Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  “What you're forgetting,” he said, “is that the Fall wasn't caused by working of the alien technology, but by its eventual failing after the Tourists left – because of our lack of the very sort of experts my School will provide.”

  Andrews was shoving a couple of pews together to form a makeshift bed. “What I don't understand,” he said after a few moments of grunting, “is why that happened. Couldn't we have learned how to maintain the artifacts they made for us, and avoided the Fall entirely?”

  “No,” Xander had said, turning the bacon over with a stick. “There wasn't anyone who could learn how, back then.”

  “Which leads to my next question. Why are there such people now? What has changed in the last two centuries, that you (and hopefully others) can actually do what the aliens did?”

  “That,” Xander had said, “is the sort of thing that will keep Church officials awake at night. They probably see it as some kind of sign of the approach of the End Times. I could lie to you and say I have no idea. The truth is, I believe that long term exposure to the Gifts has sensitized some individuals to the influences needed to work the magic. Whether this would work for anyone raised in constant proximity to swizzles and everflames or coldboxes, or whether there is some genetic predisposition to the susceptibility, I do not know.”

  “How did you happen to fall into this?” asked Andrews. “Was your father a wizard – sorry, 'parascience technician', or are you the first in your family to discover this about yourself, that you could learn the alien magic?”

  Xander finished cooking the bacon before he answered. He dished it out on two colder offering plates and passed one to Andrews, then stroked the side of the aluminum coaster until the point of brilliance faded away above it. While they waited for the bacon to cool, he spoke. “I was raised in a commune up north, back before they changed the name of the place to the People's Republic of Wyoming. Don't look at me that way, Father. My people weren't revolutionary firebrands. I didn't even know what a communalist was back then. They were descended from a few families of survivalists who moved away from the big cities early on when things began to fall apart.”

  He poked at his bacon to test the temperature. “The adults farmed and hunted. The kids had simpler chores until they were big enough to do stuff like that.”

  He paused, remembering. “The winters up there can be fierce. We used to spend the winters below ground in an old fallout shelter. We probably would have frozen to death if our commune hadn't had a couple of working everflames. One of my jobs was gathering snow to throw in the metal tub suspended over one of them. We never turned that one off all winter, so the snow melted into water that boiled and the steam spread the warmth throughout the shelter.”

  Here Andrews couldn't help interrupting. “Why boil the snow? Wouldn't the everflame have worked as well by itself as a fireplace? Even better, actually, since there'd be no smoke to worry about.”

  “A fair question. It probably would have, if we had turned it high enough. But with Gifts breaking down all over the world, the founders were afraid that running it full-out all the time might make it break down sooner, maybe in the middle of a blizzard.” He checked his bacon again. “And there were more reasons. One of those was, humid air can hold more heat than dry air. It takes a lot of energy to heat up water, you see, so with a little steam in it the air in the shelter held more warmth. Plus it didn't hurt to have hot water all the time if we wanted to boil something or make herb tea. Another reason was the risk of radiation burns. If you turn up an everflame high enough, the little point of red light goes blue and starts putting out some ultraviolet – which can give you sunburn. Higher still, and you start to get what the Ancients called 'x-rays' – and too much of that and you get cancer. So we kept it down in the red, mostly, and boiled the water.”

  “That explains where you got your exposure,” the priest commented. “But how did you find out you were developing a talent?”

  “We were pretty isolated,” Xander said. “By design, because the founders had figured things might get fierce when the cities fell apart. Hungry people can be fairly desperate, until the starvation makes them too weak to hurt anyone. There were other communes we traded with, of course, but most of the time we were on our own, about thirty of us, though the number varied a bit over the years with deaths and births. You've no idea how boring it got sometimes. We had to make our own fun. To amuse myself, I would fiddle, on hot summer days, with the swizzle we used in our well. On cold days, I'd play with the everflame when no one was watching. Did you ever play with the relics in the shrine of St. Farker's?”

  “No,” said Andrews.

  Xander just kept looking at him.

  “Oh, all right,” said Andrews. “Sometimes I used the everflame to boil water for coffee. But I always put it back in the display case.”

  “Then you know how to turn the intensity up and down. Most of the alien tech has a control interface. Back then in Wyoming, I didn't know that term, but I learned it later from books. As you know, you turn an everflame up or down by stroking the rim of the metal disk.”

  “Yes,” said Andrews. “Father Davis, the priest I took over for, he showed me that.”

  “Coldboxes are different,” said Xander. “They usually lack a control, because you want them to stay cold all the time. But swizzles always have one. If you stroke the pipe in the direction of the flow in the swizzle, it turns it up. Stroke it against the current and it slows down. I found that out by watching one of the adults fill a bucket from the well. When no one was around and I was bored, sometimes I'd turn it up high enough to make a fountain. I'd make the water shoot up ten feet in the air just to watch how it broke up into little balls, like raindrops, when it came down. And to cool off on hot days.

  “But one day I was playing with it, making a fountain, and I saw one of the grownups coming over from the vegetable patch with a couple of buckets. Not wanting to get switched, I reached for the swizzle, thinking about stroking it down, and the flow turned down before I touched it.”

  This time when he touched it, the bacon was merely warm to the touch. He fished a piece out of the plate and chewed. “At first I was too relieved that I hadn't been caught to put two and two together. But later I managed to repeat it in a similar circumstance. After that it was only a matter of time before I learned I could turn it up as well as down, without touching it. The rest was just a matter of practice.”

  “What happened?” the priest asked him suddenly.

  “Eh? What do you mean?”

  “Why did you leave Wyoming? Or at least the commune. Was it to find a wife?”

  “No, that might have been a good reason to, but in my case it was simple curiosity. We didn't have a lot of books in the commune, and I wanted to find out more about how the world worked, and what else I could do.”

  They talked through the remainder of the night and well into the next morning, when mutual exhaustion brought pause to these discussions. Xander had fallen asleep sometime before noon, and like a fool, had slept away the afternoon. Now the sun was setting, and he hadn't even checked on poor Lester yet.

  “So,” said Andrews, stretching and yawning as he sat up. “Do you have a plan to get out of the city?”

  “I do. But we need to pick up someone first. I'm sorry to tell you this, father, but I didn't come all this way to rescue you. A friend of mine needs help.”

  Andrews was obviously puzzled when the left the abandoned Church, and sought out a smithy. Xander did this by simply following, at a discreet distance, a guardsman leading a horse that had thrown a shoe. When at length he reached the smith, who evidently did a lot of farrier's work in this age of horse travel, the wizard let the guardsman go first, to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

  While the horse was being shod, the priest kept looking at Xander with a face that plainly asked the question, why are we here when your friend needs help? but he left the priest unanswered for the moment, unwilling to talk in front of the strangers. He was
coming to the reluctant conclusion that the priest would have to leave with them, and that raised complications he would rather avoid.

  “Now, then,” said the smith, whose name turned out to be Marco, “what can I do for you gentlemen today?”

  Xander looked around the smithy before answering. Seeing the silver dollars change hands had reminded him that he was without currency. “I see you've been making a lot of pipe lately.”

  Marco laughed. “Not making it, exactly. Some of the apartment buildings on the west side of town collapsed years ago in the last great quake. Their swizzles were looted, but there was enough piping left in the wreckage to earn money for the locals who heard I'd pay to take it off their hands.”

  “What do you do with it? Not your usual income, I'd imagine, like making tools, swords and horseshoes.”

  Marco looked left and right. “It's a government contract,” he said. “His Excellency put in an order for a lot of pipe.” He shrugged. “It's too bad the scavengers don't know he'd rather buy it direct from them, than pay me a markup on it. But this way we both profit by it.”

  Xander glanced at the leather bellows that Marco used to crank up his forge to the temperatures needed for some metallurgical operations. “I wouldn't want to put your apprentice out of a job,” he said, “but I might have a proposition for you.”

  The smith pulled a sword out of the forge with a pair of tongs and inspected it before shoving it back into the coals. “What sort of proposition?”

  Xander look at the bellows. The wooden handles attached to the leather pleating were worn from years of pumping air into the forge to heat the coals. The mouth of it was shoved into a pipe that protruded a few inches from the side of the forge. “For a dozen feet of pipe I can replace that bellows of yours with a swizzle that would make it a lot easier to do whatever you want with your forge.”

  The smith frowned at this. “There's plenty more pipe where that came from,” he said, “but I don't do much barter business, only cash. And like I told you, the swizzles that were in those collapsed buildings were looted long ago, and most likely confiscated by the Church. I doubt you can lay your hands on any of them, these days.”

  “Not a problem,” the wizard told him. “As it happens, I can make swizzles.” And he grabbed the bellows and wrenched it out of the pipe.

  Marco scowled, affronted at this cavalier treatment of his equipment, but his expression changed when Xander concentrated on the protruding pipe and they heard a rush of air into the forge. Xander reached out and stroked the pipe outwards, shutting off the inflow before it overheated the sword in the coals. “You can always shove the bellows back in when you're not stoking the forge,” he said. “No one else needs to know you have this.”

  The smith regarded the protruding end of the pipe as Xander showed him how to turn the swizzle flow up and down. The forge roared and then was silent again. “How much pipe did you say you need?”

  Chapter 67

  Enrique: “walking round in a ring”

  He emerged from the coach and pulled on his white calve skin gloves. For a moment he dithered, seeing the ritual reversed. What is truth? Pilate asked, washing his hands. But this was a putting on, not a taking off. Did that make it any different? Like Pontius, he was trying to effect a separation from what was to come, a separation that he knew in his heart was a lie, a delusion not of grandeur, but of innocence. He knew the apprentice was not a demon. But the idea he stood for, that needed to be exorcised. We cannot advance as humans until we put aside the creations of non-humans.

  The protesters had already covered the back entrance. The prison Alessandro Martinez had built here was not as large as he had expected.

  It did not need to be, in an Empire where those who defied the established order were never forced to endure long imprisonments. Those detained here usually came out again, briefly. The gallows was just to the side of the front entrance.

  He eyed the scaffold. By acting this way, even I could be said to be defying the established order. One of the faithful would have decried such sentiments. He could imagine their rebuttal: but Holiness, you are the established order! And in a sense, that was true. But the execution he planned was not sanctioned by secular authority. And in truth, this was not a thing that he wanted to secular authority to enact. There were no secular charges against the accused, this apprentice. The only reason he was here was because he had been with the wizard who had captured the Honcho's scouting party.

  But if released, he might someday become a wizard himself.

  “Holiness?”

  With a start he realized he was woolgathering again. His driver and the leaders of the crowd were looking to him for permission to begin. He nodded, and they began pounding on the front door. “Bring out the sorcerer!” they cried.

  Hoofbeats behind him made him turn. His Excellency, the Honcho, ruler of the Lone Star Empire was hurtling down the street, closely pursued by four guards and the Runt. They drew up on the edges of the crowd that surrounded the front of the prison.

  “What the fuck do you think you're doing, Ricky?”

  He smiled sadly, ignoring the profanity. “What you wouldn't, Excellency. Exorcising the demon you've kept alive and fed.”

  Peter glared down at him from his horse, which whinnied at all the torches in front of it. “He's no demon and you know it. Just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Call this off, now, before you make matters worse.”

  “The man inside these walls,” said the Pontiff, raising his voice for the crowd, “is tainted with alien sorcery! He would spread it if allowed, bringing down the wrath of God that struck down the Ancients for their arrogance and impurity. If he truly wants to be like the Tourists, then he needs to go as they have gone.”

  The Honcho lowered his voice. “You know I can't allow this. I can't let mob rule replace the rule of law. Stop this now. It can't end well.”

  Enrique regarded him. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked, his voice calm and brimming with self-assurance. “Are you going to have your men shoot me? Shoot the Pope, in front of a hundred witnesses? They'd tear you to pieces.” He jerked his head toward the crowd. “Or will you have your men fire into the crowd?”

  The Honcho's eyes narrowed. “The Army's on the way to surround this entire block,” he said. “If your people don't disperse quietly, they'll all be arrested.”

  Yes, exactly, he thought. My people. Not yours. You are only the caretaker of their bodies, but I am God's chosen to defend their souls. “We both know you can't afford to turn the Church against you, Excellency.”

  At this moment the guards inside the prison decided to open the front doors. They swung outwards, revealing men with loaded crossbows. The Honcho seized upon this pause to bellow a warning. “Who wants to die first? Everyone clear out now, by God, or – “

  BOOM! An explosion like a burst of cannon fire surprised everyone.

  Enrique opened his mouth to condemn using cannon on unarmed civilians, when a sudden roar of wind was sucked into the open door of the prison. It blew out dozens of the torches in the crowd as if they were mere candles on a birthday cake, and knocked the guards at the entrance backwards like pins scatted by a bowling ball.

  Movement above the roof of the prison drew his eye, and those of others, upwards. A figure burst upwards, then curved towards the crowd like tossed confetti. In seconds it plummeted and crashed into a couple of the protesters.

  After the moment of shocked silence which followed, the tangled figure groaned and extricated itself from the ones who had dropped their torches. His Holiness stepped forward into the crowd, which parted before the spectacle of his bone-white vestments as he advanced.

  The human projectile looked up at him. He appeared to notice the significance of his whiteness. “Well, hello there,” the man said. “That didn't work out exactly as I'd planned. Am I late for my execution?”

  His Holiness was not the only person pushing into the open space win the crowd. Two gray-haired me
n shoved their way in One of these was dressed in gray, and sported a matching beard and a staff. The other was smooth-shaved and looked like a threadbare priest, and was lugging two lengths of pipe with him.

  “There you are,” said the bearded one. “Are you ready to leave, or would you rather stay here and chat with His Holiness?”

  The escapee stared at the bearded one for a second or two and rubbed his eyes as if they were watering, or as if he thought he was seeing things. “If you're leaving, then I suppose I should tag along,” he said. “Is one of those for me?”

  The one who looked like an old priest handed him one of the pipes. “Xander said you'd know what to do with this,” he remarked.

  Enrique heard a hissing that grew into a deep-throated roaring or humming sound. Before his astonished gaze, the bearded one and the priest hugged their pipe and staff as if climbing poles, and rose into the air, scattering a cloud of dust below them from the street. The other followed them, clasping his pipe awkwardly, making even more noise as he ascended.

  They were gone in a matter of seconds.

  Enrique turned and saw Peter on his horse behind him. “Was that your prisoner, the apprentice we've been arguing about?”

  Peter exhaled. “I'm afraid so. Looks like he's learned more than I thought, Holiness. Maybe I should have handed him over, after all.”

  Enrique blinked. “It appears that the transaction we had discussed is not possible,” he said. “But in view of the circumstances,. I guess I'll have to give you what you need, anyway. And may God help us all.”