Pathspace: The Space of Paths (40 page)

“
I think I understand,”
said Jeffrey, who didn't, not completely. “But why couldn't you
pipe the relief valve out through the roof, or a side wall, and
avoid stinking up the place? Isn't it dangerous, letting oil vapor
leak out when you're going to light the everflames again
soon?”

Tomlinson folded up the plans and shoved
them in a drawer. “In answer to your first question, I plan to, but
as you can see we've used a lot of pipe, and the vent is a lower
priority.” He paused to scratch his neck. “In answer to the second
question, no, it's not all that dangerous. Crude oil, straight out
of the ground, doesn't evaporate very fast, and is hard to ignite.
It stinks, but there's not much chance of a fire or an explosion.”
He glanced at Jeffrey. “I know, I know, it's a crude system., at
the moment. We'll do better with the next refinery. But we're
getting results. So far the gas and diesel is not as pure as we'd
like, but good enough to be usable.”

“
It looks to me like you
lose a lot of time shutting down to refill the boiler,” the Runt
commented. “Couldn't you change the design to let you constantly
pipe in oil while you're boiling off the gasoline?”

Tomlinson shrugged. “We could. But we'd
still have to shut it down every time we fill up a wagon tank from
the condenser.”

“
Why?”

Instead of answering, Tomlinson led him over
to the spigot at the end of the pipe projecting from the condenser.
He held his hand under the spigot and caught the last few drops
leaking out of it in his hand. “Look,” he said, holding the hand
palm up in front of Jeffrey.

The palm was wet with what looked like
water. But as Jeffrey watched, the wetness evaporated in less than
a minute.

“
Gasoline's not like crude
oil,” the engineer informed him. “It evaporates pretty fast at room
temperature, and when the vapor mixes with air, the combination is
explosive. That's how the old engines of the Ancients worked. Lots
of little explosions, over and over, inside the pistons. Pushing
rods that drive the crankshaft.” He paused to take a breath. “If we
had gasoline vapor in the air in here and turned on the everflames,
well, we'd have problem.”

“
I see.” Jeffrey thought
about it. “But how did the Ancients solve that problem?”

Tomlinson sighed. “They had much better
designs, and machines to control the machines. From the books I've
seen, their refineries were better than we're likely to see in my
lifetime. Having electricity to work with instead of just manual
wheel valves made everything easier to monitor and control. But
don't you worry, sir. We're getting the job done.”

The Runt nodded. “Looks like you are,
Captain. Is there anything we can do to help you at this stage of
your operations?”

The engineer considered the question.
“Well,” he said, finally, “we only began to fill the wagons day
before yesterday. So far we can only fill two wagon tanks a day, so
we haven't run out of wagons yet, but getting them to Abilene and
back takes time, so we'll be needing more wagons soon. And more
guards to go with them.”

Jeffrey frowned. “Why didn't you set up
closer to Abilene? Or just store the gas here until we have
enough?”

“
Good questions. I'm told
the wells here were the easiest to use. And considering how
explosive gasoline is if it leaks...it's better to store it in the
vehicles themselves, in Abilene. Or in the fuel tanks they have
there, that are better than anything we could build
ourselves.”

“
Sorry to be so full of
questions,” Jeffrey said. “But if you know my father, then you know
he's going to ask me the same things when I give my
report.”

The Captain gave him a sympathetic
half-smile. “Well you can tell him we've had a few problems, but
with a little patience, we'll get it done.”

Jeffrey sighed. “My father,” he said, “is
not a patient man.”

Lester put down the book he had been
reading, a book about ancient motorized armies led by a man with an
abbreviated mustache. “If the Honcho has anything like the stuff in
here, we're in big trouble.”

Xander took a bite from an apple and chewed
before answering. “Try not to worry. Powered vehicles could be an
advantage, certainly. But he's never used them before. If he
succeeds in Rado, the experience will make it easier on him as he
continues to expand his Empire. But he won't.”

“
What makes you so sure of
that? We've got some cannon that have to be hauled around by teams
of horses, taking forever to position and move. He's going to have
guns that roll around by themselves wherever he wants to take
them!”

The old wizard ate more apple. “We're going
to have some surprises for him,” he said. “And the thing with
technology is, the more complicated it is, the more things there
are to go wrong with it. For example, all it takes to stop a car is
a potato.”

Lester stared at him. “What?”

The engines of the Ancients,” Xander
informed him. “require an exhaust for the burned fuel vapor as well
as an intake for air. Block either one, and the engine won't run.
Shove a potato in the exhaust pipe of one of the old automobiles
and it's useless, unable to vent the exhaust.”

“
You're planning to run
around behind his vehicles with a bag of potatoes?”

“
No. It was just an
example. You'd be surprised how easy it is to disable high-tech
systems with low-tech meddling. The more complex a system, the more
weaknesses it has. The process with more steps has more places in
which it can fail – or be made to fail.”

“
Then how does nature
succeed? Aren't biological processes more complicated than anything
humans have ever built?”

Xander finished the apple. He picked a seed
out of its core and showed it to Lester in his hand.. “Actually,
pieces of nature fail all the time. See this seed? It could become
an apple tree, and make thousands of more apples. But it can fail.
It can fail because of drought, disease, overcrowding, lightning,
fire, floods....or simply because it never ends up in in the
ground.” He picked out the rest of the core's seeds and tucked them
into a pocket of his robe. “Parts of nature fail all the time. But
the entirety of nature, by which I mean life on Earth, it goes on
year after year.”

“
Could all of it fail,
like our civilization crashed after the Tourists left?”

“
Oh, certainly. The Sun
could get too hot or too cold, or asteroids could hit us and render
the entire globe lifeless. But the difference between nature and
Civilization is, it doesn't need people to make it work. We've
forgotten how to build computers, but seeds never forget how to
become trees.”

Xander tossed the empty apple core into a
box by the table where they threw food scraps to save them for
composting in Aria's garden. He rose from his chair and reached for
his staff. “Its time for us to help prepare for the invasion.”

Lester pried himself out of his own chair.
“Aren't the Governor's officers doing that already?”

Xander smiled without sadly. “They think
they are,” he said. “But we're going to need more than they can
come up with. To stop the Honcho, we're going to need more than
horses and arrows this time. Swords won't stop his tanks.”

“
But we don't have our own
tanks, or fuel. How do we beat him?”

“
By being smarter. By
using what we do have that he doesn't.”

After that the old wizard fell silent until
they reached the armorer's smithy near the ground floor. Unsure of
their destination, Lester finally understood when he heard the
ringing of a hammer on iron. By then he'd already figured out what
Xander meant. What did they have that the Honcho didn't? Magic.

But what good would that be? He could lift a
rook or a pawn into the air, but he was pretty sure that he
couldn't flip over a tank with his pathspace. He doubted Xander
could either.

The head smith, was
adjusting the swizzle on the side of his forge as they entered, his
strong hands stroking the pipe, fine tuning the temperature of the
coals. He looked up at the sound of the door. “Ah, there you are,”
he grunted. “Wondered when you'd be by.” He glanced at Lester. “So
this is your latest apprentice, eh? Hope he makes a
difference.
”

Lester heard the ringing of the hammer
again. Turning, he saw a pair of the smith's strikers placing some
kind of circular die over a sheet of metal, whacking it with their
hammers to cut out a seemingly endless series of metal discs that
another assistant was putting into open boxes.

Xander saw him looking at the discs. “I'll
handle making the everflames,” he told Lester. “You take that stack
of pipe in the other corner and start making swizzles.”

Soft feet in supple leather boots pounded
the stairs as she descended and ascended, searching. She did not
know where the thought had come from, but now that it had, she
could not relinquish it. No, that was a lie, a lie she was telling
herself. She knew perfectly well where the thought had come from,
the thought that had roused her from an unaccustomed nap in her
gardens, where she had set her little rake and watering can down
and just lay down in the scent of the blooming roses.

She had opened her eyes with the thought
stirring inside her, clear but unacceptable. She almost laughed at
her dismay. What would it change? Nothing. Everything! It could not
change the past, and yet somehow, it did. She had not yet decided
how it should change the future.

Undeterred by guards, Aria burst into her
mother's chambers, full of the outrage and moral arrogance of
youth. “Is it true, Mother?”

Kristana looked up at her, surprised by the
seldom-used title as much as by the interruption. Aria could see
the Governor was at it again, stroking the General's sword with a
whetstone, an old oiled rag by her side on the mattress. A
meaningless activity, sharpening the sword of a man who had been
dead for years.

It had been owned by the
General.
By my father.
But was
he?

“
Tell me it isn't
true!”

Kristana wiped the sword one final time with
the rag and hung it back on its peg on the wall behind her. She
regarded Aria. “It might be easier to do that,” she said, “if I
knew what you were talking about.”

Aria's chin jutted. “I'm talking about my
father.”

Kristana patted the mattress beside her.
“Sit down for a minute. We need to talk.”

Aria stamped her foot. “No, you need to
talk,” she said. “I went to see Daniels yesterday to talk about
preparations for the invasion. I was going to suggest we start
stockpiling blood in coldboxes, so that we'll be able to help when
our soldiers get wounded.”

Kristana just folded her hands and
waited.

“
He'd already thought of
it. There were soldiers all over the place, reading and chatting
with the nurses while they donated blood for storage. And do you
know what the good doctor said, when I offered to join
them?”

“
I can guess. But go
ahead, tell me anyway.'

“
He said he was glad to
see me, because only Xander and me have this certain blood type,
and he couldn't ask Xander to donate, since he was still recovering
from his close call. In fact, he said he was hesitant about asking
me, because he'd already taken some of mine recently, to help
Xander when he was so close to dying.”

Kristana's gaze was calm and steady.
“So?”

“
Mother, what was the
General's blood type?”

Kristana didn't bat an eye. “A positive. But
that's not really what you came here to ask me, is it? Go ahead,
ask.”

Aria stared at her calm, then rallied. “I'm
not the General's daughter, am I?”

Kristana shook her head. “No, you're not the
Governor's daughter. And to answer your real question, yes, Xander
is your father.”

Aria felt her eyes welling up with tears.
“But why? Why did you lie to everyone about it? And how could you?
How could you betray the General like that?”

“
Sit down,” Kristana
repeated. And this time, she did, collapsing on the mattress beside
her mother, but not touching her. “Why? Why did you do
it?”

“
First,” said the
Governor, “it wasn't a betrayal. The General was dead. How you came
to be, well, that's not hard to figure out. Xander helped me
through a rough time. I needed someone to lean on, and he was
there. We'd known each other for years; he's a good
man.”

Aria was quiet for a moment. “All right,”
she said, slowly. “You were sad and lonely. I can see that. You
needed emotional support, I can see that too. But the timing! I was
born barely nine months after the General died.” She glared at her
mother. “it sure didn't take long for you to move on.”

Kristana jerked. Aria had the feeling her
mother was resisting the urge to slap her.

“
Xander and I liked each
other for a long time,” Kristana said. “But we were both smart
enough not to do anything about it, while the General was alive. I
loved my husband, and neither of us would do anything to undermine
his image as the ruler of Colorado. Once he...once he had passed,
however, that consideration was moot.”

“
Then why did you keep it
a secret? Why didn't the two of you marry?”

Kristana sighed. “We talked about it. I
wanted to. He's a good man. But Xander talked me out of it.”