His father said something about centrifugal force. Xander, piggy-backing on the boy's memories, understood immediately. From the spinning of the ring-like ship about its axis, things inside the skin of the ring were pushed away from the center. Now that the shuttle was become, in effect, part of the ship, its passengers felt the same away-from-the-middle push of the centrifugal force. That must be why the ship had seemed to turn upside-down before docking. Now 'up' was toward the center of the rotation for them, just as it was for the aliens, who must live in the inside of the outer skin, walking with their head pointed toward the middle of the ring.
His father unstrapped both of them from the acceleration chairs at the front of the shuttle.
“Now what?”
“Now we trade,” said his father, leading him toward the rear of the shuttle. He had to walk between stacks of boxes to get there.
He heard a hiss of air pressure equalizing as a square section of the roof midway between the front and back ends of the shuttle descended like the floor of an elevator without walls. As it extruded from the ceiling he saw it was connected to whatever was above them in the alien ship by two parallel walls, with the sides facing forward and aft open. It moved downwards until it sank into the floor, pushing it lower, so that the floor of the elevator was now even with the rest of the floor of the shuttle. He could see wooden boxes piled on it.
“It's like an elevator, the boy said, “but with only two walls.”
“Think about it,” his father said. “If it had four walls, then whatever we give them would be hard to get at when they lift it. It would be inside the walls. Come on, help me move the boxes.”
They pushed at the boxes on the platform, shoving them off it into the rear of the shuttle. Whatever was in those boxes must be heavy, he thought.
After the floor of the elevator had been cleared, they returned to the boxes they had passed getting onto it, and pushed these onto the platform. “What are we giving them?”
“Good question,” his father said. “Most of it comes back to us on the next shuttle run. The boxes themselves will be made into coldboxes. Inside them are pipes to be made into swizzles, various sized disks to make everflames, and so on. And in the middle of each one is a biological sample. They take the sample and turn everything else into gifts to trade back to us.”
“How? How do they make the boxes into coldboxes? How do they turn our pipes into swizzles?"
His father shrugged. “No one knows. They keep it a trade secret. If we knew how to do that, we wouldn't have to give them anything.”
“But it's so inefficient! Why don't they just come down and do it all on Earth?” He looked at the boxes on the elevator as it began to rise up toward the ship. “All these trips to move a little stuff seem like the hard way to do it.”
His father laughed. “It does, doesn't I? But from what I've been told, their ship is too damn big to land and take off from a planet's surface, especially one with a gravity as strong as ours."
“Then why don't they bring shuttles down instead of us sending them up?”
“They'd be going up and down either way,” his father said. But I think the aliens, they're not made for strong gravity. Haven't got the muscles for it, probably because their drive has a very weak acceleration.”
“But you said they spin their ship to push things toward the outside,” the boy in the dream said. “Couldn't they just spin it faster, and build stronger muscles?”
His father shrugged. “I guess they could but that would also make everything else heavier for them too. And consider the engineering problems it could cause. Floors and pipes built to handle a certain amount of weight would buckle, if you spun them up to heavier weights with more centrifugal force.”
“Do we ever get to meet the aliens?”
* * *
A coughing fit ripped him out of the dream. Xander rolled onto his feet and put out a hand to steady himself against the wall until the coughing ended.
Well, now I know a couple of things I didn't know before. The reason we've never seen a picture of the Tourists is because they never came down for a visit. The reason we've never found a big cache of, say, swizzles is because they weren't manufactured here. Oh, and one more thing, the dream-learning is progressive; you can pick up where you left off the last time.
He strolled out to the stairwell and headed up to the School floors. There was something he'd been meaning to talk to Nathan about.
When he pulled open the door and stepped onto the floor, something slammed into the wall three feet away with a SPLAT that made him duck and roll to his left. What the hell?
He rolled to his feet. Nathan and Kareef were facing each other, standing about twenty feet apart. Both wore stark white robes (which seemed odd, because as graduate wizards from the School's first class they were entitled to the gray) decorated with several colored spots. Kareef held something vaguely like the stock of a crossbow, except instead of a horizontal bow and a slot for the arrow to lie in there was a metal tube about two feet long, pointed at Nathan. On the non-pointing end, Kareef squinted at a pair of protruding metal notches. Next to his right cheek, a stiff metal hose curled up to a little hopper.
Kareef pulled the trigger and something flew out of the other end of the contraption and streaked at Nathan, then deflected and splatted into the wall behind him on the left side of the stairwell door.
“What the hell do you think you're doing? Is this some kind of duel?”
The two boys finally seemed to notice him. Kareef lowered the weapon as he turned to face him. A couple of brightly colored balls tumbled out of the gun's makeshift hopper and rolled across the carpet toward him. Xander picked one up and sniffed at it. “Is this paint?”
“It was Kareef's idea,” said Nathan. “We found that if you mix paint and glue and a little sawdust you can make a ball out of it that holds together well enough that you can shoot it really fast. If it misses you can see how far it missed by, and if it doesn't it stings enough to remind you to try harder. Isn't it great?”
“If you're trying to make a mess of the walls, I'd have to say yes. Other than that, I'm not sure.”
“It's for deflection practice,” said Kareef. “if we ever find ourselves facing crossbows, like if Texas invades, we have to be able to make them miss...”
“...but arrows are too dangerous to practice with, until we get better at whipping up pathspace weaves in a hurry, so we thought we'd use something less lethal like balls of paint.” Nathan said. “We take turns shooting at each other to build up our pathspace-weaving speed.”
He examined the gun. As he thought, it was merely a swizzle linked to a hopper of paint balls. Pulling the trigger opened a flap in the tube connecting the two, sucking a paint ball into the swizzle and accelerating it out the barrel.
“It's a clever idea,” he told Kareef. “But I think you should practice somewhere else. Or at least turn your firing line ninety degrees so you don't shoot someone coming out of the stairwell.”
“You're right. Sorry, we won't make that mistake again.”
“What happens if you hold the trigger down?”
Kareef grimaced and pointed to one side, where a spattering of multicolored paint spots made a sort of jumbled rainbow. “I wondered about that too. The balls fly out one after another and you run out of ammunition in about a second. Plus the recoil makes it hard to aim accurately while that's going on. It's much better in single-shot mode.”
“I'll bet,” said Xander. “But can you count on only one crossbow firing at you at a time?”
“You're right. Maybe we should work with short bursts, like two or three balls. We'll get more of a challenge without losing the aim completely.”
Xander's eyes fell on the worktable, where a hinged mold and a pile of drying paint balls lay. “Your paint balls are too slow,” he noted. “At close range, a crossbow bolt is too fast to see. What's the next step? Crank up the acceleration in the swizzle to make them faster?”
Kareef
's face fell. “Actually, we had to slow it down. We originally had them moving too fast to see but they tended to break up in mid-air and spread the paint all over.”
Xander turned his head when a whistling sound came from behind him. Nathan had picked up a bottle with a straw as thin as a toothpick sticking out of it. He was painting over the colored stains near the door with white paint, the paint spewing out in a thin mist that made a spot of white about the size of a dollar coin on the wall.
“Where did you get that?”
“That was my idea,” said Esteban, emerging from the bathroom and rolling up his sleeve. He'd managed to get nearly all of the paint colors off his hands and forearms. “After I saw Kareef's idea of the paint-ball gun, I thought, why not do it with just paint? But you have to use a really narrow swizzle or you dump too much paint on the wall and you end up with an empty paint bucket and a white puddle.”
Good god, thought Xander. If they used metal balls or rocks instead of paint in Kareef's gun, it would make a nasty weapon. And if the paint sprayer shot acid or boiling hot liquids, someone on the other end would have a really bad day. “Where's Carolyn? Please don't tell me she's down with the alchemists cooking up some kind of poison gas bomb.”
“No,” said Esteban, “but that's not a bad idea. We could change the water in our steam bombs to something nastier.”
“Something tells me,” said Xander, “that you're letting the threat of invasion steer the School in a very dark direction.”
A whoosh sounded in one of the rooms. Xander ran inside and saw Carolyn had managed to set a practice dummy on fire. She was holding a gun like Kareef's, except that instead of the hopper for the paint balls there was a small tank of something, and welded to the end of the swizzle he could see a flat disk, with a mote of red light dancing in front of the end of the barrel.
She set the (fire-gun?) on a table and turned to the flaming dummy, pointed a thermodyne at it in cooling mode, and unleashed a blast of frigid wind that looked like it should have fanned the flames but snuffed them instead. After a second he realized that the thermodyne made an excellent fire extinguisher, like the hand-pumped water sprays the smiths were keeping in their forges these days. It cooled the burning material below its flash point, as a stream of water did, but it would never run out of water and would never make a mess.
“I see you've been busy, too,” he remarked.
She spun at the sound of his voice. “Oh there you are. Yes, it turns out that some kinds of paint are flammable, and when I saw what Esteban made, the paint sprayer, and what Kareef made, the paintball gun...”
“...you realized all you needed was a tank of oil or something and an everflame on the end of the barrel to make it shoot fire at the target.” Xander shook his head. “Pretty horrible and effective. But I have a suggestion.”
She set down the thermodyne. “What?”
“If you crank up the everflame a bit, say up to yellow, it'll work fine as a blowtorch without the oil. The air will be so hot it'll set their clothes on fire, and you won't run out of ammunition.” He gazed at the fire-gun. “But what do you do about the recoil?”
“It does push back on me pretty hard,” she admitted. “But if I plant my feel securely enough it's no problem. Unless I happen to be on ice. But winter is a long way off now.”
Another though occurred to him. “If you use a thermodyne for the barrel instead of a swizzle, you won't need to weld an everflame on the end. Then you have both a fire gun and a fire extinguisher in one device.”
She smiled. “You're right! I should have thought of that.”
Xander shook his head. “I should sleep late more often,” he mused. “While I snoozed, you and the others came up with several new ideas without me.” Suddenly he felt old. Do they even need me any more? It looked as if the School could carry on just fine without him. And they might have to, he thought, remembering the cancer.
He turned and strode out into the main room. Nathan had refilled the paint ball gun and now Kareef stood waiting to practice the deflection weave. Sure enough, the stairwell door was now out of the line of fire.
“Do me a favor and try not to break any windows, will you? The self-cleaning glass is hard to replace.”
Without waiting for a reply he made a beeline for the stairwell, in case they missed. Someone should tell Kristana about the new weapons so she could arrange to gear up production before Texas came knocking.
Should I discourage them from making weapons? he wondered. The whole point of the school is to bring back civilization and abolish war, so that we can move on to more important things, like going out into space again. The last thing I wanted was to make a bunch of terrible new weapons.
But if the junta had its way and the Lone Star Empire conquered Rado, the School would vanish, exterminated or scattered into hiding, perhaps never to re-form. The School had to survive, and Rado too, or this dark age of endless warfare would last a long long time.
So we have to win, and if we don't want to lose a lot of people that means we need better weapons than them, he decided reluctantly. We got lucky last time. Peter thought a few tanks would give him enough of an advantage that he pressed the attack before he could bring up his main army.
The junta won't make that mistake, because we have the tanks now. We haven't the farmland to support a big enough army to match them. Ten thousand men with crossbows are going to be hard to beat with a much smaller army on our side, even with wizards to tip the scales.
So we need these terrible weapons, and any others we can come up with, at least in the near future.
He didn't like it. But he saw no way around it. Kristana's Union of States might eventually stop this madness, but unless she and Rado survived long enough to gather more allies, more States in her Union, it appeared that they were trapped in this terrible necessity.
He kept turning the thoughts over in his mind, trying to see another way out, and was so distracted that he descended past her floor. When he realized his mistake he growled and bounded back up again.
He heaved the door open and another fit of coughing seized him and shook him like a dog with a rat in its jaws. He tried to ride it out, but collapsed on the floor and everything went black for a while.
Chapter 81
Isaac: The Wrong Response
“Do not devise evil against your neighbor”
– Proverbs 3:29
He relaxed in the easy chair, watching Samuel play with his spinspace-enchanted dreidel. The boy seemed mesmerized by something that never stopped spinning. The aroma of an apple pie wafted in from the kitchen, no doubt pushed by the cooling wind from a thermodyne that Rebekah had decided was a new necessity. No longer did she emerge triumphant but perspiring when she placed dinner on the table.
The trouble was, he thought, life was too good. Sooner or later God would decide to test him again. He wondered how Qusay was doing down in the Emirates with his copy of the trade agreement. The rascal had seemed satisfied with it, even though in the final version the trade centered around thermodynes, which would be made by Rado and New Israel.
He reached for the old book on the table before him. He'd found the text, A Brief History of Inventions, on one of his bookshelves next to a book about steam engines. This one appeared to be compiled from the Official Gazette for Patents, published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of the old United States.
A number of the inventions it described could no longer be made, because they required electric motors, electronic devices, and other artifacts of the Ancients that no one knew how to fashion these days. But what if the motors could be replaced with everwheels? Maybe...
Someone knocked on the front door.
Isaac sighed and rose to answer it. A single Tzaddik stood in the moonlight, his white robe under a warm coat for the cool spring evening. “Come in, brother Ezekiel.”
Rebekah bustled out of the kitchen, a question on her face, but when Ezekiel shrugged off his coat and she saw the white robe her face
closed like a book and she stalked back to her oven. Isaac sighed mentally, knowing there would be words later about interrupted evenings.
But when else could they come to visit without attracting unwanted attention? You knew I was a Tzaddik when you married me, he thought.
He led Ezekiel into the study and closed the door. “What's the news, old friend? Are they ready for me to convey our acceptance back to Denver?”
Ezekiel sat down heavily on one of the padded chairs. “There's no point in trying to sugar-coat it,” he said. “They have decided to reject the trade agreement.”
Isaac stared at him in disbelief. “But this agreement is good for everyone! What possible reason could they have to turn it down?”
Ezekiel exhaled. “The Elders don't think we need it. They say we've done fine enough without any help up to now, so why should we go changing things and helping our enemies?”
“Helping our enemies!” Now he sat down, too. “But don't they see the Emirates don't have to be our enemies? Trade will bring nothing but more peace and prosperity, for all of us.”
“That could be true,” Ezekiel said. “But it might also be true that we can gain more prosperity by taking some of their territory away from them.”
He couldn't believe he was hearing this! “Ending the warfare, that's why we agreed to create the Desolation between our countries. And it worked. Armies can't feed themselves long enough to cross it, with all the farms there gone.”
“Yes,” Ezekiel agreed. “Until now. But if the Emirates made better wagons, big enough to transport troops, and powered them with everwheels, they could cross the Desolation in a day or two. We can't wait for that to happen. We'll have to strike first.”
“But they could have done that any time in the last hundred years, and they didn't. Why would they do that now?”
“Isaac, you're not thinking clearly. What's different now? Xander's school, that's what! Now that we know how to prepare more students to learn magic, the Emirates know it too.”
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 33