Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3)

by Matthew Kennedy

  “Yes. Third, there is the fact that you already knew of the existence of the Reconditorium Prohibitum, even if you didn't know its name. You father suspected we had artifacts, and when His Holiness allowed some of them to be used for the Honcho's refinery, those suspicions were confirmed.”

  “And you figured that my father's agreement to keep the source of his swizzles and everflames secret would apply to me too, as his heir.” He pondered that. “But don't your faithful suspect you've been hoarding Gifts? Surely the people who surrendered them to you, or had them confiscated by you, know you have them. Or do you let them think you destroy them?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Most of the Gifts in our possession were acquired long ago. They are harder to come by now, especially since more time has passed and more of them have stopped functioning...including some of the ones we already have.”

  You don't have anyone who can maintain or make them, he realized. “You don't have any wizards like Xander or Lester, do you?”

  Marcus shook his head. “It is unfortunate that the Church's policy towards 'wizards'...”

  “...you mean, burning them at the stake...”

  “...has discouraged any of our flock from doing any serious investigation of the Gifts the way Xander has, up in Rado.”

  “And confiscating any Gifts that are found in the Empire makes it impossible for anyone else to play with them.”

  “There is that,” Marcus admitted.

  “Which brings us to his fourth reason. Let me guess. The Pope is afraid that Xander's School may lead to other countries getting ahead of Texas. We both know the Gifts can be used as weapons. If Xander succeeds and more and more people learn how to make the artifacts, while Texas holds back for religious reasons, then you'd be in danger of invasion, even if the political situation here stabilizes without a civil war.”

  Marcus nodded. “This is so. Fortunately, we have received no reports of troop movements from the Emirates since the junta seized power in Dallas. Either they are not currently interested in expansion, or other matters occupy their attention at the moment. But that could always change.”

  Jeffrey stood up and paced. “I've heard that Xander prefers younger apprentices, as if it is much harder for adults to develop the...rapport...with the artifacts. If that's true, then how is this happening to me?”

  “Good question. It might be that some people are just lucky enough to have an affinity for the so-called 'magic'. Perhaps you are one of those special cases.”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “You don't really believe that. Why would any human have an affinity for alien magic?”

  Marcus exhaled. “We should not be calling it magic. I think we both know that no demons are involved, and how could either of us learn magic without a teacher? But you are correct. I suspect that your own development is due to the concentration of Gifts here. It may be that having many artifacts near a person at the same time can overcome the problem that adults are slower learners.”

  “That makes more sense,” Jeffrey agreed. “But it doesn't solve your problem, does it? Without a Xander to teach your people, you might never have anyone who can make more artifacts for you. All you will get by bringing more people down here is a lot of guys who can turn a swizzle up or down at a distance. You need someone who knows more about how it works, in order to get to the next level.”

  “You're absolutely right.”

  “Well, why don't you send someone up to Denver?”

  Marcus actually frowned. “We have. But we haven't heard back from him.”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “You sent one of your warehouse monks, didn't you?”

  A sigh. “Yes. He was sent in ordinary clothes, but it is still possible that he was recognized. Given the recent history between us and Rado, I'm not surprised if Xander is hardly inclined to help the TCC.”

  “Well, then, you need to send someone else. Someone who's developed the required 'affinity', who isn't connected to you and owes you a favor...oh crap that's me, isn't it?”

  Marcus smiled. “I'm afraid so.”

  “But they'll recognize me!”

  “We're counting on it.”

  Chapter 46

  Esteban: Unraveling the Words

  “For who can make straight what He has made crooked?”

  – Ecclesiastes 7:13

  He sat on the edge of his bed paralyzed by a conflict between anticipation and dread. In one hand he held the blue metal sphere Xander had given him to experience. In the other he held a piece of paper with a square 64x64 grid of letters. What should he do? A man cannot serve two masters.

  The others must be asleep by now. He should be following their example, and learning if there was anything useful stored on this memsphere. Over two centuries ago, some Ancient may have left memories of marvels, of long-lost technology, forgotten history, or even unremembered details about the aliens, the so-called Tourists. He had a duty to the School to sleep on it and learn what, if anything, was recorded in it.

  But what about his duty to the Church? There was still the final stage of decoding to perform, and now would be the ideal time to do it, late at night with little likelihood of interruptions.

  The problem was, if the coded message contained what he feared, sleep might be a long time coming.

  He went over the possibilities in his mind, turning them over as he stared at the orange 4 painted on the blue sphere.

  It could be a summons back to Dallas. It might be that His Holiness had decided his emissary had learned enough, and had moved to recall him before he could suffer further “contamination” by the secular and magical influences at Xander's School. Ironically, when once he might have welcomed an order to leave Denver, now he wouldn't. There was nothing to fear here, and he'd learned things the Pontiff could never have imagined or predicted.

  But why would a recall order need to be encrypted? The very secrecy of this message argued against it being a mere summons back to the arms of the Church.

  It could be a list of contacts and a table of places and times to meet with them. Surely the Church had agents in Denver, if not in the Governor's building itself. He'd been told that arrangements would be made to enable him to report back to Texas securely. Did they imagine it would be an easy matter for him to just stroll out and confer with Church operatives?

  But darker possibilities haunted his imagination. He remembered his audience with the Pontiff before setting out for Denver. His Holiness had hinted that if the School did not fall apart naturally from internal conflicts, then “other steps” might be necessary. He did not want to learn what those “other steps” might be.

  What he really wanted to do was to stuff the original and partly decoded versions of the letter into a pocket and forget about them. He could always claim that he'd been too busy or hadn't had enough privacy to finish the decoding process.

  That would be a coward's way out. But better to be a coward than a traitor. There were good people here, and they had been nothing but kind to him.

  The problem was, if the message directed him to act against the School in some way, he would then have an impossible choice: be a traitor to the School, or to the Church.

  He had sworn too many oaths.

  Well, maybe not sworn, not exactly. But there was no denying it. In remaining at the School and graduating with its first class of wizards, he had taken on an implicit obligation to assist Xander and his fellow wizards. And now that might conflict with his prior obligations to his Order and the Church.

  He sighed and turned to slide the sphere under his pillow. All of this mental debating was accomplishing nothing. He had to finish the decoding. It seemed unlikely that he'd be able to fall asleep without knowing what the message held, anyway.

  He lifted the Bible from the table and found a blank sheet of paper and a pencil from his supplies. Pulling the table closer, he laid the page containing the matrix of the first stage of translation on the table and put the blank page next to it.

  The first stage of dec
oding had been a simple affair of transposition, turning the grid of ciphertext letters backwards and upside down.

  The final stage of decoding required a Catholic Bible. He picked up the pencil, opened the Bible, and turned to the book of Genesis.

  A a monk in the Order, he had learned a little of the history of codes. A common form of encoding employed long ago had been the book cipher, in which the sender and receiver used a book to encode and decode messages. In the old days this had been done by changing each letter in the original plain text into two numbers – one for the page number in the book and another for the position of a word on that page. For example, the letter A might be encoded as 137,14 meaning look on page 137, find the 14th word and use the first letter in that word.

  The trick to the book cipher was that both the sender and receiver had to have the exact same edition of the book in question. The advantage of it was the letter A did not need to be encoded as the same pair of numbers each time it occurred in the original message. It might be that on page 137 it was the first letter in the 14th word which might be “apple”. The next time A occurred in the message it might be the seventh word on the 12th page, perhaps the word “Adam”. In effect, the encoding changed with every single letter, avoiding the kind of repeated encoding that made more primitive methods far easier to crack.

  In the case of the Church's book cipher, the choice of book was obvious: the versio vulgata – the Latin Vulgate, which was made the official Latin Bible at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. Even though the twentieth century had seen many churches abandon the Latin mass in favor of more modern languages, the Vulgate had so many centuries of use behind it that it had enormous staying power with most orthodox clerics.

  But the Vatican of America changed the cipher method from the standard book cipher. Instead of encoding the message into numbers, their cipher used letters. The necessary numbers came from the positions in the square grid of letters.

  He looked at the upper left corner of the square of transposed letters and began. Row one, column one meant to start with book one, chapter one. Suppose the first letter of the transposed grid of letters was a 'd'. The decoder would read the first verse of Genesis until he or she encountered a word beginning with that letter, and then write down the letter that appeared right after it in the text. If there was no word in the first verse beginning with the right letter, he'd just continue into the second verse or as long as it took to find a word beginning with that letter.

  He wrote the first decoded letter on the blank sheet of paper and moved to chapter two for the next letter. Genesis had only 50 chapter, not 64, but that was no problem. For the fifty-first letter he would just wrap around back to chapter one again.

  Chapter 47

  Kareef: Unwanted Memories

  “Do not commit evil deeds, whether openly or in secret.”

  – Quran 6:151

  She surveyed herself in the mirror and turned around slowly. Was she gaining weight? A strangeness intruded upon her thoughts. It seemed a part of her was finding the naked image in the mirror disturbingly attractive. It both wanted and did not want her to stop looking at her body.

  Paul's arms slid around her from behind and his lips kissed her neck. “Either you get dressed right away,” he said, “or both of us are going to be late for the reception.” She smiled, feeling a growing warmth between her thighs...

  STOP!

  Kareef opened his eyes and sat up.

  From across the room Nathan, sitting on his own bunk, scribbling on a sheet of paper, looked up and eyed him curiously. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “No.” He swung his legs over and stood up. After he tightened the cord fastening his robe he reached under the pillow for the memsphere. “Is anyone else still awake?”

  “I saw Xander out there talking to Carolyn when I went out for more paper. Why?”

  “I'll be right back.”

  He strode out into the common room. They were seated facing each other across one of the work tables.

  He went over to them. “I need a different sphere.”

  They both eyed him. “Why?” said Xander.

  He set the blue metal sphere down on the table top. “Because this one holds a woman's experiences. And that's another thing – I think it needs more paint. We should mark them, indicate whether they are male or female.”

  Xander's eyebrows rose. “What difference does it make? Might do you some good to see life through a woman's eyes.”

  Kareef's own eyes narrowed. “There are some things,” he said, “that I do not want to remember...even if they happened to someone else.”

  They kept looking at him.

  “Her husband was going to make love to her,” Kareef growled. “I have never been with a woman, and I don't want my first sexual memory to be one of a man penetrating me, even if he was some ghost of an Ancient from two centuries ago.”

  Xander nodded. “Understandable. I should have anticipated this problem, but the first one you experienced was of a boy with his father so the issue didn't come up.” He picked up the sphere and reached for a brush. While he dabbed an ancient symbol next to the 5 (a circle with a cross coming out of the bottom) he remarked “I could just collect them back and go through them myself, although that will take a lot longer. Maybe I should ask candidates if they are virgins when they show up to be students here.” He blew on the fresh paint, holding the ball while waiting for it to dry enough to risk putting it down. He turned to Carolyn. “Or you could take this one.”

  “If there's sex on it, I'd rather not,” she said. “I'm from a small town. A couple of boys have kissed me, but I haven't, well you know.” She blushed.

  “Purity is nothing to be ashamed of,” said Kareef.

  Xander's eyes were on the metal sphere in his hand. “This is my fault,” he said. “I was in such a hurry to harvest the knowledge of the Ancients that it never occurred to me there would be more in these memspheres than history and science. Maybe I should let the Governor try this one.”

  Kareef glanced at Carolyn. “Have you tried yours yet?”

  “No, and now I'm afraid to.”

  Xander set the sphere down carefully. “Did Nathan have any issues with his?”

  “No,” said Kareef. “He was writing his dream down when I forced myself awake. He must have fallen asleep before I did.”

  “Hmmm,” said Xander. “All right, maybe we all need to slow down on this. From now on, I'll try each one first and classify them.”

  “Will that work?” Carolyn asked. “I mean, we don't even know if they always give you the same dream...or even the same Ancient.”

  “With the first one,” Xander said, “Kareef, Nathan and I all had the same experience, the same dream."

  “Yes, but that might have been just luck,” she said. “For all we know, the experiences might come out in the same order they were recorded, or they might come out randomly.”

  “You're right,” said Xander. “We don't know that yet for sure. But I think we can safely assume that each sphere holds the memories of only one Ancient.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Kareef asked him.

  “Because otherwise, I think it would be too confusing. If you kept a diary, would you let anyone else write in it?” He gazed down at the blue sphere. “Pass the word. Tomorrow morning I want the others to hand in their spheres and notes.”

  Carolyn pulled hers out from a pocket of her robe. It had an orange 3 on it. “You'd better take this now before I forget and fall asleep with it.”

  “I'll go get Nathan's before he pulls another dream out of it,” said Kareef.

  “Wait,” Xander said, putting a hand on his arm. “You said he didn't have any...problems with his?”

  “None that he told me about.”

  “Then let's try something. You sleep on his sphere tonight and see if you have the same dream as he did with it. If not, then we'll know they don't always come out in the same order.”

  “But if I do, th
en we can be pretty sure they do,” said Kareef. “Good idea.”

  Chapter 48

  Rainsong: A Journey Continues

  “No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.”

  – Guinean Proverb

  “Your name is Rainsong,” they told her. That was back when she was only a million spins into her latest cycle. She had barely assimilated the first universal memsphere, the one that taught youngsters the language of the People, so it did not occur to her, then, to ask how they knew her name when she didn't. One name was as good as another to a youngster. She exulted in the freedom of the recently-reborn, leaping and darting among the trees of this place called Nav Section.

  Later, she asked about her name. After letting her sleep curled around a Tech memsphere, they explained to her about the cloning process that had grown the latest version of her body.

  She felt amazement. “But...but I thought I was born in the, the natural way,” she said, as chromatophores in her skin dilated, making her blush the brown of trunk-concealment.

  No, she was told, the crew had made many sacrifices for the Mission, but giving up their very being, their unique genetic codes, was not one of those sacrifices. Every crew member retained his or her original body in each cycle. Ordinary breeding would have produced individuals not necessarily as suitable for the Mission as the original crew, and so they had designed an alternative that preserved the original crew complement exactly. Those who had demonstrated particular aptitude for certain specializations were given the same sequence of instructional memspheres each time they were reborn; the rest were cycled through various occupations determined by the Monitors based on the current distribution of skillsets in the adults and which were projected to retire during the youth of the individual youngsters.