Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  I always had the idea, when I was young, that if I stared in the mirror long enough at some feature, my lips or eyes, some sun freckles I did not care for, or a mole, I could somehow, by force of will, “stare” my face to a more perfect shape—clearer skin, higher cheekbones, eyes greener, or more long-lashed, perhaps slightly tilted and exotic.

  And because this does indeed describe me, then as now, I had always had the unspoken, haughty assumption that plain girls either lacked willpower, or lacked imagination. It is my least attractive feature, this prejudice against the unsightly, and it is based on a very wrong notion of what life is like for normal people. It gives me no pleasure to notice that many normal people have the selfsame prejudice against the plain, but with far less reason than I.

  I am tall. Rather, I should say, I am tall for a girl, but I hope you will understand me if I say I was taller when I was younger. Everyone but Primus, who became Victor Invictus Triumph, was smaller than me, and I could outrun and outwrestle my two younger brothers.

  9.

  I remember the day when Quartinus, who turned into Colin Iblis mac FirBolg, proved he could master me. There was some quarrel over who was to pluck apples from the tree, and I threw one at his head hard enough to raise a bruise. He grinned, as he did when he was angry, and chased me down. You see, I laughed because the last time we had raced, I had beaten him. Now he tackled me, rolled me on the ground, and took my hair in one hand to yank my head back—something he would never have done to a boy. Still, I grinned, because the last time we fought, I had toppled him downhill.

  And so I struck and I wrestled and I pushed and I kicked, but my blows seemed, by some magic, to have been robbed of their force. Just one year before, he had been a child, and I could bully him. Where had my strength gone?

  He pinned my wrists to the ground, and knelt on my legs to prevent me from kicking. Suddenly, the game turned into something serious, mysterious, and somehow horrible. I writhed and struggled in his grasp, and I somehow knew, knew beyond doubt, that I would never be stronger than a man again. Not ever.

  Colin smiled, and ordered me to apologize, and he bent his head forward to stare into my eyes. I wonder if he was trying to awe me with his frowning gaze, to hypnotize me with his luminous blue eyes.

  If so, he succeeded beyond his dreams. This boy, whom I had never really liked, now seemed inexpressibly powerful to me: manly, potent, confident. I will not tell you all my wild thoughts at that moment. But I wanted him to kiss me. Worse yet, I wanted not to want it, and to have him steal a kiss from me nonetheless.

  I did not apologize, but snapped defiantly at him, “Do your worst!” And I tossed my head and yanked at my wrists in his grip. My fists seemed so little compared to his, and his grip seemed as strong as manacles. I felt entirely powerless, but the sensation seemed oddly intoxicating, rather than dreadful.

  He did not do his worst. Instead, baffled, he stood up suddenly, releasing me, and seemed suddenly a boy again, a child I could defeat.

  I remember we raced back toward the house, apples in our hands. We had just enough that we could throw one or two at each other, trying to bruise shins and legs.

  And I won that race, that time, but he grinned and tried to make me believe he had allowed me to win.

  Strangely enough, I knew he thought he was lying. And I knew he had not been.

  2

  The Experiment

  I do not know how young I was when I performed the experiment that required me to conclude that something was wrong in my life.

  Victor—so I may call him, though he was still called Primus at the time—had grown a trace of down on his upper lip, finer than the fuzz of a peach. With even this small hint of manhood, he seemed more our leader than before, and there was a newfound glamour to him that touched my heart and troubled my dreams.

  We had crept by stealth from the orphanage grounds, and stood among the rocks and bald hills of the West. Below us and to the East, we could see the lights from the Main House, the servants’ quarters, the outbuildings, the stables.

  Dr. Fell had bought Victor the instrument he was using for his experiment from a scientific catalogue. At the time, I thought it normal and unexceptional. Now, I realize that such an instrument was fabulously expensive: a piece of precision machinery even an observatory would envy.

  The moon rose not long after sunset, and we pointed the lenses of the instrument to the East. Victor held his eye to the eyepiece and made minute adjustments to the vernier dials. He thumbed a red switch with a grimace of satisfaction.

  He said, “An internal computer will track the path of the moon as it rises, and send out periodic pulses. We want to gather a number of samples, to correct for the different cords of atmosphere the signal passes through. The return signal is received by the large dish on the tripod over there, whose motors are slaved to these wheels here. And voila!”

  A numerical readout lit up. It was two point something something. 2.8955. Almost three seconds.

  I said, “What now?”

  He said, “And now we wait four hours.”

  “Did you bring anything to read?”

  He just looked at me oddly.

  “Or smoke?” I said.

  “You are too young to smoke. Besides, it’s bad for you.”

  “Quentin said you tried it. You experimented with it.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t me. Trying things common sense abundantly demonstrates are bad for you is not an experiment; such things show you nothing but what your own tastes are. That does not constitute knowledge. This is an experiment!”

  “Then who was it?”

  “Who was what?”

  “Quentin said he smelled smoke in the boys’ bathroom. Cigarette smoke.”

  He looked at me with scathing condescension, but said nothing.

  “What?” I said.

  “Logic. If it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Quentin, and it wasn’t a girl, who was it?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling sheepish.

  Hours passed. I fidgeted. I paced. I complained about the cold. I sat on the ground, which made me colder. I asked him for his down jacket, which he doffed without a word and tossed to me. I rolled it up and used it as a pillow.

  I must have slept.

  I dreamed that I was on a boat. A man held me roughly in one arm, dangling me over the side. The boat pitched and tossed terribly; rain pelted my face and ran in icy ribbons down my flesh. The man held some sharp, horrible thing near my face: a knife, or something larger than a knife.

  In the dream, the water, which had been black and rolling, webbed with white foam and spray, suddenly grew clear as crystal. A figure that was so large as to make our ship seem the size of a lifeboat was gliding beneath the waves, parallel to our course. The figure had his hands back along his sides and his head down; he did not kick his feet. Instead, the water streamed past him, like wind streaming past a man falling effortlessly through the air.

  “Tell him to quell the storm,” said the voice of the doctor in my ear.

  The figure turned its head and regarded us both. Its eyes were lamps, eerie with a greenish light, and it had a third eye, made of metal, embedded in its forehead.

  Instead of being terrified that I was going to be pitched overboard or stabbed, I was overcome with a painful embarrassment to realize that the gigantic figure was utterly nude and that, as he kept turning, I would soon see a penis larger than the member of an elephant, rippling through the water like a periscope. What made it more embarrassing was that the figure had Victor’s features.

  The third eye, the metal one, seemed to be the only one with a soul in it. In the senseless way things are known in dreams, I knew that the mere fact that it could see me with this eye meant he could speak to me, despite all the water between us, and the noise and wrack of the storm. “I am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preconsciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you…”


  “Tell him to make the clouds move.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I hope the clouds move. We need to get a clear reading when the moon reaches zenith.”

  I was awake again, with Victor, on the cold hillside. A knotted texture of charcoal-black and gleaming silver hung like a ship out of fairyland high above us. The cloud covered the moon, and limned the edges with swirls of argent.

  Victor was still standing.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Two hours, fourteen minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence.

  Then I said, “Why are you doing this? We could get caught. It’s not as if Michelson and Morley hadn’t done this experiment one hundred years ago.”

  He said, “One hundred eight. They’ve been saying untrue things to us. The teachers. The readings we got from the interferometer in lab class had been meddled with. When I did the experiment under controlled conditions, I got results consistent with the theory that light is conveyed via luminiferous aether.”

  I sat up. “Are you saying there’s no Einsteinian relativity? But there have been other experiments. The procession of the axis of Mercury. Cesium clocks in a fast-flying airplane. Light was seen to bend around the sun during an eclipse.”

  “We have only hearsay for that.”

  I was astonished. The sheer magnitude of his skepticism was beyond words. It was like an elephant I had seen once during a rare field trip to Swansea Zoo. As soon as you think you understand how big it is, you look again, and it is bigger.

  He said, “Picture this. According to relativity, objects compress in the direction of motion, right? And yet it also says that the same objects and events appear from each other’s ‘frames of reference’ to be symmetrical, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Take a cup with a tight-fitting lid. The cup and lid fit together, correct? Now move the lid and cup away at right angles, the lid horizontally, the cup vertically. Got the picture?”

  “Got it.”

  “What happened when you bring the lid and cup back together at near light speed?”

  “Um… I am sure you are about to tell me…”

  “From the point of view of the lid, the cup is compressed in its direction of motion, horizontally. The cup is shorter, but still a cylinder. The lid, to itself, suffers no distortion, of course. When the two meet, the lid will fit on the cup. But from the point of view of the cup, the lid is foreshortened in its direction of motion, vertically. Which means the lid is now an oval. The cup still appears round to itself. When the two meet, the lid cannot fit on the cup. The same event has two different results from two different points of view.”

  I looked at him sidelong, wondering if he were kidding. For the first time, I wondered whether other people have more trouble visually picturing things in their imagination than I did. I mean, it is not as if I could look into their heads to see.

  I opened my mouth to say that both observers would see the motion vector as a diagonal, but then I closed it again. I did not like arguing with Victor.

  “What in particular happened?” I said.

  For a moment I thought he was going to ask me what I meant, but then he said, “You know Mrs. Lilac from the village, whom Mrs. Wren uses to carry burdens and packages when she has done too much shopping?”

  “Sort of the way you do me,” I said archly. I had carried the equipment up the slope from the hedges behind the lab shed.

  “I don’t see the analogy.”

  “Go on with your story.”

  “Mrs. Lilac passed me in the hall. She said her daughter Lily was going to graduate from upper school soon and, seeing as how I had helped Lily learn her letters when she was in grammar school, would I care to attend the graduation ceremony? You know who Lily is, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I know who she is,” I said shortly.

  I was thinking that Victor had been to see Lily Lilac on every occasion that the Headmaster would allow. She was fair haired and fine boned, with a breezy, insincere manner I found exasperating.

  Her father owned the fish cannery, and was counted as being one of the more influential people, among the working class, in town. Lily owned her own outboard motor, and she went boating on every possible occasion.

  From time to time I had seen Victor watching Lily Lilac from the sea cliff. He would stand among the rocks with a telescope, and watch her fly by, her boat bouncing along the waters of the bay, her blond hair bouncing in the wind. She was always with a different boy each time. She seemed to be able to do what she liked, and go where she liked, when she liked. I do not recall hating any other living being so fiercely.

  “I know her,” I said with a sniff. “So you’ve been invited to a graduation. I doubt Headmaster will allow you off the grounds.” I remember I was being fiercely loyal to Headmaster Boggin in those days, and thought he could do no wrong.

  Victor favored me with another one of his withering glances.

  “What?” I said. “What?”

  “Logic. How young do you think a person has to be to not know her letters and numbers? And I must have been old enough to know mine. Let’s assume I was unduly precocious, and she was unduly slow.”

  “Yes, let’s do,” I said, perhaps with a note of venom in my voice.

  “I could have been what, three? Have you ever heard a child know his letters at two? How late could she live and not know her letters? Let’s say five. She would be nineteen when she graduated. If she skipped a grade, eighteen. That makes me how old now?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “But suppose the numbers were reversed. What if I had been around five when I taught a two- or three-year-old? How old does that make me?”

  I said, “If you were twenty-and-one, you’d be an adult. They would have let you out of here. They’d have let you out three years ago.”

  “Would they have?”

  “Why would they keep you?”

  “Perhaps they get money from the trust for my upkeep. Who knows?”

  “But how could they tell such a lie, and not get caught?”

  “Who is to catch them? The townspeople are afraid of the Headmaster.”

  The idea that anyone could be “afraid” of the kindly old headmaster, with his gentle smile and mild humor, was beyond belief. Had it been anyone other than Victor, I would have laughed aloud.

  But I didn’t laugh. “Someone would tell. They can’t just go on keeping us here forever.”

  “Who is to tell?” he said. “Who will question their statements? Suppose they say I am fifteen. Don’t I look it? Who questions them? Who doubts them? Who is skeptical enough to go to the trouble to check?”

  At that moment, a timer on the instrument bleeped.

  Victor leaned in and looked at the eyepiece. He clicked the red button with his thumb. A moment later the LED readout lit up. 3.3214…

  He said grimly, “The difference between the reading now and the reading at dusk is merely the angular momentum of the turning of the Earth. Light shot forward, tangentially to the turn, has the velocity of the Earth added, and travels faster. Light shot at a right angle, away from the axis, has no velocity added, and is slower. If we wait till dawn, the component of Earth’s rotation will be subtracted, and the velocity will be slower yet.”

  “There must be a mistake,” I said slowly. “The instrument must be off.”

  “Is that the most reasonable explanation?”

  He turned and squinted. The light in the boys’ bathroom off the dormitory was flickering off and on, off and on. That was the signal that Mr. Glum had been seen leaving his little house on the back grounds, no doubt to pull a surprise inspection of the boys’ dorm.

  There was no light in the girls’ bathroom. Either Mrs. Wren had not stirred and the girls’ dorm was safe, or else Vanity had fallen asleep at her post.

  Victor stood. “I must run. Don’t let the equipment get damaged when you carry it back down the rocks.”

  “Ye
s, master,” I said sarcastically. But he did not hear me, because he was already jogging down-slope.

  Now I was alone, in the cold, with no one but the moon to look after me.

  Well, there was no need to delay. I started doing, in my mind, that trick I had learned that made all burdens seem lighter than they were when I hoisted them, and I put my hands out toward the instrument.

  I was thinking: it was impossible.

  The angular momentum of the Earth’s rotation was so small a fraction of the speed of light, I know, that no possible instrument could detect a difference; and surely not a difference of nearly half a second over the (relatively) short distance between Earth and Moon. To be a valid experiment, the second reading would have to be taken half a month later, not half a day later, so that the velocity component added would have been that of the Earth’s motion around the sun.

  So, instead of lifting the instrument just yet, I put my eye to the eyepiece, made sure the instrument was still centered on the same crater of the moon as it had been at dusk, reached, and hit the red switch.

  The dish hummed as a radar beam was sent out, bounced off the moon, came back.

  The LED readout lit up. 2.8955.

  I had little trouble getting the tripod folded and the instrument case packed up, and getting the whole thing hidden under the bushes, where Victor would sneak them back into the lab in the morning, while he had cleanup duty.

  But I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep that night. Surely it was just a quirky reading from a misaligned instrument, right?

  Either that, or the speed of light acted differently when I was watching it than it did when Victor was watching it. Which is impossible, isn’t it? That is not what the Theory of Relativity means. Our notions of reality can change as we learn more; but reality itself, the great unknown, cannot change.

  But if reality was unknown, how did I know it could not change?