Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  Chapter 68

  Lester: “And three trees on the low sky”

  This time it was not nearly as terrifying. He kept his eyes open, but that was mainly because he was the one steering his swizzle, not Xander. His fellow inmate from the prison clung to the pipe silently, not that much conversation would have penetrated the roar from the pipe.

  The first part, the ascension, was easy. From his experimentation in his cell he had already noted that the flow lines of the pathspace around and through the anchoring pipe did not have to be symmetrical. He had no way of measuring the speed at which the air was being pulled into the front end of the pipe and spewing out the back, but it must be enormous, because he learned, in time to follow Xander, that slight changes in the symmetry of the flow were sufficient to effect course changes. When they were pointed straight up, for example, a shift in the pathspace weave to make a bit more of it come from the Northwest caused the pipe to tilt over and send them moving in that direction instead of straight up or hovering.

  Xander, on his own staff, must somehow be controlling both his staff swizzle and the one the other fellow was rising. Lester had not had enough time to get a good look at the other guy yet (and was far too busy mentally now) but the man seemed far too old to be another candidate for apprenticeship. If they all survived this, there would be plenty of time later to find out why he was with them.

  Several too-late-launched crossbow bolts arched up vainly toward them and were soon left behind. Following Xander, he swung the pipe northwards and tried not to think about the fact that the only thing between him and death by falling was his own imagination and its tenuous grip on the pathspace pattern around the metal pipe they were hugging.

  Eventually he reached a sort of dynamic equilibrium where the flow rate, which he had cranked way up to lift them off the ground, or rather, its component in the vertical direction, was enough to keep them from falling, but not enough to push them any higher. By that time they were already, by his reckoning, several hundred feet in the air and several miles northwest of the prison. The sideways component of their thrust was enough to have them moving faster than any horse could ever gallop, and their weight, most of which was farther back than the middle of the pipe, was enough to keep the flow asymmetry from pulling them into a fully-horizontal flight that would have let them plummet to their deaths.

  Having reached this relative state of equilibrium, there was little for him to do except make minor course corrections when exterior wind from the sides tried to push them from their northward direction, so he could at last think about what was happening. He was full of questions, and since there was no chance to ask them of Xander at the moment, he conjured up a mental image of the wizard in his mind and tried to imagine how the old man would answer his questions.

  Lester: I've only experienced this once before, so I'm still puzzled how what we're doing could be possible. How does this wind-in-the-pipe get us into the air and push us toward Rado?

  Xander: I already told you about the Third Law of Motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action. Since the air in the pipe is being pushed (or pulled) backwards, the pipe is being pushed forwards by conservation of momentum.

  Lester: But what's pushing on the air? I know how to make it happen, now, but not what exactly I'm making happen.

  Xander: We've talked before about this. Since neither of us is a Tourist, we don't know how they think it works; all we have is the best guess of human scientists. Apparently it has to do with space, time, and consciousness.

  Lester: Could you tell me again what they thought?

  Xander: That which we call space, or the aether, or, more modernly, the space-time Continuum, is a plenum of all kinds of particles. Most of these are called virtual particles because they appear and disappear again like a weed in the desert. But just as a weed can grow into a bush if you give it enough water, these virtual particles can become real particles if they acquire enough energy to become permanent.

  Lester: I remember you saying that once. I don't see the connection between that and pathspace.

  Xander: Every particle that exists is not just existing, it's going somewhere. Especially photons, the particles of light, which couldn't stand still if they wanted to. Photons have to move at the speed of light, whereas “ordinary” particles move at some slower speed.

  Lester: So?

  Xander: Ordinarily, the velocity is uniformly distributed in all directions. In other words, if you looked at a point of space, both the real particles passing through it, and the virtual particles appearing at that point and coming out of it, are moving in all possible directions, rather than concentrating in any particular direction like horses on a road.

  Lester: What you seem to be saying is that by configuring pathspace, I'm altering the distribution, herding them in a particular direction – making roads for the horses to follow.

  Xander: Exactly!

  Lester: This is frustrating. I already knew that's what I'm doing. What I don't understand is how my imagining a road in space persuades the particles to follow that imaginary road. I could imagine another road down there, different than the one our pursuers are following in their losing bid to keep up with us. But if I did that, it would only be in my head. Their horses wouldn't know about my imaginary road or feel compelled to follow it. So why is it any different with these particles you keep talking about? What makes them obey me?

  Here the imaginary conversation faltered, because he couldn't remember Xander saying anything that would give any clue as to how he would answer that question. He might as well have asked, why can I make them follow different paths if most people can't? He had heard a partial answer to that question, of course. It had something to do with his being exposed,. over a period of years, to the altered configurations around the everflame and the coldbox back at Gerrold's inn.

  But so had his mother and Gerrold, and they'd shown no sign of being able to weave patterns in pathspace.

  He had nearly gotten to a state where he could look down without wanting to scream. The toroidal pattern of pathspace was wound up tight inside the pipe, but its flowlines outside the pipe were only bunched together at the entrance in front of him and the exit behind him. It was as if he were in the dough of a donut that had been stretched along its main axis of symmetry into a pipe, but then inflated. The breeze blowing past him was moving only about as fast as they were moving with respect to the ground, which though considerable, was not terrifically fast. From the time they had spent flying already, he judged, as they passed over Wichita Falls, that they were moving at or less than a hundred miles an hour.

  That was fast, of course, but not nearly as fast as the air shooting out the back of the swizzle. Since the pipe was tilted over at an angle, and a lot of that air had to be moving downwards, or, as Xander would have said, its velocity had to have a strong component in the downwards direction to keep them in the air. So it was roaring out of the pipe at more than a hundred miles an hour. He was glad it wasn't much more than that; they had none of the stickum Xander used on his staff to get a better grip on it.

  As they sped toward Denver in the northwest, the green countryside of East Texas faded to the yellow-white of West Texas, where higher elevations combined with fewer rivers to parch the land into semi-desert. The verdant lawns and cultivated fields were vanishing behind them, decaying to the scrub-dotted waste of the west. It was evidently Xander's plan to more or less follow the Red River, the traditional northern boundary between the Lone Star Empire and Okla, and then turn almost due north when they got to Amarillo.

  Before they left the Red River behind, however, he spied Xander and the other stranger coming in for a landing. This would be interesting, because Lester has never landed one of these before. Before they whizzed by the other two, he made his pipe imitate their pipes, deftly reshaping the flowlines so that it turned vertical again, then unwinding the pattern around the pipe enough to let them sink toward the ground in a controlled descent ra
ther than a lethal drop.

  By the time his feet kissed the ground the other end of him wanted to do the same thing. Xander and the man with him had left their swizzles on the bank of the river and gone off their separate ways into the bushes to relieve bladders. Lester's pelvic area had been numbed by the humming vibration of the pipe, but after he dismounted, sensation returned and he found himself a bush.

  When he returned, it was time for introductions. This was awkward, for although he finally learned that their party's third member was a priest whose name was Father Andrews.

  Chapter 69

  Kristana: “Six hands at an open door”

  The atmosphere in the room was tense, to put it mildly. If it were the cable on a ballista you could have used it to shoot the moon.. She wasn't sure whether that was because they didn't know what to say, and knew she was expecting them to say something ... or because they did know what to say, and knew she wouldn't like hearing it.

  Colonel Thanh was the first to finally speak up. “Madame Governor,” he said, “is this a serious question? If it is a joke, you deadpanned it well. I can see my comrades are too terrified to laugh.”

  “I am totally serious, Colonel. I'm open to any suggestions you have as to how to defend ourselves against the weapons described.”

  He glanced at the others. “Is this some sort of training exercise? What you are talking about has not been seen in any of our lifetimes.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “we may shortly be facing them.”

  “But you're talking about things of the Ancients! Things out of legends!” protested one of the majors. “Tanks? Armored personnel carriers? Self-propelled guns? Even if they really existed once, no one has anything like that now.”

  “The Honcho does. His men have uncovered a long-buried armory with well-preserved examples of these legends. The report from the spies I sent to Abilene confirms it.”

  There was murmuring around the table at this. Thanh tried again. “With respect, Madame Governor, have you considered the possibility that your operatives have been used to feed you disinformation? People have been known to change sides. Perhaps this is intended to make us waste our time instead of preparing for their actual attack.”

  “Colonel, I trust my people. Two of them died getting this report out to me.”

  “But … why weren't we informed earlier?”

  “Because until recently, it was only hypothetical. These self-propelled devices use a kind of fuel that has not been available for a long time. Since they are very heavy, it would be impractical to pull them here with horses. “

  “However...?” he prompted.

  “However, we have reason to believe that he has found a way to produce fuel for them.” She then rapidly explained about the Gifts the Honcho had received from the Church. How he was now able to pull oil out of the old wells, and “crack” off the gasoline and other components as needed. “This all means that, in all probability, he will be using these weapons to expand his empire. And we will be his logical first target.”

  “Why us?” This from the major who had already spoken. “I've seen a report that he's only the Honcho because his older brother was killed by the Queen of Angeles. Why wouldn't he use them against her first?”

  “For three reasons,” she replied, ticking them off on her fingers. “First, she is much farther away from him than we are, requiring more fuel to reach, so although he undoubtedly has plans to assault Californ, we will come first in his list of targets. Second, he will have to cross the Mojave Desert,which is tough on wheeled vehicles of any kind, not to mention his men. And third, because we have gold mines and he doesn't. The expansion of the Lone Star Empire will require a much larger army, an army that must be equipped, trained, fed … and paid. He can buy supplies from his trading partners, but he will need gold to get the quantities he needs for his ambitions. And we are the closest source.”

  Heads nodded. Empires rise and fall like sand castles on a tide-swept beach, but one thing rulers always want is gold.

  Chapter 70

  Aria: “With a wicked pack of cards”

  Of all of her tutors, she liked Mrs. Timberstone the best. Old as the hills but sill spry enough to surprise you, Mrs. Allison Timberstone (or “Allie” if you were so fortunate to have gained membership to that minority of the human race) was one of those few elderly that did not spend a lot of their time complaining or bragging about their infirmities. She was serene in a way that Aria wanted to be someday, and it wasn't by being famous, wealthy, or popular.

  What Mrs. Timberstone taught was difficult to define. She liked to describe it as “filling in the bits your other teachers left out” which was a fair if vague description of it. Today's lesson seemed to be about something called Archetypes.

  Very little wind stirred the dust on the top of the building. The day was surprisingly warm, with no clouds at all yet, and so they had moved to the roof to enjoy the fresh air and the sunshine before the cold heart of Winter began beating. Mrs. Timberstone shook out a blanket and they sat on it as she drew something rectangular from her satchel. It was a deck of cards, but not like any cards Aria had ever seen. The cards were old, but hardly wrinkled, and they reflected the sunlight as if sheathed in glass.

  “Plastic laminate,” Mrs. Timberstone explained without explaining. “Something the Ancients developed that is proof against water and dirt.”

  Aria felt awed. “You're saying this's from before the Fall?”

  “Handed down in my family. My mother gave it to me.”

  “Has my mother seen it?”

  “Of course. I taught the governor, back when she was your age. Now pay attention. You know that the cards people use to play games are very old, going back more than a thousand years. The design of this deck is not as old as the usual decks, though even though the actual cards themselves, their physical manifestation, are older than the ones people use these days. The design was done by a man named A. E. Waite, although it used to be known as the Rider pack.”

  “Did you play games with them when you were a girl?”

  “Not like you think. They were not designed for games. They were made to encode and preserve certain concepts. People have used them to tell fortunes, for which purpose they are better than the ordinary, everyday deck.”

  The deck had four suits like the ordinary cards Aria had seen and played with, but in this deck the suits were called Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles, which, Mrs. Timberstone explained, corresponded to the ordinary Clubs, Spades, Hearts, and Diamonds.

  It was larger than the usual deck of 52 cards. Each suit had an additional Court card, called the Page. Aria asked about it, and learned page was an ancient word for an assistant of sorts. So each suit ran from one to ten, then the Page, Prince, Queen and King. But there were still more cards left in her hand after she dealt all these out on the blanket.

  “What are those other cards?” she asked. “Jokers?”

  Mrs. Timberstone laughed. “No, dear. Those are the most important part of this set. They are called the Major Arcana. It means 'great secrets' and they are the Archetypes I wanted to talk about today.”

  “What's an archetype? I know in the Church an archbishop is higher than a bishop.”

  “An archetype,” said Mrs. Timberstone, dangerously close to launching into lecture mode, “is a common model, a type that we all share unconsciously. A universal pattern in our heads – a concept that we recognize in many forms that all have the same set of associations. For example, what do a bear's cave, a bird's nest, and a gopher's burrow all have in common?”

  “They're all homes?”

  “Exactly right. The outward form of a home might not be the same, but we still recognize that it is a home – somewhere where something or someone lives. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana are archetypes like that. For example, here is the first one, numbered zero in some traditions and one in others: the Fool.”

  “So he is the archetype of idiots? Or is it suicides – he'
s about to step off a cliff!”

  Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “Not really. The Fool represents the beginning of a quest, the beginning of wisdom which is the realization that we know nothing, as Socrates said, and the willingness to leap into the unknown to acquire experience. He's pictured here as a vagabond, and the bag tied to his stick represents the baggage we can't help carrying along for the journey: our preconceptions and hopes and worries.”

  She dealt out the next card. “This is the Magician. In the older decks he was called the Juggler. You can see a sword, cup and pentacle on the table in front of him, and a wand in his hand. There are many ways to interpret this card. He represents the transformation of ideas into actuality, a magical process. As he points his wand skyward, his other hand is pointing down at the ground, encoding the ancient saying “as above, so below.”

  Aria's brow wrinkled. “What does that mean?”

  “The correspondence of patterns at many levels of existence. As the Earth orbits the sun, so the electrons in an atom can be said to orbit the nucleus. Light radiates from the sun, just as light radiates from a candle here on earth.”

  A thought struck Aria. “Magician is another word for Wizard, so it represents Xander too, doesn't it?”

  “Of course.” She dealt another card.

  Aria, who was beginning to get the hang of this, recognized the next archetype immediately. “The High Priestess is you! A guardian and transmitter of secrets.”

  Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “In a way, yes, I suppose so. You picked up on that even faster than your mother did. I can see your father's influence. You inherited strength and quickness of mind from both your parents.”

  “Did you teach the General, too?”

  Something flitted over the teacher's features. “Um. No, I hadn't come to Denver back then.” She turned over more cards. “The Empress, and the Emperor.”