Spinspace: The Space of Spins (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 2) (37 page)

Chapter 2

Jeffrey
: living to fight again

“It requires more courage to suffer than to die.”

– Napoleon Bonaparte

How far were they taking him from his homeland?  Lying there, huddled under the cart's false bottom, he was acutely aware that he had no idea even what direction they were traveling in.  He might emerge in Mexico, Rado, Okla, or even some part of the Dixie Emirates.

For an awful moment he wondered if it was all some elaborate joke on the part of His Holiness.  Could the Pontiff be planning to just wheel him around Dallas a few times and then hand him over the the revolutionary cabal?

The moment passed.  It could not be.  The Pope was a pragmatist, but, Jeffrey felt, not a cruel man.  If he had planned to betray the Honcho to the ousters, he would not have bothered to deceive Commander Vaco.  No, it was a ridiculous thought.

So why, if he was such a pragmatist, was the head of the Church aiding and abetting a deposed ruler?  Whatever his reasons were, Jeffrey was certain they were not sentimental.  Either Enrique really did believe in supporting the legal ruler of the Empire...or he must believe that Jeffrey, young as he was, would be better for the country than a bunch of military malcontents intent upon reclaiming the spoils of war they had expected would flow from the invasion of Rado.

He wished the cart would stop and let him out.  Surely they must be beyond the patrols hunting him by now.  They didn't have to loan him a horse.  He'd be happy to walk, if it meant getting out of this rolling coffin.

To distract himself, he reviewed his options.  He could only see three at the moment. First, he could accept what had happened, try to fit in wherever he ended up, find a job and settle down to a life drastically altered from the one he had in front of him just a few days before.  This option was the most feasible, in practical terms.  He was young, he was good with horses, he could learn new skills, and for all he knew he might even be happy as an expatriate.  Why not?  Did it really make any difference in the grand scheme of things what he did?

The problem was, it was the easy way out, the coward's way, and he knew it.  Those bastards were going to attack Rado again, and would he really be able to live with himself if they did?  Even if Aria survived the invasion, he had no doubt she would be captured.  With him out of the picture, she would never be Honchessa.  No, she would be, at best, a plaything for corrupt officers, and at worst a political prisoner, perhaps awaiting death by execution after the cabal extracted politically useful 'confessions' from her about her.  Perhaps they would accuse her of using witchcraft to ensnare their former Honcho to weaken the glorious Lone Star Empire with a alliance with Rado.

So much for the first option.  His fiancée would be killed or captured, and the people of Rado who had accepted him as an ally – even after his father had attempted to subjugate them by force – would be conquered and made into slaves to mine gold for Dallas, and into cannon fodder to swell its armies as the Empire expanded.

His second option would be to survive the manhunt and then slip back into Texas to raise an army of loyalists to restore him to power.  Not as easy as giving up, but at least not as cowardly, either.  The trouble with this options was it seemed less practical.  The traitors would have time to consolidate their power while he laid low, and no doubt they would be filling the ears of citizens with slanders about his actions and motives to justify their seizure of power.  

He doubted that it would be easy for them to arrive at a consensus to let one of their number be exalted as the new Honcho, but if they did and the new leader of the Empire was accepted by the people, his cause might be doomed.  How would he afford to supply and support his army of restoration?  He was a penniless refugee.  Would he turn to banditry, and prey on his own countrymen to build up his forces, abandoning morality in the service of the greater good?  Would he become just another thug like the highwaymen who preyed on trade caravans?  So much for that option.

The third options was hardly better.  He could survive and make his way to Rado to ask for their help.  Even if they granted it, though, he could imagine how that would look to his people: a failed leader turned villain, returning with a foreign army to conquer his own country so he could be a puppet for distant rulers.

The road must have become smoother.  The jolt of the cart stopping awakened him and he realized he must have dozed off from the monotony of the cart's slow progress.  He only realized how long he had been asleep when he heard a chorus of squawks of displaced chickens and the hidden door was lifted to grant him a view of the night sky.  Groaning from the stiffness in his back and the tingling of limbs that had been too long cramped in the narrow space, he allowed himself to be lifted bodily out of the hidden compartment and forced himself to stand and stamp his legs and wave his arms to restore his circulation.  “Where are we?”

The monks helping him stand appeared to ignore the question.  Gazing about him he finally located Brother Marcus and marched over to him.  “Your men won't tell me where we're going or where we are.”

Marcus was calm.  “They have taken a vow of silence, Excellency.  His Holiness thought it prudent to ensure that they would not be questioned on our way out, or upon their return.”

“And yet you are still talking, I notice.”

“His holiness thought it best that one of our party be excepted from the vow, in order to respond to soldiers.  And so that you would have someone to talk to.”

The carts had pulled off the road into a stand of trees by a field.  Some of the monks gathered fallen branches for a fire, which Marcus lit with the aid of an everflame.  Others began putting up tents.

“So where
are
we going?”

Marcus appeared surprised. “Didn't you hear what I told the soldier?”

“Yes, to some monastery.  I assumed that was a cover story.”

“The best cover stories are true,” Marcus told him.  “Some people are better than others at sensing when they are being lied to.  I could not afford to arouse suspicions.  I knew I was telling the truth, so the soldier knew it too.”  He replaced the everflame in a pocket of his robes.  “As I said, we are going to the monastery of St. Avory's.”

“Why go there?”

“It seemed a logical place of refuge for you, Excellency.  You will have the time you need to plan your next move.”

If only he knew what that was.   

(END OF PREVIEW)

Appendix I: Spinspace

Once again, as I did in Pathspace, I'd like to point out that the aspect of metaspace I am emphasizing in this book,
spinspace
, is not completely a figment of my imagination.

Those who study quantum mechanics know that the so-called “fundamental particles” are supposed to possess certain properties, one of which is called spin.  Particles can have zero, integer, or half-integer spin, which is one way to classify them.

But spin is like other quantum properties like 'strangeness' or 'charm': a simple name for a mysterious quality.  Undergraduates often visualize an electron as a little spinning ball, like a billiard ball with some English on it. 

They are often dismayed when it is explained to them that this is an inadequate and oversimplified way to imagine spin.  For example, an electron has a spin of  ± ½.  Huh?  Half of what?  One way of explaining it is to say that the electron has to spin around twice in order to get back to where it started.  Needless to say, this is awfully hard to picture.

It gets worse.  When you measure the spin of a particle, you might think (imagining the electron like a tiny spinning Earth) that the tilt of its axis would give you all sorts of possible values.  But it doesn't!  Whenever you measure the spin of an electron, the answer is
always
+½ or - ½ .  Never anything else.

We would prefer to ignore such craziness, except for the fact that spin is extremely important when you talk about electromagnetic fields.  The spin of any charged particle, like the the electron, makes it act like a little magnet, and the motion of the particle is influenced by other magnetic fields.  If you send an electron into a fairly even magnetic field, its path bends into a circle or spiral, like a curve ball thrown by an atomic pitcher.

This behavior is crucial to the construction of particle accelerators these days, where strong magnetic fields are used to make the particles fly around in circles instead of off in straight lines.  That way we can keep spanking them with electrostatic pushes to make them go faster and faster .

One of the interesting questions about spin is where it comes from.  We know from the conservation of energy that when a high energy particle smacks into another, some of their energy of motion can become new particles that seem to come out of nowhere.

And then they arrive, most of them already have spin.  But where did they get it? It is fairly easy to picture the electron as swelling up with extra mass when it is accelerated – that the energy used to speed up the particle makes it put on weight – and then to see these collision-created particles as debris knocked off it somehow.

If you smash two rocks together, bits will be broken off and fly away like shrapnel from a grenade.  These fragments, however will exit the scene with a diverse collection of linear and angular momenta.  In other words, some might be spinning slowly, other more rapidly.

But the particles creates by collisions
always
appear with spins that are either zero, or some multiple of positive or negative ½.

And where does their spin come from?  The mechanical analogy breaks down here, because they are
not
pieces of the original particle that hit something.  Well, not usually.  They are not like pieces of a shattered rocket that got hit off-center by a passing asteroid.  They are full and complete particles in their own right, with their own mass, motion, and spin.  So where do they get the spin?  And why is it always exactly zero or some  multiple of ½ ?

Many physicist refuse to get tangled up in trying to imagine what particles look like.  Their motto is “just shut up and calculate”, meaning that we don't need to spend time picturing particles and their interactions as mechanical events.  We have equations which predict measurable results, and that should be enough to do whatever we want to do with the particles.

Like make televisions.  In the early days of television, long before the advent of flat screens and  pixel LEDs, images were made on TV screens by shooting electrons at phosphors to make the dots on the screen glow.  The electrons were obtained by heating up a piece of metal so that they would jump off it.  From there they were accelerated to make them hit the screen fast enough. (Yes, you guessed right – early TVs were particle accelerators.)

The problem was, the electrons were focused into a beam, like water shooting out of a hose.  And there was no way to wiggle the electron hose fast enough to make them hit all the positions on the screen in time to make a frame of a movie appear. 

The solution they came up with was having electromagnets controlled by the incoming TV signal   With a couple of perpendicular fields, they could make the electrons curve left and right, and up and down.  Since the fields were controlled by electromagnets, instead of permanent magnets, and the current in their coils could be changed very quickly, the deflection fields could redirect the beam of electrons to make it point at any position on the screen.

None of this requires anyone to spend much time worrying about what the spinning electrons look like, or where they got their spin.  The math is simple enough and good enough to design consumer electronics without worrying about such “philosophical” issues as where the spin comes from.

But sooner or later, if you think about such things, the question arises out of the background noise and sparks fresh imaginings.

The explanation that I like is that particle spin is an intrinsic property of space, of the Continuum.  Okay, it is an odd property, granted.  But if it is a property of space, then any particle “created” in space will have a configuration that either includes it or not.  If not, you get the zero-spin particles like the photon.  In 3-dimensional space, after all, you can imagine objects with hardly any thickness in the 3
rd
dimension, like flat planes.  Similarly, in the Continuum we can  imagine particles that have none of their existence distributed along the dimension of spin.

I like to suppose that spin is a property of space, not of particles.  Particles have it because they exist in space.

One thing I forgot to mention is that while particles can be created by investing enough energy in a small region of space, as when electrons in old TV sets smashed into phosphors and liberated photons, there are also particles that seem to literally come out of nowhere.  They are called
virtual
particles, to distinguish them permanent ones, and they seem to be living on borrowed time.  The Einstein version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty says that the more sure you are about how long something takes, the more
unsure
you are about how much energy is present...and vice versa.

In other words, you can “borrow” energy from the Continuum, as long as you pay it back.  The more you borrow, the sooner it has to be paid back.  The more massive a virtual particle is, the more energy must be borrowed to create it, and so the sooner it must disappear again to return that borrowed energy.

Space is boiling over with virtual particles all the time.  And the interesting thing about, for example, a virtual electron, is that when it appears out of nowhere it always has spin.  When you instantiate an electron in space, it always comes complete with spin no matter whether the energy was supplied or borrowed.

So I say, spin is an intrinsic property of space.  This might seem like mere philosophy, but every electric motor in the world depends on magnetic fields exerting force on electrons moving in wires.  When you turn on a fan, the rotation of the fan is not caused by the power cable somehow turning gears attached to the fan blade.  It is caused by the spin of electromagnets talking to the spin of electrons and pushing them around to build up mechanical spin in the rotating shaft.

You could say that
spinspace
is exploited every time you start your car and power up the electric starter motor.  Spinspace is used in every old analog electric watch and clock where an electric motor makes the second hand move.  Every time you ride an elevator, print out a document, or even look at a compass needle, you are using
Spinspace
– the space of spins.

--- MRK

Other books by Matthew R. Kennedy

             
Gamers and Gods

Gamers and Gods: AES

Games and Gods II: MACHAON

Gamers and Gods III: ALEXANOR

The Metaspace Chronicles

Pathspace: The Space of Paths