Pathspace: The Space of Paths by Matthew Kennedy Page B

it
happens.”
    “ But they must have known
it would! Surely they'd seen that happen to islanders, just as you
described! Didn't they realize the same thing could happen to
them?”
    Xander had shrugged again. “Maybe some did.”
he glanced at the window. “Maybe somewhere out there people are
still making generators and internal combustion machines. God help
us if we run into them, because they'll conquer us easily.”
    Lester put the book back
on the shelf where he found it. But if we develop an
effective technology first, he
thought, we'll be the ones doing the conquering. And that's what Xander is hoping to set in
motion. A hybrid technology, like the Ancients adopted, but this
time with technicians who can keep it going: wizards.
    And I can have a place in this plan if I
seize the opportunity.
    Right. He sat himself down again and devoted
himself to the apple. There was something missing in his attempts.
He had been imagining the photons as moving around the apple
instead of hitting it, and that resulted in a partial transparency.
But he must be doing it wrong. He must be barking up the wrong
tree, or heading down the wrong path...
    Suddenly it came to him.
He had been thinking about the photons, not about the pathspace . Maybe that was his mistake.
Instead of imagining all the bits of light zooming around the apple
and not hitting it, he should be imagining the path as a
thing-in-itself, like the road through Inverness, that existed all
the time, not merely when a coach was rolling down it.
    He had to lay out the road
in his mind, and then the light would follow it. Concentrate on the
road, not the coaches. The pathspace . The space of paths.
    This time he imagined a rectangular region
on his face. Then he moved the rectangle toward the apple, tracing
out innumerable paths in the intervening space that glowed in his
mind's eye. As his rectangle neared the apply, he split is like
opening window curtains and swept the sides around the apple,
tracing out glowing paths around it that remained when the
rectangle had passed it.
    And the apple disappeared!
He slid back his chair and got up, moving slowly lest he break his
concentration. The apple stayed gone. He let his mind relax, and
the apple was still gone. The
pathspace configuration he had managed was persisting!
    He experimented, walking
around the table. When he reached a position a quarter of the way
around the table the apple reappeared. Damn it! He moved back to his chair, and it disappeared
again. What?
    Walking completely around the table, he saw
that the apple was invisible from his original position and
directly across from it. Evidently the pathspace was bidirectional.
Once he had established the pattern, it hid the apple along that
line of sight from either side. But not sideways to it. All right,
so he needed more practice. But he was finally getting the hang of
it. What he had now would be pretty good, if he were hiding in a
corner of a room, or directly in front of someone. It was better
than nothing.
    Now the next questions were: how long would
it last, and how could he stop it if he wanted the apple completely
visible again, from all sides?
    Hmm. First he tried to
make the invisibility complete. And he succeeded, but only in a
tedious way, by using eight patches of pathspace , deflecting around the apple
from the eight major directions of the compass. This worked. There
was enough overlap that the apple was no invisible from all
directions around the table.
    But not from all directions in space, as he
found by leaning over the table and looking down. So he eliminated
that too, but visualizing a circular patch of pathspace
cross-section descending on the apple from above and splitting
around it.
    He frowned at all the work involved,
doubting that in an emergency he would have the time for so
elaborate an imagining. All those patches took too long. But at
least he was finally getting complete invisibility.
    Now for the next step. To the right of