Pathspace: The Space of Paths (35 page)

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.

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 telegraphy 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.

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 everything 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.