Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Archer paused to let that sink in, and then he said with soft danger in his voice, "Lord Terminus, for all his power and might, could not escape my darts, nor pull the barbed heads free of his enflamed heart. Ask Io, ask Europa, ask Leto."

  I was suddenly certain he could do it. Take away what I felt for Victor, just like that. Make me fall in love with Colin, or Quentin. Or Grendel Glum, for that matter. All the warmth, all the special, hidden thoughts I had, all my plans: They could be turned to dust with a pluck of the string.

  Something more precious than life itself, and it could be lost.

  Now is not the time to go wobbly.

  I said, "Controlling someone's mind is generally not a good foundation for a long-term, working relationship of mutual trust. Besides, if you make me fall in love with you, I'll try to change you.

  So, you have the Great Weapon. You can threaten me with a nasty crush. But is that your best offer? Mavors can threaten me with bloodshed, death, and ruin."

  Archer laughed and put the heel of the bow on the tiles, and leaned on it. "Okay. Let's make a best offer. I have limits on what I can decree, as all gods do. But I have the authority to prevent other gods from decreeing your capture. That is not the same as decreeing your freedom. You understand? I cannot be seen helping you. If you can make it, on your own, into a position where no one is chasing you, well and good: My oath will allow you to keep the freedom you earn. But you must earn it, and I cannot give it. I cannot deflect Lamia or the other vampires from your trail, because they are creatures no one loves or can love."

  I said, "What about Boggin being able to trace me?"

  He answered as I thought he would, "Even could I, I would not free you of your debt to him. That was the price he asked for selling me the chance of meeting you."

  "But you have the power to free us from Mavors' curse?"

  "Mavors is beholden, most shamefully, to my mother, Lady Cyprian, and his decrees I can undo, even in matters of war, for Love conquers War, and the Imperial Seal is still mine, and my bow is greater than his bloodthirsty spear. No more can I do."

  I made myself wait, despite the bubbling sense of triumph rising inside me, and I made myself pause and look thoughtful, and I am sure I fooled nobody, because I am the world's worst actress.

  With as much dignity as I could muster, I said to Vanity, "Go get the boys. We are going to exchange oaths with Mr. Archer."

  While she was gone, he and I stood, awkwardly saying nothing for a moment. At least it was awkward for me. Guys do not usually feel a need to talk, because maybe they aren't curious about what people are up to, or their brains are built wrong, or something, and getting them to open up is like pulling teeth.

  "I'm curious," I said. "Um, Mr. Imperial Majestic-"

  "Let us not stand on ceremony," he said, leaning on his Turkish-style bow. "Just call me

  'Handsome,' that'll do."

  "Your Handsomeness, I was just curious about-"

  "You want me to make someone love you? Who, Boggin? Wouldn't make him any nicer. He'd still be your enemy, except now he'd lust after you, too. Or maybe, should I say, more? And him a married man. Hmph."

  "No!" I said, my face hot. I could feel my ears blushing hot, even in places where I thought ears did not have capillaries. "I was going to ask about, about... something else... an unrelated topic."

  "What topic?"

  I groped for one. "The Norse gods! Odin and Thor. Are they around? And, and, I dunno, Aztec gods and stuff?"

  "They're around, some of them. Some of them are us, called by other names in Germany, and some are homegrown. They call Uranus by the name of Ymir, and claim Hermes, Vili, and Ve killed him, not Saturn, the liars. A lot of the Norse guys were wiped out during our last war with Chaos. Jormungander was like your friend Victor, and Fen-rir was like your friend Colin. Surtur is a first cousin to Quentin Nemo on his mother's side. You folks do a lot of damage when you cooperate.

  "Whom else did you ask about? The ten thousand gods of Japan are real, and we've had a fruitful relationship with Amaterasu-o-mi-kami and her folk for years. The Aztec gods are mostly wiped out by the gods of Iberia, Cario-ciecus and his crew. Never heard of them? Iberian. They were close enough relations to absorb, and we could steal their honors. I am glad they were around long enough to deal with the New World gods, because the Aztecs were a nasty, filthy bunch. You wouldn't want to meet them."

  "Why do you hide from the humans?"

  "We need the worship. If they saw us as we were, they'd hate us."

  "But they don't worship you, not the pagan gods, not anymore."

  "My mom and dad are Lust and Violence. You telling me human beings don't worship them? We're in L.A.! Race riots and Hollywood. Men don't worship what they think they do, no matter what they say."

  "You don't hide from other creatures. Cyclopes and Laestrygonians and mermaids and stuff."

  He smiled a strange little smile. "Humans are different from other created creatures. Prometheus used something he stole from Lord Terminus and kindled a fire in the human souls. An inextinguishable flame. Indestructible. We don't know what it is. Lord Terminus did not know what Prometheus did, but he was scared silly. He ordered the Titan tormented, to get the information, but Prometheus spat in his eye and prophesied betrayal and death for Grandfather Terminus. The King of Heaven would be overthrown by his son, even as he overthrew his father, and his father overthrew his grandfather. A family tradition. No more than that did he say."

  Archer shivered slightly, and drew his purple wings close about himself, as if cold. "If you find out who is trying to kill you, you'll find out who sent Typhon of Chaos to kill Heaven's Great King."

  I said in a hollow voice, "Prometheus foretold that men would overthrow you, as you overthrew the Titans, and the Titans overthrew the Uranians. That's what he did, isn't it?"

  Archer shook off the mood and smiled again. "This was not what we came here to discuss. You had quite another question, did you not?"

  "Well," I said, "if, as part of our bargain, if I also asked, I mean, can you make it so my boyfriend, um-"

  He laughed. "Now you see why everybody hates me, and wanted me off the throne. I've got the one thing everyone, gods and men alike, thinks he wants, but nobody ever really wants it once he gets it. The first answer to your question is no. I have come around to the opinion that messing up the lives of mortals, and driving them to poetry, or madness, or suicide, is not as funny as it once was.

  "You see, I'm a married man these days. Psyche is her name, and she went to Hell and back for me.

  "So I believe in true love, now, and my Soul tells me there is a greater love in the universe, a Timelessness beyond time, a supernal Eternity. A Forevermore. I'm a changed man. I'm still cruel, but I don't enjoy it as much.

  "The second answer is, you picked the wrong boyfriend. He's the Lost One, isn't he? The Telchine?

  Your people, the Nameless Ones, can reach into Telchine skulls and rewire them. You could make him love you with no help from me-and the fact you can do that, just by itself, whether I use the Great Weapon or not, will kill your relationship."

  I said, "I would never... never do anything... like that! It would be cheating!"

  He grinned his charming grin and shrugged his feathery shrug. "Women are supposed to domesticate men. List the countries where they treat women like dirt, and then list the crude, warlike, and brutal countries. Same list, yes? So you sweet little dears cannot help your sweet little selves. You have to try to change men. Remember your sister, Circe? Women are like that in reverse. Turn pigs into human beings. But a man you can control is not really a man, is he? He's a boychild, not a paterfamilias."

  By then Vanity and the boys were approaching, so there was no more time for talk.

  The Surprise

  I wish I could remember whose idea it was to split up in the shop after Archer left. It must have been mine, because I was the leader. I guess I am responsible for the decision, no matter whose idea it was.


  After seeing the boys all dressed up and handsome in their tuxes, the leader made the unilateral decision that we really ought to visit the club down the street anyway.

  I said to them, "The same problem exists now as before. As long as we are being hunted, we endanger humans by being near them. So we'll have to search for some spot remoter than the planet Mars. Promixa Centauri might be nice!"

  That was greeted by a choir of moans and groans. The troops were not eager for another long trip in an ancient Greek spaceship.

  "But this is a victory, troops!" I said over the noise of dissent. "Sort of. The authority of Mavors is overruled. We're not out of the woods yet, but now getting out of the woods is possible. Archer was not willing to stop other fates already in motion, but no new ones will be set against us. If we ever, by our own efforts, get free from the gods, they cannot now simply decree that we'll be caught again. In other words, we still have to find some way to sever the bond between me and Boggin, or deceive Mestor's needle, but once that is done, Phoebe or someone else will not and cannot just predestine us to be found again. The game is still on, but now the playing field is level.

  "So how about one last night of celebration before we leave? We're all dressed up, or, at least Vanity is"-I had not even tried on the dress I picked out-"so who wants to go dancing?"

  The reaction to that was more enthused.

  We had none of us left the store yet. I had gotten the money out from the fourth dimension where it had rested for so long, and everyone but me was all decked out in his finest, with old clothes balled up in shopping bags.

  And all seemed amenable to a last night out on the town. Vanity and I still had one or two things to buy. Because who knew when we would get the chance again?

  But since sensible people (girls) like to, you know, actually look at what we are buying and actually make informed decisions, it was driving certain not-so-sensible people (boys) slowly crazy, especially since they were standing around in tuxedoes I hadn't paid for yet.

  So Colin and Victor wandered off to look at something else, or maybe I ordered them to find a clerk and find out where the checkout was. I don't remember. It just seemed natural at the time.

  Quentin went with them.

  We were going back into the dress department when Vanity's cell phone played the theme from the William Tell overture in electronic cricket chirps. That is what phones do in America instead of ringing.

  Vanity was giggling, and her emerald eyes were dancing with light, and her cheeks turned ever-so-pink (her light complexion lends itself quite easily to blushing) and she was holding the little gizmo-phone in both hands, so that she could cover her mouth with her fingers to hide the giddy smile---

  Okay, I am not an idiot. It was not Victor or Colin calling her, see?

  Vanity, blushing red as a beet, snapped shut the little phone and, looking only at my chin or ear, said she had something else she had to do right now, and did I mind? She could put in a call to Victor and Colin, and have them come here from wherever part of this vast store into which they had wandered, so I would not be left alone.

  "I need to go look at something over by the jewelry counter," she said.

  My first thought, of course, was that Quentin was going to pick out a wedding ring. When else do men look at jewelry? But maybe she just wanted him aside to herself for a little snogging practice.

  I did not want to be left alone, but, just at that moment, I saw something shining so brightly, so useful, even through the intervening walls and floors, that I knew I had to get it.

  That little voice people are supposed to hear when they are in deep need of common sense spoke now in my ear. It told me to go back and get Victor and Colin, because I should not be alone. This shop filled up most of a long city block. It was bigger than Abertwyi village. The fact that Archer could walk up to me in the dressing room showed that across the shop was too far away.

  I did not tell my little common sense voice to shut up- I would never do that-but I told it to talk a little quieter. Just a little. Only for a minute.

  Because at that very moment, I was looking out across a wide countryside of modern musical instruments. There, bright beneath the neon lights, alone in an almost empty store, I saw it.

  There it was, perfect and perfectly tasteless.

  It was a guitar. An American guitar. Just like the ones the rock stars use, all those loud and unkempt boys Colin had watched so avidly on the telly during our crossing on the Queen Elizabeth II.

  It was black and sleek and metallic and shiny, and had a weird-looking triangular sound-box instead of the normal hourglass shape. It looked like an alien rocket ship poised for takeoff.

  My eye fell on that guitar, and I fell in love with it. I had to have it, to get it for Colin, and it had to be a surprise.

  My thought: Colin didn't hate music. He only hated good music. Classical music, Brahms and Bach and Beethoven. Music in four voices, point and counterpoint, grace notes and floating glissandos.

  Ah, but rock and roll was a different matter, wasn't it? Drumming backbeat, screaming guitar, banshee-shrieks of sound, all mangled and compressed together into thundering avalanches of pure noise! It had Colin written all over it. It was perfect for him. Perfect!

  So I went off alone. The clerk, or maybe he was the manager, was a bent, balding man with a sunburned scalp and white puffs for eyebrows. He unlocked the display case and took the guitar out and showed it to me. "What type of amplifier does your friend have?"

  "How do you know I am not buying it for myself?"

  He smiled a bit into his mustache, and nodded and looked shy, but did not answer the question.

  Maybe I was holding it in a way that showed I knew nothing about guitars.

  The price he asked was more than I wanted to spend. On the other hand, we were about to leave civilization forever, and the money would be of no earthly use to me hereafter.

  I was not very good at haggling, higgling, or chaffering, but I admitted it was a gift for a friend, and that I did not have very much money.

  He could probably see that my upbringing had burdened me with ideas of polite behavior and ladylike refinement that, I am sure, have no place among the brash businesswomen of America.

  The old man cut the price, just a bit, perhaps as a reward for the fact that I at least tried to get into the dickering spirit.

  I could not afford any cords or amplifiers; the thing was worthless without them, but I had a vague notion that Victor could cobble something together.

  I bought the thing anyway. The final thought that weakened my resolve to hold out for a reasonable price was this: Everything we bought on the cruise ship, either Victor or Vanity had bought (since they had been holding the envelope at that time), and I was not present during the Paris shopping spree. Come to think of it, hadn't Colin picked up the tab when we ate out our last night ashore? And Quentin bought the coats and stuff from the Isle of Man? I had not spent a single pound-note of the money yet.

  So the bad news was that it was expensive. The good news Was that I had just enough.

  It must have happened the moment he rang up the cash register and handed me the receipt.

  I was riding back up to the ground-floor level on an empty escalator, the sleek black guitar in its case in one hand, my purse in the other, into which I was still (with one or two fingers not being used) trying to stuff the folded bills of my change while, at the same time, performing the not-quite-topologically-impossible act of trying to stuff the slender purse into the rather voluminous pocket of my leather jacket... when my radio phone chirruped the opening to the

  "Moonlight" sonata in electronic cricket-beeps.

  Okay. Enough was enough. Granted, I was in a store, and there might have been security cameras, but, on the other hand, no one was around me at that moment. No one was looking.

  I stepped "past" the surface of the escalator and found myself in a little maintenance or machinery room in an unpainted section of the store customers are not s
upposed to see. There was a loading dock off to my left and a bare concrete corridor off to my right.

  Now I reached "down" into the flat plane of three-space with a number of limbs made of motes of light, like tendrils of music, if music were made of solid energy-forms.

  One group of motes diverted the mass-relationship leading from the guitar to the center of the Earth, to make it lighter in my hand; a second group folded my stray bills and slid them "past"

  the surface of my purse into its interior; and a third group superimposed the purse on the interior of my pocket. To me, it looked much like putting a paper cutout of a purse inside a pocket-shaped line drawn on a plane. Since the purse actually (now that I could see it from more than 180

  degrees at once) looked too large to fit through the mouth of the pocket, I would have to use the same means to get it out again, or resort to knifing open the pocket seams.

  A fourth group of motes reached "into" my pants pocket and tilted the switch-hook of my phone into the fourth dimension, so that it popped "up." The mere fact that the lid of the phone was shut no longer engaged the off button. In effect, this took the cell phone off the hook without actually opening it.

  A fifth group of motes folded the tiny area of time-space around my pants pocket to hold it against my ear.

  I am not sure what this might have looked like to outside three-dimensional observers. Maybe they would have seen me bend at the waist at an impossible angle to put my ear to my hip. Maybe they would have seen or heard sound waves being teleported out of my pocket through a wormhole directly into my ear.

  A manipulation set up a second distance-negating space-fold between my mouth and the cell phone's cunningly made little mouthpiece.

  Maybe an outside observer would have seen me twisted like a Mobius pretzel to have my mouth and ear both pressed up against the same convex surface in a way spherical heads cannot. I prefer to think they would have seen a second wormhole opening between my head and my pocket, without any gross distortions. After all, the limited three-dimensional light would have followed the space-time curve as if it were flat, right? Outside observers surely would have seen a pretty girl with little firefly glints in a complex halo around her head. Hope so, anyway.