He glanced at Lester. “So this is your latest apprentice, eh? Hope he makes a difference.”
Lester heard the ringing of the hammer again. Turning, he saw a pair of the smith's strikers placing some kind of circular die over a sheet of metal, whacking it with their hammers to cut out a seemingly endless series of metal discs that another assistant was putting into open boxes.
Xander saw him looking at the discs. “I'll handle making the everflames,” he told Lester. “You take that stack of pipe in the other corner and start making swizzles.”