He did it again, but this time, as Qusay watched, he drew the same paths but his hand sped up inside the pipe, moving faster while inside it. “To be stable, though, you have to do this by imagining a pipe-shaped layer of air zooming though it and then sort of ballooning out into the curving paths that take it back and inside again. That's better than individual lines.”
Qusay studied the drawing. “Toroidal path geometry. Interesting. Is it used only for making a swizzle?”
“No. You can use it for other things too, like this.” He wove an invisible vortex just above the pitcher, and it rose an inch off the table as the ambassador watched. After a minute or so it settled down again. “You see, since a pathspace weave is like a change in the local space curvature, you can use it to lift objects too.” he paused. “You have to be careful to restrict the size of the pattern, or you'll get a lot of wind at the same time.”
Qusay was still staring at the pitcher. “Is that how Xander flies? I heard rumors the graduating class celebrated by cavorting in the air over the 'scraper.”
“Yes. He could probably do it in empty space, but it would be pretty dangerous, since the weave isn't stable unless you anchor it in matter. The way we did it was with swizzles.” He lifted his staff from where it was leaning against the wall and showed it to the ambassador. “He gave us these instead of diplomas. They look like wood but they're actually metal pipes, because metal holds the weave better than wood.”
Qusay's look seemed skeptical to him, so Kareef stroked the staff to turn up the swizzle and, holding it, rose a foot into the sir. The exhaust jetting out of the bottom of his staff stirred the folds of Qusay's robe and blew the drawing off the table.
He reverse-stroked the staff to turn it back down and sank back to the floor, then bent down to snatch up the drawing and place it back on the table.
Qusay's skeptical expression had been replaced by one of wonder. “That might be fine for hopping over a wall or getting to the top of a building,” he said. “But how do you steer it?”
“That's the tricky part,” Kareef admitted. “To make it go sideways you have to tinker with the flow symmetry. You can make it lean over a little to go in a particular direction other than up...but if you're not careful and tilt it all the way to horizontal you lose the lift, and then you're like an arrow: flying fast but also falling.”
Qusay rested his chin in the palm of one hand as he stared at the staff. “This, or something like it, could help us restore contact and trade with the other continents,” he said, as if thinking out loud. “The ramifications are both exciting, and worrying.” Then he seemed to remember Kareef was there. “You have given me much to think about, young wizard. Come back tomorrow night after dinner and we shall see if I can help you with your spinspace applications.”
Chapter 6
Xander: Laborious Task
“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”
– Winston Churchill
As he climbed the stairs to the main School floor, he pondered the graduates and their differences. The regional specialization in particular puzzled him. Why was it that Kareef seemed to have a knack for spinspace weaving, yet struggled with pathspace? Why did Nathan have such a hard time with both pathspace and spinspace, yet seemed uniquely gifted in regard to tonespace?
Were these differences random...or did they point to real differences in the environments each had been raised in? From what they had told him, both came from families that owned farms. So why such disparity in ability?
The simplest explanation could be that the Emirates still had some surviving everwheels, but hardly any swizzles or everflames or coldboxes. Similarly, New Israel must have everflames and maybe coldboxes but not swizzles or everwheels. But why? Surely all regions must have had their share of the Gifts of the Tourists.
He paused on a landing, feeling out of breath. Not as young as I used to be. This never used to bother me much.
After a little while he had recovered enough to continue climbing. Have to find a better way of getting around in this damn building. Too bad the machines that ran the elevators couldn't be trusted. Even if they found a way to power them up again, who knew how much strength was left in the ancient alloy cables?
He passed another landing, already feeling himself growing short of breath again. If this keeps up I'm going to have to either move my quarters up nearer the School floors, or else move the whole School down.
He couldn't bear the thought of moving all his possessions and precious books and artifacts up two dozen floors. But the other option - moving all of the classrooms and student quarters down closer to him - was equally unthinkable. He'd have to get diplomats, clerks and artisans to swap floor and move higher up.
Look at me! Acting as if this is my building, instead of Kristana's. The real hurdle would be convincing Kristana to order the moves...and then waiting as the affected parties pushed back and tried to talk her out of it.
Might as well face it. The only real options are moving myself up, or finding a way to use the ancient elevators.
He stopped again at the next landing when a coughing fit seized him and was slow to subside. When he could resume his ascent, he made a mental note to ask Daniels if he knew some herbs that helped reduce coughing.
After what seemed like an eternity of climbing he reached the fifty-fifth floor and, after stopping to mop his brow and straighten his black robe, opened the door. There was no guard station to walk around, at least. Now that the Queen's saboteur was free of her influence, there was no need to guard the stairwell any more. They'd dragged the other table back in front of the still-open elevator doors just as a precaution.
Six figures in gray robes were concentrating so fiercely they didn't notice his arrival at first. Lester had them working in pairs doing what he called 'tug-of-war' exercises. Three of them sat with their backs to one wall, facing another three across the room. Kareef and Kaleb were using spinspace, each trying to make a wooden ball between them roll toward the other while the other opposed this. Carolyn and Esteban were doing something similar with pathspace, shoving a chair back and forth.
The tray on the floor midway between Lester and Nathan didn't seem to be moving. Xander squinted and saw it had water with chunks of ice in it. One of them must be trying to freeze it all with a coldbox weave while the other tried to boil it with an everflame weave.
The pairings seemed too logical to be accidental. In each case, one of the two was clearly stronger, helping the other work harder to build up their strength in that particular flavor of metaspace. From the look of it, Lester was having a hard time of it against Nathan's natural aptitude for tonespace weaves.
He wished he could just stand there and watch, and see if they were smart enough to change partners to make sure everyone worked on their weak areas, but he didn't close the door softly enough. The click alerted them, and they all stopped and turned to face him. They are the future, he thought.
He opened his mouth but a fit of coughing seized him again and it was a minute before he could speak. “I didn't mean to interrupt your practice,” he said, “but I've been tiring more easily lately and I thought it would be better to have today's talk sooner rather than later. And I need your help.”
That got their attention. “With what?” said Lester.
“We'll get to that. First, let's talk about tonespace,” he said. “I know some of you are struggling with it.” He reached out and pulled a chair over to him with pathspace and sat down. “Nathan, tell us again how you discovered the icetorch weave.”
The youngest of them cleared his throat. “It's still a bit of a mystery to me how I found it,” he said. “That was the night you showed us the smoke ring and told us it was what gave Lester the hint he needed to make his first swizzle.”
Nathan rummaged in a box of materials and pulled out a short length of pipe. “Kareef and I were trying to figure out how to apply the smoke ring patt
ern to get the swizzle effect. I tried imagining rings traveling down the inside of the pipe but that wasn't it.” He paused. “Neither of us knew you had to stretch the ring axially, and embed the pipe inside the flow. Everyone knows a swizzle makes things move inside the pipe, but we forget that the inner acceleration path is balanced by a minute flow in the opposite direction outside the pipe. I mean, I see that now but it wasn't obvious before.”
Xander nodded. “And what did you do next?"
“I got it in my head that maybe my pattern was too balanced, that maybe I should put the vortex at one end of the pipe. I know, I know,” he said, before Xander could interrupt. “I know that wasn't it. But when I tried, that's when the end of the pipe started heating up.” As he said it, the far end of the pipe he was holding began to turn reddish. Soon red shifted into orange and he frowned and reversed his pattern, calming it down.
“With some people, it would have done nothing,” said Xander. “You seem to have an affinity for tonespace weaves, energy magic, and so your pattern was close enough to an everflame weave to heat up the metal.” He turned his gaze. “And what happened next, Kareef?”
Kareef shrugged. “When he left to show the others, I tried something similar, except I imagined the smoke ring around the middle of the pipe, like a belt. I got no wind, but I felt a twist, and when, surprised, I dropped the pipe, it started rolling all the way across the room until the wall stopped it.”
“But pipes do roll,” Xander said. “How did you know something different was happening?”
“Well, it was the way it happened. If it had hit the floor rolling it wouldn't have seemed so odd. But first it landed and lay there for a second, and then it began to roll, so I knew I had caused it.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I imagined the smoke ring pattern reversing, and the pipe rolled back to me.” He sighed. “I can do it, but I still have no idea why it works.”
“The interesting thing to me,” Xander told them all, “is that the two of you achieved completely different effects starting from the same mental picture. Does anyone want to guess why?”
It was Esteban who spoke up. “Seems to me that Kareef has a natural affinity for spinspace weaves.”
Xander nodded. “This will surprise you, but having you all here has taught me something I didn't know before.” Their eyes widened, and now he knew he really had their attention. “You see, for a long time now it's been my belief that exposure to the Gifts that are still functioning, at an early enough age, encourages a person's ability to do these things. But I assumed that everyone would follow the same learning curve as I did, beginning with pathspace and going from there.”
He took a breath. “But I was wrong. I didn't realize it when I took on Lester as an apprentice because his exposure was similar to my own in some ways. When I was younger we had a swizzle and an everflame in the commune. His parents run an inn that has an everflame and a coldbox.”
“Not quite the same,” Lester objected.
“Close enough. Pathspace was easy to teach because the concept of a path is a familiar one. Lester pumped water from a well every day and so imagining a path as a flow was natural for him.” He turned back to Kareef. “But you didn't have to pump water, did you?”
Kareef shook his head. “My sister did that.”
“I thought so. But you did have something you did a lot, some chore, didn't you?”
“Well...before I started school, I used to help the miller who ground my father's grain into flour.”
“Ah,” said Xander. “I will bet you my robe that his waterwheel worked just fine even when the water in the mill pond was low. Didn't it?”
“I never thought about it. I thought they all worked that way.”
“Not in Rado,” Xander told him. “You father has a still-functioning everwheel. I'm sure of it. Do you all see what I'm getting at? Nathan, I'll bet your father had no swizzles or everwheels, but plenty of everflames, didn't he?” It's all right, son. I won't tell them he's a wizard too, if that's a secret.
“Are you telling is,” said Kaleb, “that what we were exposed to determines what kind of wizard we can be?”
“Not entirely, no. But I think it does make it easier for you to start learning whatever magic you grew up around.”
He let them mull that over for a minute, then continued. “That's one thing I believe. Another is that the basic kinds of magic are all interrelated.”
They looked blank at that, and Carolyn said “What do you mean by interrelated?”
“Think about it. When a wheel turns, the wagon moves forward in a straight line but the rim of the wheel moves in a path too – a circular path. The straight and the curved paths are connected where the wheel meets the road.
“The Ancients discovered this in another way. When they sent an electric current down a piece of straight wire, it created a magnetic field that consisted of circular rings around the wire like concentric wheels. And when they wound the wire around a piece of pipe to make something they called a solenoid, a long coil like a spool of thread, guess what happened? It made the field stronger – in a straight line going down the middle of the pipe.”
He touched his left forefinger to his thumb, making a little circle. Then he did the same thing with his other hand, but linked the two circles like a couple of links in a chain. “See, here's two circles interlinked, like in a chain. Each is perpendicular to the other. If I could lay one flat on a table, the other circle would be coming up in the middle of it – or going down into it.” He paused to look at them again. “It's the way electricity and magnetism work – always at right angles to each other, even when they go in circles. Push electricity in a straight line, and you get magnetism going round in circles. But make the electricity go round and round in a coil, and the magnetism goes through the middle of it in a straight line, like water flowing in a pipe.”
He looked at Kareef. “You have a knack for spinspace magic. So when you imagined a smoke ring around the middle of the pipe, and tried to make the air in the pipe go in a straight line, you made the outside of it want to move in a circular path. Apparently, that's one way of making an everwheel.”
“Why didn't you tell me that?”
“Because I didn't know. I learned that from you, Kareef.” He took another breath. “It took me years to make my first everwheel work. You solved it in seconds, without help.”
Kareef sat up straighter now. “Then how did you do it?”
“I used a different pattern. I imagined the space around the wheel to be full of spin, and then thought of gathering it all in, concentrating that spin in the wheel. It works, but it's harder than your method.”
Nathan frowned. “How is that related to everflames and the icetorch?”
“I'm getting to that.” He reached into a pocket of his robe and pulled out a coin. “Here's an everflame. Anybody remember how you turn the power up and down?”
“That's easy,” said Nathan. “You just stroke it...around the rim.” He blinked. “You control it with a curved path!”
“Yes. And we already know that Kareef produced the everwheel effect starting with a smoke ring.” Going over to a table, Xander picked up a wax crayon and began to sketch. “Remember what I showed you about the chain-interlinked circles? Remember the smoke ring I blew for you? What happens as it moves outward?”
“It slows down,” said Carolyn.
“And it expands,” Kaleb added.
“The smoke ring, or vortex ring, as it was called in some of the Ancient books, is a perfect example of linked circular paths. We see the smoke following one of the links – that is, we see the smoke go out of the top and around and back into the bottom.” He paused. “But there's another motion – on the other path, going around the ring like a turning wagon wheel.”
There was a moment of silence as they absorbed that.
“What happens to the surface of a bowl of water if you stir it fast with a spoon? A funnel-shape appears in the water – th
e water drops in the center and rises around the outside.”
“I don't understand,” Esteban complained.
What I'm getting at,” said Xander, “is that as the smoke ring travels outwards, and slows down due to friction, it expands. But it doesn't expand because it's hot – it expands because as the air in it slows down, the coiling, the linking, is looser. It eventually breaks up and disappears the same way a tornado does, when the motion is too slow to keep the flows tightly bound.”
“I still don't see what this has to do with the icetorch and the everflame,” Nathan said.
“Each of the three kinds of magic you have been learning has its own peculiarities,” Xander said, “but they are all interconnected. When you tried to make a swizzle, Nathan, you imagined a vortex around the end of the pipe. And when you didn't get any swizzle wind from that, what did you do?”
“Well, I imagined the flow in the smoke ring going faster.”
“But the smoke ring has two flows, interlinked. So when you imagined how smoke would flow in the smoke ring faster, you also made the other flow, the one Kareef uses for spinspace, go faster too.”
“So?”
“So we've seen what happens when a smoke ring slows down. It the flows get looser and it expands. What do you suppose would happen if we could make the flows speed up, instead?”
“It would get tighter,” Lester said. “And that would make it contract, get smaller."
“Exactly. And how do I make an everflame? Well, since I never saw an icetorch until you taught me that, Nathan, I make an everflame by imagining the energy in the space around the coin contracting, gathering in to concentrate it. It works, and I never knew, before, why after I make it, it can be turned up and down by anyone by stroking around the rim. Somehow it makes the weave tighter or looser.”
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 3