Pathspace: The Space of Paths (38 page)

That was fast, of course, but not nearly as
fast as the air shooting out the back of the swizzle. Since the
pipe was tilted over at an angle, and a lot of that air had to be
moving downwards, or, as Xander would have said, its velocity had
to have a strong component in the downwards direction to keep them
in the air. So it was roaring out of the pipe at more than a
hundred miles an hour. He was glad it wasn't much more than that;
they had none of the stickum Xander used on his staff to get a
better grip on it.

As they sped toward Denver in the northwest,
the green countryside of East Texas faded to the yellow-white of
West Texas, where higher elevations combined with fewer rivers to
parch the land into semi-desert. The verdant lawns and cultivated
fields were vanishing behind them, decaying to the scrub-dotted
waste of the west. It was evidently Xander's plan to more or less
follow the Red River, the traditional northern boundary between the
Lone Star Empire and Okla, and then turn almost due north when they
got to Amarillo.

Before they left the Red River behind,
however, he spied Xander and the other stranger coming in for a
landing. This would be interesting, because Lester has never landed
one of these before. Before they whizzed by the other two, he made
his pipe imitate their pipes, deftly reshaping the flowlines so
that it turned vertical again, then unwinding the pattern around
the pipe enough to let them sink toward the ground in a controlled
descent rather than a lethal drop.

By the time his feet kissed the ground the
other end of him wanted to do the same thing. Xander and the man
with him had left their swizzles on the bank of the river and gone
off their separate ways into the bushes to relieve bladders.
Lester's pelvic area had been numbed by the humming vibration of
the pipe, but after he dismounted, sensation returned and he found
himself a bush.

When he returned, it was time for
introductions. This was awkward, for although he finally learned
that their party's third member was a priest whose name was Father
Andrews.

The atmosphere in the room
was tense, to put it mildly. If it were the cable on a ballista you
could have used it to shoot the moon.. She wasn't sure whether that
was because they didn't know what to say, and knew she was
expecting them to say
something
...
or because they
did
know what to
say, and knew she wouldn't like hearing it.

Colonel Thanh was the first to finally speak
up. “Madame Governor,” he said, “is this a serious question? If it
is a joke, you deadpanned it well. I can see my comrades are too
terrified to laugh.”

“
I am totally serious,
Colonel. I'm open to any suggestions you have as to how to defend
ourselves against the weapons described.”

He glanced at the others. “Is this some sort
of training exercise? What you are talking about has not been seen
in any of our lifetimes.”

“
Nevertheless,” she said,
“we may shortly be facing them.”

“
But you're talking about
things of the Ancients! Things out of legends!” protested one of
the majors. “Tanks? Armored personnel carriers? Self-propelled
guns? Even if they really existed once, no one has anything like
that now.”

“
The Honcho does. His men
have uncovered a long-buried armory with well-preserved examples of
these legends. The report from the spies I sent to Abilene confirms
it.”

There was murmuring around the table at
this. Thanh tried again. “With respect, Madame Governor, have you
considered the possibility that your operatives have been used to
feed you disinformation? People have been known to change sides.
Perhaps this is intended to make us waste our time instead of
preparing for their actual attack.”

“
Colonel, I trust my
people. Two of them died getting this report out to me.”

“
But … why weren't we
informed earlier?”

“
Because until recently,
it was only hypothetical. These self-propelled devices use a kind
of fuel that has not been available for a long time. Since they are
very heavy, it would be impractical to pull them here with horses.
“

“
However...?” he
prompted.

“
However, we have reason
to believe that he has found a way to produce fuel for them.” She
then rapidly explained about the Gifts the Honcho had received from
the Church. How he was now able to pull oil out of the old wells,
and “crack” off the gasoline and other components as needed. “This
all means that, in all probability, he will be using these weapons
to expand his empire. And we will be his logical first
target.”

“
Why us?” This from the
major who had already spoken. “I've seen a report that he's only
the Honcho because his older brother was killed by the Queen of
Angeles. Why wouldn't he use them against her first?”

“
For three reasons,” she
replied, ticking them off on her fingers. “First, she is much
farther away from him than we are, requiring more fuel to reach, so
although he undoubtedly has plans to assault Californ, we will come
first in his list of targets. Second, he will have to cross the
Mojave Desert,which is tough on wheeled vehicles of any kind, not
to mention his men. And third, because we have gold mines and he
doesn't. The expansion of the Lone Star Empire will require a much
larger army, an army that must be equipped, trained, fed …
and
paid
. He can buy supplies from
his trading partners, but he will need gold to get the quantities
he needs for his ambitions. And we are the closest
source.”

Heads nodded. Empires rise and fall like
sand castles on a tide-swept beach, but one thing rulers always
want is gold.

Of all of her tutors, she liked Mrs.
Timberstone the best. Old as the hills but sill spry enough to
surprise you, Mrs. Allison Timberstone (or “Allie” if you were so
fortunate to have gained membership to that minority of the human
race) was one of those few elderly that did not spend a lot of
their time complaining or bragging about their infirmities. She was
serene in a way that Aria wanted to be someday, and it wasn't by
being famous, wealthy, or popular.

What Mrs. Timberstone taught was difficult
to define. She liked to describe it as “filling in the bits your
other teachers left out” which was a fair if vague description of
it. Today's lesson seemed to be about something called
Archetypes.

Very little wind stirred the dust on the top
of the building. The day was surprisingly warm, with no clouds at
all yet, and so they had moved to the roof to enjoy the fresh air
and the sunshine before the cold heart of Winter began beating.
Mrs. Timberstone shook out a blanket and they sat on it as she drew
something rectangular from her satchel. It was a deck of cards, but
not like any cards Aria had ever seen. The cards were old, but
hardly wrinkled, and they reflected the sunlight as if sheathed in
glass.

“
Plastic laminate,” Mrs.
Timberstone explained without explaining. “Something the Ancients
developed that is proof against water and dirt.”

Aria felt awed. “You're saying this's from
before the Fall?”

“
Handed down in my family.
My mother gave it to me.”

“
Has my mother seen
it?”

“
Of course. I taught the
governor, back when she was your age. Now pay attention. You know
that the cards people use to play games are very old, going back
more than a thousand years. The design of this deck is not as old
as the usual decks, though even though the actual cards themselves,
their physical manifestation, are older than the ones people use
these days. The design was done by a man named A. E. Waite,
although it used to be known as the Rider pack.”

“
Did you play games with
them when you were a girl?”

“
Not like you think. They
were not designed for games. They were made to encode and preserve
certain concepts. People have used them to tell fortunes, for which
purpose they are better than the ordinary, everyday
deck.”

The deck had four suits like the ordinary
cards Aria had seen and played with, but in this deck the suits
were called Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles, which, Mrs.
Timberstone explained, corresponded to the ordinary Clubs, Spades,
Hearts, and Diamonds.

It was larger than the usual deck of 52
cards. Each suit had an additional Court card, called the Page.
Aria asked about it, and learned page was an ancient word for an
assistant of sorts. So each suit ran from one to ten, then the
Page, Prince, Queen and King. But there were still more cards left
in her hand after she dealt all these out on the blanket.

“
What are those other
cards?” she asked. “Jokers?”

Mrs. Timberstone laughed. “No, dear. Those
are the most important part of this set. They are called the Major
Arcana. It means 'great secrets' and they are the Archetypes I
wanted to talk about today.”

“
What's an archetype? I
know in the Church an archbishop is higher than a
bishop.”

“
An archetype,” said Mrs.
Timberstone, dangerously close to launching into lecture mode, “is
a common model, a type that we all share unconsciously. A universal
pattern in our heads – a concept that we recognize in many forms
that all have the same set of associations. For example, what do a
bear's cave, a bird's nest, and a gopher's burrow all have in
common?”

“
They're all
homes?”

“
Exactly right. The
outward form of a home might not be the same, but we still
recognize that it is a home – somewhere where something or someone
lives. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana are archetypes like
that. For example, here is the first one, numbered zero in some
traditions and one in others: the Fool.”

“
So he is the archetype of
idiots? Or is it suicides – he's about to step off a
cliff!”

Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “Not really. The
Fool represents the beginning of a quest, the beginning of wisdom
which is the realization that we know nothing, as Socrates said,
and the willingness to leap into the unknown to acquire experience.
He's pictured here as a vagabond, and the bag tied to his stick
represents the baggage we can't help carrying along for the
journey: our preconceptions and hopes and worries.”

She dealt out the next card. “This is the
Magician. In the older decks he was called the Juggler. You can see
a sword, cup and pentacle on the table in front of him, and a wand
in his hand. There are many ways to interpret this card. He
represents the transformation of ideas into actuality, a magical
process. As he points his wand skyward, his other hand is pointing
down at the ground, encoding the ancient saying “as above, so
below.”

Aria's brow wrinkled. “What does that
mean?”

“
The correspondence of
patterns at many levels of existence. As the Earth orbits the sun,
so the electrons in an atom can be said to orbit the nucleus. Light
radiates from the sun, just as light radiates from a candle here on
earth.”

A thought struck Aria. “Magician is another
word for Wizard, so it represents Xander too, doesn't it?”

“
Of course.” She dealt
another card.

Aria, who was beginning to get the hang of
this, recognized the next archetype immediately. “The High
Priestess is you! A guardian and transmitter of secrets.”

Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “In a way, yes, I
suppose so. You picked up on that even faster than your mother did.
I can see your father's influence. You inherited strength and
quickness of mind from both your parents.”

“
Did you teach the
General, too?”

Something flitted over the teacher's
features. “Um. No, I hadn't come to Denver back then.” She turned
over more cards. “The Empress, and the Emperor.”

“
She reminds me of my
mother, but more relaxed. He ought to remind me of the General,”
said Aria, “but for some reason he reminds me more of the Honcho.
Especially since he calls his country an Empire, and mother doesn't
say that about Rado.”

“
Remember that,” Mrs.
Timberstone advised. “It is a significant difference between them.
Often what we call something says more about us than it does about
the thing itself.” She laid down another card. “The
Hierophant.”

“
He reminds me of the
Pope.”

“
And for a very good
reason. In older versions of the Tarot, he is called the Pope. He
is often taken to represent organized religion, or religious
authorities.”

A deep humming filled the air, like a cloud
of giant bumblebees. As Aria jumped to her feet, Mrs. Timberstone,
who recognized the sound immediately, scooped up the cards on the
blanket before they could be blown away. Aria shaded her eyes with
her hand and peered around the horizon, finally spotting three
objects approaching.

The roaring grew as they tilted up over the
roof and went vertical to land. Lester was the first to do so.
Xander came down more slowly, and at the same time as the third
rider, who looked, improbably, like a lost priest on a
broomstick.

The blanket surfed off to the side and Mrs.
Timberstone chased it, managing to step on a corner before it was
swept off the rooftop. She turned to Xander. “I can't believe
you're still doing that!”