Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  He reached into a breast pocket of his finely tailored suit and pulled out a business card, which he proffered to me. I took it with thanks, looking confused. "I do not have phone privileges," I said.

  Mulciber looked at Boggin. "Oh, Reggie here will fall over himself to make things smooth for you, Windrose. He just tried to bollix up what I was working on, and he did a damn fine job of it, too. He doesn't want to bollix up any more of my things, or it will go bad for him. I think he understands that.

  Don't you, Reggie!" And he poked the Headmaster in the chest with his metal cane.

  "Of course, Your Lordship…" said Boggin, looking angry and ashamed. It was his pride, you see.

  English gentlemen never called each other out in front of lower orders, servants, or children.

  "See that you do!" snarled Mulciber.

  "Mr. Talbot," I said.

  "What is it, girl?"

  "Are you and the Headmaster—? I mean, are you in some sort of financial trouble with him or something? I realize it is not my place to ask, but you seem so angry…"

  Mulciber smiled. "I had some friends in Herculaneum. They saw me angry. This isn't angry. Reginald and I are not competitors. We are enemies, and I may have to kill him someday. I hope not, though. Bad for business.

  "Good day to you, miss. Reggie, I'll see myself off the property. I know the way. 'Tis my damn property anyway."

  And with a rolling gait, clashing his steel cane at every other step, Mulciber stomped away.

  I actually felt sorry for Boggin. I don't know why I did, because I knew what he had done and how he brought it on himself. But I said, "I am sorry I had to see that, Headmaster. I am really sorry."

  Boggin drew himself up and glared down at me. For a moment, I could see peeking through his expression that masculine pride and almost sexual power he had shown in dealing with me before. But it did not come to the fore. He wanted just to order me to forget it, to sponge away his humiliation in my eyes.

  But he thought I had forgotten he was a god, one of several involved in some sort of deadly struggle, between factions vying for control of the throne of heaven. He thought I did not remember being carried through the air in his strong, strong arms. He thought that I did not remember being spanked by him.

  So he couldn't say whatever he wanted to say. He couldn't erase his shame by reminding me of his power and pride. He was supposed to be just the headmaster of a school.

  "Let us not speak of this again, Miss Windrose. Perhaps His Lordship is aching in his joints, and the pain has distracted him. We cannot be too quick to judge those whom fate has condemned to being grossly crippled, can we? That will be all. You may go."

  And since I was pretending just to be a schoolgirl under his command, I went.

  I looked back through the panes of glass of the library door. Boggin was facing away from me, but he had his hands to his face, as if he were wiping away tears of rage.

  Victor would not have felt sorry for the Bad Guys, I thought. He would have noted, in a precise and dispassionate voice, that emotion was a weakness, and any sign of weakness on the part of the enemy is a potential advantage for us.

  I fall short of the Victor standard.

  2.

  Victor and I had study hall that period, and we sat in the library, facing each other, our books and notes spread out, looking as if we were studying.

  In fact, I had my eyes half-closed, and the words of the textbook into which I stared seemed to swim and grow flat in my vision. I was seeing the words on pages that were not open under my left hand and right hand; I was seeing the internal texture of the paper and bindings.

  I began to see its internal nature (dry and patient), moral relation (textbooks were required to be honest and candid), and utility (the gleaming nonlight of the usefulness to me of the text was fading dimmer and dimmer as I thought less about classes and grades, and more about escape). Oddly enough, the histories and philosophy works from second and third period, lying unopened on the table, shone very brightly (except for Kant, who was black as pitch). It was by this light that I could see other objects around me in hyperspace.

  Because hyperspace was dark. There was no sun nor stars here, and the objects that had shed light for me before—Miss Daw's concentric wheels, or the chiming of the hypersphere—were absent.

  Also, there seemed to be more layers of substance, a heavier medium, than had been here before, as if the whole school, and a wide area of time-space before and after, had a new energy-structure imposed on them.

  I did not have the ringing hypersphere to stimulate me; I did not have Vanity and the magic green table to allow the native laws of nature to leak in here from Myriagon.

  Basically, I was stuck.

  Don't get me wrong: I could see things around me in four-space, but even the little things I used to be able to do (such as the trick of making heavy objects less massive) simply were not working. I could see world-lines and probability paths, but I could not deflect them anymore.

  I could see the various limbs and energy-extensions of my 4-D "body" lined up "next" to me in hyperspace, neatly folded like nested spoons or the segments of a Japanese fan.

  Let me see if I can explain this without it sounding gross. Imagine my body was a geometric shape like, say, a pyramid. When it is base down, the flatlanders living in the plane on which it rests see it as a square; when it has one side down, they see a triangle. To them, it looks like the square body changes shape and loses one angle.

  A more feminine example might be conic sections. Base-down, a cone forms a circle (my normal girl body), but as the cone axis tilts, one generates ovals of various eccentricity, parabolas, or hyperbolae (my other bodies that looked more deerlike or swanlike or dolphinlike). In the limiting case, when the plane is tangential to the cone's side, one generates a line, which has very different properties from other conic sections. (I had shapes or limbs that "looked" like strands of energy, or music.) If the plane goes through the origin, one generates a point. (In effect, I could turn insubstantial.) The trick I did to look like a centaur was to rotate in a deerlike body from the waist down, while keeping my face and upper body "flat" in the plane.

  At the moment, I was unable to wiggle left or right, which meant I could not manifest any manipulator constructs (i.e., limbs) into this time-space.

  So I could see the dark parts of Victor's nervous system, and I could see how small an adjustment I would have to make to the tilt of his governing monad to bring the meaning axis back to bear… But it was out of reach. His memory was out of reach.

  3.

  My plan was to spend the whole period writing in my notebook, to give a report to Victor of the events and discoveries of the last ten days. I swear, I sat paralyzed for about two minutes, just trying to think of how to boil it down or what to put first.

  The period was half over, and I had covered about four sheets in tiny writing, on both sides, and I had not even hit all the main points I wanted to cover. It was like trying to walk up a mudslide; every paragraph I wrote seemed more inexplicable than the previous paragraph, further down the slope of confusion. There simply wasn't enough time to fill Victor in on all the background, and details I thought I could skip kept cropping up as important. Soon my margins were covered with little arrows pointing back to previous paragraphs I was trying to clarify.

  To hide what I was doing, I wrote on the back pages in the notebook whose first few sheets contained the real report I was supposed to be working on for organic chemistry. If the librarian, Miss Flinders, got up from her desk to look over my shoulder, she would see nothing suspicious.

  But Miss Flinders did not move from her post behind her desk, where she was wrapped in a heavy quilt with her jacket and hat still on, her feet propped on a little cherry-red electric space heater she had smuggled in. The library was an old building, not connected to the central heat, and there were no fireplaces in the main room, where so many old, dry books were kept.

  The fifth page was the beg
inning of my questions and

  recommendations for what to do next. Since Miss Flinders was so far away, and not looking, I thought it safe to tear the five pages from my notebook and pass them to Victor under the table.

  4.

  Here is an excerpt:

  Paper scissors rock. Can't restore your memory because Glum wished off my powers. I can see, but cannot touch, the 4-D world. Colin could wish back on; but Wren stops wish power w/ curse.

  Q could lift curse, but Fell anesthetized his magic w/ chemical dose (affects nervous system?

  suppress REM sleep? spirits think he's unclean?). Your cells could construct antidote, but Daw shifted your monad in 4-D to block your molecule control. I could realign your monad, but Glum negates me. Round and round.

  Powers need two things to work: (1) Subj must be healthy, uncursed, un-negated, un-drugged. (2) Permission from Head of Bran to let laws of nature (?) come into this dimension from our homes.

  Boggin or Vanity (!) can ask Bran to grant permission. Special green table acts as radio to Bran.

  One in Boggin's waiting room; another in warehouse (Drinkwater knows where). Boggin has toe-ring made of same green, portable version (?).

  IMPORTANT Even w/o permission, some home laws of nature "leak through" at the boundaries surrounding the estate. Get partial results. Quentin went north to the Barrows to cast his flying charm.

  BUT!!! Boggin has things (talismans?) in safe in Gr Hall that wake up our powers. 2nd ft. SW

  corner office. If yr magnetic psychokinetics working, could zap safe open, get stuff to turn on PK, then open safe. If my pw'r working, reach through safe wall, get talisman to turn on power. Round and round.

  6.

  I saw Miss Daw. She was sitting rather stiffly on the couch in Boggin's waiting room, her knees pressed together, a thin briefcase balanced atop them, both gloved hands on the handle of her briefcase.

  She was also Thelxiepia. The fourth-dimensional extensions of her body, however, her wheels within wheels of musical energies, had other substances affixed, or attached, or oriented along their hypersurfaces. Unlike me, her 4-D body was dressed, armored, equipped.

  One instrument that orbited her outer wheel structure was something like a lens, a device that amplified the massive hyperlight of overspace. There were other instruments for sending and recording signals, measuring tiny variants of the utilities of objects, introducing fluxes into the webwork of moral strands that ran from object to object to examine the moral implications of hypotheticals. I could tell what these instruments were for, because they were so useful to Miss Daw they practically blazed with the whatever-it-was that my utility-detectors picked up.

  Miss Daw rotated two of her outermost wheel-structures and imprinted a cluster of meanings on a thread of energy running from where she was through my

  5.

  I ended the fifth page with a question: Where were you standing when you first PK'd a metal object?

  Colin's letters to Hollywood had real magic in them. Where did he write them, in the dorm or somewhere else?

  Victor was writing out the answers. I could see, over the top of his book, his pencil eraser wagging back and forth in short, crisp motions. Then something happened.

  I saw an object. It was not in this continuum. Like the beam of a lighthouse, turning toward me.

  area of time-space. This imprinting was similar to what I had done to give Dr. Fell's molecule-size memory-erasing engines within my body their own free will.

  When the energy flux passed through my body, a new sense, or perhaps it was an overlap of the utility and morality senses, translated the flow into words:

  "Miss Windrose, I am obligated to Boreas to reveal any plans and schemes of yours discovered to have an adverse effect on his interests. As you pointed out in an earlier discussion, I am not necessarily obligated to be prompt or zealous in reporting my findings, particularly in cases where (as here) your intent is not entirely clear.

  "In which case, for your own sake, if not for mine, would you at least try the tiniest bit not to be so blatant about your little schemes? If you leave notes lying around under desks or in books, where anyone glancing in through the fourth dimension can plainly see them, I cannot for long continue to pretend to be oblivious.

  "Do try to exercise a modicum of caution. Briareus and Cottus are not blind. Erichtho has a seeing glass; Grendel feels troubled in his heart when his desires are frustrated, as, no doubt, a successful escape on your part would do."

  7.

  Thelxiepia rotated something like a mirror or an echo-dish into my view; and I saw the pages in Victor's hands, shimmering with utility (because I needed so badly to talk with Victor) but also snarled with a huge and attention-getting warp in their moral nature. Apparently, the universe considered my word I had given to Boggin, that I would do nothing he would regret, to still be binding me, and to be violated by passing notes to Victor.

  She rotated her lens away from me; the searchlight beam failed. Hyperspace was dark once more. But now I

  knew that, just because it seemed dark to me, did not mean it was dark to everyone or everything that might be there.

  I remembered how, less than an hour ago, I had vowed to myself how elusive and clever I would be. A sensation of dread trickled into my chest, drop by drop.

  8.

  Victor meanwhile, passed a note back to me. Colin at Kissing Well when wrote letters, Apr 22, 24, May 1, May 25. Magnetic control centers in my brain activated during bad rock climbing accident last year, east slope of Kerru-gan's Rock, 3:04 PM Feb 17. Tumbled 30 m, reinserted metal pitons into rock face at remote distance.

  I looked Victor in the eye and gently slapped my neck. Bugs. I pointed to the notebook I was writing.

  He very casually leaned back and yawned, his gaze traveling quickly over the ceiling. He was looking for cameras or something in the light fixtures.

  Victor brought his gaze back down to me. He casually raised his hand as if to run his fingers through his hair, but instead tapped himself twice on the head and pointed at me.

  You are the head. Take the lead.

  1.

  It made a certain amount of sense that I should be leader. I was the only one who knew the information, and, apparently, we were being watched much more closely than any of us would have guessed, so closely that even passing under-the-table notes in an empty room was fraught with risk.

  But the prospect of being leader scared me.

  Every time we found out more about the situation, it seemed increasingly complex. In stifling our powers, for example, they had used not one but two or maybe three methods, each from a different paradigm, each operating by its own rules. Our enemies had factions, and each faction had factions in it, and even within a single person, such as Thelxiepia or Grendel, there were opposing impulses and imperatives.

  And how safe were we? Mavors said he would kill anyone who killed us, but whoever sent Lamia had not cared about that. Someone wanted to start a war. The quickest way to do that was to kill the hostages. Us.

  And what did they have on their side? Even if our powers turned on tomorrow and operated at full strength, we were still amateurs at their use, fighting experts. For example, how had the school staff found us during our last es-cape? Had they seen the boat Vanity summoned and set a guard around it?

  Possibly.

  But what if my escape had snarled the morality strand representing my promise to Boreas, giving Thelxiepia or Erichtho the Witch some ability to trace us down through the fourth dimension? Or what if Dr. Fell merely implanted a radio transmitter in our clothing, or in our flesh?

  So that was my task, as leader. Escape from a situation that was complex, dangerous, and littered with unknowns. Get out of the burning labyrinth without stepping on the buried land mines.

  If I made a mistake, it was Vanity and the boys who would pay for it. And if I let my fear of making a mistake paralyze me, we would be unprepared and helpless when the time came.

  And t
he time was coming. As long as it seemed to me, ten days is not a long time. Negotiations between Mayors and Mulciber and whoever else was involved might be far from over.

  But once the factions came to an agreement as to what was to be done with us, it would be done. Boreas was playing a game of delays, pretending we were younger and less powerful than we really were. There was a hint that he intended to use and keep us for himself. I saw how shamed he was when it was his turn to be spanked, so to speak, by Mulciber, who stood above him as Headmaster Boggin stood above me.

  If the five of us could serve as the key to elevate Boreas above his peers, would he let that key pass out from his grasp?

  Well, the first step of my master plan was this: Go to history class, and pretend I had read up on what Gibbon said about the life of Imperator Julian the Apostate. It was now fourth period.

  2.

  I spent the whole day, lunch, afternoon classes, sports, supper, evening lecture, and retirement doing nothing a schoolgirl would not do. I did not talk, I hardly even thought, about what to do. The information that I was in charge of the group trickled from Victor to Colin to Quentin, and at some point the next day, was leaked to Vanity, who was watching me anxiously at breakfast, seeing how I would bear up under the pressure. Colin took to saluting me with a Nazi "Sieg Heil!" when he passed me in the hall.

  But I said nothing and did nothing related to the escape plan. Patience, patience was my motto: patient as the mouse who watches the cat watching the mousehole.

  I spent breakfast staring at a fork. I thought about picking it up to stab Colin in the hand. I thought about trying to eat my soup with it. I thought about using it to eat my omelet. The fork grew brighter and dimmer in my higher vision. It had to do, not with how well I imagined doing the act, but how serious I actually was in my will.

  Interesting. The amount of "usefulness" given off by an object could be changed. I think the thing I was picking up with the sense I called "utility" was really something related to time; how many changes in the number of possible futures issuing from the object depending on my relation to it.