Pathspace: The Space of Paths Read Online Free PDF Page A

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