Pathspace: The Space of Paths (46 page)

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 not 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,
though 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.