Pathspace: The Space of Paths Read online

  “The Governor's in a meeting,” said Henry.

  So? “She'll want to hear this.”

  He knew better than to argue, but he couldn't avoid a grimace as he opened the door for her. The Governor did not like interruptions. They all knew that. But they also knew that Aria was a special case.

  The Governor of Rado did not look pleased with the progress of the meeting. Eyes like black diamonds glittered angrily above her hawkish nose as she regarded the Lone Star envoy. “Is that the best you have to offer?” she growled from behind the marble desk.

  The man fidgeting in front of her swallowed. “Your eminence,” he protested, “I am only a messenger. I am not empowered to negotiate new treaties. The Okla protrusion was fairly won in battles long ago. As you know, they agreed – “

  “But I did not agree. Does Peter really think he can take us this time? Has he learned nothing from the last war?”

  The envoy gulped again. Watching him, Aria was nearly moved to pity. Nearly. He was clearly new to this. Was sending such a green diplomat to them some kind of message? Surely they had better trained diplomats. But then, maybe the ruler of Texas really did think he was ready enough for war to make only token gestures.

  “I am not privy to the thoughts of the Honcho,” he said. “But I have fulfilled my instructions. Do you have a reply for me to carry back to him?”

  “I'll think on it,” the Governor said. “Now get out of my sight.”

  As he oozed from the chamber, her eyes swung around to Aria. “Didn't they tell you I was busy? You know I don't like to be interrupted in meetings of State business.”

  “He's run off again,” Aria told her, without preamble.

  Kristana sighed. “I know. Six hours ago.” She looked down at the map on her desk for a moment, then up again. “But how do you know?”

  She exhaled. “The same way I always know. One of the glow-tubes started to die.” She frowned in puzzlement. “Why does he do it? Isn't he happy here? Doesn't he know the work he does for you is important?”

  Her mother regarded her. “More important than keeping your flowers happy. But yes, he knows. Even so, he'll still always leave from time to time. I thought you knew that.”

  Her face clouded. “I know that he does. I just don't know why.”

  The Governor of Rado leaned back in her chair. “It's the old dream again,” she said. “You know, of setting up a school to pass on his knowledge.”

  “But you've told him you'd help with that, many times!” Aria discovered her hands were clenching into fists, and forced herself to relax them. Why was the old man so difficult?

  “I know.” Kristana took a sip from her goblet. “When things settle down. But he gets impatient. He's not getting any younger. I think sometimes he wonders if I keep telling him that just to string him along.” She gazed at nothing for a moment. “He knows he's valuable to us … but maybe, occasionally, he regrets joining us.” She bit her lip. “Maybe he doesn't need us as much as we need him.”

  She didn't like the way this conversation was going. “So, are we going to war with Texas again?” she asked, to change the subject.

  “I wouldn't doubt it for a second,” her mother replied. “There is a certain inevitability to it. He knows it, and I know it.”

  Now she didn't know if her mother was talking about Xander again, or the Honcho of Texas. “But why? It never solves anything. Why do people have to keep dying?”

  Kristana shrugged. “It's like earthquakes and volcanoes, I suppose. Pressure keeps building up, and has to be relieved from time to time. Armies have to be exercised like muscles or they grow weak, inviting invasion. There's always Deseret to the west, Mexico to the south, and plenty of others looking to expand. Some have more pasture land than us, but then again, we have more soldiers than them. You know.”

  Yes, she knew. Her tutors made sure of it, always grooming her for the succession, an event she hoped would never come. “I wish we could just conquer them all and make just one country!” she said. “Then we could stop fighting them all the time.”

  “Now you sound like your father,” said the Governor.

  “The General? I wish I'd known him.”

  Kristana had been about to say something but appeared to catch herself just in time. “Ah, yes. The General. He certainly didn't mind fighting.”

  Aria's mind turned back to old Xander again. She couldn't help herself. “What about Xander? Did you send someone out after him?”

  Her mother shrugged. “As always. No doubt he'll be back soon, whether he finds what he's looking for, or not. They'll find him. They always do.”

  Chapter 3

  Xander: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

  He sat in the corner, in the gathering gloom that was his life, waiting for the inevitable pursuers. By now they would be hot on his trail. He would not be waiting long to hear the weary refrain of the song.

  But there were always possibilities. Even in these times of latter-day saints and devils. Sometimes he came back empty-handed. Sometimes not. He could not give up. Would not give up. The future was waiting, and it would not wait forever. It can't end like this. Millennia of striving, then savagery? No! It cannot end like this. The human race will rise again. The stars still waited, still beckoned. I won't let it end like this.

  His waiting was rewarded with a cup. He watched the lad pour beer into it. “Can you bring me a little salt?”

  He could see from the boy's expression that the request was not entirely unexpected. There was a shaker on the tray he was carrying. So someone recognized me. He wondered idly who it was. So many little towns, all the same, but with different people. I can't let it end like this.

  He shook salt into his palm, then took one tiny pinch and dropped it in the little bubbles. He wondered how much time he had.

  While he waited, he amused himself by watching the people in the inn, trying to divine the threads of life that connected them to each other. The preacher in the opposite corner he ignored as a known quantity. The girl sitting in the center table was obvious enough. She must have gone to Denver to seek work, perhaps as a seamstress, and found little to her liking in the decaying metropolis. The oaf with her was as plain as a book, although he doubted the fool had ever opened one. His clothes spoke of local privilege, perhaps the son of a prosperous farmer or merchant back from a carouse in Denver. The girl beside him knew him from around here, that much was clear, as was the fact that she didn't care for his company. But better the devil you knew, eh? Xander guessed that the jerk had a local flame and was hoping she might spot them and get jealous.

  The front door opened and two more young men sauntered in. Farm boys, by the look of them. No rooms for them, then. He guessed there was no other convenient place for them to get soused after a hot day in the fields. It was a small town.

  Was there someone here for him? He trusted his instincts. A faint echo had led him to step off the coach.

  Remembering the coach and all it signified, he grimaced. A school bus, drawn by a team of horses! The days of the Texas oil barons were truly over. He doubted anyone here had ever even heard of internal combustion. I can't let it end like this.

  Eventually the boy brought him a bowl of stew. As before, he made no mention of payment. It was just as well. He often forgot to bring money on these little excursions, having no need for it back at the Governor's skyscraper. Lucky someone here knew him.

  There it was, that mental echo again. Someone here was a possibility.

  He took the included spoon and ate sparingly, fishing out pieces of chicken and carrots. The meal was adequate, if limited. But they didn't have the resources of Aria's herb garden. He thought of the girl and wondered if she would ever resign herself to filling her mother's boots. But someone had to do it. One stray arrow had changed her life forever.

  Once the big chunks were gone from the bowl, he amused himself with a couple of bits of a cracker from an inner pocket of his cloak. He dropped two bits onto the
surface of the liquid and reached out with his mind to weave the pathspace. Soon they began orbiting in the bowl like little planets, in concentric circles.. But that bored him, so he added another layer to the trick, and sent them drifting round in opposite directions, the inner one clockwise, the outer one counter to that.

  He was so preoccupied with this that he did not see the staring eyes. It wasn't until he heard the little gasp that he realized his indiscretion.

  “How did you do that?”

  He looked up and saw the serving boy watching. His hair was fair, his eyes blue as a summer sky. An observant lad. Well, well. Rather easily, he projected at him, and was rewarded with a blink. Aha! He looked around the room quickly, but no one else had noticed.

  “That's pretty good ventriloquism,” the boy said, looking interested. “We had an entertainer come through once but I didn't get a chance to learn it.”

  Alert, then, but ignorant. That could be changed. Indeed it could. Things were looking up. This trip was not a waste of time, after all.

  “I wasn't throwing my voice,” he told the boy, who looked to be almost a man. “It was something else entirely.”

  He could see he had the boy's attention now, for sure.

  “The beer was cold,” he mused. “Almost frosty. Too cold for a mere spring house. That means your inn still has a functioning coldbox, doesn't it? And you're the one who fills and empties it, aren't you?” He cast his eyes about and saw the empty fireplace. “Is there an everflame, too? There is, isn't there? I knew I didn't smell any woodsmoke.”

  The boy shrugged. “So? The smith has one too. What's that got to do with throwing your voice?”

  Of course he didn't know. How could he? “Listen,” he said. “We might not have much time. Very soon some men are going to come looking for me. Before that happens, I need to tell you some things, things you probably don't know about coldboxes and everflames.”

  The lad frowned at that. “What's there to know? They work or they don't.”

  “What you don't know,” said Xander, “is that they also work on you. And they've been working on you for years, I'll wager, else you wouldn't have heard me, just now.” He pushed the bowl away from him and interlaced his fingers on the tabletop. Ignored, the bits of cracker continued round and round in the cooling surface of the stew. “How long have you been working here?”

  A shadow seemed to pass over the boy's face, his features tightening as if an unpleasant subject had come up. “I don't see as how that's any of your business,” he said. “And you never answered my question. How did you stir the bowl without touching it?”

  He was about to answer that when something he had been waiting for finally arrived: the sound of hoofbeats. Drat! This discussion would have to wait. He drained the cup quickly and turned. “Could you get me another beer? Explaining is thirsty work.”

  The boy shrugged and picked up the tray. As he turned to head back to the kitchen, Xander grabbed his staff where it leaned against the corner, then reached out again, this time with his mind, and wrapped pathspace around him quickly and thoroughly, enfolding himself in a private pocket of darkness as the light flowed around him.

  The boy was interested, but not yet hooked. There was no way he was going to let the men take him back before he'd gotten what he'd come looking for.

  Chapter 4

  Lester: “Time for you, and time for me”

  He was halfway to the kitchen when the front door opened and the men came in. There were four of them, and he would have known they were soldiers even without the dark blue uniforms. For a second he stiffened, thinking they were an advance scouting party from Texas, but then he saw the red C enclosing a circle of yellow on the outside of their upper arms, and knew them for Rado men.

  One of them glanced at him. “Have you seen an old man with a staff, dressed in gray?”

  He turned to the corner, but the stranger was no longer there, it seemed. “He was in here just a minute ago. But I don't see him now.” He set the tray down on the kitchen counter. “Who is he?”

  The man didn't answer him, but turned back to the others instead. “Jefferson, Morgan, you check the rooms. We'll try the street.”

  The two he indicated bounded up the stairs like dogs after a rabbit. Lester watched them curiously, then went back to the common room to collect dishes. He had nursed the faint hope for the past hour that Burton would be on some trip further south, but there was scant hope of that. Burton was escorting Nellie out the front door, no doubt to prolong the pleasure of her company walking her back to her mother's, when the soldiers came back down the stairs.

  They spared a moment to glance into the common room again, then followed Burton and Nellie outside.

  “Here,” said Preacher, waving for his attention. “Can I get a refill?”

  Lester nodded, collected his empty bowl and headed back into the kitchen. Descending the stairs to the basement again, he was reminded about what the old man had said about the coldbox working. Working on him. He had never thought about it in that way before. All a coldbox did was, well, keep things cold. And he only reached into it for a second or two to put things in or take them out again. But according to the old man, it was affecting his hearing.

  As he swung the lid up again to pull out another bottle for Preacher, he realized that he had never wondered about exactly how the box kept things cold. It just did, was all. But how did it work? Ordinarily, cold things always warmed up, and hot things cooled down, once you fetched them from a coldbox or the stove..

  He inspected it. It was just a wooden box, after all, the wood now dried to a strength like iron the way most wood did after a while. Thick wood, anyway. The coldbox was as thick as the four fingers of his hand, though the lid was a trifle thinner.

  The outside of it was neither hot nor cold. The metal hinges on the lid, of course, were cool to the touch, but that was the way metal was, unless it was warmed by a fire or the smith's forge. He thrust his hand back down into the interior, disturbing the layer of fog that always appeared when it was open. The air inside was as chilly as a breeze in January, and the inside surface of the wood was also cold, which of course made sense, because it was in contact with all that cold air. But what made the air cold?

  Frowning, he closed the lid and took the bottle back up the stairs.

  His mother was ladling out their dinner when he passed through the kitchen. He watched her stroke the tip of a finger around the edge of the everflame, turning down the heat until the flame hovering in the air above the old bronze disk was only a tiny red dot, barely visible under the stubby tripod legs of the iron cauldron.

  Satisfied, she replaced the cauldron's lid and handed him his bowl. “We'll finish the rest for breakfast,” she said.

  He nodded agreement and took Preacher's refill out to him and brought his coin back before settling himself down at the table in the corner where the old man had been. His mind couldn't stop thinking about what the stranger had said about the coldbox working on him. Was the everflame working on Mary, too? And now that he thought about it, how did the everflame work? He'd always taken it and the coldbox for granted, he realized.

  “You're a quiet one,” said the old man from the other side of the table.

  Lester nearly jumped out of his skin. There he was, as if he never left. How did the guy move so silently? “Where did you go? There were soldiers here looking for you.”

  The other just smiled. “I never left.” He glanced as Lester's bowl. “You've barely touched your stew. Better finish it before it goes cold on you.”

  He grimaced at that, but the old man was right. He picked up his spoon again.

  “Leave him alone and leg it while you can, Xander,” advised Preacher from across the room. “You know they'll be back for you.”

  The old man's bushy eyebrows lowered. “Mind your own business, Carl. I know what I'm about. Go drink yourself to sleep like always.”

  Preacher scowled at that but picked up his Bible and stood to leave. As he
trudged toward the door, no doubt on his way back to the little chapel down the road, he paused to give Lester a piece of advice. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,” he said. “I'd stay away from old Xander if I were you. Otherwise, you'll be itchin and scratchin the rest of your life.”

  Lester watched him go as he finished his bowl of stew. When the front door closed behind Preacher, he turned back to the old man. “You two know each other?”

  “We've crossed paths. There's some wisdom in the Book he carries, but he hasn't absorbed much of it.” Xander met his gaze. “But he's right about one thing. They will be back for me.”

  “Why do they want you?” Lester asked him, curious. “What did you do?”

  “You've been thinking about what I said earlier about the coldbox, haven't you?” said Xander, ignoring the question.

  Lester decided the man was used to doing what suited him, and answering questions, apparently, didn't always fall into that category. “A little,” he admitted. “What do you know about them, coldboxes and everflames?”

  “Oh, I know a lot more than that,” said Xander, leaning his chair back against the wall. “About the Tourists and what they did to us with their Gifts from beyond the sky. About a lot of things that aren't in the preacher's Book. Or in other books, come to that.”

  “We've got a few books,” Lester said. “Sometimes travelers barter them for few days of room and board. My Ma lets me keep them in my room.”

  “You can read, can you? Precious things, books.”

  “Better than Gerrold can. There's not much else to do in Winter, when the snows are deep and almost nobody travels. She taught me. Gerrold thought it was a waste of time.”

  Xander glanced toward the front door. He appeared to be listening to it rather than Lester. “What kind of books?”

  “Stories, mostly. Why are those soldiers looking for you?”

  Xander grinned. “Because I ran away. She wants me back, because I'm useful.”