Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  "Leader," I said, "I am not sure what to do. There are monads controlling the matter in his body, but they have been put out of synchronization. I can fix one at a time, but there are millions of them. It would take me years even to affect part of them. And he also needs mass, and I am not sure where to get that from. He can't eat anymore. I don't think I can do this. I don't really understand what he's done to himself. Everything is all backwards. The matter is moving the consciousness, as if they are two separate substances. Everything has an internal nature, but nothing has an entelechy or an innate purpose. This isn't my paradigm-"

  I suppose I sounded more nervous than I should have, because Phobetor shouted over the storm, his mouth fanged with flame, "Steady on, Blondie. If I can do you, you can do him."

  I shouted back, "I don't know what to do. What do I do, Leader?"

  Boy, I just really loved saying that to someone else.

  I was not the only one who loved saying it. Vanity was nearly in tears, asking Quentin what to do.

  She was screaming over the storm noise, "We're trapped here! My ship can't move! Whose chaos is this? Don't you guys rule this stuff?"

  You guys. Huhn. File that one away to think about later.

  The ship was now being tossed and slammed from side to side so violently that Quentin could not remain upright on deck. Phobetor had his arm around Quentin, and was walking across the tilting deck, supporting him, one snake-patterned wing held high to ward off falling pellets of ice, mud, and acid. Phobetor's hooves clung to the deck as if it were solid and calm, no matter at what crazy angle it jumped. With the flaming, lightning-lashed clouds behind him, and his long mane streaming, the antler-crowned demon-prince seemed, with every step, to grow larger and more solid.

  As Phobetor supported Quentin past my position, Quentin's mild voice appeared inside my ear again, bypassing all the furious noise outside, "Where is the repair-creature made of blood? The one you gave life to? Is it in me, or does Victor still carry it?"

  I understood his idea. The blood creature could carry out an operation on its own. If it could make repairs, I could concentrate on making more blood-creatures. They could even make each other, self-reproducing machines. I could fix the millions of damaged cells if I had millions of little helpers.

  I took out my cell phone and explained my idea to Victor. The original molecular engine made by Dr. Fell, which I had turned into a living being, Victor could make inside his bone marrow with the molecular factories he now had there. He had the blueprints for the repair creature. I could start changing them into self-motivated things as soon as he made them.

  Victor, his voice tiny over the cell phone, said, "It sounds like a bad idea, Amelia. If you give random programs to the atoms in my body, they will act randomly. I do not see the advantage."

  "I am not talking about random! I am talking about giving them free will."

  "Free will means random. The concepts are one and the same."

  I opened my mouth to explain about self-organizing systems, such as evolution or free-market forces, which create purposeful action in concert, in spite of any separate purposes of the individual actors, but then I stopped. The concept was not in his paradigm. For him, logic was a mechanical thing, not an organic self-correcting dialogue. There was no Godelian incompleteness in Victor's universe. It was all clean and sterile and perfect Inanimate.

  No creative initiative for the atoms in Victor's universe. No surprises.

  Well, this was going to be a surprise. I reached out and down with an energy-tendril, and out and over with another. I located the living molecular creature inside Quentin's body, plucked it out of the middle of him, and rotated it across four-space (without crossing the intervening distance) to deposit it inside Victor. As I moved it, I passed the creature through a field of force spreading from my wings in the upper dimensions, which oriented it to its repair-purpose. I pointed it in the direction of Final Cause and gave it a little bit of thickness in that direction.

  Into Victor it went-and it multiplied. Its essence spread to everything like it. I saw his bloodstream light up with entelechy. Suddenly it was not just a stream of atoms forming inanimate carbon molecules in his blood anymore. The atoms had a purpose. They existed for the sake of curing Victor. That was their final cause.

  Aside from that, they were free; they could evolve, adapt, mutate, and modify themselves as they each individually saw fit. But to prevent any wild nonconformity, such as had bedeviled my fish back on the island, I established an identity-purpose, a set of conformities, so that any group of molecules that cooperated with another group for their mutual benefit would be advantaged in the competition over molecule-groups that just struck out on their own.

  That was the theory. Activity started in his bloodstream and soon spread to all cells. Slow mutations started, then more rapid ones; I saw ten then one hundred monads get repaired. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand. It was working! It was going to work!

  His skin started changing.

  Meanwhile, Phobetor had carried Quentin (tucked under one huge and hairy arm) across the shaking, jumping deck (not shaking to Phobetor), swept by burning rain and hail (Phobetor ignored the weather), to where Vanity crouched under the bench. Phobetor spread one wing on high, like an impromptu umbrella, sheltering his two puny human-shaped comrades.

  Quentin was trying to get a coherent report on the situation from Vanity. Why wasn't the ship moving?

  Vanity said, "I can't open any new doors. There are no unseen places to look, no walls for doors to be in. There are no boundaries in this place!"

  Phobetor said, over the storm noise, flame flicking on his tongue: "Leader, it sounds like this place was set here to trap us."

  Meanwhile, Victor's skin changed color, becoming blotchy. Red, yellow, blue-black blotches chased each other across his integument. Why was that happening? Maybe I had given the creatures too much free latitude. They were supposed to fix things, not change things.

  I drew back in alarm. The skin was hot to the touch.

  Victor's flesh began to boil and bubble and fall off. His chest split open, and organs, struggling and fighting against each other, began to slide away in each direction across the deck. I saw hearts and lungs and livers growing tentacles and eyes and multiple tongues slipping and sliding around, throwing out thorns, growing shells, spitting poisons. His bones all curved into crooked shapes, and put out spines.

  Oh my God, was it horrible. It was a nightmare. My Victor was melting.

  I called out to Quentin for help. Called out? I screamed like a girl.

  A girl who had just killed the man she loved.

  At that same instant, as if my scream had summoned it, the waters to each side of us suddenly exploded. Jets of water, or lava, or acid, or whatever that damnable stuff was, rose up before us, forming spouts or columns. The storm of flame and hail suddenly dwindled, falling silent.

  In hyperspace, explosion. Darkness. The blister had ignited again. The scattered troops and navies of Mavors and Mulciber went whirling in knotted folds of space-time off into outer dimensional wilderness, and were gone.

  The boiling masses under the keel of the Argent Nautilus were beginning to solidify, becoming like molasses, then like mud.

  The ship ran aground. The deck tilted over forty-five degrees. The bow of the ship was crushed between rocks, rock grown suddenly solid and firm; the stern was jumping for a moment, bubbles of churning chaos-stuff surging and sloping up over the stern rail splattered the bench under which Vanity still hid. Then the stern waters iced over, slid to one side, dragging the keel with them. A horrid popping and cracking came from below, as if the keel had broken. The sloughs of liquid to the stern changed and started to grow muddy, thick.

  Vanity sobbed as if she could feel the pain of the ship. The beautiful silver ship, so swift and graceful, now lay canted far over, her prow out of line with her stern, her hull scarred and scratched with acid stains, her once-proud sail now brown tatters. Her keel had been bro
ken, her proud spine snapped.

  A wave of flaming muck surged over Quentin, who made an impatient gesture. A gasp of fear or awe came from the boiling black syrup, and it politely parted to either side, splashed past to his left and right, and did not get a drop on him. The rest of the deck was washed under with a ripple of brownish slop.

  The bent segment of railing supporting Victor gave way. I reached out and down with tendrils of energy, upper-dimensional songs made solid.

  The wave of goo from the stern picked me up and tossed me roughly against the railing at the same time. Some of it got in my eyes. My skin was burned and frostbitten.

  And I lost my grip on Victor. He is so thin in the fourth dimension, so paper-thin.

  His dissolving body fell into the muck, which bubbled and became solid as the flopping and dripping body fell into it. It turned from mud then into rock. There was a green wash of color, and the rocks were coated with grass.

  The columns and spouts of mud then changed. Their inner natures altered. With the suddenness and meaningless-ness of a dream, they all turned into trees. The tall fountains grew bark and solidified; the explosion of lava and red spray at the top turned green, became leafy and cool, and began rustling.

  And we were in another landscape, a fairy-forest, dreamlike, cool and soft. The one ugly thing in a grove of delicate cherry trees was the grounded, keel-broken boat, lying half on her side, half buried in rock and grass.

  I rotated another face into existence. It was quicker than wiping the hot goo out of the eyes of my old face. This one was only about an eighth of an inch different: slightly thinner, higher cheekbones.

  I could see Victor. He was only about two yards away from us in the blue direction. The chaos storm was still around him. I saw the acid and writhing mud entering his open chest cavity, entering his mouth and nostrils. He was choking.

  I jumped and caught him in my energy-shaped limbs. I yanked him back into the red direction, and we both fell to the deck in a slosh of chaotic goo, flame, and freezing mud. Since the deck was canted over at forty-five degrees, the slop slid down along the deck boards, dripping in a brown fan of filth off the starboard rail.

  Victor's torso and trunk had elongated, and his arms had melted off or had been subsumed into his body. His flesh slid through my fingers, running red. Again, he was slipping from my hands.

  Again, he was caught up against the starboard rail. Parts of him floated through the bars of the rail and fell to the grass below. I cannot express the ugly horror of it. My boyfriend had turned to sludge.

  The chaos-stuff followed him in from the other scene. His legs were shining with blue energy where I had not quite pulled him all the way back into our dimension, and sluices and rivers of fiery slush were crawling after him, slithering across the deck.

  Something in the way the slime moved was disquieting; it did not flow like mud or lava. It was more like a nest of centipedes, scuttling on many hair-tiny legs.

  There was a hole in midspace, about a yard above our tilted deck. Chaos frothed and crawled and gushed and bubbled in each direction, globes and blobs of fiery mud cascading outward in a sphere, falling in sloppy streams to the deck, gurgling over the smoldering deck planks, flopping and hissing over the side in long muddy icicles.

  It covered him up. Victor was somewhere in that mess, half-buried, half-visible, and his body, half liquid itself, stretched and stretched as his head and torso slid down the deck slope, trailing the runny goop of his torso behind him.

  Something must have seen my jump up into hyperspace; wefts of siren-music, spinning along more than one axis, ricocheted through the area, whirling like buzz saws.

  The shots mostly went wild. The sirens were at extreme range, and the music faded into and out of audibility.

  One or two stray notes struck me. I lost sensation in upper and lower parts of my body, and jerked back into a three-dimensional shape. There was blood on my left arm and leg, the points analogous to the wings and tail that had been sliced.

  The numbness was only momentary; with an inching, ant-crawling sensation, little ice picks of pain began to play along the nerves of my wounds.

  The snap of music knocked me backwards across the deck. My upper senses showed me only pale noise and flashes. I was lying on my back, staring up at our blackened mast. The sails were burning.

  "Someone help Victor!" I screamed. My voice was very loud. Instead of trying to outshout a storm, I was yelling over the soft noise of cherry blossom petals in the breeze.

  I tried to get to my feet. There was blood on my hands.

  My blood. My forehead was bleeding. I was on one knee, my other foot braced against the crazily tilted railing, too dizzy to stand further.

  Phobetor scuttled, half-bent, across the tilted deck, bending his upper leg and stretching his lower, reaching down to support himself with one hand. The orb and scepter he had been carrying were gone.

  Odd. He had been striding across the storm-tossed deck as if it had been a flat carpet; now he could barely walk on a slope. What did it mean?

  Behind him, I saw a cloud smother the horizon.

  This cloud of mist billowed with alarming speed up the sky beyond the cherry trees. In the space of time it takes a man to draw a deep breath, it had blotted out half the sky. It formed a gray pyramid, and began to part.

  Behind it, there was a mountain. The mountain had not been there before: Yet now here it was, appearing from behind an unrolling curtain of mist. Something in the way the mist opened reminded me of a curtain.

  No. Not a curtain. A door. A trapdoor.

  This was Phaeacian magic. I could see another plane bending in from another segment of dream-space, intersecting with this area. The Phaeacian had folded space.

  I looked closer, trying to see the internal nature of what was happening. Something in the composition of the earth and air reminded me, strangely, of that primitive version of Abertwyi town I had stumbled across when I was lost in the snow, back during our second escape attempt.

  With more senses to analyze it, I could see what it was: a version of man's world occupied not by men. Its mountains and trees and towns were in the analogous locations to their sister spots on Earth, and this made a Phaeacian space-lapse easy to perform between them. I had not known it at the time, but that fishing village I had so briefly seen had been a by-product of Phaeacian magic attempting to close time and space around us as we fled, back then. Now I could see what it was: Our enemies had the power to bend the fabric of the universe to trap us.

  The clouds parted like a door opening. I saw the lower slopes of the mountain forested with rank upon rank of black-clad warrior-women on horseback, rifles ready. Field pieces on gun-carriages were placed here and there among the cavalry squadrons, two-inch and four-inch guns of blue metal, with caissons standing by. The beautiful armor-clad women sat ahorse, without motion, without noise, awaiting orders.

  To either side of the well-ordered squares of Amazonian soldiers were two loud and ragged mobs of maenads. The vine-clad girls were rollicking and cavorting on the grass, some wrestling, some throwing the discus, many dancing to pounding drums, and bathing in wine, which they drew out of solid rock with their fingernails.

  The mist parted further, drawing up the slope, revealing more mountainside. On the upper slopes were broad designs of chalk cut into the green turf, eerie stick-figure drawings: a man; an elongated bull, crook-legged with crescent horns; a spread-eagle design; a set of curves representing a snake. In the center of each wide chalk drawing, a coven of nymphs stood in a circle, gathered around altar-stones placed here and there across the slope. Some held silver knives or sickles; others held torches. Burned offerings of sheep and cattle lay on the bloodstained altars, and trains of smoke trailed up from them.

  On the high slopes, among stands and shards of rock, stood choirs of sirens in austere pale robes of Greek cut, armed with fiddles, recorders, and tambourines. A choir-mistress with a wand stood before them, and the sirens were arranged in
a semicircle, three ranks deep around her.

  And, on a shelf of rock near the top, above them all, kneel-ing on an altar-stone, was Lamia. The Phaeacian in white to her right, and goddess of Fraud, Laverna, to her left.

  Lamia raised her knife. I saw a huge wash of knotted strands and webs of magic, the force she was using to control the maenads, flex, throb, and begin to turn around that knife. The madwomen had to be controlled by a spell; otherwise, they would have torn themselves and their allies to pieces. Now the spell was heaving itself like a gathering tornado, reaching down to wash over the maenads, readying to fling themselves upon our ship.

  With a mechanical precision, each Amazon shouldered her weapon.

  The gun crews sent out range-finding pulses of radar energy, which I could feel, useful and innately undreamlike, bouncing obediently off our ship and returning with information to the guns.

  The covens of nymphs all raised their torches. With a hissing murmur, the coven-mistresses spoke a word. The flames turned black as midnight, black as pitch, and the shadows of the women began to billow out from them like pools of ink.

  The choir-leader raised her wand, and the choir of sirens drew in a breath.

  Laverna smiled.

  Something rose up from the pool of muck where Victor had melted.

  And rose and rose, up and up.

  It was a dragon. A cybernetic leviathan. An armored segmented wormlike thing, with weapons and projections built along every ring-segment of his long, long body.

  The dragon-worm, five hundred yards long, thousands of tons of armed and armored flesh and horn and bone, metal and wire and substances unknown, raised a sleek serpentine head, parted serrated mandibles, and opened a mouth ringed with row on row of crystalline teeth, to reveal a central orb of blazing azure, buried deep in his throat, surrounded by a symmetrical array of boxy muscles and nerves and solenoid coils.