Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) (30 page)

Chapter 79

Nathan
: hard is not the same as impossible

לא משנה מה היד שלך מוצאת לעשו
ת,
לעשות את זה עם הכח שלך

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might”

– Ecclesiastes 9:10

Things we changing, and not always for the better.  Like the fact that their meals were sent up from the kitchen now, and the fact that the  stairwell door was always guarded, by Xander or Lester sitting at a desk with the door behind them.  Although he secretly suspected that neither of the older men minded having an excuse to sit down with a book  Sometimes, he envied them.

Like now.  Reading seemed much more rewarding at times like these, when his endless practice   He glowered at the length of pipe in his hands.  “Positively Sisyphean,” he muttered.

Esteban looked up from his own work.  “Positively what?”

“Sisyphean.  You know, from Sisyphus.”

Kareef paused in his glaring at his own pipe.  “Who's he, the god of sissies?”

Nathan shook his head.  “No, he was a king in ancient Greece.  He was good in some ways, but deceitful and a violator of
xenia
.  The god punished him for it.”

Carolyn stopped making a little wad of paper float above her palm and joined in the discussion.  “Who was Xenia, and how did he violate her?”

Nathan blushed.   “Not a person, a custom. 
Xenia
means 'guest friendship' – hospitality and kindness to strangers and travelers.   Kind of the opposite of
xenophobia
, the fear of strangers.  Sisyphus killed travelers who came to his kingdom.  For this he was punished in the afterlife by having to roll a stone up a hill.  It always rolled down again, so he could never complete his task.”

“Hellish” said Esteban.

“From his name we get the adjective Sisyphean, meaning something that can never be completed.”  He looked down at his pipe.  “That's what trying to make a swizzle seems like, to me.  It's a Sisyphean task.”

Kareef smirked at him.  “So which is it?  Are you saying you're a sissy, or that you're being punished for something?”

You mean, like for wearing a white robe like my Tzaddik father does...without earning it?
Nathan answered his smirk with a scowl and was about to say something when there was a knock at the stairwell door.  Lester put down his book and slid his chair out of the way so the door could open.

Xander stepped onto the workroom floor.  “I thought you could all use a break from your practicing to consult with me on a major project for the School and for the Governor.”

“Who, us?”  Kareef looked skeptical.  “We can't do anything special.”

“You can think, can't you?  I'm looking for ideas.  Sometimes knowing what to do or how to do it is more important than being powerful.  I'm looking for suggestions, things I haven't thought of yet.”

Lester scratched at his stubble.  “Ideas about what?”

“A way to fix the elevators.”  Xander pointed to a double door without handles, set into a metal frame in the wall.  Every floor had one or two of these doorways, but Nathan had never seen any of them open.

“What's an 'elevator'?” he asked.

“A movable room.  It's a metal box hanging from alloy cables.  Back in the times of the Ancients, you could step inside and motors would haul it up to other floors, so you didn't have to climb all those stairs.”

Now he had their attention.  “How did they get back down again?” Kareef asked.

“Going up, the motor would wind the cable around a wheel kind of like the one on a fishing rod.  The motor could turn in reverse, unwinding the cable to let the elevator slide back down the shaft. “

“How did they make the wheel turn?”

“The motor was powered by something called
electricity
.  Unfortunately, we haven't had that for a long time.”

“Logically, then,” said Esteban, “you have to either find a way of making electricity again, or else find another way to make the wheel turn.”

“Yes.  I've been thinking of both of those.  But there might be other ways of making it work that I haven;'t thought of yet.”

“I don't see the point of that,” said Kareef.  “Since we can't even get the doors open.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” said Xander.  “There is always a way to make things move.  We just use a little
pathspace
.”

“I thought that was just for things already in motion,” said Kareef.  “The swizzles work on air or water because the the little bits of air and water are always in motion.”

“
Everything
is always in motion,” Lester told him.  “We're spinning around the middle of the Earth right now.  The Earth is orbiting the Sun, also, and the Sun is going around the center of the galaxy.  This building and the elevator doors only
appear
motionless because we're riding around with them at the same speed.”

“He's right,” Xander said.  “Because of that, everything you see around you is already following a path.”

“And we can effect paths by reshaping
pathspace
,” Lester said.  The Sun is doing that all the time, bending the space the Earth is passing through, to keep our planet on its orbit.”

“What you're saying is, we can change the pathspace of the elevator doors to make them slide open, in addition to their regular motion through space with the Earth,” Nathan said.

“Exactly.”  Xander stepped up to the elevator doors.  Nathan couldn't see him doing anything.  Xander closed his eyes.

At first, nothing happened.  Nathan wouldn't have blamed him for giving up.  If it was too hard, what was the point?  All that would happen would be the old wizard would fail in front of his students.

CRACK!  A sliver of darkness appeared between the two doors.  Xander's eyes opened.  His eyelids rolled all the way up, and his eyes seemed almost to
blaze
at the doors.

A rumbling began.  Nathan could feel it as a vibration in the floor even before his ears detected the sound.  The sliver of dark between the doors widened to a finger's width.

Xander raised both arms toward the elevator.  Maybe he needed the gesture to focus his will tighter.  From the intensity of the wizard's gaze, Nathan wasn't sure the wizard was aware his arms had moved.

The rumbling grew louder, then suddenly, with no warning, the rumbling and vibration ceased and the doors slid open. 
Ding.

Xander sagged for a moment, then raised a hand to wipe the sweat that had appeared on his forehead.  No one spoke a word.  Nathan barely breathed.  Hearing this could be done and actually seeing it happen were so different that everyone in the room, even Lester, seemed stunned into an almost reverent silence.

Xander turned.  “And that's how you do it,” he said, simply.

Light from the overhead glowtubes flooded into the elevator shaft, illuminating a space that had held only darkness for two hundred years.

“It's usually not that hard,” the wizard said.  He turned around to face them.  “In this case, the metal surfaces were probably partly welded together from centuries of contact.  That can happen, with metal.  Or so I've read.”

“But...how did you do it?”  said Esteban. 

“It's the same as any application of
pathspace
,” said Xander.  “You imagine the altered paths, just as you do to bend light around you to go invisible, or shape the course of air to make a swizzle.  Your brain will know how the existing pathspace need to change in order to create new paths for matter to follow.”

“What if my brain doesn't know how to change the paths?”

“It will,” Xander assured him.  “Once your mind's coupling to metaspace is strong enough, all you have to do is imagine what you want and the rest will be automatic – just as it is when you eat with a fork, wash your hands, or climb steps.  It's just a matter of practice...and I've been practicing for decades.”

Nathan crept forward and peered into the elevator shaft.  He could see the cable now, stretching down into darkness beyond the reach of the light from the glowtubes.  “How far down does it go?”

Xander shrugged.  “I'm not sure. There's a pair of doors down at the ground level, so it goes that far.  For all we know, it might go further.  Many of these old buildings had a basement level where they kept emergency generators and a furnace for the heating ducts.  But for some reason the stairs end at the ground level.”

None of this meant anything to Nathan.  “It's a shame we can't just climb down there and see.”

Xander frowned.  “Don't even try.  That alloy cable is old, and even if it's somehow still strong, it might have oil on it, to prevent corrosion.  One slip from this far up, and you'd be jelly.”  He turned to Lester.  “Help me drag a table over in front of the doorway.  I don't know if I'm up to closing it again, just now.”

Chapter 80

Kareef:
different strengths

“And wish not for the things in which Allah has made some of you to excel others.”

– Quran 4:32

His roommate wouldn't stop talking about the elevator.  Kareef was tired of hearing about it.  He opened his Quran and pretended to read, hoping that it would stop the babbling.  It didn't.

“I mean, can you imagine what would happen if someone attacked him and he just warped the pathspace to make the two sides of their body go in different direction like he did with the doors?  They'd be torn apart!”

He didn't need to hear things like that.  Kareef's mind was turning back to that time on the road to Denver when Qusay knocked out a man by “twisting shut” the arteries in his neck.  And that was when the Ambassador was still calm. 
If the bandit had jumped at him, would Qusay have twisted his head off? 
It was a sickening thought.  But definitely possible.  In the defense of life, much is permitted.

But wizards are dangerous. 
And here I am  in the middle of them.  Is there any way I can flunk out and go home?

Nathan was still yammering.  “I've got to master
pathspac
e.  If I do, nobody back home will ever mess with me.  I don't think any of them know it!  Not even the...”   Nathan fell silent.

At last maybe he was shutting up.  But the last part sounded tantalizing. Not even the what?   But he sensed this might not be a good time to pry.   He forced himself to be casual.  “So are you any closer to making your swizzle?”

Nathan's face fell.  “No,” he admitted.  “I try imagining smoke rings traveling down the pipe but nothing happens.  It's way harder than just bending light around myself.”  He paused.  “What about you?”

“Nope.”  Kareef wanted to pound the wall.  “I've been trying the same thing as you.  And you know what that means?  We're both doing it wrong.”

“But he said Lester worked it out after seeing a smoke ring.”

“Yes, that's what he said.”  Kareef grimaced.  “So the smoke ring must be related to the swizzle weave, somehow.  But he didn't say  how, exactly.  We're getting some part, some piece of it wrong.”

“Maybe it's the part about making the smoke ring move.  We're thinking about motion instead of concentrating on paths.  Maybe it's called
pathspace
instead of motion space for a reason.”  He reached under his bed and pulled out his length of pipe.  “Maybe it's the pattern of the smoke ring that's important, not its travel through space.”

Kareef set the Quran down and seized up his own piece of pipe. Staring at it,. he sensed himself on the brink of an understanding, but it still eluded him, dancing out of his reach.

He looked up when he heard Nathan's gasp.  The boy's pipe wobbled as he grasped it by one end with trembling fingers.  The other end, the last inch of it, was a reddish-orange.  As they watched, it brightened to an orange-yellow.  Kareef could feel the heat from it, three feet away, on his face like warm sunlight.

“That...is
not
a swizzle,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm.  “What the hell did you do?”

“I don't know,” said Nathan, his eyes wide.  “I was trying to imagine the smoke ring pattern anchored on one end of it, and it started changing color.”

The end of the the pipe was yellow now, and getting brighter ever second.  He could see the air shimmering over it in heat waves.  The band of yellow had an edge of red on the side toward Nathan's hand.  “You'd better put that down,” Kareef told him.  “I'm pretty sure the whole pipe will be too hot to hold soon if it doesn't stop.”

“I tried for a swizzle and...and I think I made some kind of everflame instead!”  Nathan jerked his head, staring for a place to put it down.  “Put it down where?” Kareef followed his gaze and saw the carpet, the sheet-covered mattresses, and the little wooden table.

An idea occurred to him.  “Do it in reverse,” he said.  “Whatever you were imagining, imagining it going the other way.”

Nathan swallowed and nodded.  He closed his eyes.

The pipe end was nearly too bright to look at by now.  Kareef half expected it to melt, to start dropping molten steel on the carpet.  But instead, the brightness faded as the color shifted down from glowing yellow to a duller orange, then red.

He felt a drop of sweat roll down his forehead and barely caught it with the side of his hand before it could sting his eyes.  The rest f the room was warming up, but the pipe end was only a dull red now.  Then reddish-black.  Then black.

Nathan wiped his forehead now.  “that was close,” he muttered.

Fog was flowing off the end of the pipe now.  As the two of them stared at it, unable to tear their eyes away, frost began to form on it.”

“Well,” Kareef said, “that's an improvement.  You won't burn us up.  But now, it's going to get too
cold
to hold onto.”

“The same kinds of weave make the everflame
and
the coldbox,” Nathan breathed.  “It's obvious, in retrospect.”

“Yeah,” said Kareef..  “Obvious.”  He was briefly ashamed at the surge of envy and anger that coursed through him.  The little Jew had left him far behind.  Then he remembered that Nathan still hadn't solved the swizzle.  “Lester and  Xander are going to want to see this,” he said.

Nathan jumped to his feet and darted out the door, pipe in hand.  After he left, Kareef stared at his own pipe and tried to imagine what Nathan had imagined, but nothing happened.  Either the boy was mistaken or hadn't told him the whole truth, or had some kind of natural advantage with that weave.

Well, they'd learned something, even if it wasn't what they were supposed to be learning.  The boy had gotten one thing right: the pattern they wanted wasn't a moving one, but one anchored on the metal somehow.

He wondered what would happen if he imagined the smoke ring pattern around the
middle
of the pipe.  Would one end get hot while the other end cooled?

It didn't, or at least, not for him.  Damn it!  He nearly hurled the pipe away from him in disgust, before another idea occurred to him.

The everflame weave, whether Nathan had solved that one or merely gotten close to it, was an asymmetrical pattern.  When you put the disk of an everflame on a stove top and stroked the side of the disk to turn up the intensity, you got a mote of outpouring heat in the air above the disk, and not below it (unless you were fool enough to be using it upside down).  Without the asymmetry it would be too dangerous, although maybe you could boil two pots of water the the mote appeared both above and below the disk.  Assuming you could suspend the disk on a horizontal loop or something.

The everflame weave was asymmetrical.  Nathan had accomplished that somehow when he anchored his weave on one end of the pipe.  So that was not the right thing to make a swizzle.  Trying to make the weave inside the pipe, as they'd both already tried, imagining smoke rings shooting through the pipe was wrong too.

Hmmm.  Inside was wrong, on one end was wrong.  What did that leave?   Maybe instead of putting the weave inside the pipe, he needed to put the pipe inside the weave.  Maybe he had it inside-out.

Staring at the pipe. He imagined a smoke ring around the middle of it, like a belt on a tall man.  He tilted one end toward his face hopefully, trying to feel a breeze.  Nothing.

He imagined the smoke ring spinning around the middle of the pipe, like a nut screwing onto a bolt.  Still nothing.

Now the disgust became too strong to repress.  Trying not to dent the wall and attract attention, he managed to settle for just dropping the pipe on the carpet.  He exhaled slowly, striving for calm.  Come on, Kareef! 
Everyone but you and Nathan has solved this already!

He heard an excited babbling out in the main room, as Nathan told Lester about his discovery.  Sighing, he turned his head to the wall.  But as he did so, movement in the corner of his eye snagged his gaze and dragged it back to the pipe on the floor.  It was rolling.

It rolled across the carpet and stopped against his leg.  He gazed at it silently, and picked it up.  Did he feel a faint
twisting?

After a moment he put it down carefully, not letting it roll out of his hand, and watched it.  Slowly, the pipe began to roll again, until it was once more resting against his foot.

His heart pounded.  Maybe he, Kareef had a natural advantage too, a different one.  He picked up the pipe and twisted at the pattern with his imagination, thinking about the smoke ring screwing around the pipe faster and faster.  When he put down the pipe this time, it rolled faster than before.  It was no coincidence.  Whatever was happening,
he
was the one causing it.