Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) (23 page)

Chapter 56

Kristana
: diets and probes

“To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.”

– Angela Davis

She was brushing her hair by the mirror when she heard the inner door to her quarters open.  She didn't turn her eyes from her reflection, however, because there was only one person she was expecting, and anyone else would have been announced by the sentry.  “You're late.”

Xander appeared next to the bed and leaned his staff against the wall.  “Sorry.  I was reading up on Islam.  I've never been to the Emirates, and I was wondering about something.”

She put down the brush.  “About what?”

“Ambassador Qusay and the new student Kareef.  They finished everything on their plates except the ham, which puzzled me.  Why everything else, if they weren't hungry?  Why not the ham, if they were?”

“I would have thought they'd devour fresh food after a long journey like that.  I guess they must have stopped to eat before they got to the city.'

“No, it's not that.” He sat down next to her gazing at their reflections in the mirror.  “I found a book on foreign customs.  In an excerpt about the founder of their religion, it said that he recommended eating what was edible and simply leaving, alone what was not.  If they don't like a particular food, it is considered more courteous not to comment on it, to just leave it on the plate.”

“So they don't like ham?”

“According to what I read, pigs are considered unclean animals, same as they are for Jews.  Probably a sensible precaution long ago, before refrigeration, because of trichinosis.”

“I'll have the staff make a note of it.”

He kissed her cheek.  “You seem tense.”

Kristana sighed.  “It's hard not to be, lately.  Aria's not sure she can go through with the wedding to the new Honcho.”

He cocked an eyebrow.  “Jeffrey?  He seems like a decent lad...and it was her idea in the first place, to seal the alliance.”

“Yes.  Except she's not in love with him.  You know, the ages-old idealism of youth.  Only marry for love, arranged marriages are awful, and so on.”

He caressed her hair.  “They could grow into love, in time.  Or does she find him unlovable?”

“I'm not worried about that.  The thing is, if she calls off the engagement, he'll lose face with his people and he might have to start another war with us to look strong and stay in power.  This alliance we have, it's a fragile thing.  His officer would much rather fight us than dicker.  For the foreseeable future, we'll always be just one coup away from another war.  Whether Jeffrey turns out to be a good ruler or not, we have to help him stay in power.”

He pulled her back on the bed with him.  “I think you need to let it go for now.  You can always worry about that tomorrow.'

No, you think you can calm me down with sex.  Men! 
She wasn't in the mood for it, but she let him kiss her before she spoke again.  “And now this ambassador from the Emirates.  Just one more thing to stack on top of the rest.  Why now?”

“I think they're curious about the school I'm starting.  You might be right to worry about that ambassador.  Qusay's a wizard...or whatever they call them in Dixie.'

She sat up at that. 
A wizard ambassador?
“Are you sure?'

“Positive.  I found out when I checked Kareef out to see if he had enough talent to be trainable.  He does, but Qusay's echo was much stronger.  Qusay's not just talented – he's trained.”

She frowned.  “I hadn't heard about wizards in the East.”

“Nor I.  Which tells me two things.  First, that whoever trained him has a secret organization.  If they were public and talked about, your operatives would have heard of it.”

“True.  What else?  You said two things.”

Xander looked grim for a moment.  “He's not the only one.  If they can afford to send a wizard to be an ambassador, they must have more like him.”  He paused.  “And that's not all.  If they have some sort of wizard school of their own, why send Kareef to study at mine?”

She regarded him.  “You tell me.'

“To find out how much we know.  If I know more than they do, the boy can pass it along.  If I don't, they can always finish his training when he goes back.”

“So you're saying he's like a spy.  What are you going to do?  Send him home?”

He grinned his wolfish grin.  “No, we'll train him.  His presence is an opportunity for us, too.”

She lay back, thinking.  “How?”

“Think about it.  We get to see one of their raw recruits
and
one of their experienced  graduates.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll learn more about them than they do about us.”

Chapter 57

Lester
: the more the merrier

“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

– Albert Einstein

Groaning, he sat on the edge of his bed.  Sleep had been neither easy nor adequate. The pain in his head was still throbbing, and he felt dizzy when he tried to stand up too quickly.  His coldbox had nothing but a half-empty bottle of cider.  He drained it and slipped on his gray robe, wincing as he belted a sash around his waist.  What time was it?  He'd better hurry down and grab some breakfast.  No, scratch that.  No hurrying today.

As he passed the new student's room, he paused to try a simple pathspace weave.  The throbbing in his skull increased, but  after a little effort he was able to see though the closed door.  Kareef was kneeling on a little rug he must have brought with him from the Emirates, bowing his forehead to the rug, his eyes closed.  Some kind of prayer, he supposed.

Lester released the weave and held his head in his hands, rubbing his temples.  After a few seconds the throbbing subsided back to its earlier level, and he continued on to the stairs.

He forced himself to go down the stairs slowly, but after a few steps he remembered something and went up the stairs instead, just as slowly.  When he reached the landing before the roof, he stopped and fought off another wave of dizziness when he saw a little red-brown spot on the wall where he must have hit his head.

He resisted the sudden urge to paw at his bandage, and knelt down to feel the floor, a suspicion taking form in his aching head.  His fingers touched something cold, and he gripped it as he straightened to his feet.  From the feel  of it, it was a metal pipe, about a foot or so long.  Probably one of the pipes the students were using to try to learn the swizzle weave.

But why was it invisible?

Frowning, he went back down and put it on his bed before continuing on to breakfast.

Xander was still eating.  Lester hated him, briefly, for looking so cheerful, but sat down next to him.

“How's your head?”

“Lousy.  I managed a little pathspace weave on the way down.  I managed it, but it made the pain worse.”

The older wizard studied him over the rim of his mug of cider as he sipped.  “Then lay off the weaving for a while.”

“How am I supposed to teach if I can't demonstrate?”

“So don't teach today.  I'll deal with the students.  Take it easy, catch up on your reading.”

Lester started to shake his head but stopped when the dizziness started again.  “Maybe later.”

Xander finished his food and set down his fork.  “You could head down to the ground level,” he suggested.  “If any more students arrive today you could check them out.  We've been lucky so far; every candidate has had the talent.  Sooner or later unqualified ones will turn up, and it would be nice if they didn't have to climb up all the stairs just to get turned down.  If no one shows up you can always take a walk, or wander around the stables.  You never know, you might think of something new we could do for the cavalry or the smith.”

“Maybe I'll do that,” he grunted. 

After breakfast he descended to street level.   With the throbbing in his head, it wasn't hard to make himself go slowly.  If only wizards could learn to heal.  He remembered Xander telling him about one of the Gifts of the Tourists called a “tissue regenerator” that had helped ruin the medical electronics industry.  Unfortunately, from what he'd heard, no one had seen a functioning one in a hundred years.  They'd been one of the first of the Gifts to start failing, back when civilization crashed.

It was too bad, because he could sure use one.  And if they soon had a bunch of kids scampering up and down these stairs, there'd be more accidents.  If his fall
was
an accident, that is.

He reached the ground floor and wandered around the stables, looking at the horses.  He couldn't see how pathspace could do anything for their tack, however, so he ambled to the front door, nodding to the guards as he passed through it and eyed the street.

The days were growing warmer.  Xander's coldbox spell was still keeping the ice in the middle of the road frozen, but the snow piled up against the buildings was beginning to melt.  He scooped up a handful, squeezed it into a slush ball and pressed it against his throbbing temple.  He leaned against the side of the building with his other hand before  a shooting pain reminded him of his sprained wrist.  He cursed and dropped the ice to steady himself with his good hand before he fell.

The rumbling of wagons and the clip clop of hooves on road made him look up.  More arrivals?  The wagons looked better-maintained than most, and the horses, when they came nearer, were the kind that he would associate with the phrase “noble steeds” in storybooks.  Definitely a well-off merchant, then.  They stopped in front of the building and a tall man in dark clothing climbed out of the lead wagon.  He halted and stared at the patch of ice in the road, and his head tilted to one side as if he were studying it.

Well, a lot of strangers did that the first time they saw it.  Lester felt a pricking of guilt that he hadn't figured out yet how to pull Xander's two thousand ton ice cube out of the tank pit.  Out of curiosity, he tried the transparency weave to see who or what was still inside the wagon.

His head throbbed and he saw double for a moment, then felt a strong echo...or was it two echoes?  The pain increased and he dropped the weave, but he was still shocked.  The man was a wizard!

No wonder he was interested in the ice.  He must know a coldbox spell when he saw one, especially one this big.  The man turned back to the wagon.  The door opened and a smaller figure emerged.  The two of them walked up to Lester.

“Good morning to you.  Is this the Governor's building?”

“It is indeed.  Nice wagons.  Have you come to trade?”

“No we just joined the caravan to get here.  My name is Isaac.  I've come here as ambassador from New Israel to establish diplomatic relations with Rado.  This is my son, Nathan.”  He peered at Lester.  “We heard the war with Texas was over.  Was I misinformed?”

“Oh, it's over all right, for a couple of months now.”  The question puzzled him, then he realized Isaac must be referring to his head bandage.  “Oh this?  It's nothing.  I just fell and hit my head yesterday.  I'm Lester.”

“Does it hurt?” Nathan asked.

He nearly shook his head, but remembered in time.  “Yes, but it's only bad when I try to move or think.  Welcome to Denver.  If you'll follow me I'll take you up to the Governor's offices.”

“Just a moment,” said Isaac.  “If you could point us to a stable first, I can tell the driver to head there so that the rest of the caravan can continue on to their regular stop.”

“No worries, Ambassador.  As it happens, we use the ground floor for our stables.”  At a word from him the two guards heaved open the huge double doors.  Isaac stepped back to the lead wagon and spoke to the driver before rejoining him and Nathan.

“Are you on the Governor's staff, Lester?”  Isaac asked.

“Me?  No, I just teach at Xander's school.”

Isaac nodded, as if this confirmed something he already knew. 
He must have had his senses out, studying the coldbox spell,
Lester thought.

Chapter 58

Kaleb
: the demonstration

He stared at his breakfast, trying to make himself eat it.  The plate held eggs, sausage, grilled potato wedges and a thick slice of well-buttered fresh-baked bread.  There was nothing wrong with the food.  It was far better than he'd eaten most of the time back in Angeles.

The problem was inside him.  Guilt gnawed at him more than hunger.  He'd obeyed her orders, but there was no pride in that.  These people were not his enemies.  They were feeding him, housing him, treating him better than the Queen ever had - and they teaching him  magic too.

How could he repay their generosity with sabotage?  He ought to put her ring back on tonight and tell her to take her orders and...and...

And what?  She still had his family.  He tried not to think about what she'd do to them if he refused to do as commanded.  It was all too easy to imagine his sister's screams.  They'd be just like so many he'd heard coming out of the palace.  He squeezed his eyes shut.
Don't think about it!

“Are you going to eat that?”

He opened his eyes and looked at Esteban.  “I guess I'm not that hungry today.  You want it?  Enjoy.”

He pushed himself away from the table and exited the cafeteria as fast as he could without drawing attention to himself.   What could he do?  He could refuse to put the ring on tonight, at least.  She wouldn't kill them just because he was out of contact for one day.  Would she?  All right, he couldn't get away with a month of silence, but he should be able to buy a day or two to think of something else.

Maintain.  He had to do that.  Get through the rest of the day, and then he should be able to get some sleep.  Or at least better than he did last night.

He plodded up the stairs.  Yes.  Lack of sleep from last night should make it all the easier to drop off tonight.  And maybe punishing himself by skipping breakfast was a lame sort of atonement, but at least he'd be even hungrier by lunchtime.  Then he would eat.  If the guilt would let him.

He dragged open the door to the main classroom floor. 

“...will need to focus not on the pipe, but on the space around and in the pipe.”  Xander turned at the sound of the door closing.  “Ah, there you are.  Where's Esteban?”

“Still finishing breakfast.  He must have awakened even later than me.  Where's Lester?”

“Taking the day off to recuperate.  Grab a pipe from the box and join us.”  Xander turned back to Carolyn and the new guy – what was his name again? - to continue.  “Lester worked out how to make a
swizzle
while he was a guest of the Honcho in a Texas prison.  It was a confidence-booster for him, and he and I agree that getting students to pass through the same experience will help you have the confidence to explore ideas and applications no one else has thought of.”

Kaleb extracted a pipe from the box in the corner and sat down next to Carolyn.  “What, you think we should all go to Texas and sit in a prison cell?”

The wizard frowned.  He fished a small clay pipe out of his pocket, pried a wooden plug out of its bowl and examined the contents before answering. “No,” he said. A pinpoint of brightness flashed inside the bowl and he puffed on it for a few seconds.

“What I mean is, the invisibility weave will always be the first task for students, and after that you'll have to pass the swizzle test before you go further.”

Kaleb sighed, and realized the other two were doing the same thing.  They'd been hoping the senior wizard would overrule Lester on that policy.  “That's a hard test.  Deflecting light isn't so hard, when it has no inertia and is always in motion.  But to make the air in a swizzle move?  How do we do that?”

“You've got it wrong.  You're imagining it wrongly, and that's what's holding you back.  Air is
always
in motion.  You don't have to make it move.”

Kaleb frowned again.  “Always?  Even when there's no wind?  How can that be?”

The older man stared at him.  “I can see we're going to have to add some basic physics to the curriculum.  It's my fault really; I keep forgetting you haven't been through the years of reading that I have.”

Kaleb shrugged. “Back in Angeles, I worked in a library for the Queen.  She had quite a few books on the science of the Ancients.   I tried to read them but they were full of strange symbols that didn't mean anything to me.  I don't see how any of that will help us learn magic.”

Xander shook his head.  “Not magic.  People are going to call you all wizards someday, like they do me and Lester, and say the things you do are magic.  But that's a sloppy way of thinking.  Myself, I prefer the term
psionic engineering,
which is more accurate, but maybe it will never catch on.  'Magic' is a word out of fairy tales, but people are comfortable with it, I guess.

“I call it psionic engineering because the Ancient word 'engineering' meant the application of knowledge to solve problems.  It comes from the old Latin noun
ingenium
which means 'cleverness' and the related verb
ingeniare
which means to contrive or devise.  Things the Ancient engineers built were called 'contrivances', 'devices', or simply
engines
.”

“What about the word
psionic
?”

“It refers to effects produced by the actions of the
psyche
, the mind or soul that runs your brain.  Put them together and the term
psionic engineering
means building or affecting things with your mind, not your hands, in order to solve problems.”

“Sounds like magic to me.”

“There was a man once called Arther C. Clarke who used to write stories about the future,' said Xander.  “Most people have never heard of him nowadays, but he had a lot of important ideas that he developed in his books.  One of those ideas, the geosynchronous satellite, spawned an entire communications industry that let the Ancients talk to anyone anywhere in the world.

“But to me, his most important contribution was something called Clarke's Third law: 'Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.'  An ignorant person might think a swizzle or an everflame is something magical, when in actuality, it's a
device
made by a psionic engineer.”

The newest student raised a hand.  Xander turned to him.  “Yes, Kareef?”

“This is all good to know, sir.  But I don't see how it will help us figure out how to make a swizzle.”

Xander nodded.  “You're right.  It would be wonderful if you all worked it out with no help at all, of course.  But even Lester had help.  I won't  try to do the work for you.  That would be like expecting you to grow muscles by watching me lift weights.”

“What kind of help did he have, sitting in prison?” Carolyn wanted to know.

“Help with his imagination,” the old wizard answered.  “Since this sort of thing is done with your mind, you have to be able to imagine the
pathspace
pattern in order to impose it on the space around the pipe.  That's a lot of wordiness so we just call it 'weaving' or sculpting the pathspace.  The first weave you learn is the one for concealment, the invisibility weave.  You accomplished it by imagining an alteration in the paths that light takes.”

He paused to puff on his pipe again and let that sink in.  “Making a swizzle is just another weave, a different one.  In order to do it, you have to imagine a particular pattern in pathspace.  If you do it in empty air, the effect will be brief.  If you do it to the space around a piece of matter, especially metal, it will last for a long time, because the metal helps to anchor the pattern.”

He looked around at all of them to see if they were paying attention.  Kareef had his hand up again.  “Yes?”

“Sir, people imagine things all the time.  Why is it that when an ordinary person imagines something, nothing actually happens, whereas when a wizard or
psionic engineer
imagines it, something does happen?”

“That's a good question.  What I believe is that the degree to which a mind is coupled with the space around it, especially the space outside your head, is what makes the difference.  It's like the difference between trying to push something with a feather and pushing it with a stick.  Your minds are more strongly coupled to the space outside your body, so they push harder, like the stick.  Ordinary people push with feathers, so almost nothing happens.”

Carolyn imitated Kareef and raised her hand until Xander nodded at her.  “So we have to push the air inside the pipe to make it a swizzle?”

“No,” he said.  “The Ancients thought maybe people could learn to do that.  They called it
telekinesis
, 'distance-moving', or
psychokinesis
, 'mind-moving', but they never had much luck with it.  Why?  Because they were going about it the wrong way.  You can't move things with your mind.  If you could, you wouldn't need muscles to make your bones move.

“But by focusing in a region of space and imagining the right weave, the right pattern, you
can
make things happen.  Not by trying to push the matter, the air in the pipe.  You do it by pushing the space itself, the part of it you are trying to impose a different pattern on.”  He paused.  “Since we are trying to make a pattern of motion, the part of space you will be affecting is the
pathspace
– the part that tells any matter in that space what paths to follow.  Once you do that, and the metal anchors the pattern, the change in
pathspace
will affect any matter in it.  That's why a swizzle can move air, water, sand, whatever gets into its range of effect.”

“So all we need is the right pattern?” she said.

“Yes,” said the wizard.  “Well, almost.  Knowing the right pattern wouldn't help an ordinary person, what the old magic stories might have called a
mundane
.  To a wizard, however, yes, knowing the right pattern should enable you to do the weave.  Once you know the pattern, the weave, for a swizzle, you'll always be able to make one.”

Kaleb lifted his hand.  “How did Lester learn the right pattern, cut off from contact with you in his prison cell?”

Xander smiled.  “It was a happy accident.  He saw something that gave him the clue.  So to be fair, I'm going to show you all the same thing, as soon as Esteban joins us.”

As if on cue, the stairwell door opened and Esteban entered and sat on the carpet next to Kaleb.  Xander tried to catch him up while the other students tried not to fidget.

Kaleb, for his part, was almost oblivious to Xander's summing up.  He was caught up in the realization that everything the Queen did to control people and inspire fear came from her having picked up the right patterns to imagine.  Her little trick with the unrolling carpet was not so hard to understand now.  The carpet wasn't obeying her.  It was just obeying the weave her mind set up in the pathspace when she imagined it happening.

If he could learn the right weaves, he could be as powerful as she was, with a little practice.  No wonder she never set up a School of her own to teach these things!  If he could match her power, he'd never have to live in fear again.

“Here comes the hint,” said Xander.  “Watch closely, because I'm only going to show you once, because that's all the help Lester got.”

He took a draw on his pipe, held it, then made an 'O' of his mouth and blew a perfect smoke ring.