Pathspace: The Space of Paths (28 page)

“
But that was made
possible by his factories,” she pointed out. “The Honcho has none.
He's discovered a cache of motor vehicles, true, but not thousands
of them, and he can't make any more in the near time
frame.”

“
No he can't. But if he
can come up with fuel for them, a few dozen tanks and armored
personnel carriers could make a big difference against our troops,
especially if they move faster than we expect.”

She sat down on the edge of his bed. “How do
we counter them, if he manages to use them?”

“
I have some ideas,” he
said. “We have some time to prepare. From what your spies reported,
he has no fuel. He has the old oil wells, but it will take him some
time to pull out enough and put it into a usable form for the old
motors.”

She reached out and closed the book in his
hands. “We need to talk about Aria,” she said. “She asked me
yesterday what the Governor's blood type was.”

He sat up straighter in the bed, then winced
and let himself fall back again. “What did you tell her?”

“
I told her I didn't
remember. But we both know she'll eventually ask Daniels about it.
You know how he is about the truth. Once he tells her the Governor
was B positive, she'll know it's hardly likely that he and I
produced an O negative daughter.”

He sighed. “So we have to tell her before
she figures it out herself.”

“
Yes. I'm not looking
forward to that.”

He looked her in the eye. “We didn't do
anything wrong. He was gone.”

She looked down. “I know that. But you know
that won't make any difference. She'll still feel betrayed because
we never told her. Because in her eyes it'll seem that we never
trusted her enough.”

“
You know that wasn't why,
damn it. You'd just taken over for Roberto. Colorado needed a
grieving-but-tough widow, carrying on his Dream, not a happy
survivor carrying another man's child.”

“
Not happy,” she said,
looking away. “No one could have made me happy, not then. But you
certainly helped me be less
unhappy
. I'll never forget it.”

“
Nor I. You can't imagine
how much I wanted to marry you. But to the people of Rado, Aria was
a symbol of hope, the last good thing they would ever get from
their General. So I kept my mouth shut and stayed in my place as
the weird old wizard. But it wasn't easy. I never stopped loving
you, but if all I could ever be was the consoling friend who helped
you make a baby, I told myself I would accept that.”

“
You were more than that,”
she said. “You're not the only one with regrets. You're not the
only one who's had to give up dreams for the people of Rado, for
the General's Dream. You've no idea how lonely it is to be the
Governor.”

“
No,” he agreed. “Just how
lonely it is to be the Governor's wizard.”

She told him to try to
sleep and made herself leave the infirmary.
Yes,
she thought,
we all have our own
knowledge of loneliness.
Xander has to stand
near me, when he can, not touching, and I have to hold my place,
wanting to be touched. Never to show affection in public, never to
know the reassurance of human contact. A ruler must be separate.
Must be seen as always confident, always having a plan. Always
sufficient unto herself.

Especially when she's not.

It had been a hard decision. She remembered
as if it were this morning, Roberto lying there on the bed. He had
just closed his eyes, never to open them again. “That's my girl,”
he had smiled, after she had shouted at that fraying soldier,
putting backbone back into the frightened man. Her first real
command as Governor, holding the line. “That's my girl” Roberto had
said, and smiled and closed his eyes, and that was all. End of a
legend.

No one knew yet. She would have a little
time to weep alone, to still be soft.

Her tears fell on the sheet as he shoulder
shook. She sobbed quietly, but so wholeheartedly that she did not
hear the door open and Xander slip into the room. He took in the
scene in an instant, and, after giving her a minute to weep alone,
had taken her unresisting form into his arms and wept with her just
as quietly. There are some moments where the word is unspoken.
Where it is unnecessary. Neither of them said it: he is gone.

After a couple of minutes she was still. He
stroked her hair on the back of her neck and whispered to her. “Now
comes the hard part.”

Gently, she let go of him and separated
herself. “I know. Now I have to wear his hat.”

Xander smiled at her brave joke. “No. You
can't be him. They know you're not the Lion. But you can be the
Lioness. It's what he would have wanted. What he trained you
for.”

“
But how can I? How can I
be Commander-in-Chief, when I've never been in the Army? I'm a
fraud, a pretender, and they'll know it. You should take over. Take
this cup away from me.”

Xander put his hands on her shoulders.
“That's not what he would have wanted. I can't be the Governor.
I'll help you all I can, but the Governor has to be one of the
People, one of them, and I've lost that, by being what I am. I'm
too strange for them to love. They may respect me, and will
definitely fear me a little, but love? No. The shaman is never the
leader of the tribe. He does weird things, and gives advice. But he
is never the leader.”

“
Why is that?” she asked.
“I think you're as strong as he was, but in a different
way.”

“
Because the leader is a
role model,” he said, looking down at Roberto's peaceful smile.
“The leader has to be someone they can imagine themselves being.
They don't look up to me. They look across to me, across a vast
canyon of strangeness. But they will look up to you.”

She drew a ragged breath. “Why should they
look up to me?”

“
Because they know he
approved of you. That he respected you enough to marry you. And you
have to use that now. You have to be the tough-as-nails widow of
the General. Since the two of you were man and wife, they'll assume
you must be like him in some ways.”

“
But I'm not,” she said.
“Opposites attract. He was the controller. I'm more the supporter,
the nurturer. I'll never be him.”

“
Well then, it's time to
nurture Colorado,” he said. “Nurturing can mean giving what someone
needs, or helping them to get it. Right now your country needs
hope, needs confidence. You can give that to them, by helping them
to believe you can hold it all together. By giving orders and
expecting to be obeyed.”

“
Then I order you to take
my place,” she said smiling.

“
With respect, madame
Governor, you know that I cannot. But I'll do whatever else you
need. You know my priority is establishing the school for wizards,
but that can't happen without a stable environment around it, so
I'm your most loyal citizen. I'll fight for you, lie for you, steal
for you, die for you as long as I can get the school going and keep
the Dream alive. We can't let it end like this.”

“
No, we can't, can we?”
She gazed down at Roberto. “Don't worry, my love, we'll follow the
Dream.” After a moment she looked up again. “What's the first thing
we need to do?”

“
The first thing
you
need to do,” he corrected, “is to
address the troops. By now the commanders and senior staff are
assembling as you asked in the Council chamber. It's time to let
them see their new Governor.”

It was a month before they began sleeping
together. In public Xander acted as if nothing had changed. As he
told her, “Once the staff find out who the boss lady is sleeping
with, she loses a lot of her authority. We can't let that
happen.”

Nine months later Aria was born. Everyone
assumed she was the General's last gift. It must have killed Xander
a little to go along with that. But he did.

It was almost annoying when someone came to
visit him again. He'd gotten quite distracted with his new ability
to see through walls. One thing he discovered right away was that
he could warm up his cell. Evidently the prison had only one floor
above ground, because when he wove the pathspace to make his
ceiling transparent, sunlight flooded in, bringing warmth in with
it.

Once, when his meal was brought (and he did
notice right away that the standard fare was less savory than what
they brought the Honcho when he dined with him) he was nearly
caught by surprise, because at the time he was gazing up at the
clouds. The rattle of the key in the door jarred him out of this
contemplation and he barely un-wove the ceiling transparency
pathspace in time before the guard got the door open.

This time he was looking through the door,
however, so he had plenty of time to make it opaque again before it
swung open. The identity of the visitor surprised him.

“
You really should work
more on looking haggard,” Jeffrey told him. “It's a prison. You're
not supposed to be cheerful.”

“
And hello to you too. How
is Commander Glock doing? Is he recovered enough from his bang on
the head for me to kill him now?”

Jeffrey grimaced. “He's up and about. How
did you learn his name? I'm not sure you understand the gravity of
your situation.”

“
I asked a guard. Gravity?
Weird way to describe it. I feel my normal weight.” He hopped
experimentally, then sat on his cot. “Sorry, I'm just jerking you
around. I realize I'm not in a good place. But what can I do about
it?”

“
Good question. I'm glad
you asked that. You know, it's a shame we met the way we did. You
seem, a decent fellow, and under other circumstances we might have
been friends.”

“
I know what you mean.
Compared to Brutus, you don't seem so bad yourself.”

Again Jeffrey grimaced.
“Compared to him, a rattlesnake isn't bad. It might kill you, but
it wouldn't
enjoy
it. But my father
thinks Brutus is a necessary evil.”

“
Well then sorry, but I
disagree with your father, although he didn't seem too bad when he
came to visit me.”

“
So do I. There are many
things we disagree on. For example, your situation. I'm sorry to
tell you this, but it's worse than you might think. The Church
wants us to hand you over to them for a public
execution.”

Lester scratched his stubble. “I see. And
does the Honcho usually do what the Church wants? Too much of that
would make him look weak.”

“
That's what I think. But
he considers them useful, and they have something he really wants.
If the only way he can get it is by handing you over, he'll talk
himself into it soon enough.”

“
Again, I don't see that I
can do anything about that.”

Jeffrey pulled something out of a vest
pocket and handed it to him. It was a short metal tube, less than
an inch in diameter and only four inches long.

“
What am I supposed to do
with this?”

“
I couldn't bring you
anything longer, because you might try to club one of the guard
with it. But it might still save your life.”

“
I don't see how. Am I
supposed to beat it into a key or something? Then you should have
brought an even smaller one.”

“
Let's get something
straight,” Jeffrey told him. “My father doesn't see you as
dangerous because you're only an apprentice. But that also means
you're not very valuable. He'll trade you for more valuable things
if he feels he has to. Then the Church will burn you at the stake.
Your only hope of survival is to show him you can be more valuable
to him alive.”

“
How?”

“
Can you make this a
swizzle? He needs swizzles, but the Church won't let him have the
ones they've confiscated unless he hands you over.”

Lester turned the metal tube over in his
hands. “If you'd asked me a week ago, I would have said probably
not. Maybe I can now. But why does he need swizzles? I thought he
wanted to rebuild the world without alien technology.”

“
He does. But in the short
term he needs pumps more powerful than hand pumps, and that means
swizzles. If you can make them he doesn't have to trade you for
them.”

“
I get it,” said Lester.
“This is a demo. What makes you think I want to be helpful to your
father?”

“
Let me put it this way.
Do you want to be firewood? Sorry, but those are the
choices.”

“
I'll get back to you on
that,” said Lester. “Let me see what I can manage.”

Sometimes she felt as if her entire life was
being spent scribbling. Word problems! Exercises in futility was
what they were. What was the point? There would always be advisors
to calculate numerical answers for her.

“
Aria,” said Mr. Chang,
“you're not concentrating.”

“
I just don't see the
point of this. It doesn't
mean
anything!”

The barest lifting of an eyebrow. “What? But
everything means something.”

“
Does it?” She put down
the piece of chalk and surveyed the dusty scribbling on the board
in front of her. “Am I any better of a ruler if a field produces
twenty bushels of corn instead of fifteen? The number is
meaningless unless we combine it with others. Is fifteen enough to
feed a country? Hardly. The output of a single field, and the
appetites of a single family tell us nothing until we combine them
with all the others and compare the total harvest to the total
population that must be fed.”