by Garon Whited
I made no mention of coming back the night before and she didn’t mention Thomen. Instead, we had a discussion about magical gateways. We talked about how to open a portal between two places.
We’re good at not talking about things.
Tort, as it turns out, is not much help on gates. She hasn’t really studied them; apparently, they aren’t a major topic in Arondael and T’yl wasn’t an expert, either. While magical gateways can be convenient, they’re also kind of dangerous. Most magicians strongly prefer to use space-bending spells, like the League Step, or magical transportation devices, like flying chairs or saddles that generate giant birds of smoke. You know, mundane methods of travel.
On the other hand, she did confirm what I thought I knew about gates. Basically, there are three main factors to opening a magical doorway: Distance, size, and similarity. The farther away they are, the more power it takes.
If you’re not interested in gate mechanics, you can skip this with no loss.
So, we want to go from Point A to Point B. The farther apart they are, the more space we have to fold to get the two points to be congruent. Once we have them overlapping, it’s just a matter of deciding which side you want to be on. (That’s not actually how it works, but it’s a convenient lie. It seems to work like that, which is close enough.) The farther away it is, the more power it will take; crossing from one universe to another is, of course, the farthest distance you’re going to find.
Now, how big an opening do you want? Something you can send columns of sixteen through for an invasion? Or something a little less overwhelming—say, a window you can dive through to escape the angry nightlord you’ve just failed to assassinate? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect the power requirements go up directly with the surface area of the interface. Let’s say that magical units are MUs. If you have a gate opening one meter on each side, you have one square meter. If it takes, say, a million MUs to open that gate, it will take four million to open a gate two meters on a side—the surface area of the opening is four square meters. And if you want a gate three meters on a side, that’s nine million. Four meters is sixteen million MUs, and so on.
I can’t prove it, but it feels right, based on the effort I’ve gone to in the past. Heck, I can’t even tell you what one MU is; I just made it up for the example. For now, let’s say one MU is the minimum power it takes to have a spell exist at all, even if it doesn’t do anything.
Let’s not get into whether or not magical power comes in photons or elementary particles. Most people can’t even manage to wrap their heads around light being a particle and a wave.
So, the distance you want to travel and the size of your gate are obviously important. But now let’s look at the correspondence between the two points. As long as we’re using hypothetical MUs, let’s say take the cost of the size of the gate—one million—and multiply it by some factor for distance. Let’s say we divide the distance in kilometers by a thousand. So, two thousand kilometers away is a multiplier of two, so that one-meter gate going two thousand kilometers costs two million MUs.
Note that anything under—very roughly—a thousand kilometers doesn’t give you a discount. There seems to be a certain minimum threshold in required power. Like running through a rubber sheet, if you don’t break through the sheet, you don’t go anywhere. If you do break through, you’re going to go past it.
With me so far? Good.
Your job can be made a lot harder by not having a good receiving point or landing zone or whatever. Ideally, you have two identical gateways, one on each end. That way, when the gate forms, the two sort of blend in together, overlapping, temporarily becoming the same gateway—one at this end, one at the destination. The closer the two correspond, the less additional effort you have to expend to get them to sync up. If they’re identical, there shouldn’t be any additional power input required. If they’re not, you’re in for another multiplier—maybe a few percent, maybe twice as much, depending on how similar they are.
It is very bad to not have a gateway on both ends. If you only have one, it has to temporarily exist in two places at once. I could take a gateway, open it to the middle of a desert, and the doorway I used would be present both at home and in the desert at the same time. If you pried it out of the wall, later, you might find sand stuck in the fibers of the wooden frame. That’s not only tricky, it’s exhausting, and will cost you about three to five times as much power.
At minimum, you want at least a chalk outline, or a line in the sand, or scratches on a wall. Something. Anything. This “minimum effort” will still cost you enormously more in the gate spell, itself, but at least you’ll be able to get a connection.
Of course, there is one worse case—and this is absolutely the worst-case scenario of all—you can open a raw hole from one point to another. That’s not only incredibly expensive in terms of power, it’s outright dangerous. You’re basically playing with the structure of the space-time continuum with your bare hands. Things from outside the world can leak in around the edges, and that’s bad for your fingers, not to mention your vital organs, loved ones, and the world in general.
This, in the magical community, is generally regarded as bad form. Outside the magical community, it’s regarded as being in league with the powers of evil and will get you nailed to a cross and set on fire by any survivors of your diabolical summoning of Things from Beyond.
I don’t know how much more expensive that is, nor does Tort, and we decided not to test it. If I had to guess, I’d put the multiplier in the ballpark of somewhere around thirty to fifty or thereabouts.
Now that we know how awful it can be, there are a few ways to make the whole thing a lot cheaper. The Great Arch of Zirafel was designed to operate with its twin in Tamaril, sister-city to Zirafel, on the other edge of the world. You could use either arch as a destination point, if it wasn’t active—that is, you could go there from the Tower of Ice, the Mountains of the Sun, or anywhere in between—but if you activated the Great Arch to go elsewhere, it automatically tried to connect with its twin. It would take incoming calls from anywhere, but you can’t call out except to the other one.
They were designed and built to link specifically to each other. As a result, once the initial connection was made, the two arches formed a sort of expressway between opposite edges of the world. So efficient was this connection that they found it simplest to leave it open all the time, rather than reestablish it every day.
I think there’s a way to be even more efficient. It should be possible to create dedicated gateways, ones that only work when the connection is established between them and them alone. While the Great Arch in Zirafel and Tamaril could be used as target points, a dedicated arch/door/whatever would actually resist being used unless it was linking to its twin. That would be least versatile, but it would be the best possible efficiency for linking two distant points. I seem to think I might remember a hint of research from Zirafel on that subject… Obviously, such research was done by a very small minority. Say, two people, maybe three.
No wonder the Empire was huge. It effectively had one capitol city, but it existed simultaneously on opposite ends of the world. I just wonder why they didn’t build the arches as dedicated to each other. Maybe they foresaw a need to use them for other purposes, on occasion. Or maybe they were planning to include other cities with their own arches. Not enough people knew for me to have any real memories of it.
Of course, that was also still connecting two points in the same universe. Getting me home is kind of like upping the maximum distance cost by an order of magnitude. It’s hard to get much farther apart than other universes.
(As an aside… How many universes are there? Could I wind up in one by accident? Or are there only two? Theory says that there should be several, possibly an infinite number of universes. If I considered the conditions I wanted to find, could I scan through the multiverse and pick out a universe that I liked?
(If there are an infinite number of universes, does
that mean that any universe I can imagine is out there, somewhere?
(The implications are staggering.
(No. Focus. Where was I? Getting home. Right.)
To get me home, we were going to need a massive charge just to bridge the reality gap, to say nothing of establishing a gateway on the other side. It can be done; I’ve done it. Magicians in Rethven did it; it involved the accumulated effort of decades of work and some extremely powerful enchantments by magicians in service to the Hand of Light, but it can be done.
So, some quick math. A small gate—one square meter?—is a million. The distance is astronomical, so let’s say it’s a multiplier of a hundred. We’re up to a hundred million. Now, if I have to open a gate with only the gate on this end and no destination gate, it’ll go up to about three hundred million of those hypothetical MUs just to make the connection
How many MUs in a herd of cattle? I don’t know. I connected a whirlpool to a doorway, which isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing. Plus, the door was heavily enchanted to be a gate, anyway, so it provided some unknown amount of charge once the connection was established.
As for maintaining the gate, it takes about as much power to keep it going as it does to start it. That’s a good reason to not keep it open.
Anyway, that’s the short version of Gate Metaphysics 101.
On a more personal note, I am definitely planning to go home. I’m just not sure for how long. Tianna is very pleased to have a grandfather. I suspect Amber is often busy with her duties as a priestess and as the head of state for Mochara. I haven’t had a chance to gauge Amber’s feeling about me being the ruler de jure, and maybe de facto, and probably some other Latin words I don’t know.
We haven’t even had a political discussion, yet. I wonder if I can ignore all that and let it continue to be a non-issue? If I continue to ignore it, will it continue to be a non-issue? Or will it just wait to jump me in a dark alley and mug me for my political aspirations?
At least Tianna likes me. Again, I blame my horse. Tianna is delighted to ride anytime Amber will let her, and I am delighted to take her for rides. Tianna also remembered my promise to show her the basics of swords, and I have. She’s very quick, both in the sense of learning quickly and in being very fast. She’s not going to be a female warrior, but she might surprise the hell out of someone who expects her to rely solely on setting her assailant on fire. Amber doesn’t like it at all, but simply gives me that thin-lipped look that means she disapproves but will tolerate it until it interferes with something more important—i.e., anything.
I’ve also encouraged Tianna to spend more time with her letters and numbers. She can read, but she’s not very good at it. Her math skills are atrocious. Teaching her that sort of thing doesn’t earn me Significant Looks from her mother, though. I think Amber is secretly pleased about that, at least.
Bronze is still forming new lumps and dents. She’s starting to look as though she has a saddle and stirrups. She looks as though the sculptor wasn’t finished with them, obviously, but they become more pronounced by the day. I suspect all the bareback riding as we gallop back and forth from the mountain is helping. The contours fit me just fine; Tianna still needs someone to help hold her on.
At least, I think she does. Bronze can certainly hold on to her with the wire of her mane, but I’m not sure how that would work out in an accident at any speed over a fast walk. What she needs is a seat belt and a crash helmet, which I do not have for her. On the other hand, if Bronze steps in a hole at sixty miles an hour while I’m taking Tianna for a ride, I’ll be the airbag. As long as we can avoid being killed outright, I feel confident we’ll get better.
We stay on the canal road, just to be safe. Bronze has stepped in a hole before. I’m very pleased I was already dead. The crash was not pleasant.
Oh! Rather startlingly quickly, I have a boat for the canal. I keep forgetting everyone here knows some magic, usually something to help them with their trade. Cobblers, bakers, masons, boatwrights, everyone. Kavel sings to the metal he works—family tradition, apparently—and Timon’s wife talks to the seedling plants to help them grow.
It’s not really much of a boat, as such, but it floats, it’s long, and it’s narrow enough to have two of them go opposite directions in the canal. I accepted it as a rough draft to be refined and have the boatwrights working on a new one with improvements. They’re starting to warm up to the challenge, I think. Clinking money seems to help. They really are quite good at fishing boats; this is stretching their skills a bit, though. They’re learning things as they go, making these canal boats, so I can’t complain.
Let me think. What else?
No new assassination attempts, so that’s to the good. There was a scrying spell that started watching me, but I poked it with the magical equivalent of a sharp stick. It imploded on itself and went away. Nothing since.
Maybe—just maybe—since I’m minding my own business, other people are minding theirs.
I realize that’s stupid, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? Allow me my delusions.
Thursday, May 13th
It’s been a busy week. Well, I should expect it to be; I’m injecting new life into a long-abandoned, haunted mountain covered in city out in the middle of nowhere. It’s a big project. It needs agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and a whole lot of people. But it also has to be hospitable to life; there’s more to a city than just ways to keep the rain off.
Lights. I never thought I would ever have so much trouble with lights. Coming from a technological society, I just flip a switch. Lights are easy, right? Well… no. Not when we’re talking about public lighting on a city-wide scale.
The city, as a whole, is very close to a circle four miles across. To illuminate this in a way that doesn’t involve hanging another sun in the sky is tricky. But illuminating the outer city isn’t the hard part. The inner city—the various tunnels and caverns and halls inside the mountain; the undercity—that’s tough. See, the surface of the mountain doesn’t compare to the volume. That is, the exterior is all one layer of city. The interior has multiple layers, stacked, all through the mountain and even going down below the nominal ground level. The outer city is over twelve square miles; the inner city is more than four times that!
I’m trying to light up Manhattan.
Twice.
By hand.
Illuminating the subterranean portions of the mountain is a class A-prime headache.
“It’s magic!” I hear you cry. “Just make spells for that!”
Yes, that’s sort of the plan. But here’s why it’s complicated: Magic is another form of energy. It can be used in a very versatile fashion, to either guide, convert, or directly transform into just about any other type. When Tort electro-fried that guy in the street, she did a direct transformation of magical energy into electrical energy. Yes, it was a prepared, pre-charged spell, stored in her staff, but it was still a conversion of magic to electricity.
A typical wizard won’t—or can’t—do that; he doesn’t have the capacity to channel that much raw magical force, and he doesn’t know a highly-refined spell for doing it efficiently. He might prepare such a spell in advance, though. Doing it spontaneously would take a magician’s ability to focus large amounts of magic into a single spell and a very efficient spell in the first place.
I can do that, too, and I do know spells for that sort of transformation, but it seems wasteful. My usual trick is to take existing forms of non-magical energy and use magic as the converter, not as the actual power source. As a result, I spend much less power on my lightning bolts, but it takes me longer to do them—I scrounge up energy from the environment, and that takes time.
Yes, I do sometimes just dump immense amounts of raw power into spells when I’m in a hurry. Guilty. But that doesn’t mean I like doing it. It’s exhausting and makes me hungry. Hungry in a not-good sort of way.
Illuminating hundreds of miles of tunnels is a gargantuan task. It requires no small amount
of power, and I just don’t have anything lying around that will work. Oh, I can put a layer of frequency-altering spell along a piece of wall and have it turn, say, infrared into various wavelengths of visible light, but that’s barely a glow, at best. These tunnels are, basically, caves. Warm caves, yes, but the walls aren’t known for radiating excessive heat. Usually, the heat flow is the other way; the warm air has heat flow into the wall, not the other way around.
That fact did gave me cause to think. The place is much warmer than I might expect. We also have hot water and amazing levels of air circulation. All these things take power, so where does it come from? And can I use it to light the place?
So I spent a night communing with the mountain to find out how that works. The mountain is, as I said, alive. Initially, I just dumped a lot of power into it. Later, so did Tamara. This brought it to life, at least temporarily. Eventually, it should have gradually slowed down to the same pace as any other rock—that is, it should have gone back to “sleep” until something charged it up again.
Somehow, while I was in my long slumber, I was inside and in some form of contact with the mountain. I taught it to be a city, but I also taught it how to be alive.
Now, the mountain doesn’t talk, as such. It’s more of an empathic communication. It sends me ideas, images, feelings, concepts. We don’t “talk” in words. So, when it told me that I taught it to be alive, I got a lot of very strange and frightening impressions. When I stopped communing with the mountain, I went down to examine the source of these impressions in more detail.
I kept going down. Then down farther. I left behind the civilized areas and started down a long, slowly-curving tunnel, pausing every hundred yards or so to open another pivot-door. I had the strange feeling that these doors were here for a reason, and were utterly useless. Turns out, I was right.