If he put a mirror behind the candle, that is, between it and him, then all of its light should either go forward or be reflected forward. But there would still be the huge portion going out to the sides.
He remembered seeing, in Angeles, folding mirrors hinged like doors, so that you unfold the set and have, for example, three full length mirrors, showing your front, left, and right sides. Something like that would be more efficient than a single flat mirror.
A bird flew across the road in front of him and he instinctively put up his hand to shield his eyes, then felt a fool because at worst it would have hit the windshield.
Clever thing, the windshield. He wondered how the Ancients had made the thing, a curved sheet of glass. Probably something as simple as a curved mold. But the molten glass would run downhill. After another moment's thought he concluded the Ancients would have used something more sophisticated than the flat molds they used for windows. Must have been a two-piece mold, or something like that.
Well, then why not mold a curved mirror, rather than a folded one? Then you could probably reflect nearly all of the candle's light forward.
There was still the problem that the candle was a fire hazard. What he really needed was something like the glowtubes in Kristana's 'scraper. No one had tried to make one yet, but he had heard rumors that Xander had been keeping the ones in the Governor's building refreshed somehow. Which meant that the Tourists had made them long ago for the Ancients, using tonespace, probably.
Well, if Xander could refresh them knowing only pathspace, spinspace, and tonespace, then it followed that since he, Lobsang, now had a rudimentary grasp of those, he out in principle to be able to make a glowtube, if he put his mind to finding the right weave. If he could perfect it, then the vehicle could travel at night, which would be an advantage, particularly on nights when the Moon was new, or only a crescent.
Something ran across the road and he swerved, wrenching at the steering wheel and hoping whatever it was passed between his tires. To short for a human, and too big for a lizard. A wolf? Whatever it was, he managed to miss it: he heard no thump.
He thought about the glowtube for the car. When he visualized the ones back at the School, he decided they were too long for what he had in mind. He'd need shorter ones...a thought struck him...or curved ones.
He wondered if you could make a glowtube in the shape of a spiral, or a doughnut. He knew of no reason why it could not be done. Now he really wished he had been able to stay at the School longer. Xander would have had one of the glassblowers turn out a decent glass doughnut in an hour or so. Instead of that, he'd have to wait until after he'd confronted the Queen.
Thinking about the glowtube, he nearly missed the sign. By the time it registered on his vision, he had to wrench at the spinspace weave on the rear axle and press the brake pedal to slow down enough to be able to read it:
DESERET – 20
FRANCISCO – 980
ANGELES – 1450
It seemed clear that the numbers were miles. The lettering had been done in bright orange against a dark gray, not in the Ancient form of white letters on a green background. The sign, then, must be fairly recent.
He pressed on. As the miles unwound he thought again of the Queen and shook his head. Rochelle was feared, but it must be remembered that it was she who had reactivated the ancient swizzles that bought water to the southern Cali farms. In the books of the Ancients he recalled reading that the dry soils had bloomed before, when the colonists from the East had planted vineyards, fruit orchards and sprawling vegetable farms - made possible only by the waters pumped in by Ancient technology. The greening flourished again, after global warming had brought harsher temperatures, when the swizzles made by the Tourists from space replaced the ancient pumps. Without the Queen, those lands would have been dry, as barren of food crops as before.
The days was growing hotter. He stroked the thermodyne, increasing the flow of chilled air to compensate. Queen Rochelle's reign of terror and prosperity could not last forever. Her refusal to foster apprentice wizards would doom the land to poverty and famine again when she was gone. His eyes narrowed as he swung the ancient vehicle around a bend in the road. If he, Lobsang was able to defeat her, wouldn't he then be obligated to take on the responsibility for maintaining the irrigation swizzles? In his coming confrontation with the Queen, it seemed, there were only two possible outcomes. He would either be dead or victorious, but victory would come at the price of increased responsibilities.
Chapter 36
Jeffrey: Seizing The Day
“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”
– Napoléon Bonaparte
He unlocked the door and descended the stairs to the artifact storeroom, so deep in thought that he nearly stumbled down the staircase. At the foot of the stairs he looked across the room to the row of everwheels and wondered if he could influence them this far away. Only one way to find out. He reached out, imagining his arm could stretch across the room and stroked with an imaginary finger around the center of the leftmost everwheel.
The everwheel began to turn. The rotation was slow, at first, but the longer he imagined tracing an invisible finger around the hole at its center, the faster it spun. He stroked in the opposite direction and it slowed down again. It was no coincidence. He was definitely doing it. I could learn to be a wizard. But would the people of the Lone Star Empire accept a Honcho who dabbled in magic forbidden by their Church?
Stepping to the nearest table, he swept his gaze over the artifacts upon it. A length of rusty pipe, clearly not fashioned from the legendary stainless steel of the Ancients, could only be here if it was a swizzle.
He picked it up and stroked down the length of it. Sure enough, he could feel a faint wind emanating from it, cooling his face. He stroked it the opposite direction and shut the wind off.
Next, he imagined stroking it. This time it took longer for the alien magic to begin moving the air. But it still happened. He could control it with his mind.
He set it down on the table and moved back a foot and tried again. It took even longer to get it started this time, but was the difficulty real, or in his head?
He thought about the junta, and tried again. Was it his imagination, or did it come a little easier this time? He did it again several times, and then moved even further away from the table. Once again, it seemed that the effect began more slowly, at least at first. But he could still control the swizzle. Without touching it.
Right then and there he decided to start setting up a regimen. From now on, he would practice on the everwheels and the swizzle every day and try to build up whatever it was he had, this strange strength or ability. And he would add to his exercises as time went on, trying the same thing with an everflame too. Maybe it would do him no good against the junta. But it was worth a try.
The question was, should he tell brother Marcus about any of this? He would have to think about it.
Chapter 37
Esteban: Two Masters
“For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.”
– Ecclesiastes 12:14
He nearly put the letter away for fear of what the missive could contain. He tried to imagine a coded letter from His Holiness being good news. In all his years in the Carthusian Order he had never even received a 32-column letter from the head of the Chapterhouse, let alone a 64-column message from the Pope.
Ignoring the letter would not go make it go away.
For all he knew it could be a summons back to Dallas. He'd been sent to Denver, and there was always the possibility that his time at Xander's School could end any day, just as easily as it had begun.
Perhaps at first he might have welcomed such an order as a rescue from a nest of vipers. But now that he had a better idea of what the old wizard was trying to accomplish, he no longer could see such an order as such. It seemed clear that Xander had nothing to do with demonic forces. Though Father Andrews had kept secret
his confession of being sent by the Church. Esteban felt certain that even if he knew, Xander would not have cared.
But what if the letter carried some darker message? He shivered, remembering their close call with Kaleb/Lobsang.
But that was different, he reminded himself. Lobsang had been trapped by fears for his family, and controlled by the Queen's hypnotic commands. If His Holiness gave orders to undermine the School, he could not hide behind the excuse of acting under hypnotic control. He would have to make a conscious decision.
Only s short time ago, it might have been an easy decision to make. After all, the Church concerned itself with matters eternal, with the souls of mankind and their connection to God. Beside such a responsibility, would not all other concerns seem trivial?
A man cannot serve two masters. Never before had that verse seemed so important as it did now. He had never imagined that any responsibility could ever seem important compared with his duty to the Church and, through it, to his fellow humans.
Yet such thinking led backwards, to the horrors of the Inquisition that he'd read about. Concern for a man's immortal soul was a noble thing, but it could lead to acts the Church would roundly condemn, were they committed by anyone else. To torture, to deliberately inflict wounds and pain upon a person was unthinkable...yet it had been done, and could be done again, if one followed the rationale of Torquemada: anything that saved a soul from Hell was surely an act of charity, was it not? Even if it involved red-hot pincers and the rack...
But when he thought of all the lives cut short by war, all the souls sent to judgment without last rites, all the lives ended, perhaps, before they would choose God over sin and evade the snares of the Adversary, he felt sure that preventing war would be a far nobler act than allowing it to occur.
History provided an easy example in the life of Adolph Hitler and his evil regime that had slain so many millions. If a man had been able to kill him before he came to power, then would not that sin have been judged an act of great charity? A single death to avoid the premature deaths of millions?
Agonized with indecision, Esteban knelt within his room and prayed for guidance. Lord, if that letter holds which I fear it holds, I cannot serve two masters. What should I do?
But God was silent as usual.
He tried to imagine what brother Marcus would do in this situation. Surely Marcus was a godly man. But if ordered to perform an act that would be a sin in other circumstances, would Marcus obey without qualm, assuming that His Holiness had the wisdom or holy guidance to know what was best?
But interfering with Xander would not prevent a war. Probably it would do the opposite, for the wizard's intentions, as Esteban perceived them, were to bring back a state of affairs that would render wars obsolete. The Ancients, according to the records that had survived, had (with the assistance of the aliens they called the Tourists) produced a level of civilization that provided plenty for all. With enough resources for everyone, there had been no temptation to make war. Who would risk their life fighting over farmland, when swizzle irrigation made the deserts themselves bloom with sustenance? Who would kill over oil wells, when everwheel vehicles and everflame energy made the fossil fuels of the past unnecessary?
And if Xander were right, if a significant portion, if not most, of humanity could learn the weavings of what he called pathspace, spinspace, and tonespace, then they could bring back the prosperity and peace of the past. All the petty and horrific violence of war could once again be banished. All the lives that would otherwise be cut short, some before they could be saved for Heaven, could then continue to their allotted spans. If this were so, then surely Xander, whatever His Holiness might think of him, was in fact doing God's work, was he not?
Chapter 38
Xander: Living in the Past
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
– Winston Churchill
He opened his eyes. “Oh my God!” the memory of the dream seemed burned into his mind. It did not fade as other dreams always did. It had a feeling of solidity, of permanence.
He sat up and lit a candle on the table with a mental flick of tonespace. There, illuminated by its glow, lay a folded piece of paper. Trembling with a mixture of awe and eagerness, Xander leaped off his bed, sat down by the table and lifted the page of Kareef's writing. Part of him already knew what he would find.
It was all there. The description of feeling like a young boy, awakening to accompany his father to the roof. The shuttle. The flight up out of the atmosphere. Kareef's neatly printed words described but could not possibly capture the thrill of the moment when the boy looked through a window in the craft and saw the supernaturally beautiful blue ball with fleecy clouds and sun-bright ocean that was the Earth.
I was in space! thought Xander. Well, not exactly. The boy was in space...but I remember it now. And I remember seeing the ship of the Tourists!
For a while he simply sat there, mute, heart pounding as he tried to absorb the impact of what Kareef had discovered. It was a humbling moment. This could very well be the most important discovery of their lives. His own discovery that exposure to the Gifts at an early enough age nurtured the mind's ability to weave metaspace seemed almost trivial compared to this: a way to see through the eyes of the Ancients!
This would change everything. His plan to rebuild civilization using a hybrid technology had seemed so simple at first. Find talented students. Teach them the psi-magic that created the Gifts. Spread the abilities by making more Gifts and exposing more children. It had all seemed so simple, once you knew a way to nurture those abilities, and knew how to train them to achieve their potential.
But even with more swizzles and everflames, and, yes, even thermodynes out there in the world making life easier for people and spreading the psionic enlightenment, there was still the matter of rebuilding the lost infrastructure. Getting mankind off its fallen ass and back out into space, out there among the stars, would take more than restored irrigation and everwheel-powered cars. While he had collected many books over the years, there were doubtless millions more locked up in the crystalline memory chips of the Ancients. The keys to those electric books and manuals would be powered by electricity, but simply spinning coils and magnets as those ancestors had in their dynamos would not be enough. The electricity would have to be patterned, subtly encoded by the mysterious machines the old books called computers.
He remembered a description of meditation he had read in one of the books on his shelves. Meditation, the book claimed, was a way of developing the mind that came in gradual stages. It could free the mind trapped by chaos, but one could not achieve this liberation all at once.
The books spoke of a man trapped in a tower. His friends on the ground could not throw him a rope to climb out because the tower was too tall. But he found a way, anyway. By unraveling sheets, he was able to lower a long thread to his friends. This thread would not by itself support his weight to climb down, or even the weight of a rope to haul one end up to him. But his friends tied the end of the thread to a piece of string, and he was able to haul up one end of the string. They tied twine to the end of the string, and he hauled up one end of the twine. Working their way to stronger and stronger lines, eventually they tied the bottom end to a strong rope, and he was able to haul up one end of the rope, secure it, and climb down the rope to freedom. Meditation, the book said was like this. You began with a single thread, a fragile strand of effort, which gradually developed into a concentration pure and firm enough to liberate the mind.
And technology, he knew, would be the same. Blacksmiths could make metal parts that others would assemble to make the first machines. The machines could then help them to make better parts and better machines. Eventually it could all be rebuilt.
But the key, the missing piece, was knowledge. Primitive men had taken thousands of years to lean how to melt together copper and tin to make bronze, stronger than both of them. And then still more time passed before th
ey learned how to smelt iron and make steel.
Even that achievement, however, paled before the development of computers. From what little he had found and read, the computers of the Ancients depended upon incredible intricate devices called chips in which atoms of different elements were combined to make patterns like miniature cities, small enough to fit on the head of a pin, where power pulsed and flowed, a million times faster than human nerves.
He had no idea how to achieve any of this. All he knew was, it had been done before, and therefore it could be done again. But not with a swizzle or an everflame. They needed the knowledge and the experience of the Ancients to know how to tap into all those stored volumes of electric lore.
And now...now maybe there was a way to get all that.
He rose, fastened his black robe, and strode out of his room to knock on Lester's door. After a minute Lester, looking as if he had just awakened himself, open the door, yawning and rubbing his eyes. “What is it?”
“Get up to the School floors and rouse everyone. I want to speak to our graduates about a new project.”
“I haven't even had breakfast yet.”
“Then go downstairs and grab something to eat, but make it quick. We have...” Xander had to break off the thought because another coughing fit seized him. He fought to suppress the urge for a half minute before he was able to continue. “We have to do something we've never done before.”
Lester eyed him. “What we have to do,” he said, putting deliberate emphasis on the 'we', “is to get some breakfast into you, too, and then take you to see Daniels.”
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 14