Pathspace: The Space of Paths (36 page)

“
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.

“
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?”

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.