Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Think I can make it. Too late to stop anyway.

  Up. Good takeoff.

  Air.

  Oops. Not going to make it. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

  Catch the cliff edge right at breast level. Ow, ow, ow. Hands claw at thorns. Thornbush in midair with me, roots trailing clods of dirt. Traitor.

  Maenad flies by overhead, turns head to stare curiously at me. Very strong. Makes the leap with ease, lands on broken splinters of branches, impaled, dies. Her limbs jerk and thrash. Can't stop dancing, frenzy, even when dead.

  Splash.

  Pain. Darkness. Water.

  I am not a bad swimmer. I assumed the pursuit would look downstream for me. Staying underwater, I struggled against the current. Maybe that was a stupid idea. Maybe I should have gone with the current, tried to get as far away as possible. When I had to break the water, I struggled again toward shore. For a moment, I did not know where I was. I thought I was swimming through the medium of hyperspace again. When I clutched, dripping and battered, the hard rocks of the shore, I stared about myself stupidly, wondering why everything seemed so small and flat, why my vision was stopped by the surfaces of objects.

  Yells and ululations behind me. I dragged my legs out of the water, looked over my shoulder.

  Several hundred yards downstream from my position, I saw the motion and silhouettes of maenads on the cliff opposite me. Two of them jumped lithely across the chasm to my side of the bank, rags and vine-wrapped hair a-flutter. Others jumped, or were pushed, into the stream.

  Some hit the stream; some hit rocks. Girlish yells of joy rose up when that happened. Sick, sick, sick.

  I saw this horrid scene with misery and pain clouding my eyes. A few hundred yards. Is that all the farther I had swum? It had seemed like hours I had been in the river. How long had it been? A few minutes?

  They were coming.

  I examined the bank on my side of the river. There was a cleft, a spot where the cliff was low and broken, and a tumble of rocks was heaped just below it.

  I made it to the top of the cliff with surprising speed, considering my aches and pains. The maenads yelled and yodeled when they saw me in motion, and one ill-aimed tree fell across the rock face above me, wedged solid. It provided me a quick impromptu ladder to the top.

  At the top, I saw a break in the trees, a meadow sloping away to my left. A line of electrical power poles ran down the middle of the open area.

  I wondered if I was on Earth. The writing on the transformer boxes was English. This could still be in America, perhaps even in Northern California.

  I thought: a straight sprint down the meadow, with no obstructions, while the maenads jump the river and swarm up the cliff. Gives me some distance. Downhill; slope will block the view. When they lose sight of me, vault into the forest, hide. Good plan? Good plan.

  My feet felt light as I sped across the grass, transformer towers buzzing and muttering above me.

  Too light? Maybe the hallucination that I hid been in four-space while I was swimming had been half-true. Maybe I could just get out of range of the Glum-effect the maenads were radiating.

  Oh, I know Mr. Glum had not suffered from any range limits when he was wishing me into a three-dimensional girl-shape. And I know the blood-lust of the intoxicated bacchants was no doubt as fierce and powerful as Mr. Glum's lust-lust. But I had to have a reason to hope. Even an irrational reason."

  So down the slope at my best speed, and then, after a glance over my shoulder to confirm that the shoulder of the slope was blocking the maenad view (They were in the riverbed, I guessed. No lookouts in the trees. No leader, remember?) I took off into the brush.

  The trees grew thick, and then thin again. With unexpected suddenness, I broke out on a little trail or deer-path.

  There were two women on horseback, dressed in skintight films of black metallic substance. They wore futuristic-looking helmets of black ceramic fiber, and the ponytails of their hair were pulled through holes in the rear of each helmet, giving them a pseudo-Roman look. They both had identical weapon belts with cartridges slung low across their rounded hips, holstered pistols tied to their left thighs, slim knife sheaths tied to their right.

  Both women were young, trim, athletic, attractive. Both had expressionless expressions, eyes without passion or compassion. They held riding crops in hand.

  For a moment, I was confused about what I was seeing. Two bathing-beauties in skintight catsuits, carrying whips? It sounded like one of Colin's earlier wishes had come true.

  Neither wore makeup. The only ornament I saw was a gem, the size and shape of a crystal marble, riding atop the black helmet of the warrior-babe on the right.

  I skidded to a halt.

  The horses turned narrow heads to look at me. Each horse had a metallic blue orb, like a third eye, shimmering and throbbing in the center of its forehead. A cyclopes-eye.

  With the precision of machines, the two beauties dropped their reins; each one tucked her riding crop away, drew a streamlined glittering rifle from a holster built into her saddle and shouldered the weapon, and took aim.

  At me.

  The one on the left spoke in a soft, unemotional tone: "Leader! Target identification?"

  For a moment, I thought she was talking to me.

  The one on the right measured me with cold eyes. Her voice was also soft and cool: 'The Phaeacian. Use the anti-psychic shell, medium charge."

  There was a double click as both women chambered a round.

  At the same time I shouted, "Wait-! Don't shoot!" another voice, Lamia's voice, issued from the crystal marble (which had swiveled in its socket to look at me) the leader wore on her helmet. This voice said, "Wait-! Hold your fire! That's not-"

  The women must have been confused, and thought that only I was speaking. Had I been silent, they would have heard, and no doubt obeyed, the command not to fire.

  I did not hear any noise from the weapons. A dull vibration passed through my body as I was flung back by the force of the shots against a tree by the side of the path. My head lolled, wildly twisted more than 180 degrees backwards against my spine. With my remaining eye, the last sight I saw was the bloody stump of my arm, flying up, hanging in midair, surrounded by red droplets and white bone fragments.

  Strange that I did not hear anything.

  Sister, it was for this purpose you were sent into the hells of time: the indebtedness of your murder triggers now my spell With my moly wand I transform you from this shape to a new shape that unlocks the messages buried by the dreamlord Morpheus into your hidden soul and imprinted by Argyron of the Telchine into your nervous system. You will hear this only during a moment between life, when you are not properly in the Cosmos, and free, if only at that moment, from the meddling of fate, surrounded by silence far from the endless noise of crystal heavens turning.

  Saturn built his world out of the raw materials of Chaos. The destiny-binding power of the Olympians can thus be factored into four component powers.

  I listened with great interest as Circe taught me. Memories of a science I never knew blossomed in my brain.

  From overspace, I sensed the internal nature of the bullets that had blown that cross-section of my body into bloody rags. They contained a powerful field that sharply reduced the utility of matter, rotating the meaning-axis of material things toward zero.

  It negated psychics, rendering matter useless to the paradigm used by Colin, which was also, according to our theory, one half of the same paradigm used by Vanity.

  It negated what the maenads had done to me.

  Please don't misunderstand me. It hurt. It really hurt. Usually hydrostatic shock will kill any human struck with bullets of heavy caliber. A human body does not contain enough volume to disperse the kinetic energy of the impact.

  But that body down there was merely a cross-section of mine. Merely one surface. And not my only surface, either, and not my largest surface.

  My true mass, calculating all the volumes of all my possible cros
s-sections, greatly exceeds what could be packed into a mere three-dimensional body.

  No matter how much damage they did to that body, it was only harming one surface. Imagine a very painful skin wound. Even if your outermost layer of one patch of skin were entirely burned, ripped away, and destroyed, it would not destroy your body, reach any important organs, or do any real damage.

  It really hurt. It hurt like the dickens.

  And it made me mad.

  The Amazon leader on the right-I could see from her internal information that her name was Antiope-was saying aloud, 'Target destroyed. Request confirmation..."

  Lamia was shouting, "Not Nausicaa! That one is not Nausicaa! Shoot her with the anti-siren shell!

  Shoot, shoot, shoot!"

  The interior workings of the rifles were fascinating. There were four separate magazines with four separate types of ammunition. There were four thumb-switches to select which magazine was active. As the round was chambered, a magnetic impulse accelerated it from the barrel. These devices were not "rifles" at all, but rail guns.

  One bullet was silver, and wrapped with webs of moral energy. One was charged with a monad-rotating vortex. Fascinating. One contained a charge of the matter-utility-negating energy-this is the one I had felt. The final one was the 3-D cross-section of twenty-one strands of 4-D dimension-compressing musical wave fronts. This was the one the ladies had chambered.

  The power supply came from something that looked like a miniature cyclopes eye embedded in the stock. Buttons along the barrel controlled a microcomputer that fed commands to this hidden eye.

  There were packages of material set in the stock, and the beams from the eye could be focused to pass through one or more of them, altering their contents; and there was a chambering section to load the altered contents into a magazine of empty shells, which could then be chambered by working a lever above the trigger. Thus, in addition to the four main types of shells, these weapons could fire any number of possible nanite-packages to produce a very wide range of effects, limited only by the skill of the weapon programmer.

  When I twisted the controlling monad of the power supply, and then granted the mechanisms free will, the guns did not know what to do. Of course, since the silly things had been (until this very moment) only made of groups of mindless atoms organized without final causes or moral purposes, once free, they had no unity to hold them together. One barrel blew bubbles; the other smacked its lips and started warbling Bing Crosby tunes. The bullets trickled out of the no-longer barrels and dropped limply to the grass.

  So glad Vanity suggested that idea.

  Negating the controlling monad of these robotlike women robbed them of purpose and made them, also, drop limply to the grass.

  The horses were also artificial constructs, made with a very advanced form of biotechnology, perhaps constructed one molecule at a time. Instead of protein, their bodies were made of something more like fiberglass, layered with Kevlar. The bones were some sort of flexible living ceramic.

  The steeds were smart, fast, tireless, and strong. And brave. And well-trained. (Or should I say

  "well-programmed"?) Just the kind of steed every girl dreams about.

  The horses, like the women, were also "flat" in the fourth-dimensional direction, not unlike Victor, or Dr. Fell.

  I should mention that I moved my cross-section one-hundredth of an inch redward into the material plane.

  Had I rotated my body further, I could have produced any number of other cross-sections: phoenix, centaur, deer, dolphin, squid, energy ball, seven notes of music, or any combination thereof. But I rotated my body as little as I could, to get a body as much like my destroyed body inserted into Earth's three-space as I could get. It would have taken a scientific instrument to detect the slight differences in measurements, volume, and bone structure from the destroyed body.

  The destroyed body still hurt, so I folded it into a one-dimensional space so that the pain signals could not reach the rest of my nervous system.

  Oh, and I should mention my clothes vanished.

  Nude again. The story of my life.

  I guess I should also mention that the horses attacked me. Their cyclopean-eyes glittered and flared with strange energies. Deadly chemicals, magnetic discharges, nan-otechnology packets, nerve toxins, incendiaries, and so on and so forth blasted the trees behind me and blew wide craters into the ground.

  It was really quite impressive. Really.

  Then I made the horses stand on their heads.

  It was fun. Really.

  Amazons

  Lamia reacted quickly.

  I saw, approaching from the fourth dimension, shining with orb within orb of death music, Parthenope and Leucosia.

  I "ducked." I folded my body into a tightly three-dimensional shape. The guitar and the hypersphere manifested themselves: I had been carrying this stuff in four-space. I folded the hypersphere from a globe to a circle to a line, which I stuck into my billfold. I slung the guitar into the saddlebags of the biotech horse. My horse. I picked the prettier one.

  Parthenope passed by, about one hundred yards underground, twenty yards or so "above" me in the blue direction. She was making a quick scan, simply looking for something popping up or dropping down out of the hyperplane. She did not see me. I was flat, like a soldier hugging the terrain.

  Lamia was still shouting orders to the Amazons over her little crystal eyeball when Hippolyta (at my instruction) crushed it to pieces beneath her boot heel. Antiope was quite shapely in her birthday suit. I sort of wish Colin had been here to see it. She helped me on with the black metal-cloth catsuit and tucked my hair into her helmet. My suit. It took me less than a minute to wiggle into it.

  My clothes, including the jacket Vanity had just bought for me, I bundled up and stuffed into a saddlebag.

  During that minute, I saw two squirrels, a brace of rabbits, and several flocks of birds streaming out of the trees to my left. A fox ran alongside the squirrels without molesting them. The rabbit paused to thrum his hind paw against the dirt, giving off the drumming warning-signal of his kind.

  All the birds were shrieking with alarm.

  I had heard about animals acting this way when they ran from forest fires. The noise and smoke and commotion coming through the wood was louder than any forest fire, and toppling trees groaned and creaked, wood snapped with reports like rifle shots, scores of trees smote the ground like thunder, and the cloud of dust approaching rose higher and ever higher.

  Leucosia swam past, circles within circles of eyes blazing "beneath" us in the blue direction, only six inches or so below the world-plane, but scores of yards above the treetops and to our left.

  Time to saddle up. I let Antiope keep the sidearm, which had bullets similar to the four types of shells carried in the rifle. My rifle. I gave her two extra magazines of the anti-psychic shells.

  I figured that if those were the shells designed to work against Colin, they would work against the maenads.

  It should have been the most terrible turning point in my life, the darkest moral quandary.

  Instead, it was thoughtless, almost automatic. You see, it never occurred to me that the maenads were real people, that they had souls or preferences or families or anything. I just thought they were crazed monsters. Without a qualm, I ordered my two Amazon-puppets to advance through the little stand of trees separating the deer-path from the clearing where the line of electrical towers stood, and open fire upon the maenads when they crossed the open grass. Number two cyclopes-horse I sent with them, so he could start fires, create explosives, turn the air into neurotoxins, do nasty things.

  I did not tell the two Amazons to fight until they died, but I did not program them with any orders to retreat either. So I guess I sent them to their deaths. One of them was stark naked, and armed only with a pistol.

  I did not feel bad about it at the time. Despite all of Quentin's warnings, despite that I had been brought up as a civilized and thoughtful girl... I just sent th
em off.

  I rode in the other direction.

  The three-eyed steeds were fast.

  Not fast enough. I had ridden the few tame ponies at the Academy, of course, but they were not horses like this. Everything about the artificial beast was different: its gait, its contours, its movements. I was not riding; I was clinging desperately to its back, with my hair blown back by the hurricane of its speed. The super-steed was barreling down the deer-path at the kind of clip one expects from a motorcycle, and the noise, dust, and shrieks of the maenads, undiminished, were rising through the trees behind me. After half a minute of flight, I had come only about half a mile down the path, when the deer-path opened suddenly into a little glade carpeted with knee-high marshy grass.

  A troop of horsewomen were there, maybe a dozen young beauties in black catsuits and helmets, charging toward me at immense speed. The warrior-women were bent low over the necks of their steeds, their hips higher than their ponytail-shaking heads, their spines more or less parallel with the grass over which they flew.

  Each rider was skilled. As each Amazonian steed jarred and thundered wetly across the whipping grass, each Amazonian rider absorbed the shocks with smooth, quick motions of her long legs, so that her prone black form seemed to float, moving not an inch up or down.

  As I fumbled, trying to rein in my horse and get its head turned around, there came a loud, clear female voice rising over the riders: a command to break off. With the precision of a machine, the cavalry troop wheeled left and right, avoiding me.

  The horsewomen also drew, aimed, and fired their rifles as they wheeled, their aim not one whit disturbed by the maneuvers, leaps, and gyrations of their steeds.

  Some of the Amazons, I saw, did not even try to fire in my direction. They merely pointed their barrels at the ground and shot the dimension-collapsing shells into the grass.

  Again, ribbons of energy unfolded. These acted like flares. Hyperspace lit up with the dazzle of musical spheres, expanding and popping like bubbles. To the red and to the blue of me, I saw Leucosia and Parthenope, strange as flying saucers made of rings of eyes and deadly light, emerge from the gloom of hyperspace and push through the dimensions toward the dazzle.