Rand's Gateways

[Goldstar]

I'm curious. In the last chapter of Crown of Swords (you know, the one titled "Crown of Swords"), Rand makes multiple gateways to chase Sammael. But unless I'm wrong, he's never been to Illian before... How can he make gateways without skimming?

[A Rant Lord]

He knows the place from where he first travels from. When you make a gateway somewhere, you ´learn´ that place. So from there he can make another gateway instantly. It is explained somewhere in a later book.

[Sid]

Also, if you only intend to go a very short distance, you don't need to know the place at all. (From Rand's thoughts in that very chapter) Later on in TGS, Nyneave sees him do this before he meets with Hurin and thinks it was silly that she had never thought of doing that.

[HighWiredSith]

Also, if you only intend to go a very short distance, you don't need to know the place at all. (From Rand's thoughts in that very chapter) Later on in TGS, Nyneave sees him do this before he meets with Hurin and thinks it was silly that she had never thought of doing that.

 

I read that a couple of times and this is what I took away from it - that in order to make a gateway between two distances a great distance apart one had to know the place where the gateway was made and the place where it would open. In other words, you had to have been there before, seen the place, and have at least some memory of it. But near the end of TGS, Rand discovers some loophole in gateway law that says you CAN travel to a place you've never been or seen if you first travel to a gateway that opens to a place nearby. For illustration purpose, let say I am in Miami, FL or want to travel to Moscow. Since I've never been to Moscow I cannot make a gateway to a place I've never been. BUT, I can make a Gateway to Coral Gables, FL (only 20 miles away), walk through, then open a Gateway to Moscow.

 

Please tell me that's not the logic here, that I misread.

[Erunion]

Not quite Talmanes. Gateway logic goes somewhat more like this:

 

To open a gateway, you must be incredibly familiar with your immediate surroundings. Once you know your own surroundings instinctively, you are now attuned to, well whatever it is your supposed to be attuned to (the pattern? The quantum state of the universe? Not sure. It has something to do with measurements of distance and your own location in relation to that of the rest of the world). The closer the location that you need to go is, the less you need to attune yourself to your own location (as you do not need as accurate a read on your own location as you do for a longer jump).

Do you remember from your high school math those lovely y=x-whatever- equations? To discover what 'y' is, you simply had to plug in the 'x', and do the math. However, you had to know what 'x' is. My assumption is that traveling works the same way, once you discover 'x' (your own location), getting 'y' is pretty simple.

Once you've done that, you can travel anywhere, you just need a rough idea of where you are going. Unfortunately, a rough idea means that you'll land a rough distance away from where you need to be. This is not terribly good, as you can end up slicing through walls, buildings, trees or people. If, however, you've already been to a place, then you are more accurately able to make the 'calculations' for it's location when you open up a gateway, allowing you to arrive almost exactly at the right place.

 

The tricks you see in gateway travel are as follows: One, doing a short jump instantly familiarizes yourself with your current location, allowing you to do a longer jump. (Likely the One Power automates many of the calculations that you would normally have to make when you do a shorter jump, and you are then able to use those automatic calculations to make a longer jump).

Another trick you may see is 'reading the residues' of a different gateway (for example, the gateways that Sammael made and Rand followed). If you have this ability, you are able to read the calculations done to use the previous gateway, and are able to accurately mimic them.

 

Note: While I use the terms 'calculations' and 'equations', these are abstractions. The calculations and equations likely don't involve numbers or math, but the pattern of the weaves used to form the initial gateway.

Gateway jumping isn't a matter of specifying where you want to go, it's a matter of knowing where you are, and then telling a gateway where to open in relation to where you are. I assume that the curvature of the earth/etc is accounted for by either the initial one power 'equation' developed by the first Travelers, or by the One Power itself.

 

 

Edited for Clarity.

[Sid]

Let's see.

 

You can make a gateway to anywhere if you know the place you are at well enough. If you make a gateway to a place you learn it as soon as you step through. You can make a gateway to somewhere very close to you without knowing your current location very well. When you go through that nearby gateway you then know where you are well enough to make a gateway to anywhere.

 

Remember that Avi made a gateway to Seanchan (a place she'd obviously never been before) and could because she was in Rand's tent (a place she'd been for a while and knew well). This is her first gateway, so she never Traveled to the tent.

[HighWiredSith]

Sorry, that still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How can creating a gateway a short distance away allow you to know about the place you came from any better, much less know anything about a place far away to which you've never been?

 

It just feels like so many other things in this series, when the established "rules" that surround it become a nuisance or hinder the plot in any way, some quickie solution is dreamed up.

[Goldstar]

I think I get it. So you can Travel anywhere, but if it's a large enough distance you have to know your starting point very well. But if you take a gateway somewhere, you automatically know the area well enough to make another gateway from that spot. Say I just arrived on a plan to Miami, never been there before. Then I wanted to go to Moscow. If I'd been to... say... Any other city in Florida, I could take a short hop there, then Travel to Moscow, correct?

[Sid]

It doesn't help you know the place you came from any better, you just know where you went better, which happens to be close by where you made the initial gateway. You don't need to know much of anything about where you're going, ever. I assume it helps accuracy if you do, though.

 

I assume the close gateway thing has something to do with the way people think of making gateways when they make them. Women make two places seem the same place in their mind, which would be easy if they're close. Men bore a hole in the pattern to get somewhere else. If they don't have to go far it might be easier to make that hole without knowing much about where they are. This is just speculation.

 

This is just off the top of my head, though. I have to go to work or I'd look it up in more detail.

[ranjitb]

Yeah, Gateway-logic never made any sense to me at all.

It seems far more sensible that to travel to a place you would need to know THAT place, not where you are standing.

 

But.....it's a book, so we'll just accept it and move on.

[LemonPastie]

I like what Erunion said, but would word it slightly differently. (remember this is all abstractions)

 

The place you are in now is 'x'

The place you want to go is 'y'

 

To get there you use the gateway equation y = mx + c - where 'm' and 'c' are the weaving of the gateway.

In order to make a gate to the place you want to go, you need to know x - all simple so far

To make a gateway when you don't know x, you can just look into the distance (be it 1 metre, or 100, just as long as you can see the destination). This distant point you are looking at is your 'y' point so you can skip needing to know x. When you make your gateway to this close destination, your 'y' point now becomes your 'x' point - it is your new starting place.

 

When copying another gateway via reading the residues, you just copy someone elses equation, and you have your next 'x' value once you have gone through

[mbuehner]

The philosophical mistake is in thinking you are opening two gateways, one here and one there. You aren't, you are opening one gateway by making the distance between here and there zero (whether via punching a hole [a wormhole essentially] in the pattern, or making the locations touch each other as women do). Think of it as a closed door- i have to know where the doorknob is on my side... where the knob on the other side is irrelevant, it must be attached to my doorknob. Assumedly, the short distance caveat is simply a question of 'learning' your site well enough faster, its easier to bring those two points together because they are physically already close together.

 

1.If you know your area, you can travel as far as you wish, distance is immaterial.

2.If you dont know your area, you can travel a short distance, and if you know that area you can travel as per #1.

3.If you dont know your area, and dont know anywhere a short distance away to travel to, you can travel a short distance but then repeat #3 until you find a location you know or stop and learn some new location.

 

Something that hasn't been addressed is another good trick- if you have no idea where you are and have nowhere close by that you know either, you could open up a succession of gateways a few miles apart each and travel at a pretty respectable clip until exhaustion. Considering how many gateways Rand opens when he makes deathgates he could probably travel hundreds of miles like that in a few hours. Not as fast as real traveling, but not bad. Of course you run the race of whether you're better off staying and learning the place, but that might not be an option.

[Erunion]

Thanks LemonPastie: This is just what I came up with, after I had written my original post (it was reflected in the edit, but wasn't too clear).

 

It really does make sense, it's just not initially intuitive. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff is like that. But yeah, Traveling Logic is basically just algebra. So it does make sense, it's just not intuitively obvious.

 

Edit to Avoid Double Posting:

@Mbuehner:

Some nice points, but you just missed one thing, that traveling to a place makes you familiar enough with it that you can travel a great distance. This is because, as LemonPastie described, the 'y' from the initial equation is now 'x', so as long as you know the 'm' and the 'c' (the traveling weave), you can go anywhere.

 

The trick you mentioned would bevery useful for a small army or for scouts, the ability to actively outmaneuver your enemy instantly would be a huge advantage. "Hey, that's a nice hill! Let's put our archers there! *Traveling sound* Oh looky, the enemy are forming up in the valley here, line up the cavalry! Excellent, now let's open up some gateways behind the enemy force and charge!"/etc

 

For scouts, they could travel to a place they can see, look around, then jump to another place.

[mbuehner]

Some nice points, but you just missed one thing, that traveling to a place makes you familiar enough with it that you can travel a great distance. This is because, as LemonPastie described, the 'y' from the initial equation is now 'x', so as long as you know the 'm' and the 'c' (the traveling weave), you can go anywhere.

 

I'm not sure this was correct but it may be my memory- was Rand traveling from one place he didn't know to another he didn't know and then far away, or from a place he didnt to a place he did know and then far away?

 

If its like you guys are saying, why cant you travel arbitrarily far away every time you travel (say i jump across the world, now my y is x, I should be able to travel again as far as I like).

 

Like i said, i could be totally wrong but I remember it as Nynaeve noting that Rand traveled to someplace close that he knew well, and then obviously he could go far away (which would make it 'obvious' in retrospect to Nynaeve). If he was just traveling to another spot close by he didn't know either and then was able to travel far, why would that seem obvious to Nynaeve? It should seem weird.

[LemonPastie]

If you jump arbitrarily to the other side of the world, you don't know where your 'y' point will end up, which is all good - it can be done.

 

However nothing fixes the weaves to open at ground level - you could be 5 m above the ground, 5 m under ground, in the middle of the ocean (imagine a gateway opening and blasting you with 100m of water pressure). The reason you can travel to where you can see, is you can definitively see where you are going.

[mbuehner]

If you jump arbitrarily to the other side of the world, you don't know where your 'y' point will end up, which is all good - it can be done.

 

However nothing fixes the weaves to open at ground level - you could be 5 m above the ground, 5 m under ground, in the middle of the ocean (imagine a gateway opening and blasting you with 100m of water pressure). The reason you can travel to where you can see, is you can definitively see where you are going.

 

Ok, but why then would traveling the short distance create the 'knowledge' to travel the far distance? You could still step out high in the air etc. I kind of get the idea that if you travel the short distance you now 'know' the area (your variable flip), but why wouldn't that apply to traveling the long distance as well?

[LemonPastie]

I think you could, just if you don't know where you start, you can't know where you end and there are dangers as to where the gateway could open up.

 

As a complication to this, I think I recall someone saying that they knew a place well enough to get close enough to where they were going - like the had an 'x' point + or - a few metres, and that would get them their 'y' point + or - a few kilometres. The better you know a place, the more accurate your destination

 

but if you can see your destination, you know the relative distance between the two points

[Finnssss22]

On top of it all you also have to factor in each individual's talent level for it.

Egwene for example seems to take less time to "know" a place than most, Rand seems to be the same.

Rand also isn't the only one to use the short "jumps" trick after making a gateway, Demandred does the same after traveling to SL during the cleansing.

Androl on the other hand, can not only make gateways far larger than should be possible for his strength in the power, he doesn't seem to require much, if any time at all to "learn" a place, tGS chptr 5.

 

It's also been mentioned that holding the power can shorten this process.

Again though, this might not be the case for everyone.

[yoniy0]

This isn't about RJ's rules being logical, it's about using logic once you accepted a set of axioms he gave us:

1. You have to know where you are very well to Travel anywhere; except

2. You can always Travel a short distance away.

3. Traveling to any place immediately makes you familiar enough with that place to Travel from it.

 

These three rules explain everything you need to know. Also, we've seen a WF try to Travel from a place she didn't know well. Elayne told them it didn't work because they were aiming to a moving ship, but that was bull (as she knew well). At the most the Gateway would've remained in place while the ship sailed it by. The simple fact was that the WF wasn't familiar with her surroundings, and the Gateway collapsed without opening. This proves that it's not a matter of reaching the wrong place if you don't know where you are - the weaves simply don't work.

[Erunion]

This proves that it's not a matter of reaching the wrong place if you don't know where you are - the weaves simply don't work.

 

Good find! This is likely a mechanism built into the weave in order to prevent disaster (like, say, opening a gateway into space, or the core of dragonmount).

 

One thing I always wonder about is whether the author of a series (in this case, RJ), applied logic to a system in order to make it up, made it up and then applied logic to it in order to refine it, or simply made it up and let us apply logic to it.

I think it was, in RJ's case, the first or second one. Still, that's just my opinion (based on RJ's background in Physics and some quotes from him on how he made up his cultures).

[yoniy0]

BTW I don't think you could get past the limitations if you copied somebody else's weaves. Rand copied Sammael weaves (almost, anyway) because he had no idea where Sammael went, but I don't think they would've worked had he not just Traveled to that room from a lower level (yes, I know not everyone agrees with me on that issue, and I admit I have no proof; but neither does James ).

[HighWiredSith]

Here's the bottom line, at least imo - when traveling was rediscovered it had some pretty distinct limitations on it, the primary of which is you had to know or be familiar with the place you were traveling TO in order to make it work. This limitation was necessary for a number of reasons - not the least of which if Rand could travel anywhere in the world, including places he was not familiar with, then he could simply pop out a gateway in the same room with any of the forsaken he was hunting, blast them from the pattern and be done. It would have erased pages and pages of conflict and action and story.

 

When we arrive at a point in the plot where we need one of the characters to travel to a place he or she has never been to, THEN we concoct some silly loophole that says if your first jump is someplace close then your second jump can break all the rules. Not only does it not make sense but now you have to wonder why Rand doesn't simply use this loophole to resolve a number of issues, like ridding himself of the remainder of the forsaken, or the black aja, etc.

[rand4747]

I was under the impression you need to know where you are and where you are going to, you could learn where you are either by a trick like the short gateway or by waiting to learn.

 

You could alternatively skim which you don't need to know where you are but you do need to know where your going.

 

Short distances are basically explained by you cans ee where your going to go/know where relative to where you are and so don't need to know the exact locations.

[Ala Rubra]

Here's the bottom line, at least imo - when traveling was rediscovered it had some pretty distinct limitations on it, the primary of which is you had to know or be familiar with the place you were traveling TO in order to make it work. This limitation was necessary for a number of reasons - not the least of which if Rand could travel anywhere in the world, including places he was not familiar with, then he could simply pop out a gateway in the same room with any of the forsaken he was hunting, blast them from the pattern and be done. It would have erased pages and pages of conflict and action and story.

 

When we arrive at a point in the plot where we need one of the characters to travel to a place he or she has never been to, THEN we concoct some silly loophole that says if your first jump is someplace close then your second jump can break all the rules. Not only does it not make sense but now you have to wonder why Rand doesn't simply use this loophole to resolve a number of issues, like ridding himself of the remainder of the forsaken, or the black aja, etc.

 

I think you're confusing Traveling with Skimming. Skimming(which Rand learns first) does not require that you know well where you are, only that you know well where you're going. (This makes a certain amount of sense, given that you first open up a gateway to that blackness, and only then do you move towards your destination.) Traveling wasn't learned until Rand took on Rahvin, and from the beginning it was the reverse- you needed to know well where you are, not where you are going. This rule has always been upheld throughout the series, and indeed Rand does use Traveling to hunt Forsaken. The 'loophole' that you mention is simply that if you Travel to a place, you automatically get to know your destination well enough to Travel again from it during the process of making the gateway there.

 

There is no inconsistency.

[yoniy0]

@HighWiredSith, alas, if only the Forsaken all wore lojacks, then yeah - Rand could've Travel-hunt them. He actually did it every time he found out where one of them is (it started with Rahvin, though back then he was very close, so his familiarity with that Caemlyn street didn't play much of a role. Later Rand uses that 'trick' you refer to as early as ACoS, to follow Sammael out of Ilian. You'll note that the moment Rand learns of Graendal's location he immediately Travels there and attempts to do her in. In short, that thing you worried would take away pages upon pages of plot - it's already happened.