Pathspace: The Space of Paths (4 page)

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

And then he vanished! This time Lester
saw it happen. The old man grabbed his staff and then he just …
faded away. How did he do that?

Right after that the front door banged
open again and the leader of the soldiers strode in and scanned the
room. Gerrold was behind him.

“
Lester!” Gerrold barked. “Governor's men are looking for an
old man in gray with a staff. Have you seen him?”

“
I saw him a while ago,” Lester answered, truthfully.
A very short while.
“Why
are they looking for him? What's he done?”

“
Never you mind, boy.” Gerrold reached for the bowl Mary had
set on the counter for him. “Make yourself useful. Go refill the
watering trough. Their horses must've been thirsty.”

Lester managed not to smile as he
grabbed a bucket and brushed past the men. There were four horses
hitched to the front porch . They eyed him curiously, and one of
them seemed to snicker as he ambled to the pump by the side of the
inn. He ignored that and began filling the bucket. While he pumped,
he thought about what the old man, Xander, had told him. Everything
the bearded geezer said seemed to invite more questions. Gifts from
beyond the sky? What could that possible mean? And what, pray tell,
were these 'tourists' he had mentioned?

Xander
: “the sound of water only”

Xander listened to the boy pump water
into the bucket. Part of him regretted what he was about to do. If
he did nothing, this son of an innkeeper could have a normal life.
That man (what was his name?) might be hard on him, but as the
eldest son the boy was sure to inherit the inn someday when his
father finally succumbed to age or sickness. By then he'd know all
he needed to run the place, and with the inn to support him, he'd
be a decent catch for some local seamstress or farmer's
daughter.

But that was not going to
happen.
The needs of the many,
he reminded himself. The boy had enough natural
talent that the Gifts were beginning to encourage his own gifts.
And that doomed him to greatness. Such material could not be
wasted, not with the world in the state that it was at
present.

A thousand years ago, he might have
become just another innkeeper with a knack for knowing when his
guests wanted a drink refill, or a healer who was better than
average at knowing who needed extra care to stay healthy. Without
the Gifts of the Tourists his natural talents would most likely
have never flowered into anything strong or significant.

The coming of the Tourists from the
stars had altered things forever. That they had brought about the
downfall of technological civilization was undeniable. Had they
known what they were doing? He might never be sure of that.
Personally, he would like to believe that it was all a tragedy of
carelessness. Though the extent of the destruction was
heartbreaking, he refused to assume it was the result of deliberate
malice. For his own peace of mind, he preferred to assume that the
Tourists simply had never dreamed that their actions would have
such consequences.

Were we the first planet to be so
stricken? There was no way to know. If, as he believed, they never
returned to previous ports of call, then perhaps they had never
witnessed what could happen to a lower-technology world that had
prematurely tasted their magical shortcuts.

No, not magic,
he corrected himself. But it might as well have
been. And who could resist it, who could refuse
something-for-nothing? Almost nobody.

The boy had come back to
refill his bucket. The squeaking of the pump and the sound of the
water splashing at the bottom of the empty container broke his
reverie and reminded him that he was here for a reason.
Might as well get it over with
. So many other things to do.

He reached his mind out of
the darkness surrounding him and unwrapped the pathspace. The
readmitted sunlight, fading as it was at the end of another long
summer day, was blinding. It always was when he dropped the
invisibility weave. He squeezed his eyes to slits to let the pupils
adjust to the dimming brightness of the evening.
Maybe I should have waited till after sunset.
Always in such a hurry, you old fool.

And there was the boy, gaping at his
reappearance. “Do you know how to ride a horse?” he asked the
lad.

“
No. Why?”

“
Pity. It would have made this a little easier. Come on, let's
go.”

The boy followed him back to the
watering trough, since he was headed there anyway. But of course he
had to ask, as he poured the water. “Where are you
going?”

They heard a distant shout of “There
he is!” Xander turned and saw the men hurrying toward them. They
had their crossbows now, and they looked anxious. Well, they had
their orders.

“
Actually, we're both going,” he told the boy. “What's your
name?”

The lad looked at him as if he were
crazy. “Lester. What are you talking about? I'm not going anywhere!
“

“
I'm afraid you are, Lester.” He turned to the men who were
surrounding them now. “Relax, gentlemen. We're not going to do
anything stupid.” He glanced back at Lester. “You're not going to
do anything stupid, are you?”

“
I think I already did,” Lester muttered. “You planned this,
didn't you? You expected them to catch you. Whatever it is you've
done, you've involved me in it, and it isn't fair!”

Xander nodded at that. “Entirely
correct,” he said. “Not fair at all. But necessary. The sooner you
understand that, the better we'll get on.” He turned to the men.
“The boy can't ride,” he told them. “We'll have to borrow a cart or
something, or else wait for the morning coach.” He supposed it must
seem peculiar to the boy, a prisoner directing his own
retrieval.

The captain pursed his lips. “Are you
sure you've finished with running for the time being, old man? As I
recall, you've gone further than this is the past.”

“
Oh, quite. I never argue with crossbows at close range,
Captain. Especially so, now that I've found him. We'll give you no
trouble, my word on it. Will we, Lester?”

The boy's face alternated between
alarm and hostility. “Found me? You never set eyes on me until
today. How could you have been looking for me? Let me go! I've done
nothing to deserve getting arrested by the Governor's
men.”

The captain glanced at Xander, one
eyebrow raised. “Haven't told him, have you?”

“
Well, you know me,” said Xander affably. “I like my little
surprises. I expect he'll settle down once he understands the truth
of the situation. Might take some explaining, but there's time,
especially since a cart will slow us down for the trip
back.”

The captain shook his
head, smiling. “Poor bastard.” But Xander detected a trace of envy
in the officer's voice.
The boy has no
idea of what awaits him.
But if he had,
would he have come gladly … or run for the hills?

“
Hard even for me to imagine the wonders they had in those
days.”

The old man just could not shut up.
And after listening for a while, Lester discovered he did not want
him to. Xander's words were like a drink that makes you thirsty –
almost every sentence opened more questions than it
closed.

Lester shifted in the back
of the cart, his legs dangling over the back of it.
I could just hop down and start
running
, he thought. But so far his
curiosity prevented it. That, and the fact that it was not quite
dark enough yet. The stars were just beginning to poke out in the
sky above them. “What do you mean by 'those days'?”

“
The days before my time. Before the coming of the
Tourists.”

He sensed whole paragraphs buried in
that one word. He might as well learn as much as he could before he
made his escape. “Why do you call them the Tourists?”

“
It's an old word for people who travel to places they haven't
been just to see what's there. They travel from star to star, you
see, although of course they pick the ones with planets like Earth
– planets likely to have life. I expect they heard our radio
transmissions.”

More mysteries. He felt a hunger in
his head to know them all. “What do you mean, from star to star?
You can't live on a star. They're just twinkly points of
light.”

“
The stars are suns like ours, just very far away. The Earth's
a ball going round the Sun, and many of the stars, those distant
suns, have planets of their own. Some are like Earth. And some of
them have people on them. The Tourists visit them, traveling from
place to place like the coach goes from town to town.”

He thought about that. “Do we ever
visit them, too?”

“
We were planning to, once. But then the Tourists came, and
changed everything.”

Back to the Tourists again. Sooner or
later Xander always got back to them. Why was he so obsessed with
the Tourists? “Why did their coming change everything?”

“
Because of their Gifts. They made 'em, as easily as you or I
could pump a bucket full of water. They made 'em and left 'em
behind like toys given to children.” Xander shifted his weight on
the hard bed of the cart. “Well, not exactly
gave
. It was a trade, their Gifts
for our genomes.”

“
Our what?”

“
Have you never wondered what makes you different from a dog
or a tree? In every little bit of your body are sets of
instructions, like little cookbooks, that tell the stuff in your
body how to make muscles, bones, skin, and such. It's called DNA.
I'll tell you more about that later,” he added, as Lester opened
his mouth to ask about it. “And the DNA is different in every kind
of living thing. Different in some ways even in every being. It's
why people all have eyes and noses – and also why their eyes are
different colors, their noses different shapes. It makes us all the
same, and it makes every one of us unique.”

The Tourists, he went on to explain,
were curious about DNA, and collected it like books. Every planet
they visited had different DNA and they always took samples,
unraveled it and stored the patterns in case it turned out to be
valuable someday.

“
How could it be valuable?”

“
Does your town have an herbalist? Someone good with healing
plants? Well some plants are good for headache, some for
indigestion, and so on. And some are poison. It's all because of
the stuff the plants make inside them. And what they make is all
determined by the little cookbooks in them, their DNA.

“
So you never know how useful a plant might be. Or a bug or a
fish. And neither do the Tourists, so they collect all the
different DNA they can find, from every planet they stop at. Who
knows? Someday our marigolds might turn out to cure some sickness
of theirs. To them, every planet is a library, and there might be
treasure in our cookbooks. So they collect it, take copies. And
they paid for our DNA with the Gifts, as many as we wanted. And we
grabbed for those gifts like foolish children.”

“
Why?” He sensed Xander was working up to something. The
Tourists had changed everything with their Gifts. Changed in what
way?

“
Because people are lazy,” the old man growled. He looked up
at the sky, frowning.

“
I don't understand. Why was it lazy to trade for the
Gifts?”

Xander sighed. “Pumping water is hard
work, isn't it? Suppose you could fill a bucket bigger than a
house, and put it up on a hill? Then the water would want to come
back down, and it would push its way through pipes if you let it.
We used to do that. Every house had pipes buried in the ground to
let water come right into the kitchen. No one had to pump water to
fill buckets or take baths. The water towers were filled by
electric pumps, pumps that people had to build. It took money and
work to set them up.

“
Then along came the Tourists, and they knew how to make
something called a
swizzle
that pumped water all by itself. It looked just
like an ordinary pipe, but if you stuck one end in water, the water
would get sucked into the pipe and shoot out the other end. Even if
the other end was uphill of the water! Perfect for bringing water
to houses and farmer's fields. All of a sudden, we didn't need to
make pumps anymore.”

“
Sounds good to me,” said Lester, who had no great love of
pumping water from the well all the time. “It would save a lot of
time and money and work. Wouldn't it?”

“
Yep. It also drove the pump-makers out of business. And that
was just the beginning of the end. It's hard to imagine life
without a coldbox, isn't it? Over a thousand years ago they were
called 'iceboxes' because people kept food cold by putting it
inside insulated boxes with big blocks of ice.”