Pathspace: The Space of Paths Read Online Free PDF

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.”
    “ But didn't the ice melt?”
    “ Sure did. But there were men who delivered ice right to your
door, from horse-drawn trucks. When the ice block melted you put
another one in. That worked for a long time, and then men invented
electric refrigeration, a way of using pumps to cool down the
icebox without ice. You had to have wires to bring the electricity
to every house, and people had to pay for the electricity that ran
in the wires, but they could go on trips and not worry about the
food warming up, because their refrigerators kept running all the
time, staying cold. The ice delivery men were out of business, of
course.
    “ But then along came the Tourists, and they could take a box,
any box, and put their magic on it. Then it would stay cold without
ice or electricity. Thanks to the coldboxes, we didn't need to make
refrigerators anymore. So more companies went out of
business.”
    “ Is the everflame one of the Gifts from the Tourists,
too?”
    “ It sure is.” Xander shook his head. “It really made a lot of
people happy. No more pumping oil out of the ground or cutting
trees down for firewood, no more burning oil, no more electric
heaters for houses to have hot water. Just get the Tourists to work
their magic on a piece of metal and you could have heat anytime for
free. Saved tremendous amounts of time and work and money. Guess
what happened because of it?”
    Now he was beginning to see a pattern.
“The people who cut firewood and pumped oil out of the ground went
out of business?”
    “ Theres a price for everything, son. Never forget that, like
Mankind did. If all a man knows how to do is cut firewood or mine
coal for people to burn, guess what happens when people don't need
firewood or coal? If he doesn't get another job, his kids starve.
Or the government has to pay to feed them for him.”
    Lester swallowed. “What you're saying
is, the Tourists hurt us by helping us.” He thought about that for
a moment. He had never realized that you could do that – could
actually hurt someone by helping them. It sounded crazy, but when
you thought of whole countries instead of single people, it made
more sense. He thought of families starving because their fathers
were too old to learn a new trade, and shivered in the cooling
evening air. No one wants an old apprentice. If they lost the inn,
Gerrold would be laughed out of town if he went to the smith and
asked to be accepted as a blacksmith apprentice.
    “ Hurt us tremendously,” Xander agreed. “Civilization fell,
almost back to the Middle Ages level. We lost all of the high
technology that it took hundreds of years to develop. Now we're
back to peasants and crossbows. All the old low tech still works.
Farming with horses, blacksmithing metal tools, weaving cloth with
hand looms, and poultices instead of pills.”
    “ But why? Why didn't we just adapt? Why did things go so
wrong?”
    The old man didn't answer immediately.
An uncomfortable silence grew for long moments before he
spoke.
    “ Two reasons,” he said finally. “The first was, we let the
infrastructure rot away.”
    “ The what?”
    “ We used to have a thing called a tractor that we used instead
of horses to pull plows. You can still find them here and