Pathspace: The Space of Paths (29 page)

“
True,” he said. “But
that's not the point of this exercise. The task is to take all of
the given factors into account and to render an accurate result,
which in this case is the amount of corn left sixty days after
harvest. You've left out the spoilage due to mice, so your result
is unreasonably optimistic.”

She surprised him with a curse, because he
was right. “But it's still unreasonable even if I include it,” she
said. “What about insects? What about pilfering by vagabonds? What
if an army takes it all – or burns it?”

“
Those were not included
in the givens,” he said.

“
But they do happen. And
in any real situation, the people evaluating this for me will
include such factors if they are known or can be predicted. If I'm
to be Governor, I won't be doing the scribbling – they will. So
what's the point of my practicing it?”

“
People will supply you
with numbers when they can be calculated, and estimates when they
cannot, true enough. But how will you know that the numbers you are
given are accurate? How will you be able to tell if budgets are
padded, if estimates are exaggerated?”

“
I'll employ people who
know their jobs, and replace them if they don't,” she
said.

“
You'll still have to be
able to do some of the estimating yourself,” he said. “You can't
always afford to wait until they're proved wrong to replace them.
When you order an army into the field, you have to know in advance
what it will cost to keep them there.”

“
That's the job of the
quartermasters,” she retorted.

Chang sighed. “You're missing the point,” he
said. “Suppose your army's quartermasters know that it will require
one thousand bushels of grain to feed the troops for a month. Their
knowing will mean nothing, if you only have five hundred bushels in
silos.” He pointed at the chalk-covered board. “These numbers are
made up. But in an actual situation they will be crucial. Ordering
your army to do things it doesn't have the resources to do will
only frustrate them and make them resentful. Politics has been
called 'the art of the possible' for good reasons. To expect the
impossible is to invite defeat.”

She wished her mother would come in and
interrupt this lesson, as she had done a few times in the past. Too
much more of this and she would scream. She felt like screaming
now. She knew there was truth to what Chang was saying. But
falsehood also. The examples were arbitrary, not really as
reasonable as they seemed. An army could forage. They could hunt.
And of course they could obtain crops from the fields of the enemy,
if they were in enemy territory.

She felt as if they were asking too much of
her and at the same time not giving her enough to do what they
asked. In a real situation should would have to be able to trust
her people, else she and they were doomed. Yet these exercises were
to be done all by herself, as if she were alone on a battlefield!
Madness.

Furthermore, it wasn't the way her mother
had been prepared for her rule. Why weren't they letting her spend
time reviewing troops, touring installations, observing troop
training exercises? It was as if her mother were trying to redo her
own past, to make her daughter into the kind of leader she wasn't,
a knower of all instead of a maker of decisions.

After Jeffrey left and closed the door
behind him, Lester laid the metal tube on the floor of his cell and
contemplated it, trying to decide what he should do. Doing nothing
was not an option.

He could refuse to cooperate, of course, but
that would lead to his death at the hands of the Church
executioners and wouldn't help Rado. It would be a gesture of
defiance and nothing more, a pointless death that would accomplish
nothing for him, nothing for the Governor, and something for the
TCC (the discouragement of inquiry).

He could cooperate with the Honcho: find a
way to make whatever the ruler of Texas needed. This would prolong
his life, at the cost of endangering his countrymen. He had a
feeling that the Honcho's desires were connected with his aim to
expand the Empire. He did not believe the Honcho was a monster, but
it was clear that if he were willing to trade a human life for
something, that something must be something he desperately needed
for his dreams of conquest.

Lester couldn't accept sacrificing himself
for nothing, but he would despise himself if he aided a tyrant.
There had to be a third way. And it had to involve escape for him,
because he couldn't do anything to help Rado from inside this
cell.

While he thought these thoughts, he tossed
the tube from hand to hand, feeling its weight, its solidity. Yet
is was probably lighter than that apple he had seen Xander make
float from his hand back to the table. He had no idea how the
wizard had done that, but he knew that it could be done. Perhaps he
would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how.

For now, he had to get to work on trying to
make a swizzle. He had no doubt that the Honcho would not wait
forever before consigning him to the merciless arms of the
Church.

Everybody who knew anything about swizzles
knew that they sucked in one end and blew out the other. Another
way of saying this was that in the middle, the working fluid moved
in one direction. Air, water, or whatever was in front of that
motion was pushed out of the way, and similarly the motion pulled
more in at the back to make up for what was lost going out the
front.

No matter how he tried, however, he could
not make the tube work by imagining the air in the middle moving
along the axis of the tube. There was more to it than that. If his
hand could somehow fit inside the tube, pushing it forward would do
the trick, but only once, and then somehow he would have to get his
hand back into its original position in the middle of the tube.
Simply moving it backwards would negate the progress achieved –
he'd push the air in the other direction.

A rotor pump could get around this
difficulty, he knew, by putting a sort of waterwheel in the middle
of the tube, where the wheel would be turned by an external crank
and its paddles would push the air forward, rather than the reverse
that happened in a miller's waterfall. But somehow he had to
accomplish that without altering the shape of the tube or
installing a wheel. Somehow the motion had to be continuous, and in
only one direction.

He tried mentally pushing, mentally pulling,
mentally squeezing the tube, and nothing worked. He was still at it
when he heard a key in the door and the guard brought him dinner: a
crust of bread, a cup of water, and a dubious-looking sausage.

The guard, whose named he learned was
Patrick, was a grizzled old veteran whose career was plainly
winding down, to be assigned this duty. He liked being a prison
guard about as much as Lester liked being in prison. After he swung
open the door and put the wooden tray on the floor, he pulled a
hand-rolled cigarette from behind an ear and lit it from the torch
he was holding with his other hand.

“
That's a stupid habit,”
Lester told him.

Patrick grinned a half-sneer at him. “Not as
stupid as being in a prison cell,” he said. He took a long drag of
smoke into his lungs without coughing, stared into Lester's eyes,
and with studied indifference, blew a smoke ring at him. Then he
turned with a laugh and took his leave.

Lester stared at the smoke ring and stopped
breathing, afraid to disturb it. After a moment, the gust from the
slammed door struck it and it unraveled into wispy fragments. But
he could still see it in his mind's eye. It was a collection of
circular paths. The particles of smoke had gone round and round,
not spreading out aimlessly, but following a rigid pattern.

And in the center of that pattern all of the
particle of smoke had been moving forward. They moved forward
together as a circle, then the circle expanded, turned around, came
back together, and moved forward again, over an over.

It was exactly the configuration of
pathspace he had been looking for.

He ignored his supper and picked up the tube
again. What he needed was a longer version of the smoke ring – a
donut stretched to look like a cylinder, curving back on
itself.

He had been going at it
all wrong! He'd been thinking linearly, imagining pushing the air
in one direction down the length of the tube, when what he needed
was for the air to go
around
the
tube, like threads through the holes in a shirt button. Through and
out the front and around and back in the back and through again.
The unidirectional lines he'd been imagining inside the tube were
only the straightest part of a path that curved around on
itself.

He visualized a circle of air in the center
of the tube. Pictured it moving forward, tracing out a straight
pathspace until it emerged, than spilling out over the end of the
tube and curving back down the outside before curving back into the
rear of the tub and returning to its previous position.

To see this better in his mind he held the
tube with one end facing him, a few inches away. The circle tracing
out the stretched smoke-ring path came toward him, curled back,
slid away, bent in, entered the back, and came toward him again.
Over and over again he imagined the pathspace, making the
configuration clear in his mind, setting his intention and his
expectation of it – trying to reshape the pathspace near the
tube.

And he began to feel a breeze blowing in his
face.

His heart raced. It was working! Not very
strongly, but it was working! All by himself, he'd made a weak
swizzle. He'd solved the puzzle, learned how to make one of the
Gifts of the Tourists. Now all he had to do was make it stronger,
and learn how to control it.

Music drifted from across
lake Austin. The early Winter Cotillion was in full swing, with the
debs and swains of various Houses strutting their stuff under the
watchful eyes of senior Empire aristocrats. The Honcho leaned on
the rail of his veranda and remembered a simpler time in his life,
when his main worries revolved around the cut of his jacket, the
proper form for acknowledging the interest of a débutante without
seeming too eager, and the best way to filch half-consumed (yet
many times refilled) glasses when their possessors were distracted
by the nubility around them.
Yes, there was a time when I
believed that as the younger son, not even the Runt, that I'd be
free to enjoy the idle life of an aristo: riding, drinking, dancing
my life away until I joined the ghost riders. And then Frank rode
rode off to reason with the Queen of Angeles.

Katerina's hand touched his arm, rousing him
from his reverie. “Remembering the good old days, before you met
me?” she asked, smiling.

He smiled back. “The 'good
old days'
began
when I met you,” he
said, reaching out to pull her against him. They'd both put on
weight over the years, but she was still a fine figure of a woman.
“I was thinking about Frank. His optimism is the real reason that I
became Honcho, you know.”

“
Ah, poor Frank. My sister
had high hopes for him, all dashed when that horrible woman sent
back his head. A perfect example why women shouldn't be
rulers.”

He pretended surprise. “My
dear, I'm, shocked. I remember a time when you used to point to her
as an example that women
can
rule.
You used to be quite a scandal in your family, with all your
youthful insistence that women can be more than just mothers and
wives. There were some in my father's circle who were glad I was
only the second son, and not the heir apparent. They feared you'd
make Texas a matriarchy.”

She drew back her head, and laughed. “Small
chance of that! Complaints about one's own country are common in
the young, but they often fade in the illuminating discoveries
about conditions in other regions. The Dixie Emirates, for example.
Their women are even less free socially than we are here, I'm told.
I'm glad not to have been born into one of those places.”

“
Not as glad that I am you
weren't,” he said. “Your legs would be a lot harder to see in what
they make their women wear. And your veil would get in the way,” he
added, leaning forward to kiss her.

“
I don't see how they bear
it,” she remarked when her lips were free again. “All that flowing
linen must make them swelter terribly in Atlanta. I hear it gets
beastly hot there.”

“
Oh, I don't know,” he
said. “I've heard the robes wick away perspiration and use
evaporation to cool the wearer.”

“
While they dry up like
raisins. No thank you.” She shaded her eyes with one hand and
peered across the lake. “Is Jeffrey there?”

He frowned. “No. Perhaps he ought to be, but
I asked him to join us for dinner.”

“
Oh, Peter,” she chided.
“Not more talk about your war? He needs a wife.”

“
There'll be time enough
for that,” he grunted. “But the needs of the Empire come
first.”

“
Your needs, you mean.”
She abandoned her peering and glanced at him sideways. “Do we have
to fight Rado now? Why this need to expand? Why can't we be content
with what we have?”

He gazed out across the lake, but his eyes
were turned inward, seeing only Frank's head in a box. “Because we
can't,” he said. “We have a lot of territory, but most of it is
practically desert, except for East Texas. We shouldn't have to be
so dependent on trade for foodstuffs.”