Pathspace: The Space of Paths by Matthew Kennedy Page A

scrapers,
would not yield to Autumn, ordinary people were going about their
lives with the certainty of their daily routines.
    But his mind resisted
routines in this place. Oh, he was diligent in his practice, but
not in a regularized way. Something in him balked at the idea of
marching off the hours the same way on every day, this now and the
other later. Like a plow-horse tilling a field, with no will of its
own. Yes, I will practice. I'll learn what I must learn
to set my own course.
    On impulse, he swiveled to
his left and reached out to pluck a book from the hundreds Xander
lines his walls with. Questions For
Posterity , by Hugh Stevenson, was a volume
about the last days of the Ancients, after the Tourists had
departed, their database of Earth's genome sequences complete. It
was after the adoption of the Gifts as cornerstones of a more
efficient infrastructure, but before the collapse of that very
infrastructure, due to what Xander had called “the lack of
technical support for the Gifts.”
    “ ...and so questions
remain long after the objects of those questions have gone. Will
the Tourists find actual uses for the genetic sequences they
bartered for? Will we ever come to grips with an understanding of
how the Gifts actually work? Sometimes, this reporter finds it
doubtful. Their operation cannot be doubted, yet contradicts what
we thought we knew about the universe. A friend of mine at MIT
assures me that there is no such thing as something for nothing.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely converted to other
forms such as matter, or concentrated or dispersed.
    “ But the Gifts of the
Tourists deft such reasoning. They have no moving parts, no
circuitry, and require no power input. Where is the catch? A
swizzle can impart motion to fluids and even pump them uphill:
hydroelectric dams no longer require a river for their source of
water, merely a lake and a big swizzle to push the water back up
after it has fallen and driven the dynamo. But this gives free
electricity! It is literally something for nothing.
    “ Similarly, the everflames
that now smelt our ore require no fuel. So where does the heat come
from? Is somewhere else cooling off to balance the equations? Are
we pulling heat out of the magma inside the Earth? Or from the Sun
or other stars?”
    He closed the book. Its questions went
unanswered, most of them. But at least he now knew the “catch” the
Hugh was referring to – the price to be paid for the use of the
Gifts in Earth's . For gifts without knowledge, the price had been
the loss of our own wisdom.
    It had been hard form him to accept how
easily it had happened. He remembered his last argument with the
wizard about it. “The Ancients were not fools. The couldn't have
been fools, when they accomplished so much before the Tourists
arrived. So why didn't they predict the consequences? More to the
point, why didn't the Tourists?”
    Xander had shrugged, as he often did to such
questions. But he tried to explain it. “Imagine you are an ancient
explorer in a sailing ship and you meet natives on an island who
use stone axes to cut down trees.”
    Here Les interrupted. “How do you make an
axe out of stone? Smiths use iron for that.”
    “ You take a couple of hard
rocks and use one to chip away at the other one, breaking off chips
along one or both sides of one end to make a crude edge, then you
tie the sharp rock to the end of a stick. But now you, the explorer
arrive and trade the natives pre-made axes with steel blades. What
happens?”
    “ They realize the metal
axes are better, and stop shipping stone for axes.”
    “ And
eventually?”
    “ They forget how to make
stone axes.” He thought about it. “And after you sail away, the
metal axes eventually rust away and are useless. Now they're back
to square one. They have to learn how to make stone axes all over
again, because they didn't think that skill was important enough to
pass on to their children.”
    “ Exactly. And so