Frowning, he tried again, imagining a circle of light that came toward him from the wall and did nothing other than grow to a larger circle. After several passes, as if he were mentally combing invisible threads of pathspace into a symmetrical cone-shaped region fanning out toward him, he finally managed to improve the clarity of the image, until he was looking at an individual brick on the wall of the building across the street.. Better.
But when he tried to steer his seeing, and move his gaze to another brick, the image distorted again. Sighing, he wiped sweat from his forehead and tried again. After what may have been an hour or so, he found he could magnify the seeing to telescopic vision as long as he held the sight-line absolutely still. No matter how he tried, the image still distorted and broke up when he tried to move the sight line left or right to see something else.
He took a break to growl and release his frustrated tension. How convenient it would have been to just use one of the ancient telescopes instead of this! All the warping of pathspace accomplished by the lenses in a telescope, he imagined, would be stable no matter what direction you turned it, because the lenses would turn automatically with the scope. But he had no such advantage with his weaving. Without a material abject to anchor the weave on, such as the pipe of a swizzle or the disk of an everflame, he had to re-form the pathspace shaping every time he moved his eyes to look in another direction. If I just had a length of pipe, he thought, I could anchor the weave on it and have a woven telescope.
Motion out of the corner of his eye alerted him in time. The guard was strolling down the hallway. Lester canceled the weave and the “window” to the outside disappeared just before the guard glanced in through the barred window in the door.
Seeing the guard reminded him that he had other things to practice. He picked up the silver dollar and tried to imagine how to make it into an everflame. Xander had said that was done using something called tonespace, but he hadn't explained what he meant.
The only context he could remember hearing the word 'tone' in before, other than referring to the way someone was speaking (as in, “don't use that tone with me”) was in reference to musical tones. He could still remember the feeling of wonder that had possessed him when he had realized, for the first time, that different sized bells produced different musical notes. Like other boys in the village, he had played with empty ale bottles, blowing across their tops to make them resonate, and partially filling them with water to make them sound different notes.
None of this helped with making an everflame, however. As far as he knew, it had nothing to do with music. The one his mother cooked over back at Gerrold's inn never made a sound. But he tried anyway, imagining music in the space around the coin. Nothing happened.
A wave of mingled sadness and despair swept over him as he remembered that Xander was gone. How can I hope to learn any of this without him?
After indulging in that angst for a few moments, he growled at himself. Get a hold of yourself, fool! Sadness never helped anybody. If he, Lester, was all the Governor had now to help her defend Rado and start the school, then he would have to do. Somehow. And that meant he had to escape from this prison.
All right. He had a way to see through walls, and around corners if it came to that. He could make a swizzle on short notice, and make his supper tray levitate, but he didn't see how any of that was going to break him out of here.
He spent the rest of the afternoon until dinner trying to work out a plan, using what he knew how to do. What he finally came up with was risky but not, he was certain, as risky as remaining in the prison until the Honcho tired of waiting for everflames and decided to turn him over to the TCC.
After the guard had brought the dinner tray and departed with his lunch tray, Lester wove another window to the outside. He had no way of telling time in the cell, so he couldn't simply wait for darkness. He would have to watch for it.
While he waited, he thought about Xander. The wizard had not mentioned any mentors. The implication was that he had learned everything he knew on his own. That was encouraging, in a way, because it showed that it was possible to become a wizard by teaching yourself, without a more experienced practitioner to guide your training. On the other hand, it had taken him a long time, obviously, and it seemed likely that there was a lot he had never learned. If he knew the trick of telescopic seeing, he had never mentioned it to Lester.
Outside, the streets were darkening. There was still an orange-yellow glow reflecting off some of the buildings, but soon it would be dark enough for him to act, and then...
Wait a minute. That glow was to the East, not the West. Had he somehow slept through the entire night and it was morning? He couldn't believe it.
And then he saw the first people with torches come around a corner. There seemed to be a lot of them. He wondered where they were going. After he watched them for a couple of minutes, though, he knew, and felt like an idiot for not knowing it immediately.
They were coming for him. It was time to leave. He un-wove the “window”, jumped off the bed and concentrated on the door lock. It was only the work of a few moments to get it open. Now what? His original plan had been to overcome the guard and slip out the front door. But from what he could see, both exists were going to be packed with torch-holders. The original plan was out of the question now.
Lester strode up and down the hall, weaving temporary transparencies as before, but this time he was looking up through the ceiling. In a moment he stopped his pacing and contemplated the roof, imagining a huge smoke-ring of pathspace just above the spot he had selected, its suction end against the roof.
He covered his ears. If this worked, it would be quite loud.
Chapter 65
Peter: “Lying down in the melting snow.”
Quintus squinted up at him from the depression in the floor where the listening post for the maglev rails from Shreveport and Jackson was situated. “No further messages from Dixie since the last time you asked,” he said. “I've kept the listening rota up, but something or someone must be interfering with your operatives on the other end.”
“Well, keep at it,” the Honcho directed, knowing it was unnecessary but wanting to give some reply to the man. “Unless they've been caught, they ought to check in presently when their transmission window recurs.”
He turned to the stairs and wondered if he should return to his roost above, or call it a day and head back to his estate by the lake. It had been a long day. Perhaps it would be better to leave off planning until he was rested. If the pasha of the Dixie Emirates had, in fact, penetrated the disguises of his agents, there was nothing he could do about it except select replacements and hope they had their worldly affairs in order.
A distant pounding reached him. Someone must be tearing down the staircase above him on a mission of urgency. Tiredly, he wondered absently what could be so important this late in the day. He couldn't imagine it was that crucial, whatever it was, and so instead of exerting himself to intercept the other he merely climbed to the street level and waited.
Jeffrey nearly fell down the last flight of stairs in his haste. “They're marching on the prison! I saw it when I went up to see if there was any news from the heliograph.”
Peter had nearly forgotten about the backup messaging system, obsessed as he had been with the information coming in from the rail bangers. Both media used the long and short pauses of Samuel F. B. Morse. The value of his code was that anything that could be sensed at a distance could carry information by merely interrupting it rhythmically.
Visual line-of sight communication was a much older art. From ancient times tribes on many continents had used smoke and beacon fires to “sound” alarms of invasion. But fires were less articulate than hand operated mirrors. The Greeks had used polished shields to do their sun-signaling in 405 BC. The Roman emperor Tiberius was said to have used a heliograph to communicate with the mainland when he ruled his empire from the Isle of Capri in 35 AD. Napoleon's empire used a different optical teleg
raphy system devised by Claude Chappe consisting of semaphore towers with rotating arms to send information even on cloudy days.
The street outside the front doors of the building had fallen dark, but even at this hour messages could still be sent to the roof for a bit longer. Such signals could be sent also at night, of course, but torches and lamps were a poor substitute for the Sun, plus their fires had to be confined in all other directions lest the signal be overheard.
“Did you hear what I said? People with torches are converging on the prison.”
That explained how he had spotted them so easily in the gloom of evening. “Sounds like Ricky's decided not to wait any longer,” he said. “How far off are they?”
“Only a few blocks by now,” said the Runt. “But I saw no signs of a ram. If we move quickly we ought to get there before they work up to bashing the doors down.”
“How many has he got?”
“Looks like at least a hundred.”
There was no time to call for the Imperial coach to be harnessed, so he sent Jeffrey to fetch some soldiers and a couple of horses for them. While he waited he thought about what they were getting into. Is this a feint, to draw me out and sick the crowd on me? No, he'd never be that stupid. It would be civil war. But he went to the armory and snatched a couple of crossbows for him and Jeffrey anyway., trying not to think about the obvious: one or more of those torch-bearers could be hiding a swizzle-gun.
Chapter 66
Xander: “our ignorance brings us nearer to death”
A mouse scurrying among the papers in the corner of the sanctuary woke him. Xander groaned and stretched, wondering what time it was. From the reddish light slanting in the window of the abandoned church he concluded it must be sunset.
Memory trickled back. After he had gotten Andrews away from the shrine of St. Farker's, the two of them had wandered through the streets randomly, on the theory that if they didn't know where they were going, then neither would the Honcho's men.
“I'm not complaining, mind you,” the priest had said to him, “but how did you know I needed help, and why did you offer it? I gathered you're not Catholic.”
Stepping over a dead rat, Xander had pondered the question. “I followed you out of pure curiosity, at first,” he said. “But when the soldiers accosted you, I was curious. Why would the Honcho risk offending the Church? And then after I heard what they were after...”
“So I wasn't the only one who was puzzled by that. They've never shown the slightest interest in the shrine before.”
“The situation has changed,” Xander told him. “His Excellency and His Holiness were of like opinion until recently. Both were opposed to any use of the Gifts. Their reasons were different, of course; while the official Church policy is that the artifacts in question are demonic, the Honcho just wants to resurrect the technology we had before such things came to this planet. But Martinez has decided to make an exception to his policy, for purely military reasons of expediency.” Seeing uniforms ahead, he drew the priest into an alley with him. “All in all, his decisions are understandable, but what puzzles me is the inconsistency of the Pope. He has been confiscating swizzles and everflames for years, so why didn't his men visit you at the shrine before the Honcho's?”
“Maybe because there was no need to confiscate our relics because the Church already had them. And the artifacts were not in use, after all.” Andrews coughed. “Or perhaps we were not important enough to attract the Holy Father's attention.”
“We need to get you off the streets,” said Xander. “When the reinforcements arrive and can't find any working Gifts at the Shrine, they will assume you took them with you. Do you have any suggestions?”
Andrews shook his head. “Can't go to friends. They'd not thank me for bringing trouble to their doors. Anywhere I'm known to go, they'd be checking. But hold on a second,” he continued, as if another thought occurred to him. “If the relics don't work anymore, maybe they'll give up and leave me alone.”
Now it was Xander's turn to shake his head. “They won't believe it,” he said. “As far as they know, no one can make a swizzle, let alone stop it from working. They'll assume you just switched fakes for the real ones.”
“That's another thing,” said the priest. “How did you do that? Make them stop working, I mean.”
“That's a long story, Father,” Xander had said. “It'll wait until we find you a sanctuary.”
“A sanctuary?” Andrews snapped his finger. “Of course! Saint Christopher's! That's the ticket! We should go there.”
Xander frowned. “Sounds like exactly the wrong idea, to me,” he said. “Going to another church would be just as bad as going to friends of yours. It's another logical place for them to look for you.”
“Not this one,” said Andrews. “It was abandoned, during the Fall. As the cities died from failing infrastructure and they couldn't bring in enough food any more, congregations moved to the outer suburbs, closer to farms. Martinez's grandfather tried to reverse that trend in Dallas when he moved the capital here, but most of the old churches in the city proper are still abandoned. And St. Christopher's isn't that far from here.”
When he learned that it wasn't that far from the prison, Xander had agreed. Looking back on it now, he wondered if he should have thought of someplace else. They'd managed to wedge the door shut again after breaking in, but still … the convenience of being close to the place of Lester's confinement was overbalanced, in his mind, by the chance that they could be spotted by soldiers going to or from the prison at every change of the watch.
He should never have let the priest draw him into a discussion of the apparent conflict between theology and technology, alien or otherwise. Andrews had held up his end of the conversation. The priest was nearly Xander's age, and he had apparently put his nose in some non-ecclesiastical books more than once during his service to the Church.
“From what I've read,” he had confided, “there has often been an uneasy relationship between religion and science. It heated up long before the Tourists came, you know. Hundred of years before that, after people found dinosaur fossils and started carbon-dating things they found themselves opposed by clerics who insisted the Earth, and the entire Universe was created only a few thousand years ago.”
Xander knew all about this. “I've heard that someone added up the lifetimes stated in the Bible and arrived at a figure of 4004 BC. Later it was adjusted a few thousand years farther back. It's remarkable that they persisted in this assertion in the face of the evidence coming from the radiocarbon dating.”
The priest smiled sadly. “I think of it as a turf war, myself,” he said. “Both the Church and the scientists were basing their views on unseen forces and events. There were many who felt dismay that the new dogma of Science, with its machines and mathematics that said nothing about how human beings should live, was displacing the old values that had held society together for thousands of years.”
“Held it together by saying too much about how humans should live,” Xander retorted. “The problem with rule-based societies is that the number of rules tends to grow over time. And then when you add in the idea that even thinking about breaking a rule is, itself a sin, and just as bad as committing the act, well, you soon arrive at a place where a lot of folks wonder if it might not be more expedient to chuck the whole structure, rather than walk around feeling guilty all the time.”
Andrews nodded. “And yet,” he said, “humans need structure. Our taboos, some would say, make the difference between a society and a jungle. I believe God wants us to live in peace, but I don't think everyone would refrain from violence if there were no structure in place to punish gratuitous mayhem.”
“I can't argue with that,” said Xander, thinking about Brutus and the farmer's family. “But I have a problem with making the ultimate authority an invisible man in the sky that no one can argue with. Secular governments do as good a job, and without the sense of helpless despair people get from thinking that God wants ev
erything to stay the same...that they have to be virtual slaves of the rich in order to get into Heaven.”
“It is difficult, sometimes to be content with one's lot,” Andres agreed. “I admit that sometimes I've gone through periods when I thought the Hindu system of reincarnation was more intellectually palatable. In their belief system, everyone gets a turn at being rich and poor, eventually. But then again, there is the depressing feeling that you'll just end up doing things over and over again, with no end in sight. No redemption. No salvation.”
“The Tourists didn't bring us salvation, that much is certain. Just a different kind of technology. Instead of railing against it, as the Creationists did against carbon dating, we ought to be learning how to make it work for us,” said Xander.
“And you've learned how to do that?”
“In some ways. To the uneducated, I'm a wizard. I prefer the term 'psionic engineer' but it might be a while before it catches on, if ever. I haven't made a pact with the Devil to do it, and I firmly believe that we can make the new technology work along with the old to rebuild civilization.” He'd gone on to explain his dream of establishing the school.
“I can see the value of it,” Andrews told him. “But I think you might be underestimating the difficulties entailed in such an enterprise. Even if you manage to find suitable candidates, funding, and supplies, there is a never-ending horde on this planet that blames the Tourists and their Gifts for the current state of affairs. In the light of two hundred years of aftermath from the previous techno-magical performance, they will hardly be sympathetic to the idea of encouraging an encore.”
Xander, having ventured out in the early morning's light to seek provender, was using a brass offering plate that had seen better days to cook them both a breakfast (or actually a second dinner since they had not slept yet) over an improvised everflame. If the Church considered him an evil person who trafficked with demons, then he had been doing a thorough job of it. In lieu of money, the butcher he had located had traded him a pound of bacon and a few other necessities in exchange for for converting one of the smaller rooms in his house into a walk-in coldbox.
Pathspace: The Space of Paths Page 25