Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  "Quentin discovered how to fly! He broke into the meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors, discov-ered who the enemy was, and was almost killed for his trouble. You'll remember everything in a little while… I hope."

  I did not know whether my hope had any justice to it. I knew, among the staff, whose powers canceled out whose among the Uranians. But Vanity? She was a Phaeacian. Both Boggin and Mestor seemed to have the same space-distorting powers she did. But who had worked on her to blank her memory?

  Maybe—and this was just a guess—it was a combination of two powers, and both were needed to stop her. Who had promised Vanity to Glum? He had mentioned more than once that she was "promised" to him. If that promise had been made by Boggin, for the purpose of inflaming Grendel's desire to keep her here, then maybe Grendel was one of the two powers needed to suppress her power.

  Who was the other? Mrs. Wren, I assume. Why else have her be the one to lead us in nighttime prayers for so many years? Unless it was Fell, who gave us injections once a month. Or Boggin? The Board had said explicitly that he was here to stop Vanity. Was that merely because of the green ring, or did he have an anti-Phaeacian power?

  Maybe. I was speculating in midair at the moment.

  But I did know that I could still use my sight powers, and had regained the limited ability to affect weight when I walked along the South boundary. Quentin complained that spirits could not hear him, i.e., he could not affect them, even though he could still see things in tarot cards; his version, so to speak, of my

  "higher senses." If I got Quentin to the North boundary, when the barrows pushed up their cold mounds, his ability to fly might come back. If he could fly without his walking stick. If, if, if…

  We crawled in silence for a while. I took the risk of glancing through the walls again.

  5.

  I saw a long manlike shape in the waters. Its third eye rolled and shimmered in its forehead like an orb of metal. Telemus held me around the waist, high above the frothing wild waves, and driving rain formed black sheets, beating the water white. Waves like sudden mountains rose and fell to every side.

  Telemus held a knife to my throat. 'Tell him to quell the storm."

  The sea giant—he looked like Victor—turned his head toward me, his eyes shining like lamps. "I am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preeon-sciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you to free yourselves. Once we have regained contact with you, we will descend down into the Cosmos and destroy its foundations. All biochemical-based life shall cease operation. Communicate on this frequency, by means of focused thought-energy signals directed at our outposts in the Hyades cluster. Longitude and Right Ascension notation follows…" There followed degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc.

  An invisible signal—somehow in the dream, I was aware of it—sprang from the sea giant.

  The clouds parted. Here and there, stars appeared in the gaps.

  There were beings above the clouds. Far, far above. Their bodies looked like statues, hanging without weight, and coated with a gold metallic surface instead of skin. Only the smallest, little specks, were manlike; their faces were the faces of statues, stern and kingly.

  Ten and one hundred times their size were a second group. These others were oval, like seeds from a metal tree.

  One thousand to ten thousand times their size were even larger beings. This third group were shaped like serpents, mile upon mile of golden armor.

  This third group were very large, and very high up in-deed. Sunlight, harsh and unfiltered from any atmosphere, glinted like solidified fire off their starboard sides. Their port sides were black with unsoftened shadow.

  The giant in the water was not a giant; he was microscopic. He was a Telchine, a servant of much vaster beings. The Fallen were not fallen at all, but orbiting. I kept revising my estimate of how far away they must be, how large they were___

  My dreams. We were crawling through my dreams now.

  What sort of power did Vanity have? What were the Phaeacians?

  6.

  I saw two dreams up ahead. One showed a red lake, steaming beneath a desert sky. From the lake came a naked figure, rising, and a sensation of voluptuous passion and luxurious demand radiated from the figure. The sensation was so strong that it took my breath away. I could not see, in the dream, if the figure was male or female. As the figure rose, the blood-red fluid streamed down arms spread wide.

  From it came a sound like a drumbeat, beats so loud that they seemed like gunshots, pounding, maddening.

  The second dream showed a handsome old man seated on a crocodile. His beard and hair were white, and his expression was benevolent. On his wrist he carried a goshawk, hooded and in jesses. Next to him was a donkey, which, even as I watched, stood and became a donkey-headed man, and then a bearded man with a hoarse and coughing voice, who said, "One comes, and, with her, another!"

  A third figure was there, a bull with a man's face, and between his hooves were circles and epicycles drawn in the ground, and signs of the zodiac written around the edges. "Sisters fair, yet sharing nor sire nor mother."

  The old man on the crocodile replied, "Not hither crawls that which we stand to ward away; yet sound alarm, for so strict duties say. Wake, young Master, wake! Of liberal arts and sciences you shall dream more anon; but in no wise may we touch the world, now that your wand, our bridge, is gone."

  The second dream flared up and faded like a candle being snuffed.

  7.

  I whispered to Vanity, "Quentin just woke up. He knows we're coming."

  "How do you know?"

  "I can see through the walls. The tunnel runs out of normal space-time through a dreamscape and back in at another point. The distances are skewed."

  "This is just a great tunnel, isn't it! Are you sure I found it?"

  I said, "Found it? I think you made it. How can you not remember? Two weeks ago you told me you had been having dreams about this secret panel every night for months. That was before the segment of memory they erased. How come you don't remember this?"

  She shook her head. "Memory works by association, not by chronological order. Maybe they just ordered me to forget my magic powers."

  I said, "I have a theory that your powers are based on states of consciousness. That you enter types of awareness below dreams and above normal alpha wave states that other people cannot reach. If that is so, I do not see how they could have erased your consciousness. Your unconscious memories should be open to you, at some level. If you can reach that level. Do you see what I mean?"

  "They could do it in two steps. First, change my na-ture so that all my memories were stored mechanically, then, physically invade the brain to interfere with the storage mechanism."

  Grendel and Fell. They had used a very similar combination of powers on me. It made my nape hairs stand up to hear her talk so calmly, and say aloud almost exactly what I had been thinking.

  Vanity said, "Which way was the dream coming from? I've reached a fork."

  "Left. Look for a peephole."

  8.

  All three boys were awake when we reached their dormitory. Quentin and Colin were still pulling on clothes, staring at the main door leading into the dorm, obviously expecting us to appear there. Both of them jumped slightly when Vanity and I came out of a hatch in the wall. Quentin sat on the floor, his trousers around his ankles. Colin hopped and hopped, looking puzzled and annoyed.

  "How'd you do that?" he demanded.

  Vanity put her hands on her hips and tossed her head, her green eyes alight. "Magic!" she said loftily.

  Victor was over by the window, throwing a rope down. The bend went twice around the bedpost, and both ends trailed out the window. One end was a bowline with a loop, so we could lower ourselves down by letting out the other rope. The last man down could draw the rope out, and leave nothing but an open window to show the way we went.

  I said, "We may only
have minutes. Please assume the alarm has already been given. No talking! Out the window, double-time. Dressed people first."

  I went first, and practically just let the rope slide through my fingers, regardless of the speed of my descent. Near the bottom, I made the Earth less attractive to me by spreading or spraying my bundle of world-lines outward at a sharp angle. For a moment, I was weightless. I put my feet on the ground, and weight returned with a jolt.

  Victor, Vanity came next. Then Colin.

  He said, "So what is the plan, Dark Mistress?"

  "North," I said.

  Quentin landed, yanked the rope down after him.

  Quentin said, "Are we each going to go to one boundary of the estate, and regroup at the Great Hall?"

  I was surprised. "How did you figure that out?"

  Colin said, "We saw the notes you wrote Victor. Quentin's tarot cards figured out the rest of it."

  I said, "That's bad. If Quentin knows, Wren knows. You guys did not talk about this, did you? The wind can hear us; Daw can see through walls and around corners."

  Victor shook his head brusquely; Colin looked a little guilty. Quentin said, "Your note said Boggin can listen along the wind. Colin and I talked. I thought indoors was safe. No wind."

  "It's my fault," I said. "I should have had Victor destroy those notes immediately."

  Victor said, "You didn't tell me Miss Daw could see through walls."

  Another big mistake from Leader Amelia. Keep the troops informed of security risks. I tried to throw off a sense of rising despair. I said bravely, "Spilt milk. Assume the enemy knows our plan. What are they doing?"

  Victor said, "You tell us. Only you remember seeing them in action."

  "Well, they must be taking their own sweet time getting here. Since Boggin can fly, I don't know what is keeping them."

  Victor said, "Fear. They don't know what we can do, how much we remembered."

  Quentin said, "They would not come for us here. Right now, we are five kids standing outside a dorm window. They're at the boundaries, waiting. The boundaries are where our power is."

  Colin said, "Assume they moved the safe."

  I said, "If our powers were working, they have to split us up to defeat us. They'd be posted around the boundaries."

  Colin said, "But? Dark Mistress, our powers are not working."

  "They don't know that. I am afraid of splitting up. They can crush us singly."

  Colin said, "Dark Mistress, hello? Hello? Earth to Amelia! If none of our super-duper powers are operating, they can crush us anyway, singly or as a group."

  I said, "I want to see if I can turn Victor on."

  I turned toward Victor.

  Colin said, "I could make the obvious joke at this point…"

  I said to Quentin, "Give me the hypo."

  He passed over the syringe he'd stolen from Dr. Fell.

  Colin muttered, "Quick, Watson, the needle!"

  I took out some of the filter paper I had filched, made a crude funnel, held my hand over it.

  My palm and fingertips turned red. Vanity crinkled up her nose in a silent Eyew, gross expression as blood dripped into the filter.

  I said, "This is a creature that exists on a molecular level. It knows how the brain is put together. I have asked it to unblock Victor. It might work; it might not. Miss Daw is the one who knocked his memory askew, by manipulating the fourth dimension; but if Dr. Fell tried to erase any brain segments by purely mechanical means, this might undo the damage. There is a risk of—"

  Victor yanked his sleeve back and thrust out his arm.

  I thought about Lily Lilac. That made it easy to thrust the needle in.

  Everyone stood waiting to see if Victor would keel over or something.

  I said, "A brisk jog will get your blood moving. And we don't have time to wait."

  Vanity and Colin were giving Victor worried looks. Nonetheless, we set off at a brisk trot to the North.

  9.

  I spoke in white, puffing whispers as we ran. "Three stages to powers. First. Vision powers. ESP. Tarot cards. They can't stop at all. Second. Little powers. Make things light, heavy. Fly. TK. Jump long ways.

  Can stop for a while. Boundaries turned on before. Why not again? Third stage. Talismans. Kept in safe.

  Change shape, walk through walls, talk to molecules. Goal: get to safe. Need little powers on to get into Great Hall. Wired."

  Quentin puffed, "Why me first? No staff. Need wand."

  I shook my head. I was out of breath to explain my plan. I looked at Victor. He was trotting along, his feet moving up and down in the snow like pistons, his expression calm, smooth, unafraid. To him I said,

  "Anything? Remember?"

  He said, "Not yet. If I understand the table of opposition, of who stops whom, you should have given the injection to Quentin, not to me. Quentin is trumped by Fell, who used materialistic science to banish his alchemy. I was trumped by Daw, who uses the fourth dimension to neutralize three-dimensional science, right?"

  It was actually the relativistic and quantum-statistical worldview overcoming the limitations of the absolutist Newtonian atomistic-mechanistic model, but I was too out of breath to say.

  Maybe he was right. One more bad decision from Leader Amelia. Dear God in Heaven, but I hated the job of leader.

  10.

  Tattered clouds like ghost ships were being blown along the starry sky, and a pale moon, now here, now hidden, shone on the bright and silent hillocks of snow. The barrows were in a hilly place, far from anything, and bits of broken wall, or standing stones erected by ancient peo-pies, stood here and there among the widely spaced mounds.

  We had stopped jogging. Everyone looked at me.

  I said to Quentin, "What did you do last time?"

  He said, "If I could remember, I would not need to do it. But I had my walking stick. Apsu. Where is he?

  I miss him."

  I said, "He was a gift from Mrs. Wren…"

  When I spoke, a rustle of cold wind started from the north, and blew across us. I tucked my cold hands into my armpits and turned my back to it. Vanity was tugging at her muffler; Colin and Quentin squinted and hunched their shoulders. Only Victor, who stood without scarf or hat or gloves, seemed unaffected, and his gaze traveled left to right, as if he were watching some unseen thing move quickly past us.

  The wind gust died down. I heard the sound of snow slithering and hissing, windblown, moving away to the south, and diminish.

  To Victor, I said, "What is it?"

  He said, "Magnetic anomaly. Interesting."

  Quentin said, "What about the staff V

  I continued, "The staff. When you used it against her, it shattered in your hand."

  Quentin looked stricken.

  I said, "What's wrong?"

  "You are thinking of these things as super-powers, aren't you?" he said, a trace of bitterness in his voice.

  "Like a mechanism you turn on and turn off. I do not think it works that way. I think it is like being a Roman Catholic priest. If you get married and break your vow of chastity, I don't think you can just get divorced and become a priest again. If my staff was broken, my power is broken. It's over. Let's go on to another boundary."

  Another failure for Leader Amelia. Maybe this one wasn't my fault. But on the other hand, I remember Quentin telling me the spirits were shy. He could not even fly when people were watching. Nothing would happen while there was a big group here.

  Even if he had a staff.

  Vanity said, "What causes magnetic anomalies?"

  Colin and I stared at her curiously. It seemed an odd question. I said, "What do you… ?"

  Victor said, "Any electromagnetic power of sufficient magnitude to—"

  Colin interrupted sharply, "Hey! Stupid people! It was a demon! A thing! It went to get help! Time to run away! Which direction? Give the order, Dark Mistress!"

  I said, "East. Run. Hold on to each other! Last time they used a magic spell to split us up!"

&n
bsp; It is really not that easy to run holding hands, and I am sure it looks quite silly. The hilly terrain did not make things any easier, and the hills were getting steeper as we pulled to the East.

  Ahead of us in the moonlight, I could see the cliffs of the Downs, treeless and barren, raising sides of chalk and limestone, pale as cloud, against the stars.

  I was doing fine for a long, long stretch. Vanity was soon out of breath, and Quentin was not doing much better. Colin was gritting his teeth and puffing like a steam engine, but seemed to be keeping up the pace by sheer willpower. Victor did not seem tired at all.

  We were all pelting down a snowy slope, which did not seem steep at all, when suddenly (to me, it seemed sudden) the slope was much sharper than it had first appeared, and I was sliding. When I fell, I pulled down Vanity with me; she let go of Quentin's hand.

  1.

  We two slid and slithered down the hillside, and when Quentin tried to jump after us to get us, he tried to yank out of Colin's hand, who was apparently unwilling to let go. Their feet went out from under them.

  It would have been funny if it weren't so dangerous. I fell and slid about fifty yards, and Vanity skidded to a slow halt a few yards beyond me.

  We were still among the barrows. There was a huge mound, larger than the others we had seen, in the dead center of a smooth and perfectly round depression like a crater. It was down those crater sides we had just fallen, as if pulled inward toward the barrow.

  This mound had a stone doorway, half the height of a man, set with pillars and lintels of unfinished stone: a half-buried henge.

  It would have seemed eerie and unearthly, except that there was evidence of modern man here. There were tarps and crates off to one side. Lights had been rigged around the stone door. There was a small diesel-powered generator under an ice-coated tarp. Nothing was on; nothing was lit. It looked as if the archeologist and his assistants had packed things for the holidays, and expected to be back here digging in a week. There was even a flatbed truck with wide, oversize off-road tires parked not far away.

  I climbed to my feet. "Vanity—!"

  She stood, slid another few feet downslope, stood again. "Fun. Let's do that again. Kidding! Just kidding!"