Pathspace: The Space of Paths (47 page)

“But the skies were too big to imagine, so I
thought of the Earth like a small town, that the Tourists had
stopped over at like the General and his men. Then it was suddenly
obvious to me.”

He'd lost her in the turnings of his
recollection now. “What was obvious?”

“What had happened. What we needed. Suppose
the General had stopped at a town with no wagons and left them one.
It'd sure come in handy hailing things around. But if they didn't
know how to fix it when the axles broke or the wheels came off, it
would stay broken. And if they didn't know how to make another one,
they'd be right back where they started.

“And that's what had happened to us, only
worse. The Gifts the aliens traded us had started failing, and we'd
built them into our technology without ever learning how to
maintain or make 'em. So we lost the technology that held out
countries together, and it all crumbled down to where it is
today.”

“Why didn't they rebuild it, the way it was
before the Tourists came? We still had the scientists and
engineers, didn't we?”

He smiled a sad smile. “Great question. The
answer is twofold. First, we still had scientists but their
workshops were all funded and maintained by the countries and large
corporations. You don't find a scientist or an engineer making a
fusion reactor in his basement. Those sorts of efforts take money,
and lots of it, and mostly only the governments and corporations
had that kind of money. When the technology broke down, and chaos
descended upon the lands, with panic, starvation and disease,
without the means of transporting large amounts of food or medicine
around, governments fell and countries splintered into city-states
and kingdoms. The paper and 'electronic' money they were using
became useless without the governments to back it up, and the Fall
kept falling. Lot of people died. Without large populations to tax,
what remained in the way of local governments were poor. A poor
government doesn't support much in the way of research and
development. It concentrates on defending itself from other
gangs.

“The only dependable transportation was
horses, and so blacksmiths became important again, but the
factories, the laboratories, and the schools that trained
specialists for them all vanished like the big countries. Instead
of huge and great, all we had was a lot of small and simple. We
survived as a species, at the cost of going backwards into the way
of life we'd had centuries before.

“I lay there thinking about these things,
and I thought about what little I'd learned about the Gifts, like
how to make a swizzle and control it without touching it, and
suddenly I realized that if I could learn this, if I could learn
how to make and maintain the Gifts, then I, and anyone who could
learn what I knew, was what we needed to build our civilization. I
didn't see anyone else doing it, so it appeared that it all
depended on me.”

Aria smiled. “Sounds like a lot for a
twenty-year old to be taking on.”

“Oh, it was. I knew that one man, wandering
about making a swizzle here and there, wasn't enough to get the
momentum going. It was going to take dozens, hundreds, thousands of
people like me. That's when I first had the idea of setting up a
school to train them.”

“Just one school? For the entire world?”

“No, you're right. Even a whole school full
of us wouldn't be enough. But it would be a start. And some of the
people I trained could go off and start their own schools. It might
take a hundred years, maybe two hundred. But even that would be
better than the two
thousand
years it took us the first
time, going from horse-drawn carts to automobiles and airplanes. So
then and there, that starry night, I dedicated myself to it. Well,
to two things, actually. To founding a school, and staying near
your mother and the General.”

He laughed at the folly of youth. “The next
day I finished walking to the next town and found the local
blacksmith. He was rolling some pipe for a well a local farmer
needed to sink. I showed him how I could make a swizzle for his
forge that was better than a hand-pumped bellows, and in return for
that and a few hours work helping him with his work, I got a short
length of pipe. And I waited.

“Sure enough, the General and his men and
Kristana came riding into Panning that afternoon. They hadn't
started out as early as I thought they would. He'd bought a few too
rounds too many, and he was probably slower setting out than he
would have preferred. But he got there, and when he did, I was
waiting for him. When he swung down off his horse, I was there by
the watering trough. “General,” I said, “you don't know it yet, but
you need my help and I need yours.”

Xander shook his head. “If I had any more
sense, I might have been afraid to say anything. But I was young,
in love, and now I had my own Dream, different from his, maybe, but
not incompatible with it.

“He just stared at me with a little smile.
'Colorado needs good men,' he said. 'Do you have a horse and a
bow?' No, I said, but I have something none of your men have. He
looked like he was about to laugh. 'And what's that?' he asked me.
Magic, I said.

“I showed him the length of pipe I had,
maybe a foot long, barely wide enough to stick your thumb in it. I
stuck it in the watering trough and nothing happened. 'Son,' he
said to me, 'I've seen metal pipe before. Blacksmithing might seem
like magic, but it isn't.”

“I know, I said. But have you ever seen
anyone do this before? And I concentrated on the pipe in my hand,
made it into a swizzle, and stuck one end of it into the water
again. This time the water shot up out of it making a little
fountain. It splashed me, of course, but I didn't care, because by
then I really had his attention. He looked at that little fountain
I was holding. Then he looked a me. His eyes were a little wider
now. 'Now
that
is magic,' he said. 'What else can you
do?'

“I don't know, I told him. But I know I can
can learn more, and I can probably teach others, too. For that I
need a patron, someone to help me build a school. I've heard your
dream, and I'm ready to tell you mine. Want to have magic working
for you?”

“He was still staring at the swizzle, but he
heard me. So were his men. 'Let's go inside and talk about it,
wizard,' he said.

“Sitting around a table, we did. 'What do
you want, for pay, a bag of gold? I have to warn you, I'm not a
rich man,' he said.

“Fresh from the commune, knowing little of
money, I told him no, I didn't need any gold. All I need, I told
him, is a roof over my head, food to stay alive, and time to myself
to learn as much as I can about this magic. And when I'm ready, a
school to teach it to others.

“He smiled at that and looked at his men.
'Anything else?'

“Yes, I told him, after a moment's thought.
Any bits of the old magic that your men find, that I might be able
to learn from, and any of the old books they run across, I want
those. Deal?

“I'll never forget his handshake. I could
feel the strength he still had then, long before the consumption
took him. 'Son,' he said, 'I think you'd better come with me to
Denver.'”

Xander sighed. “And that's when two dreams
came together, and I became the court wizard to the government of
Rado. I still haven't built my school, though I got everything else
that I wanted.”

“Like being with my mother.”

He dropped his gaze. “Yes,” he whispered.
“That too.” He raised his head, then, and stared into her eyes.
“Which is why you are here, and why we are going to beat the
Honcho.”

“With the tanks he has? How?”

“I'm still working on it,” he said.

By mid-November they were finally ready. The
tanks were gassed up, the refueling trucks were topped off, the
last rounds of new ammunition loaded, and the crews assembled.
There was no ceremony that spies might have observed. They all
climbed in and on the vehicles and set out at dawn.

Brutus tried to talk him out of going, of
course, but Martinez had overruled him. “I want to see it happen,”
he'd told Glock, as he climbed aboard the leading tank. “You can't
expect me to set this all up and then just sit back in Dallas
waiting for a report.”

Ludlow was on the tank already in his new
uniform. Peter had to smile at that. The crossed wrenches on the
man's shoulder patches identified him as belonging to the new Corps
of Engineers, a cover story they'd agreed upon for the wizard. He
was sitting just forward of the turret, cradling in his arms the
lie they'd built for him: a metal box covered with gemstones that
seems to glow in the early morning sunlight, and enough dials and
switches set in the top of it to make it look like some ancient
piece of arcane technology.

Some of the men had been a little nervous
about being spotted on the move, even in the heavily armored
vehicles. They'd been told that Ludlow had found and fixed up an
ancient cloaking device that would hide them from observers long
enough to get them into striking distance. As far as he knew,
they'd believed it. They must have, since no complaints had reached
him from the Pope about using a 'demon-trafficking' wizard in his
little army. 'Captain Ludlow' had been presented to the troops as a
tireless researcher whom they'd had no need to know of, until
now.

“Ready when you are, sir,” said Glock.

Peter settled himself with his back against
the steel of the turret and look at Brutus. A quote from
Shakespeare came to him, from
Julius Caesar
, written using
The Life of Marcus Brutus
from Plutarch's Lives. A smile
came to his lips. “Cry 'Havoc!',” he said, “and let slip the dogs
of war.'”

“
Forward!” Brutus called
down to the driver, who threw the already-humming motor into gear
and the ancient weapon surged forward, treads grinding the dust of
the road.

Once the convoy was underway, he
thought back to the conversation earlier regarding the Governor's
stronghold. Perhaps he should reconsider his decision to spare the
old skyscraper. Did he have enough men to mount a thorough sweep of
all the floors and rooms in so massive a structure? He could do no
less, he knew, because even a small force hidden on one of the
floors could undermine his establishing a regional overseer. It
would never do to have gone to all this trouble only to have the
building, once it was under new management, fall to assault from
within.

The more he thought about it, the more it
seemed that his original idea was the better one. Bringing down
Kristana's symbol of power and authority would go a long way toward
convincing the citizens of Rado that they belonged to the Lone Star
Empire now. Surely there were plenty of other abandoned buildings
in downtown Denver. It would be far easier for his mis soldiers to
empty one of any squatters than to root our determined fighters in
the Governor's fortress.

His breath fogged in the chilly morning air.
Winter was here. Doubtless it was even colder in Denver. Would
there be any problems operating their vehicles in the colder air
there? He recalled his chief engineer shaking his head. These
ancient engines, according to what the man had read in the old
manuals, could operate almost anywhere on the planet. The only
significant difference between Abilene and Denver, he'd been told,
was the elevation. In Denver, the air would be a little thinner,
which could affect the fuel-air mixture exploding in then cylinders
that drove these eldritch machines. But according to the manuals
the ancient designers had planned for even such situations as this.
The mechanisms in the engines were built to compensate
automatically for differences in air pressure to ensure that there
was enough oxygen in the mixture the cylinders received. That is,
provided those systems still worked.

He was second-guessing himself, he knew, but
it was hard not to keep going over the plan of attack in his mind,
looking for things that could go wrong. One real problem was the
inability to bring as many troops as he would have liked. Without
stationing groups of fresh mounts, there was no way mounted men and
their horses could hope to keep up with the motor-driven vehicles.
That would have been too hard to hide from spies, and would have
cost him the element of surprise.

He could, of course, had ordered that they
move at a more sedate pace, to allow the cavalry to keep up without
exhausting the animals. But that would have slowed his invasion to
a crawl. What was the point of having tanks that could sweep
northward at upwards of fifty miles per hour, if he held them to a
mere five so that horses could trot alongside mile after mile? And
moving that slowly would, itself, have cost him the element of
surprise.

Denver was, by the old maps, over seven
hundred miles away. At a mere five miles per hour that would have
taken him 140 hours – nearly a week! At their current speed,
however, they would be there in lest than a day. Perhaps a little
more, if they had to refuel en route. He grinned to himself,
envisioning Kristana's astonishment when his forces just
appeared
outside her door.

That reminded him. He leaned over to Ludlow,
who was still cradling his piece of make-believe equipment. “Are
you going to be able to hold the invisibility shield all the way to
Denver?” He knew he had asked this question before, but now that
they were on their way, he couldn't stop wondering about that.

Ludlow peered at him from beneath his
Stetson, still looking uncomfortable in the blue-and red uniform
they'd provided him with. “Not if I fall asleep for too long. I've
been practicing, and the spell should hold for up to an hour or
two, but no more, before it will need refreshing. I'll need to rest
sometime, but I guess I'll have to do that in short naps rather
than a decent night's sleep.”