Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  From the voice I knew it was Pherespondus the Satyr, and the red-furred fox.

  “…I am only saying, Vulpino, that Nemestrinus of Arcadian Wood has a natural harmony of interests with Anacreon.”

  “Some call the Lord Vintner a traitor god.”

  “Certainly, a traitor. And yet I wonder what strong reason impelled him to that treachery? He was the first to traffick with the Fallen Uranians. What could they have told him? They are as old as Cosmos, and know the secrets of its construction.”

  “You think the young Uranians will offer victory to whichever side ends up in control of them. Why? Are you saying Morpheus in Cimmeria… or Helios from Myriagon… will assist our…?” Mutter mutter. I could not hear the end of the question. The fox had a soft voice.

  “Boreas is ambitious… sell out to whomever…” Murmur murmur. The voices trailed off.

  5.

  With the door shut, and the music muffled, my head felt slightly clearer. With my eyes closed, I thought I could tell what the music was doing: it seemed to be flattening or normalizing time-space in the local area. By some intuition, I now knew what part of myself was suffering pins-and-needles like a limb with its circulation impaired. This part of me did not have a name, but it was the part I used to deflect normal straight-line gravity paths and lift massive objects that boys stronger than me could not lift.

  Now I was more afraid of the music than I was of being seen, and I did not want to open the door.

  I turned my head. There was a little moonlight leaking in through the windows here, made bright by reflections from the snow below. This was a corner room, and there were windows looking East and South. There was a desk, a bookshelf, and a squat metal cabinet to one side. There was no other door out.

  I went over to the South window. I had been thinking that the second floor might be low enough to jump down from, if I hung from my hands before dropping. One look out the window banished that notion. The first floor of the building was double normal height. But I could see the corner of the portico leading to the main doors. A sloping roof, wide pillars… too wide to shimmy down? Maybe not.

  But there were wires running from the window frame to the panes. An alarm system. Victor, who knew all about such things, was not here. For once in my life, I actually felt like the helpless female Quentin had been pretending I was. I didn’t know what to do when I saw those wires, except wish wistfully that Victor were here.

  Maybe the other window was unalarmed?

  I walked around the desk to step to the East window when the walking stick… moved… in my hand.

  I froze. Something had twisted the jackal-headed cane in my grip, so now the muzzle was pointed toward the cabinet.

  Magic? Maybe.

  I stepped over to the cabinet. They were a heavy steel construction, not at all in keeping with the rather tasteful wooden décor of the room. The doors did not open. They did not even budge when I tugged on them. There were two locks and a keypad, and the locks were on opposite sides of the main panel, making it almost impossible for one person to turn both locks at once. The whole affair was bolted to the floor in eight places. It looked like the kind of safe in which you put documents you want to be left intact after a Russian missile attack. The safe looked so massive… too massive…

  There was a noise coming from inside, which I could dimly hear, or feel, when my hand was on the cabinet. It sounded like the chiming whine of a wineglass, which rings because a violin note of the proper harmonic resonance is played too nearby.

  Something inside the cabinet was reacting to the music in the hall.

  The numb part of me stirred and trembled, when I put my right hand on the top of the case, and heard that ringing crystal chime. If the music had not been dimly echoing into the room from beyond, I might have been able to sense what that inner part of me was trying to tell me.

  And then, the violin music wound into a sultry crescendo. Silence fell. I heard a scattering of applause. Calls: “Bravo!” And a pause. The musicians had finished their first song of the evening.

  Silence.

  I wiped my palm on my pants leg and put it back atop the cabinet. Something… massive… was inside the cabinet…

  …something whose mass was greater than its volume and density could account for…

  I could see it in my mind’s eye, almost as if I were looking past the walls of the case. Past, not through. If a three-dimensional man saw a safe built by Mr. A Square of Flatland, it would look like a rectangle to him. No matter how thick the lines in the plane were drawn, nothing could prevent the three-dimensional man from merely looking… over… the boundary…

  But this was not… over… I was looking… another direction…

  I saw it. There were other objects in the case. They were flat, merely three-dimensional: a book, a phial of liquid, a playing card, a necklace.

  The final object was a sphere, a globe of gold-white crystal. It was round in all directions, all dimensions.

  A normal sphere had a volume described by four-thirds of the cube of its radius times pi. The surface area was the same as a sphere—I could see that—but the volume… the hypervolume… was half its radius to the fourth power, multiplied by a square of pi.

  I began to reach out my hand in the direction that I had never been able to see before. I cannot tell you what direction it was.

  My hand grew glittery with light, turned reddish, and seemed to shrink…

  With a triumphant glissando of notes, the music started up again. The dream, or delusion, or whatever it was, ended. I suddenly could not imagine what I was doing, could not picture in my mind the direction I could not see. I could not visualize or understand how a sphere could be anything but a sphere. And I could not imagine seeing through solid walls…

  The walls of the cabinet snapped shut on my hand. I felt a pressure on my wrist, but my eyes would not focus. It looked like the stump of my hand ended in a red haze, flat against the surface of the cabinet.

  I squinted, trying to correct my vision. What was I seeing? I could feel the curved surface of the sphere… full, not flat… just beyond my fingertips, my hand… Almost touching…

  I yanked my hand back with hysterical fury, afraid that it had been severed.

  No; there it was, not a stump. My beautiful hand.

  Little reddish dots and little blue dots floated toward and away from my hand for a moment, and my hand felt far heavier than it had been. But then the dots were gone, or they had never been there… or… they had moved off in two different directions. Directions I could no longer point to, or imagine, even though, just a moment ago, I had been able to.

  My hand was normal weight again.

  6.

  Have you ever wondered whether you were insane? It is not a pleasant notion.

  Standing there in the dark, I made a resolution to myself, that I was not. No matter what I saw or thought I saw, there was a rational explanation for it.

  I may never know the explanation, but I could know that it existed without knowing its content. Algebra can manipulate numbers without knowing their values; I could do the same for my knowledge.

  So I vowed to myself I was not insane. And, despite my agnosticism, I prayed to the Archangel Gabriel to tell his boss, whoever He might be, to make my vow not one vowed in vain.

  7.

  If I were not insane, what was the next logical step to take?

  I put my hand on the case. The sphere inside was still humming or ringing as the music flattened the space it attempted to occupy. I got into a sprinter’s stance and faced the Eastern window. And then I waited for the next break in the music.

  Miss Daw would have to take a breather at some point, or the headless man would be called on to play a solo…

  The foxtrot ended. The applause was more than the few people in the ballroom could account for. Maybe the men in the blue business suits were clapping with all their clouds of hands.

  This time, I could clearly see the sphere, extending “ab
ove” and “below” the hyperplane of three-dimensional space in smooth hemispheres. It was still ringing with the echo of the shock the music had delivered to it; the sound was somehow something like light, and it allowed me to see the direction I had not been able to see before.

  The shock waves the hypersphere gave off were only “sound” along one surface (hypersurface?) of the concentrically expanding ripples of pressure. There were other surfaces, five more of them, all at right angles to each other, producing other types of vibration aside from the pressure waves created by the music: the first axis gave off energy of a type that made the internal nature of objects clear to the reason, the way light makes the surface of objects clear to the eye; the second shed an energy that made clear to the will what objects were useful or useless; the third showed the conscience what moral obligations one was under; the fourth showed the understanding the degree of causality or indeterminateness an object enjoyed, as if measuring the number of future paths or probabilities each event shed. And there was one other form of energy or beingness I could not account for, shining from the fifth and final axis. But something (could it have been that final energy form?) made all of what I was seeing so clear and familiar to me, it was as if information and understanding was being poured into my memory, as if it had always been there.

  Somehow, in the fourth dimension, concepts that to humans were merely abstractions, dim shadows human reason could only guess at, were vivid and solid.

  By the shine of that light, by the echo of that ringing, I could see how to move past and beyond the window without moving through it. I could see how the surface of time-space was curving toward me, based on the gravity distortions from the Earth’s mass. All I needed to do was do to myself what I had done to the heavy door earlier this evening. Now that I could actually “see” the fan of world-paths spread out in shining lines from me and detect, with another new sense impression, the ponderous curve of space-time where the Earth’s mass was distorting it, it was child’s play to divert the forces so that I would fall more slowly, with less kinetic energy. A thirty-foot drop was nothing. I could practically step there…

  I jumped. The world turned blue, and seemed to swell and fade in my vision. The walls and the window and the ground outside turned into gigantic things, huge, like walls of mist and cloud.

  Something… a trio of somethings… was behind me. First seemed like a wheel: beautiful, pale, intricate, surrounded by many lesser wheels, with eyes and darts of fire radiating from each spoke, circle within epicycle, delicate and baroque. The second and the third were both roughly cone shaped, clusters of ugly knots and, along the outer surfaces of the knots, clusters and hands and fingers reached out in each direction.

  I had miscalculated. The distances from the cabinet to the window to the ground were not the same in four dimensions as they had been in three.

  And the light from the sphere fell off much more sharply than I expected. The hyperlight was dim a meter from the cabinet; it was sixteen times more dim at two meters; eighty-one times more dim at three. It was practically pitch black when I passed “over” the space occupied by the window, and I could no longer “see” the direction I was supposed to go.

  The space-time occupied by Earth was like a plane spread before me, less than an inch “below” me. But when the sphere light was gone, I lost sight of it.

  The universe was an inch or two away. I could not see it.

  9

  Otherspace

  1.

  Nothing I can say can convey the horror. If I had been an astronaut on a space walk with a severed umbilical hose, countless light-years outside the galaxy, outside the local cluster of galaxies, I still would have been closer to home than I was at that moment. Because I still would have been in the same dimension.

  The thing behind me, the pale wheel surrounded by lesser wheels, dipped one curving diameter into the plane I could not see, and rotated it. The wheels were made of what, in three dimensions, were sounds to be heard sequentially, linearly, in time.

  We call it a song. But it is not. In this place, each composition was one simultaneous thing, eternal and unchanging, every part and every note existing in geometric relation to one perfect and harmonious whole.

  I called the tiny crystalline echo ringing from the sphere in the cabinet a shock wave. It was not. It was a small sound, really.

  This was not small. This was gigantic. This was larger than worlds.

  With a force like a hundred earthquakes, like a storm front of unguessed power, an explosion filled hyperspace, blinding me, numbing my whole body. It was like being mashed in a trash compactor.

  And then…

  2.

  I struck the snow with considerable force. My body was shaking with the shock of ice-cold that ran through me.

  There was a haze of red and blue particles around me for a moment. I tried to get to my hands and knees, and was poleaxed by a blinding pain.

  I vomited. Snow, a slurry of snowflakes, gushed from my mouth. How had snow gotten in my stomach?

  I had the horrible, horrible image of a two-dimensional person being forced into the same flat plane as a two-dimensional patch of snow. His skin would just be a line; all his internal organs would be occupying the same place as the snow. Was snow in my veins, in my abdomen, my lungs? Inside my eyes and skull? In every cell?

  Another moment of pain: my whole skin turned red. For a moment, I gave off a shaking shock wave similar to what the hypersphere had done; but something was carried with it. A cascade of shimmering red sparks of not-light flung snow in every direction around me, several pounds of it.

  Then, it was over.

  I blinked and looked around. There was an imprint around me in the snow. It looked more like an elongated snow angel than anything I can name. Whatever body had made this was long and streamlined, with wings and lines radiating from it. There were no footprints leading up to the imprint.

  I was outside the Great Hall, about twenty yards from the front doors. The windows behind me were lit. I could see the rest of the campus, quiet in the moonlight.

  Dimly, I could hear the faint, beautiful strains of Miss Daw’s violin, playing a waltz by Strauss.

  I rose to my feet and stumbled away, shaking, in the moonlight. Quentin’s walking stick was still in my hand. As I came near the Manor House where our rooms were, I used it more and more to support my steps.

  3.

  It was slow and painful walking through the snow, and it grew slower and more painful as I went.

  I passed by the window of the boys’ dorm as I came around the corner to the Manor House. There was a rope hanging from an upper cornice, knotted with care.

  I looked at that rope with infinite hatred. Hatred, because I ached in every limb, and had pains in my knees like someone suffering the bends. And because I knew Victor and Colin had been drugged, as had been Vanity. Even though one of us had been caught, we were still to hide any evidence of what we had done or how we had done it. It was one of Victor’s rules.

  So I climbed the rope. Usually, a rope climb up thirty feet would have taken me thirty seconds. This time, it took me thirty minutes, or more. Maybe an hour. It was cold, it was dark, I was in pain, and it was so very late.

  I finally got to the window. It was dark inside. And locked. I couldn’t open it.

  It was only then that I realized that I could have picked up the sphere, the hypersphere in the locked cabinet, just before I jumped. I could have taken it with me. Had I taken it, I would have it now. I would be able to cast its hyperlight into the fourth dimension, see the objects around me as the flat things they really were, reach through walls, open locks, walk through windows…

  I tapped on the window as loudly as I dared, and called softly to the boys to let me in. Now I was sure they had been drugged. Colin would not have passed up the chance to have me come into his bedroom at night, cold and in need of comfort.

  Well, there was nothing else to do. I pulled that stupid walking stick out of
my belt (it had been clattering and banging during my whole trip up the rope) and tucked it into the snow that had accumulated on the wide stone surface of the windowsill. As I did so, my fingers touched something.

  I brushed the snow aside and found a tiny cup, made out of pink wax, or maybe hardened bubble gum. The cup was crudely made, with fingerprints still visible in the waxy surface. In the bowl of the cup there was a blue fluid, which had frozen into a little pebble of ice.

  I was frankly too weary to wonder what it was.

  Five or ten minutes of work with my cold and unresponsive fingers, and I pulled up the rope and slung it over the cornice, which was now my pulley. In the other end I made a sling (tied off with a proper bowline) to set my hips in. Now I could simply lower myself by letting out rope and, when I reached the bottom, one yank would bring the rest of the slack down with me.

  That worked as planned. It was the only thing so far which had gone right that evening.

  With the rope on my shoulder, I went over to our window. I called softly, and threw pebbles against the window. Nothing. Vanity did not answer.

  So I walked (even more slowly, now that I no longer had the cane to lean on) over to the gardens behind the Manor House, and hid the coil in one of our agreed-upon spots.

  As I walked, I thought: Why? Why did Quentin, who could levitate, need a rope to get out of his bedroom window?

  And then I thought, in anger and disgust, why had I gone to such trouble to hide the rope, when I was about to be caught myself? I had no other way into the Manor House, unless I broke a window, except by the main door. Even if no one was there, and I made it upstairs unseen, whatever spell or alarm system Vanity had sensed Boggin lay down on the door to my room would reveal me once I opened the door to my room.