Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  “Your communalist roots are showing, wizard. Tell me why we should give them away.”

  Another coughing fit delayed his answer. “Well, for several reasons. For one thing, Winter is coming.”

  Kristana rolled her eyes. “We have plenty of firewood.”

  “We have trees, true. But with a growing population we will need all the lumber we can get for building. Right now there are a few everflames scattered about Rado in smithies and inns and the like. But if every family had one, our homes would be warm without burning up our trees as firewood.”

  “So you want us to just give them away? For free?”

  “Free to our citizens, yes. We can also export them as trade goods. Think of the prestige Rado will have when we are the only source of them. People in other countries will envy our citizens. It could even be a way to get more countries to join our Union. Think about it! We could give away some free samples, and then make them pay if they want more. But they'll know they can have all the everflames they need...for free...if they become part of the new United States.”

  She snorted at that. “You think big, I'll give you that. But I don't want you working yourself to death to give people free magic.”

  “I won't have to do it all. I'll spend a little part of each day making some, and Lester will help me when he learns how.”

  “The same reasoning applies to your apprentice,” she said. “I won't have you working him to death, either.”

  “Once we get my School up and running, we'll be able to train more apprentices. Right now it's just me, but it'll grow quickly, like a snowball rolling downhill.”

  “I smell a hidden agenda. What are you really aiming at, here?”

  He shrugged. “Same as I ever was. Making more wizards. I don't know whether it's something anyone can do, or if some people just have a natural aptitude for it, but one thing I do know is that developing the ability to do 'magic' requires long-term exposure to the Gifts. We'll start with everflames and swizzles. When he get enough of them into the hands of the people, then we'll grow a crop of potential wizards in the next generation. In time – “

  “Swizzles too?”

  “Yes. It was a swizzle back in Wyoming that started me on my path. Your citizens can use them to bring water out of wells and to fan the flames of forges. Your people will be better off, and you'll eventually have more wizards to help defend Rado and make more things.”

  “But if we export them to other zones,” she objected, “won't that destroy our advantage? If you're right, they'll be having more wizards too.”

  “It takes a long time to make an apprentice,” he said. “We won't export at first, so our own citizens will feel the effects before anyone else. We'll be way ahead of them for quite a while. And Rado becoming known as a source of wizards might make the others countries more willing to ally with us.”

  “You're forgetting something,” she said. “The Church will oppose you. They'll tell the people not to accept the Gifts. They'll order families not to let their children near them if they suspect it will lead them 'astray'...into learning magic.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “But every Winter that comes will make their members long for the convenience of everflames heating their homes and cooking their food without smoke or having to chop firewood. And every summer will make them wish they had coldboxes to help their food keep longer. We'll win in the long run.”

  Chapter 85

  Aria: “Neither fear nor courage saves us”

  Indifferent stars glittered overhead in the cold of early Winter as she emerged onto the rooftop. “I've been looking for you,” she said.

  Xander was sitting near a corner of the roof and gazing out over the decayed city, where a little snow had fallen. More would be coming. He turned at the sound of her voice, slowly, as if he had been expecting someone. “Oh? Is something wrong?”

  She paced over to sir down near him. “I'm sure many things are wrong. People are sick and children are hungry, somewhere. Soon men are going to kill each other again, and I see no way to prevent it. But that's not why I'm here.”

  Xander regarded her. Aria studied his face, seeing things she had never noticed before. His eyes. His chin. Even the shape of his nose. If you knew what to look for, the resemblance to what she saw in the mirror every day was so clear. Why had she never noticed it before? Had others? “I want to know about my mother,” she said.

  His eyebrows lifted. “I'm sure you know her as well as I do.”

  She reddened a little. “Not in the same way. Tell me how the two of you met.”

  His eyes shifted, gazing past her at nothing. She could almost see him sliding back along the line of his life, to a time before she even existed. “It almost didn't happen. I was just out of Wyoming, wandering through northern Rado, and I stopped into a little village called Dustfall, a mining town where it was common for customers to pay for supplies with a palm of gold dust panned from the placer deposits that wash downstream from eroded veins.”

  He closed his eyes, sinking into the memory. “Not me, of course. I knew nothing about mining at the time. I hadn't intended to venture into the local inn, but then I saw the horses.”

  Unwilling to disturb his reverie, she edged closer to the man she now knew was her father and whispered “the horses?”

  He nodded, eyes still shut. “They say you can tell a lot about a man by his shave, haircut, and shoes. Maybe that's true, some places. But in Dustfall, a lot of the prospectors were just back in after spending days or weeks out in the wilderness, avoiding their own kind for the most part to keep secret the locations of their strikes. It's pretty hard for a man or woman out by themselves to guard a stretch of river shallows.”

  She wasn't quite sure she had heard that right. “River shallows?”

  “Yes. You see, with a larger group, you might be working an old mine or starting a new one. Sometimes gold is actually visible in the rock, sun-bright veins in quartz or whatever, easy to get at. You hack out the rock with a pick axe, pulverize it with hammers, slurry it with water or various solutions to wash away the slag, and the gold is left. The veins are down inside a mine and the opening can be guarded with a couple of bowmen.

  “But with the loners who go solo, the mining is a lot of work to do by themselves. Most of them go for the placer deposits. When thousands of years of rain erosion exposes a vein and wears down the rock, the water flows downhill to a creek or river. When there's a hard rain or enough snow melt in the spring, the river runs hard enough to wash the rock and gold dust downstream where it ends up in the shallows, often near bends in the river, where the water slows down enough that the gold-bearing mud settles to the bottom.

  “If you find a spot like that, you're in business! All you have to do is scoop up some of the mud into a pan, add some river water, swirl it around until the lighter mud is washed away, and the gold is left there gleaming up at you like grains of solid sunlight. But unless your spot is heavily forested, your find is pretty exposed, hard for one man to guard when he has to sleep. So you avoid other people until you have enough to take it into town to bank it or buy more supplies.”

  “What does all that have to do with horses?”

  “I'm getting to that. As I said, some say you can tell a lot about a man by the state of his face and his clothes. But that's not strictly true for solitary miners. When you don't want to spend too much money on food, and you're out there by yourself, well, let's just say personal grooming is not a high priority. Every minute spent washing clothes or shaving is a minute you could have spent panning out some more gold dust, follow me? So when a solitary prospector comes into town, he'll more likely than not to be a pretty scruffy fellow. Even the ladies. Can't tell anything from his or her appearance. A ragged sleeve or an unshaven face doesn't mean he has no self-respect or doesn't care about how he looks. It means he was concentrating on what would make the most money.

  “But his horse is the exception. A man who doesn't take care of his horse is a man who might no
t make it back next time. If you run into claim jumpers or hostile strangers, or manage to injure yourself or get sick, your horse is what gets you out of danger or back to civilization. So if you want to know who the best miners are, the ones who care if they live or die, then look to their horses and tack, not whether they have dirt behind their ears.”

  “I see,” she said, not really caring about that detail much. She had no plans to become a prospector. But she knew by now they the only way to hear the story was to let Xander tell it the way it came back to him.

  “Anyway, I was strolling through the center of Dustfall, fresh off the farm, so to speak, and I see the most beautiful horse in a hundred miles tied up outside the inn. Big, bright eyes, nicely built, and white as snow.” He rubbed his chin. “A gray. That's the funny thing, you call a white horse a gray. I didn't even know that, back then. And his saddle and gear was in perfect order, not a bit of tack out of place, gleaming leather. I'd seen good horses before, but even the best weren't this clean, this fine, especially not just back from the wilderness. And there were a few more tied up next to it that were nearly as good-looking.”

  “So what did you do, steal it?”

  He opened his eyes and stared at her, shocked. “What? No way. There were two men with crossbows guarding them. But looking at that animal, I thought, there's a man who knows what he's doing. I wonder what he's doing out here in Dustfall? So I decided to go in the inn for a look-see. Who knows? Maybe he had work for me.”

  Xander laughed. “Picture the scene. I'm barely more than a kid, twenty summers old, hardly any skills to speak of. Couldn't even ride a horse! And dumb enough to think I could talk my way into a job with someone like that. But I went in.

  “I go in, and there he is, talking to a bunch of folks in the common room of the inn. What you would call 'ruggedly handsome' with a strong chin, piercing hazel eyes, and dark hair cut short, going gray at the temples. What he's saying doesn't make any sense to me, at first, but the people in there are hanging on every word as if he were about to tell them where a ton of gold is waiting to be found.”

  The old wizard coughed. “But what he's talking about is America. Now I knew by that time that it was the old name for this continent, named after some foreign mapmaker, but he's talking about it as if it were a country. One country! A country as big as a continent. And I remember some of the crap the elders back at the commune used to say, that is was one country, back before the Tourists and the Fall. So I figure he's talking about our history, and I decide to keep listening, to see if his story agrees with the ones we used to pass around with the soup.”

  He started coughing again at that point, and one of the guards on the roof watching for signals came over to offer him his canteen. Xander took a swig of it and handed it back, smiling his thanks.

  “But he wasn't talking about history. He was talking about the future. I almost laughed out loud, at the idea that all the countries here now would stop fighting and just agree to be one big country again. What a ridiculous idea! But he kept talking about it, and nobody laughed, not even me. He believed it, you see, and he believed it so hard it was like a drunk passing around his bottle and getting the whole room drunk with him. Pretty soon he had me believing it was possible too, and I realized right then and there that this guy was someone special.”

  By this point Aria knew who he was talking about. Her heart was beating a little faster now. “So you asked him for a job?”

  Xander laughed, but not in a cruel sort of way. “No. By then I'd heard one of the men call him the General and I thought, no way am I going to get myself killed being one of his soldiers. He wasn't even really recruiting, as I learned later. His style was more to put out his message and move on, and wait for the ones who thought it over and decided to come look him up.” Xander brushes a strand of hair out of his eyes. “He didn't want someone coming to join him on a whim and then changing their mind later just as quickly. He'd sow the seeds, and wait for the harvest. It was a smart approach. The ones who had time to make up their minds usually stayed with him longer.”

  Xander looked out over the city again. She followed his gaze, and saw the old buildings, some fallen, some standing, like cornstalks after a harvest. Islands of order in a crumbled wasteland of decay. In some of the buildings, she could see the old girders exposed like ribs of a carcass picked clean by scavengers. Good building stone is easier to remove from a toppled tower. Why crack it free from a quarry when so many megatons are there there for the taking?

  She brushed back her own hair with one hand and pictured the scene he was describing. She could see how it might have been, but it wasn't what she was waiting to hear. “So what did you do?”

  “I had a drink. Hadn't planned on it, but he bought the room a round, and there I was, so I grabbed a mug and listened some more. Why not? I was thirsty, and he was buying.

  “One thing led to another, and you know how it is with beer. Before I knew it, I was heading outside to get rid of some used beer that didn't want to be inside me any more. There were outhouses in back, and I headed for one. And then I saw her, in the light of a full moon.”

  He paused, and she could see he wasn't looking at the city now, but at an inner vision. “She was hardly much older than you are now, and short, but well put together.” He looked left and right to check that the guards were not close enough to hear him. “You're taller, got that from me, so it's good that he was too. She was heading back in as I was heading out, and we passed each other without a word. But before we did, someone opened the back door of the inn, probably someone with the same need as me, and the light from inside spilled out and showed me her face.”

  He put his head down for a moment before he continued. “I felt like my heart had stopped. When I saw her face, it was like everything stopped. I say we passed each other, but, really, she passed me on her way back inside, because I was just stopped there, frozen, staring at the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  “I did what I had gone out to do, but when I was finished I went right back in looking for her. Found her of course. There was no missing that face – it was branded on my eyeballs. But she wasn't looking back at me, of course. She was looking at him, at the General, and I could see from the worship in her eyes that she was with him. In that moment, I knew that I had fallen in love with another man's woman.”

  Aria was silent for a moment. She tried to imagine how that must have felt, having that strong a feeling, a yearning, for someone who was already paired. “What did you do?”

  “I left town,” he said, “ and I never saw her again.”

  “What??” He was kidding her, and the anticlimax left her wanting to slap him. “Is everything just a joke to you?”

  Xander chuckled. “Sorry, I was just trying to lighten the mood for myself. What I actually did was ask one of his men where they were headed next. I had a honest-looking face back then, long before I became the wicked old rascal you know. Once I knew where they were heading, another frontier town called Panning, about twenty miles to the east, I started walking.”

  “Why didn't you stay at the inn?”

  He shrugged. “No money for it. We hadn't used it at the commune, so I'd been working my way South doing whatever I could find in the way of odd jobs, like washing dishes, loading and unloading wagons and the like. I wanted to see her again, fool that I was, and I figured the General and his men would start out early, so I walked most of the way to the next town and slept under the stars. And that's where it happened.”

  “What? What happened? That's where you saw her again?”

  He shook his head no. “It was a day like today, with the Winter coming on, but not a cloud in the sky. While I was lying there, looking up at the stars, I found myself thinking about what the General had been talking about back at the inn in Dustfall. Somewhere up there, the Tourists were in their sky-ship, wandering between the distant suns the way I was drifting between towns.

  “Yes, I still wanted to see Kristana again, thoug
h I didn't know her name. I didn't expect she'd ever leave the General, but I had a young man's optimism, and I wanted to be near her. At the same time, though. I was thinking about the Tourists, and what they'd done to our civilization, the civilization the General was trying to put back together. I realized that simply lining up armies and putting countries back together wasn't enough. Armies hadn't kept us together the first time. Sure, they'd conquered territory and amassed land to make countries, but what had held the countries together, at least until the Tourists came along, was the technology. Our civilization didn't crumble because our armies failed. It Fell because the technology had failed.

  “I lay there under the stars asking myself why it had all happened. Why weren't we out there now among the stars like the Tourists? Technology doesn't go backward. It gets better and stronger until you can do things like leaving the Earth and traveling the skies.

  “But the skies were too big to imagine, so I thought of the Earth like a small town, that the Tourists had stopped over at like the General and his men. Then it was suddenly obvious to me.”

  He'd lost her in the turnings of his recollection now. “What was obvious?”

  “What had happened. What we needed. Suppose the General had stopped at a town with no wagons and left them one. It'd sure come in handy hailing things around. But if they didn't know how to fix it when the axles broke or the wheels came off, it would stay broken. And if they didn't know how to make another one, they'd be right back where they started.

  “And that's what had happened to us, only worse. The Gifts the aliens traded us had started failing, and we'd built them into our technology without ever learning how to maintain or make 'em. So we lost the technology that held out countries together, and it all crumbled down to where it is today.”

  “Why didn't they rebuild it, the way it was before the Tourists came? We still had the scientists and engineers, didn't we?”