“So then they developed aeroponics.”
“Indeed. It was widely used before the Fall. There may be places where it is still used, though we have not encountered anyone yet who has heard of the technology.”
“If the plant roots are hanging in air...how do they get enough water to grow?”
Suddenly he had the feeling that they were telling him more than the actual words conveyed. He recalled all those pedestrians carrying groceries, and realized that this must not be the only aeroponic garden in Esalsee. Their farms must be hidden in buildings, or else underground, sealed off to prevent the incursion of pests. Why are they hoping that others will be using aeroponics? The only answer he could come up with was, they knew their agriculture technology was superior, and wanted others to have it so they wouldn't invade Deseret to get it.
“It turns out,” the man continued, “that exposing the roots to a fine mist of water-nutrient solution produces superior growth rates. The roots can absorb oxygen and carbon dioxide with greater ease if soil or water is not in the way. A mist of tiny water droplets provides water and nutrients without drowning the roots in water.”
He was about to ask how they did this, when the answer suddenly appeared in his mind. Those upside-down mushroom structures must have a tank of water in the broad bottom, and a way for forcing the water up the stem against gravity to spray the roots and drip back to repeat the cycle.
“You're doing it with swizzles,” he blurted out. “That's why most people don't have this now. The Ancients must have used pumps at first until the Tourists arrived.”
“Yes,” the man said, “which means...”
“That's why you want to know if anyone else is doing this! Without the electric pumps of the Ancients, anyone wanting to use aeroponics would need to have and maintain a lot of swizzles, and then you'd know they had what you call Gifted people keeping it working.”
The man smiled. “Indeed.”
Suddenly Lobsang wanted to turn around and drive back to Denver. Xander needed to know this! What a wonderful way to bring people back into the cities, grow more food, and nurture a whole generation of potential wizards!
The woman spoke up. “Our turn,” she said. “Tell us why you made the long trip from Angeles to Denver, that you are now returning from.”
He grimaced. “The Queen of Angeles sent me there,” he said. “It was her idea.”
This earned him expressions of frank disbelief from the others. “That's difficult to believe,” she said. “According to what we know, Queen Rochelle is hardly likely to encourage the development of Gifted that might one day challenge her rule. Why would she send you to the School in Denver?”
“She didn't send me to study at the School,” he told them. “She sent me there to try to destroy it. She wanted me to sabotage Xander's efforts to get the school up and running.”
Naturally, this prompted other followup questions, and he could hardly avoid them, since he had asked a lot about the aeroponics. He explained about how Rochelle used his family as leverage, and how her attempt to destroy the School had failed.
“So the School survived and you were not jailed or executed?”
“No,” he said. “Xander realized I had been acting under compulsion, and I was allowed to graduate with the first class.” Naturally, this led to an explanation of her control over him via the telepathy rings.
He could see this surprised them. “Then why did you leave?” The first speaker wanted to know.
“Because the Queen still has my family. If they're still alive, I have to rescue them.” He could see them mulling this over. It would be pretty simple for them to work out that this meant he thought he had a chance of succeeding...which meant he must have really learned a lot at the School. He had the feeling he was telling them far more than they had told him, so far.
“Your turn,” the woman said.
He should probably think of a better question, but one had been on his mind for some time now, and he gave in to the urge. “How did your lookouts pass word to you after they detected me?”
A man to her left, who had not spoken until now fielded that one. “I'm surprised you had to ask,” he said. “I'm sure Xander would not have needed to ask.”
“You mean you have telepathy rings, too?”
The man shook his head. “No, although we've heard of them before. When you work with other Gifted over a period of time, you discover, as I am sure Xander has, that you develop a rapport, a connection that allows mental communication with them over short distances. The blue rings merely amplify the effect. The Queen must have discovered that somehow, before she sent you to Denver with one.”
So now you know that Xander hasn't taught us everything he knows, Lobsang realized. Damn. They're learning more from me, even from the questions I ask.
But I'm learning too. Xander could have told me this but didn't. Why? To keep the Queen from learning it from me? No, she must have discovered it herself long ago. Wait a minute! She operated differently than Xander did. Her refusal to take on apprentices might have kept her from learning from them the way Xander had learned from his.
So why didn't he tell me? Once again the answer appeared in his mind, obvious in retrospect: he doesn't want her to know that he knows.
His mind raced ahead to see where that thought led. Xander wants his magic, his psionic engineering, to help rebuild civilization. So he needs a lot more wizards. He'll welcome any help he can get with the task of training more.
But Rochelle doesn't want any more. Every new wizard is a potential threat to her reign. So she eliminates any Gifted she finds in Cali. But Xander can't let her keep doing that. He needs every wizard he can get to make his Plan work.
Conclusion: he has to stop her from killing potential wizards in Cali. Permanently. That's why he didn't try to talk me out of going back for my family. He wants me to eliminate her.
And if I can't do it, well, then he doesn't want her to learn everything he knows and get any better.
Because soon he'll have to come after her himself.
Chapter 43
Carolyn: The Plea
“We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
She knocked again when he didn't answer immediately. “Xander! Are you in there? We need to talk.”
After a minute, the door swung open. His appearance shocked her. While the old wizard had never seemed too concerned with his appearance, certainly not prissy, she'd never seen him this disheveled. “Oh, I'm sorry. I woke you up, didn't I? I'll come back later.”
He ran fingers though his hair and beard, straightening them somewhat. “No, no, come on in. I was trying to sleep, yes, to get another dream out of memsphere number one, but I'm not tired enough to visit the Sandman. Did you manage to take a nap yourself?”
“No,” she said, as she followed him inside and perched n a chair by the table. “It's about Lobsang. Is there any way you can contact him?”
His shaggy eyebrows shot up. “Why?”
“Because he's heading into a trap! He's never had to fight another wizard. None of us have.”
He eyed her. “If that were true,” he said, “you wouldn't be alive today.”
“What?” Then she understood. “But that doesn't count! They were just students. The Queen's been developing her powers for years and years! He's not ready to face her.”
“You might be right. So what are you saying, that I should have told him to forget about his family?”
“Yes! Er, no, I guess you couldn't have talked him out of it. But we could have gone with him. We should have.”
“You're not thinking this through,” he told her, gently. “Are you saying that you are ready to fight Rochelle?”
“Who knows? But I've at least been practicing longer than him.” Why was he being this way?
“You've learned a lot in the past few months,” he said. “But, basically, you're not really that much more
powerful than Lobsang is. If he can beat her, he doesn't need your help as much as I need you here at the School doing research and training new students. And if he can't...then sending you with him would mean I'd probably lose two wizards instead of one.”
“What are you talking about?"
“Think about it,” he urged. “Remember how I told you that a decent pathspace wizard is hard to attack using pathspace weaves? Because the wizard controls that part of the space around his body. All of you have picked up pathspace, spinspace, and some tonespace control now. You're more or less the same. So if the Queen is immune to Lobsang's attacks, she'd be just as safe from yours.”
Oh my God! “You don't know, do you? You're letting him go risk himself to test how powerful she is!”
“We know she's been powerful enough to control southern Cali for over fifteen years now. But you're right. I don't know exactly how powerful she's become. For all I know, she might be as powerful as me now. And remember, I'm basically what you might call a level three wizard myself, the same as the rest of you. If she can beat Lobsang there's a good chance none of us, even me, might be able to take her down.”
“Then why did you let him go?”
He regarded her. “I'm surprised you're so worried about him. After all, he nearly killed you.”
“Now you're just being stupid!” she flared. “None of that was his fault. You're the one who convinced us of that.”
“Sort of,” he agreed, in that maddeningly calm way of his. “But Daniels helped. Without him, I would have had to confine Lobsang, while I learned hypnotism.”
He was entirely too calm about it. It made her want to slap him! “Why didn't you try to stop him?”
Xander blinked. “We've been over that already,” he said. “He's a wizard, not a slave or a soldier. I've no authority to order him not to try to save his family. I'm running a school here, not an army.”
“So you're willing to just let him march off to his own death, when you might have been able to talk him out of it?”
“I doubt that I could have. But let's face it. You're right. We have to find out have powerful she's become, and sooner rather than later.”
“But why? And why now?”
“Because up to now, she's only been killing people in her kingdom who have the potential to be wizards. If she's gotten strong enough to kill trained wizards, we need to know that now. We need all the students we can get, Carolyn.” He scratched the side of his nose. “I know it sounds cold to you, and maybe it is cold-blooded, but knowing how much of a danger she really is might be even more important to the future of the School than even the life of one graduate.”
Were all men this stupid? Furious, she hopped off the chair and began to pace in front of him while he just sat there, as calm as a toad. “If Lester was in danger, you wouldn't be this cold, would you?”
He pulled out his pipe and looked at it, then put it away without lighting it. “Maybe not,” he said. “He's a good man. But I'd still let him go.”
The word just burst out of her again. “Why?”
It would almost be better if he'd just yell back at her. But he continued to be maddeningly calm. “I mean, you risked your life to go save Lester when they had him locked up in Dallas.”
“That was different,” he said. “It was just him and me then. He was my only apprentice, so I had to try to save him.”
“So how is this any different?”
He eyed her and sighed, as if she were the one being unreasonable! “Carolyn, we have the School now. It has to survive. What we're doing is important. You know that.”
“Yeah, yeah, saving the world. Sure.” She glowered at him. “How are we supposed to save the world if we can't save one fellow wizard?”
“With the help of the Tourists, the Ancients built a world free of hunger, war, and plagues,” he said. “After the Tourists left and it all fell apart, Earth lost that. We are going to bring it back, for good, this time.”
“Yes, but – ”
“Let me finish. Lobsang might die. You're certainly right about that. But do you know how many people die every day, from war, from hunger, and from disease?”
Why was he changing the subject? And why harp on about disease? Was the old wizard feeling his own mortality, from all the coughing he'd been doing lately? “Well, no,” she admitted.
“Neither do I, but I'm sure it's not a small number. They're dying every day. And they'll keep dying, until we can bring back what the Ancients used to have. That's part of what the School is all about. We're going to create a world where no one starves, no one dies of a preventable disease, and no one gets killed in a war. That's more important than any one life, even mine or yours.”
She sighed. So unfair. How could she argue when he insisted on being so reasonable? “Are you actually saying that Lobsang might have a chance, after all? Is that it? I mean, what do we really know about the Queen, anyway?”
He took out his pipe and looked at it again for a moment, as if he really wanted to light it. “What do you think?”
“Well,” she said, after a moment, “we know she sent Lobsang here to do terrible things against his will. Which means she can be ruthless. But doesn't she need to be? She must think we're a threat to her.”
“Consider the Governor,” he said. “Can you imagine the Governor doing something like that? Sending someone off to kill people, and threatening their family to make them go?”
“No,” she admitted. “I mean, yes, she sends the Army out to defend Rado, but only when we're being attacked. I can't see her sending someone out to destroy a school.”
“Me neither.”
“But you're doing the same kind of thing! You're sending Lobsang off to kill the Queen!”
“We're arguing in circles,” he said. “I didn't send him. He decided he had to go, and I didn't stand in his way.”
Carolyn glared at him. “It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? Sending, letting...it comes to the same result. A graduate of your School is going off to try to kill your enemy. How are you any different from the Queen?”
“Oh, we're very different,” he said, sounding certain.
“How are you so sure of that? You don't even know her.”
“I know her better than most people,” he said.
What? “How could you?”
“Because you're not the first female apprentice I've had,” he informed her. “Sixteen years ago, I had one. She was clever, impatient, and determined. And her name was Rochelle.”
Chapter 44
Rochelle: The Picnic
“I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle. "Come unto me" is a foolish word: for it is I that go.”
– The Book of the Law II:7
Alone in her workroom, she fiddled with the maddening blue metal spheres. What were they? She had tired of simply hurling them at the wall when the frustration grew powerful enough to demand release, although the wall remembered; the scattered dents marred the smoothness of the gold she'd had gilded on her walls, which sometimes amused but other times irritated her.
I'm a sorceress. I should be able to work out what these damned artifacts are supposed to do. But her continued failure to do so ate ate her confidence, and that was intolerable. She supposed that she ought to be glad the cache of them had been found relatively recently – if she'd been at this for a decade already, instead of only a couple of months, the rage might have killed her by now. Or at least a lot more of her minions.
She amused herself by juggling three of the spheres, without using her hands. Not a difficult task, but it required just enough focus, weaving the bursts of pathspace to bend their falling back up into the old fountain pattern, to serve as a sort of meditation, keeping her from cycling back into frustrated rage.
As it sometimes did, weaving pathspace reminded her of the man who'd taught her that name for it. Surely he would have been able to unravel the secret of the spheres...if he wasn't wasting his time in
Denver trying to raise a brood of wizard brats. But no, Xander had always wasted his time on useless dreams. He could have been ruling in Rado by now, instead of chasing a fool's goal of saving the world, whatever that meant.
No contact from Kaleb in more than two weeks meant he must have failed. She could think of no reason why he wouldn't have told her if he'd succeeding in wrecking Xander's pet project. And the way her rapport had ended suddenly meant either someone had killed Kaleb, or subdued him and removed the ring. Xander was a lot older now, but evidently, not weaker, not yet. Which meant she had to assume her saboteur was either dead or in a Rado cell awaiting execution.
Her plan to use Xander's ambitions against him, to exploit his urge to teach whoever he could find with talent, had failed. That thought ignited a burst of anger that unraveled her concentration, allowing one of the balls to fall through her weave and bounce on the floor, and once that happened, the anger increased, and the rest of them thudded down as well. Damn it!
She kicked them into a corner, too disgusted to pick them up, and stalked over to her work table. The old fool had been right about one thing: there was still power in these bits of junk left over from before the Fall. But figuring out what kind of power, and how to make it work for you, that was the trick.
Xander had seemed to have a knack for that, but maybe that was just the way she remembered it, a kind of gilding in the mind, plating memories with nice shiny fondness to make them seem better than they had really been. Maybe he'd just been lucky.
She sat down behind her worktable, looking at nothing, thinking of the man she had known. Yes, Xander was unrealistic, stupidly generous, and kinder than he was wise. And yet...and yet the memories of him still lurked like a piece of broken pottery hidden in carpet, with enough sharpness to surprise you...
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 17