Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Time passed. First period, second period…

  I had to wait for a time when I knew both Miss Daw and Mrs. Wren were occupied. The others had other ways of spying on us, I am sure. But I feared Thelxiepia's amplifying apparatus, and whatever looking glass or crystal ball Erichtho might have.

  After music and before chemistry was the moment: Miss Daw was collecting the sheet music we had written, while Mrs. Wren was (I could see through the walls) setting up the beakers and retorts in the lab for her lecture.

  I made a quick scan of the fourth dimension. No one seemed to be looking. Miss Daw was on the other side of the room. At my desk, I doodled on a piece of paper, writing words, letters, and phrases here and there across the top, middle, and sides.

  I wrote the alphabet in two-letter grouping: AB CDEF GH, and so on. I wrote: Head, lips, breasts, arms, back, behind, calves, feet, toes. I wrote numbers, 1 2 3 4 5 6. I wrote a little rhyme: This building has stairs; that building puts on airs; the other building has rooms to let; the last building has bushes to get.

  I took the paper, folding in eighths and sixteenths, so that each, little phrase was in its own separate square of paper, and pushed it into my skirt pocket.

  I looked into my own pocket with my higher senses. The paper was dim and useless in its present form.

  It was not something that broke my oath to Boggin. Its internal nature was papery, and slightly playful.

  I waited through fourth period, fifth. Dinner. Lecture. Sleep. Another day.

  Two days, three. Vanity and Colin at breakfast on Friday had relapsed into their old, cheerful, talkative selves. It was not until then that I realized the Red Alert status we were under made us stiff and nervous.

  I was not the only unconvincing actress in the group. But since I, the leader, had done nothing for a week, those two probably figured all bets were off, why worry?

  Victor, of course, seemed the same as usual. Time and danger did not flap his unflappable nature. Only Quentin was pensive.

  On Friday, when we had lab, I leaned over to Quentin's ear and said, "Spirit one." If the wind could hear my words, it could not "hear" what I was pointing at. And I pointed at the rack of hypodermic needles in a cabinet behind Dr. Fell. "Spirit," as in "spirit away," meant Steal one and palm it.

  I did not even see him do it, and I was watching for it. Quentin stepped up to the front of the room to give his lab demonstration. He asked Vanity to come up and assist him. Somehow, her hair got lit on fire by one of the Bun-sen burners, and she ran in a circle, screaming, until a bored-looking Dr. Fell took her by the shoulders and patted her head with a wet paper towel.

  I looked with my higher senses and saw there in Quentin's pocket, inside a false bottom in his pen case, the hypo. It was of no particular use to me while it was in Quentin's pocket; he, of course, had no use for it.

  Smoothly done.

  Of course, I also started blushing red as a beet. Glowing like gold next to his inner pants pocket was Quentin's masculine member, which was apparently very useful to him, or useful to me, or something. I wondered how Miss Daw kept her composure, seeing what we all looked like under our clothing.

  I was not the sleight-of-hand artist that Quentin was, but I took the opportunity to pick up some paper towels and filter paper and slide them into my notebook.

  3.

  Patience, patience. On Saturday night, Vanity and I sat in the Common Room and talked about boys.

  Chattering, Victor would call it. I am sure real girls who live normal lives talk about real boys that they know, or film stars. We either talked about Victor, Colin, and Quentin,, or we talked in theoretical terms about characters from books we'd read. I don't know what other girls read. We discussed whether, if you had to marry a sea captain, Ahab would make a better husband than Odysseus; of kings, whether Marcus Aurelius was better than Arthur Pen dragon; on a related topic, whether Mordred was worse than Corn-modus; whether El Cid was braver than Salaidin; whether Socrates was wiser than Aristotle, considering that Socrates let the Athenians kill him and Aristotle didn't.

  It was eerie and uncomfortable talk, for me, since Vanity did not recall that Odysseus might have been (and might still be) her husband; and when she spoke about how unusually kind and charming Colin had been this week, I remembered that she did not remember Quentin's (twice now) first kiss.

  She had a little napkin in her hands, which she tore into shreds absentmindedly when she spoke about matters too near her heart. Impersonating her, I pulled the piece of paper I had been carrying for four days in my pocket Every day I had transferred it into a new skirt, unfolding it and refolding it along the same seams. Having been folded and refolded, it came apart neatly at these seams, and I had thirty-two random little notes, some with only one word or two on them, or a pair of letters. I swept the litter back into my pocket. Certain of the notes began to become more useful to me than the others, and to glow a bit in my higher perceptions. But if Miss Daw could decipher my intent from those scattered notes, well… then she was more clever and better equipped than anything we children could overcome.

  Which I feared might be the case.

  4.

  That night, as I lay in bed, looking around me in the fourth dimension, I saw motion. Squinting, I saw the Manor House laid out around me, like a 3-D man staring at a blueprint.

  I saw a cone-shaped object in hyperspace, made of writhing arms, hands, fingers, like a frozen tornado of worms. It was only a cone in the fourth dimension, however. In three dimensions, each cross section formed one of many increasingly large and heavy bodies.

  The tip of the cone, the smallest body, intruded into our continuum. Boggin was talking to that body. It was dressed in a well-cut blue pin-stripe suit, and wore a heavy gold watch on its wrist. He was one of the giants who had been at the meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors, or one of his race. He and Boggin were entering a room just off the dayroom they used as a faculty lounge. They both had cups of coffee in their hands, and Boggin was pulling a bottle of whiskey from a locked cabinet, to spike the coffee and "Irish" it up, so to speak.

  The part of the giant's body that looked like a six-foot-tall man had something, some apparatus, to convey the words he spoke and heard to the main bulk of the real giant, three hundred feet tall, that was wading through the thick gelatin of hyperspace. I could hear his half of the conversation.

  "Is it true that you keep your girl prisoners all nude and chained up at night on feather beds?"

  In my imagination, I filled in a possible answer from Boggin: No, I am impotent, but I get my jollies by spanking the blonde.

  The giant laughed. "Very funny. And where do you get these bunny costumes, eh?"

  Hugh Hefner is my homosexual lover; he sends me gifts.

  "Well, I suppose I know you too well to expect a straight answer from you, Boreas. Of course, there is what the Hindoos would call a karmic symmetry here. You are not going to get a clear answer from the Unseen One until He hears what Mavors and Mulciber have decided between them. What did you do to upset Mulciber?"

  He wanted to spank the blonde, but I wouldn't let him.

  "Oh, really? But I think you do know. In any case, Mavors is not going to give you a final decision about the Uranians until after his people talk to the Destroyer and the Huntress. And, well, you know how everything slows down around the holidays. The Destroyer doesn't like to grant audiences in midwinter, when his influence is weakest."

  Only Miss Daw knows what my buttocks tattoo says.

  "I have been told that we will have definite action by the New Year. The Unseen One will act unilaterally, whether or not Mavors and Mulciber agree. Some recent event—I know not what—has convinced the Lord of the House of Silence that the Uranians are a danger."

  5.

  Saturday was terribly boring for me. For the life of me, I couldn't remember what it was I did, back when I was merely Amelia, to entertain myself during my time off.

  Eventually, I went to the gym and put on my
tights and a sweatshirt, a leather jacket atop that, earmuffs.

  Then I laced up my running shoes and began jogging the grounds. I was a little too undressed for that chill weather, but I thought my exertions would keep me warm.

  I jogged. The snow had fallen a bit on Wednesday, but Thursday had been bright and fair, the temperature hovering around the melting point. Now, the snow had a slight crust of ice, soft and feathery beneath a fragile shell.

  It was not the best surface for jogging. I plunged through with every step, and had to yank my unbooted and besneakered foot out of an icy mouth with every step.

  I ran the mile to Arthur's Mound, which is a wide and flattened dome of raised earth, heaped up by some ancient and forgotten peoples. Over and down the other side I went, crunching through paper-thin ice with each footfall.

  The trees, first one, then several, rose singly or in stands here and there along the snowy south lawn. A little farther on, the stands were thicker and more numerous, and I was not sure if it was the outlier of the forest I was in, or not.

  Where was the South boundary? Colin and Quentin, Victor and Vanity, each had their separate ideas.

  What was my idea?

  My thoughts were loose and free at that time, since the cold wind was coursing through my lungs, and the muscle burn was beginning to make me unaware of my body. Ideas rippled like clear water through my fancy, making white ripples here and there, as other thoughts, fishlike, darted from their shining surfaces.

  A big whale-type thought stirred up my mental waters. If the South boundary had not been mapped in all these years, it must be innately unmappable. A tiling is innately unmappable when the act of mapping the thing changes its ability to be mapped.

  Think, for example, of Heisenberg uncertainty of mass and position. You can see a target particle only by rebounding a photon or some other particle from it. If the photon is more massive than the target, you lose the position information, because the target is struck forcefully enough to move. If less massive, the photon rebounds, but you know nothing about the mass of the target except that it was large enough to stop the photon.

  I wondered if the Southern boundary, all these years, was a probability wave, a zone or clouds of possible locations, which collapse into certainty when looked for.

  I turned on my higher senses and looked. I was assuming the "boundary" would have a moral significance to me, since I had, in effect, promised not to cross it. It might also be very useful to know where it was.

  The nature of the estate ground might be different than the outside ground, since there was some evidence that Lord Terminus had established this place in its own pocket universe, only tangentially related to the surface of the time-space occupied by southern Wales.

  And I saw it collapse into existence not a hundred yards away from me. To one side was the estate ground. To the other were not one but four versions of the forest, each one at right angles to the other.

  To my eye, the versions were identical. Each tree and snowflake was in the same location. But my other senses could detect differences.

  In the first, each tree and rock brimmed with shining usefulness. No object was any more useful than any other object: as if any thing could be used for any purpose, without being restricted by what its actual properties were. A stone or a patch of snow was just as useful for lighting a fire as a stick of wood.

  In the second, each tree had a moral nature. It was intelligent, or it housed an intelligence. Or was it intelligence? A dog is not intelligent, but it is still wrong to be cruel to an animal who loves you. There was something august in the trees, something that must be treated with a certain dignity and respect.

  In the third, each object had a definite internal nature, set and defined, but no moral nature whatsoever, and no innate utility. In this version, things were what they were without any reference to whether they helped human beings or not.

  And the fourth was bright, shining, beautiful, as every rock and tree and patch of snow was controlled by its own governing monad, its own bit of free energy, which made the other factors—utility, morality, and even inner nature—uncertain things, rich with possibility. I saw the other factors like pearly gray clouds of luminous mist, spread in wings and streams from every object, heavy with wonder. If a symphony were made into matter, it would look as that version of the forest did.

  And I was on the far side of the boundary.

  The boundary had collapsed into existence about a hundred yards to my right. I was off the estate grounds, but, interestingly enough, the universe was not snarling my morality in sign that I had violated my agreement with Boggin. Why? I am not sure why. Maybe it had to do with intent. I had not been trying to cross the boundary; I wasn't trying to escape. Instead, the boundary had sneaked up and jumped into being behind me when I looked for it.

  Of course, now that I knew I was breaking a rule (what is the opposite of trespassing, anyway?), I sprinted back along the snow surface to get back onto school grounds.

  On the other hand, maybe I should not be running. The 3-D version of me, Amelia, was not supposed to know where the boundary was.

  I slowed. There was a moment of pressure… of increased potential… when I passed the actual definite line of the boundary. As if my body, and every atom in it, had to decide which version it belonged in, as if there was a moment of uncertainty.

  Did I get a vote? I decided I did. I voted myself to be Phaethusa, the multidimensional native of Myriagon, daughter of Helion and Neaera——-

  It was like pushing through the surface of a bubble. For a moment, my higher senses went blind.

  I kept up the sprint, feeling that warm light-headedness and sense of tireless strength that come from a really good run.

  When I looked again, the boundary was a field of uncertainty, and my act of looking collapsed it again.

  This time, it was thirty yards behind me. And…

  I stumbled. My feet fell through the surface of the ice coating the snow.

  I looked back. No footprints. For the last thirty yards, between the two positions where the boundary had manifested itself, the paper-thin layer of ice on the snow was unbroken.

  During that time, I had, unconsciously, made myself lighter. It was my old trick, my ability to bend world-lines. It was back.

  I went to go look for some heavy rock to lift.

  6.

  My ebullience faded, fortunately, before I found any good-size rock. Patience, patience, remember that motto. If Erichtho or Thelxiepia had seen me running along the top of the ice, the bad guys at least knew that my powers were beginning to return. However, since Boggin had not erased years and decades of memory, they must have known that we knew we could do odd things that other human beings couldn't do.

  Assume they saw it. What would they think? That I knew what the phenomenon was, why it was caused, what had happened? No.

  I went to the gym and stretched out, cooled down.

  And afterwards? What would Amelia have done?

  That night, in bed with Vanity (do I need to mention that our room was cold again, and we had no fire lit, because the conversation where Boggin had agreed that we could have a fire was one of the things erased from the "present" story-continuity?), I told her about my ability to walk on top of the ice.

  She must have known from Colin where he wrote his love letters, because she said, "East, the sea, is Colin's direction. Yours is South. The other two boundaries are the graveyard and the rocky, lifeless hills.

  Well, it's obvious who goes where. How come I don't have a direction?"

  Of course, she did not recall that she was not one of us chaoticists at all. I could not remember if I had told her at the powwow; maybe I had and she'd forgotten.

  Or maybe she knew I was putting on an act for the benefit of unseen listeners. Vanity is insightful, and I am not the world's best actress.

  To let the unseen listeners believe that we girls were on the wrong track, I said, "You're thinking three-dimensionally. What
if the other boundary is in time? At the moment this estate is sold to a new owner, will be your time."

  I did not tell her (or the listeners) about the four versions I saw.

  As I lay, slowly falling asleep, I kept thinking about the four versions.

  At some point, I must have truly been asleep, because it was Lord Morpheus, robed in starless midnight skies, his hair dark like moon-smothering clouds tinged silvery at the edges, who sat on my windowsill, a hooded black owl in jesses on his wrist, and said, "The first you saw was my son's version. In dream, any object can be made to perform any task. The second belonged to the Graeae boy, the son of Proteus; his people see dryads. The third was Telchine, a world of blind and careless atoms. Why do you think your people developed the senses you did? Of course your world was the bright version, daughter of Helion; your name means 'radiance.'"

  "Why are you here?" I said, or seemed to say.

  "I have come to warn you that the Psychopompos, the son of Maia, is your enemy; he has appeared at my house and urged my vassals to disobey me, to raise the comet-streaming banners of Chaos and Old Night to war, and press the infinite armies of phantasy and dream into attack. My son would die, he said, but high honors would bury him, and he be treated as worthily as any of the fallen in war. The Father of Lies spread the rumor that secretly I wished for my son to be sacrificed in our noble cause, I, who have, across many wasted eons, commemorated the undying enmity with cosmos with the death rites of many brave knights fallen in my service.

  "I have kept my wife in an enchanted sleep since the day young Phobetor was kidnapped, that she would not weary out her eyes with weeping, which, in our world, is the only cause of death. Will you tell him we still love him so?"

  I said, "I cannot speak while enemy ears hear. As soon as I may, I will tell him."

  "The Emperor of Dreams grants you a boon. Of what would you care to dream this night? I can make phantasms of Boreas or Damnameneus to wait upon the secret and voluptuous desires burning in your loins. I should warn you, however, that it will be my son Phantasmos whom your arms will clasp and your lips caress, should you choose this form of boon."