Pathspace: The Space of Paths (37 page)

The protesters had already covered the back
entrance. The prison Alessandro Martinez had built here was not as
large as he had expected.

It did not need to be, in an Empire where
those who defied the established order were never forced to endure
long imprisonments. Those detained here usually came out again,
briefly. The gallows was just to the side of the front
entrance.

He eyed the scaffold. By
acting this way, even
I
could be
said to be defying the established order. One of the faithful would
have decried such sentiments. He could imagine their
rebuttal:
but Holiness, you
are
the established order!
And in a sense, that was true. But the execution he planned
was not sanctioned by secular authority. And in truth, this was not
a thing that he wanted to secular authority to enact. There were
no
secular
charges against the
accused, this apprentice. The only reason he was here was because
he had been with the wizard who had captured the Honcho's scouting
party.

But if released, he might someday become a
wizard himself.

“
Holiness?”

With a start he realized he was
woolgathering again. His driver and the leaders of the crowd were
looking to him for permission to begin. He nodded, and they began
pounding on the front door. “Bring out the sorcerer!” they
cried.

Hoofbeats behind him made him turn. His
Excellency, the Honcho, ruler of the Lone Star Empire was hurtling
down the street, closely pursued by four guards and the Runt. They
drew up on the edges of the crowd that surrounded the front of the
prison.

“
What the
fuck
do you think you're doing,
Ricky?”

He smiled sadly, ignoring the profanity.
“What you wouldn't, Excellency. Exorcising the demon you've kept
alive and fed.”

Peter glared down at him from his horse,
which whinnied at all the torches in front of it. “He's no demon
and you know it. Just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Call this off, now, before you make matters worse.”

“
The man inside these
walls,” said the Pontiff, raising his voice for the crowd, “is
tainted with alien sorcery! He would spread it if allowed, bringing
down the wrath of God that struck down the Ancients for their
arrogance and impurity. If he truly wants to be like the Tourists,
then he needs to go as they have gone.”

The Honcho lowered his voice. “You know I
can't allow this. I can't let mob rule replace the rule of law.
Stop this now. It can't end well.”

Enrique regarded him. “What are you going to
do about it?” he asked, his voice calm and brimming with
self-assurance. “Are you going to have your men shoot me? Shoot the
Pope, in front of a hundred witnesses? They'd tear you to pieces.”
He jerked his head toward the crowd. “Or will you have your men
fire into the crowd?”

The Honcho's eyes narrowed. “The Army's on
the way to surround this entire block,” he said. “If your people
don't disperse quietly, they'll all be arrested.”

Yes, exactly
, he
thought.
My people. Not yours. You are only the caretaker
of their bodies, but I am God's chosen to defend their souls.
“We both know you can't afford to turn the Church
against you, Excellency.”

At this moment the guards inside the prison
decided to open the front doors. They swung outwards, revealing men
with loaded crossbows. The Honcho seized upon this pause to bellow
a warning. “Who wants to die first? Everyone clear out now, by God,
or – “

BOOM!
An explosion like a burst of cannon fire surprised
everyone.

Enrique opened his mouth to condemn using
cannon on unarmed civilians, when a sudden roar of wind was sucked
into the open door of the prison. It blew out dozens of the torches
in the crowd as if they were mere candles on a birthday cake, and
knocked the guards at the entrance backwards like pins scatted by a
bowling ball.

Movement above the roof of the prison drew
his eye, and those of others, upwards. A figure burst upwards, then
curved towards the crowd like tossed confetti. In seconds it
plummeted and crashed into a couple of the protesters.

After the moment of shocked silence which
followed, the tangled figure groaned and extricated itself from the
ones who had dropped their torches. His Holiness stepped forward
into the crowd, which parted before the spectacle of his bone-white
vestments as he advanced.

The human projectile looked up at him. He
appeared to notice the significance of his whiteness. “Well, hello
there,” the man said. “That didn't work out exactly as I'd planned.
Am I late for my execution?”

His Holiness was not the only person pushing
into the open space win the crowd. Two gray-haired men shoved their
way in One of these was dressed in gray, and sported a matching
beard and a staff. The other was smooth-shaved and looked like a
threadbare priest, and was lugging two lengths of pipe with
him.

“
There you are,” said the
bearded one. “Are you ready to leave, or would you rather stay here
and chat with His Holiness?”

The escapee stared at the bearded one for a
second or two and rubbed his eyes as if they were watering, or as
if he thought he was seeing things. “If you're leaving, then I
suppose I should tag along,” he said. “Is one of those for me?”

The one who looked like an old priest handed
him one of the pipes. “Xander said you'd know what to do with
this,” he remarked.

Enrique heard a hissing that grew into a
deep-throated roaring or humming sound. Before his astonished gaze,
the bearded one and the priest hugged their pipe and staff as if
climbing poles, and rose into the air, scattering a cloud of dust
below them from the street. The other followed them, clasping his
pipe awkwardly, making even more noise as he ascended.

They were gone in a matter of seconds.

Enrique turned and saw Peter on his horse
behind him. “Was that your prisoner, the apprentice we've been
arguing about?”

Peter exhaled. “I'm afraid so. Looks like
he's learned more than I thought, Holiness. Maybe I should have
handed him over, after all.”

Enrique blinked. “It appears that the
transaction we had discussed is not possible,” he said. “But in
view of the circumstances,. I guess I'll have to give you what you
need, anyway. And may God help us all.”

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.