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

the other side of the Mississippi.
    “ As to that,” he said, “I
believe that we have a couple of solutions. First, our records
indicate that alternative fuels can be fashioned. We can ferment
plant material and animal dung to produce a flammable gas
called methane which the ancient
vehicles could be converted to use instead of gasoline or diesel.
Or we could use crops with sugar in them such as corn to ferment
and make alcohol and use that as fuel.”
    “ Don't we need the dung
for fertilizer, and the crops to feed our people and livestock?”
Peter shook his head. “We don't want to win a war at the price of
causing a famine. What's the second option?”
    “ It's potentially easier,
but a little more controversial. We do have the ancient oil wells
which the alien witchcraft made unnecessary. We could start using
them again. We still have the ancient records to tell us how to
refine diesel and gasoline from oil pumped from the
ground.”
    Peter thought about that. “Just how would we
go about that? We have no working pumps to pull the oil out of the
ground. If I remember my history, the oil was useless until it was
processed in refineries. And we have no refineries left! Nothing
but rust and old buildings. Even if we could rebuild one, there
would be no way to power it.”
    “ Actually, your
Excellency,” Brutus said smoothly, “that turns out not to be the
case.”
    Peter stared at him. “All right. What do you
know that I don't?”
    Brutus took a deep breath.
“This is where it gets controversial,” he said. “Although we have
no pumps, there are some leftover swizzles here and there. We could use them to suck the oil
out of the wells that still have oil in them. And it's an
oversimplification, but the refineries basically boiled the
different fractions like gasoline, kerosene, and diesel out of the
crude oil. We could always replace the heat source for the
refineries with everflames to heat
up the crude oil. My engineers tell me it could all be done with
what we have, without having to sacrifice crops or
fertilizer.”
    So that's what he meant by
controversial. “The Church wouldn't like it.
They're firmly of the opinion that the Gifts of the Tourists are
demonic, you know.”
    Brutus had to smile at that. “No such thing
as demons,” he said. “Fuck the Church.”
    Peter eyed him. “They've
been very useful to me,” he reminded the older man. “One hand
washing the other. They keep the people in line for me.” He
fingered the letter from Kristana. “And truth be told, I want to
rebuild the old technology without any alien trash.”
    “ That,” Brutus told him
frankly, “won't happen in your lifetime. It took a thousand years
to do it the first time. It might take half that long to do it
again, even with the old records to help us along.”
    “ You've said that before,
General. But why? Like you just said, we have most of the old
records to help us avoid guessing how to do things.”
    Brutus got up and began to
pace back and forth in the office. Another dumb
habit , Peter thought. The day was warm. If he
keeps that up he'll be sweating all over his uniform. But he said
nothing, knowing that Brutus believed it helped him
think.
    “ Any blacksmith,” said
Brutus, “can flatten the end of an iron bar, temper it to the right
hardness, and put a wooden handle on it to make a screwdriver.
That's no major job. Now you have a tool to screw things together.
But it's the screws that are the
trouble. They made those with a special machine. We can put
together houses and tables and such with glue and wooden pegs to
hold them together, but if you want to screw things together, you
need to make a lot of screws. Well, screw the screws, hah, bit of a joke there. We'll weld
the metal together. But to do that you need either a torch that
burns a gas they used to call acetylene (or something like it), or an arc welder that uses
electricity, neither of which we have. Okay, let's say you decided
to do it with