Pathspace: The Space of Paths (23 page)

“
Kind of you to be so
concerned,” said Enrique, “but as you can see I'm younger than the
usual successor. The College decided a bit more vigor is in order
these days.”

In other words, two years in Dallas was
enough for you to establish an adequate power base. Despite
himself, Peter was impressed. This new pontiff was just what the
TCC needed to take full advantage of the expansion of the Lone Star
Empire he was planning. “And rightly so,” he said. “Would you care
for a shot of jack to warm your bones?”

Enrique smiled. “It would hardly be polite
of me to refuse the offer,” he said, and accepted the glass from
Peter as he seated himself in one of the padded chairs. “Forgive me
for observing,” he said, after a judicious sip, “that you haven't
answered my question. How can we be of service?”

Peter lowered himself into another of the
chairs and regarded him over his own glass. “As one of the lamented
late Rodrigo's advisors, I'm sure you know why I went to see him on
the occasion of his regrettable demise.”

“
Yes,” said Enrique. “You
need fuel for your rediscovered military machines, and you want to
use swizzles and everflames to extract and distill it.” He took
another sip. “As Pope, I am of course officially shocked at such a
plan.. But as a man of the world, I see the necessity.”

Peter showed some surprise. “You do?
Excellent. I believe that poor Rodrigo was amenable to our
intentions, but I had feared the change of leadership in the TCC
might require the newcomer to establish his credibility with more
conservative policies, at least at first.”

“
Yes, that doesn't
surprise me. It is common to see the Church as a voice of
restraint, telling people what they shouldn't do. But Jesus did not
come to make more rules, you know. In fact, He showed how the
commandments could be simplified. As He said, love God, and love
thy neighbor, and all else follows from that. The rest is just
details.”

“
More or less,” the Honcho
agreed. “But it's not always that simple, Ricky. In order to bring
peace to a warring land, we must first fight to unify it. We won't
get Rado back into the arms of the Church by simply loving them. We
both know their will be plenty of blood spilled before they pore
out the sacramental wine.”

“
Indeed. And the sooner
the fighting is over, the fewer lives will be lost. Therefore, your
new mechanized army. And I understand all too well the need for
swizzles to extract the oil and everflames to distill out the
necessary fuels, just as you understand the Church has long opposed
any continued use of the demonic magic of the aliens. In this time
of need, the Church can look the other way as long as you do not
embarrass us with too flagrant or too public a use of the alien
technology.”

Y
ou'll not make
a fuss,
he thought,
mainly because
you know my victories will also be yours.
I'll get more
territory and resources – and you'll get more worshipers and
tithes.
But there was no need to state the
obvious. “With regard to that,” he said, “I did have a favor to
ask.”

Enrique met his gaze. “And what might that
be?”

“
People like to gossip,”
said Peter, “yet often stories told have their foundation in fact.
Word has reached me that the Church has a storehouse of confiscated
Gifts. It's said you have many swizzles and everflames and such,
seized in ecclesiastical raids here and in Mexico, that could be of
enormous help to the fuel effort.”

“
Ah,” said Enrique. “Were
my advisors here with me, they would undoubtedly recommend that I
deny such rumors as baseless slanders.”

“
I'm sure,” said the
Honcho. “But are they?”

“
Let us be honest with
each other, Peter,” said the Pope. “I will not waste your time with
such transparent evasions. The warehouse exists – but I'm afraid it
won't help you to know that.”

Peter frowned. “Why not?”

“
You must understand,”
said the pontiff, “that while the Church can avoid any official
recognition of your use of alien witchcraft as you do not flaunt it
publicly, it is quite another thing to actively supply you with
such abominations.” He sipped and continued. “Your discretion with
the use of your own Gifts would give the Church plausible
deniability, and we could look the other way. But if we authorized
the transfer of confiscated material from the Church warehouse too
many people would be involved. Word would get out, and cast us in
an unfavorable light of hypocrisy, I'm afraid. It is out of the
question.”

Damn it!
Peter
forced himself to appear placid. “I am sorry to hear that,
Ricky.”

“
As I am sorry to say it.
But we might be able to help you another way.”

“
Oh?”

“
Yes. There are some of
these devices which have escaped our raids. We could point you in
the right direction, so to speak, and let you act on such
information as you will. For example, the Balcones distillery at
Waco, I believe, has at least three everflames in continuous
operation. You could acquire them.”

“
Heaven forbid!” Peter
said, with a wry grin. “After all,
some
things are sacred.” he topped off the Pope's glass with more
of the amber fluid.

“
True,” conceded Enrique.
“but other locations on the list might be helpful.”

“
To a long and mutually
beneficial relationship,” said Peter, raising his glass.

It's hardly a surprise that this spot
remained a secret,
Jeffrey thought, looking
at the pile of scree. Part of the hillside had collapsed, exposing
the underground maglev tunnel. And then the rest of the hill had
collapsed, covering it all up again, except for the two broken ends
of the rails. No different than many hillsides remodeled by the
quake a hundred years before; you had to know what you were looking
for in order to find it. And a good thing too.

Moonlight glinted off the stumps of ancient
tech. Jeffrey gazed at the sheared-off ends and fancied he could
even see the difference in reflectivity that marked the transition
between the nonferrous alloy waterproofing layer on the outside and
the ferro-graphene superconducting core within each rail. How long
had it been, he wondered, since the tube trains had floated over
these rails, the ridge on the underside of each train nestled
between the rails like the keel of a sailboat knifing through
water. How long, since mysterious forces had made the silent trains
float and fly in buried tubes of vacuum, rushing through airless
miles from city to city?

And now the tunnels were beached and buried,
and only messages glided through the waveguide rails, Morse code in
stuttering staccato pecked out by the feeble woodpecker descendants
of those who had crafted the ancient marvels. Fallen from glory,
and making do with the rubble of ages long gone, we eke out our
fortunes from incomprehensible ruins.

Well, the message was
sent. It was up to his father now. He dropped the two pieces of
metal he had been holding and looked up at the stars.
Why
did you do it to us?
Did you even know what was going to
happen, or is the comedy of errors we all suffer through not
limited to the surfaces of planets? Is this even now happening on
millions, billions of other worlds?

The sound of horses approaching pulled him
back to Earth. He straightened up as the others rode into view.
“Fancy meeting you all here.”

Brutus swung down off his horse. “Where's
your mount?”

“
I had to leave it a mile
back,” he said. I'm afraid I used up the poor thing. I was worried
I'd miss rendezvous with the rest of you if I let it walk all the
way here, since you had a head start. I barely got here ahead of
you as it was.”

Brutus regarded him. “Funny, we didn't see
you.”

“
I must have passed you a
few miles ago while you were resting the horses,” he said. “You
must have pulled them off the main road to avoid
patrols.”

Brutus glanced around the site. “Have you
seen the regular bangers?”

“
No,” said Jeffrey. “The
nights are getting cold. I guess they only come out here during the
days during winter. Looks like you'll have to do your own
banging.”

Brutus reached down and picked up the long
piece of metal and laid it across the rails. Then he picked up the
shorter bar.

“
How do you know they're
even listening, this late?”

“
Because we didn't report
in on time,” the commander grunted. “So they'll be worried, unless
I'm mistaken. By now your daddy will have Quintus listening around
the clock. He'd better, because we need fresh horses.”

Jeffrey sat and waited by Brutus banged out
the message, hammering the shorter bar on the one touching the two
rails to use both waveguides.

When the older man had finished, Jeffrey
stood. “It's about time to let the girl go now,” he said. “Your
horses are tired but she doesn't have to hurry back.”

Brutus dropped the bars and dusted off his
gloves. “Let her go? Why should I do that?”

“
Because you promised
to.”

Brutus laughed. It was not
a pleasant sound. “Got that wrong,” he remarked. “I didn't promise
anything.
You
did. Your word
doesn't bind me. I'm the commanding officer, and I'm thinking it
might be real handy to have the Governor's daughter in Dallas. She
could send a nice letter to her ma telling her how things are going
to be.”

“
Kidnapping a ruler's
daughter is an act of war.”

Brutus laughed harder. “So? We're rolling on
them just as soon as we've got the fuel. You know it and I know it.
It doesn't matter how the war starts, as long as we finish it.”

“
Last I heard, we're not
ready yet, so let her go.”

Brutus's eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to
give me orders, boy? I'll tell you exactly once not to bother. The
little lady's going to Dallas, unless anybody else feels like
trying to throw their weight around.”

Thok! Brutus looked surprised for a second.
Then he crumpled to the ground.

Xander and Lester stepped out of the
shadows. “I feel like it,” said Xander. He pointed the business end
of his staff at the group of them. “Anybody else want to take a
nap? Because I've got plenty of rocks for the rest of you.”

There were no takers.

It was only the work of a minute to put Aria
on a horse and point her up the road toward Denver. “What about you
two?” she asked.

“
Oh, we'll wait for
reinforcements,” Xander told her. “As soon as you reach the
pickets, send some men back to collect these gentlemen. And a
couple of extra horses for us.”

She looked at Jeffrey. “At least you tried
to keep your word.”

He shrugged. “Tried is not the same as did.
But I'm glad you're going home. You'd best get to it before more of
my countrymen show up.”

She turned her horse and urged it into a
trot.

“
How did you get here so
fast?” Jeffrey asked the wizard.

Xander grinned. “You have your secrets, and
so do we.” He glanced at the ends of the maglev rails. “Actually,
we caught up to you miles back. I was just curious about where you
were headed. That's a trick I hadn't thought of, using the old
rails to send telegrams. Who came up with that one?”

Jeffrey sat down next to Brutus's inert
form. “You know very well I can't discuss such things,” he said. He
bent over and listened to the unconscious man's breathing. “Why
didn't you just kill him? It would've saved the Governor another
execution.”

“
Because I'm not an
assassin,” said Xander. “If he'd been pointing a crossbow at me and
about to pull the trigger, maybe I'd have acted differently. As it
was, I used just enough velocity to give him forty winks and bad
headache later. Now let's all sit down and wait for the
reinforcements. I'm pretty sure the first ones to get here will be
from Rado, since it's closer.”

“
But she's riding an
already tired horse,” Jeffrey pointed out.

“
True enough,” said
Xander. “But she doesn't have to make it all the way back Just as
far as the nearest outpost. In fact – “

He stopped in the middle of a sentence and
looked down. Jeffrey followed his gaze and say an arrow protruding
from the wizard's chest. Xander opened his mouth again, but nothing
emerged. Wordlessly, he collapsed, nearly landing on top of
Brutus.

A man in the blue and red
of the Lone Star Empire carrying two crossbows, one discharged,
glided out of the dark. “
In fact,
”
he said, “my tent was a lot closer. Who could sleep with all that
banging going on? I had to come check, since I'm the only one who's
supposed to be banging here.” He nudged the wizard's body with his
boot. “One less idiot to worry about. Who was he?”

Lester swallowed. His eyes
were watering, probably from the cold. “ A better man than you,” he
said. “He never would have shot
you
in the back.”

The banger observed Lester's general lack of
a uniform and swung his remaining crossbow in the boy's direction.
“You were with him, weren't you? Unless you want to join the old
coot, best keep still. Who's got a rope?”

There being no rope, the men had to rip a
bit off the end of a horse blanket to tie Lester up. “You won't get
away,” he told them. There'll be men from Rado heading down here
any time now.”