Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  "A spell made us rash and stupid last time. Tell me if you can feel if we are being watched."

  She looked left and right. "Where are the boys… ?"

  They had fallen farther down the slope. Indeed, they were almost at the stone entrance to the barrow.

  I did not like the look of that. Like the tumble that had split us up when we approached the seashore, this had all the markings of a trap being sprung. I did not want to shout, but I saw Colin get to his feet, and without bothering to look back to see if the rest of us were hurt, he started to walk slowly and stiffly toward the black square entrance to the mound.

  His motion was stiff, doll-like. Quentin was rising to his feet also, walking with sleepwalker steps after him.

  I bit my lip. No shouting. I stooped, gathered a snowball, and let it fly at Colin. I have a good throwing arm, and managed to knock off his hat with a plop of snow. Colin shook himself and turned around, angered and startled.

  I pointed furiously to where Quentin was walking stiff-legged toward the waiting stone door. Colin squinted at him, looking angry. He jumped forward in three long strides, put out his hand and yanked Quentin roughly; the younger boy stumbled and went to one knee.

  I said, "Vanity! Report!"

  She closed her eyes, raised her hand, pointed upward. Her other hand lifted and pointed down.

  Her eyes snapped open. "Overhead and underfoot. Two of them."

  I looked back up the slope. I could see Victor's slender silhouette in the moonlight, a shadow against the brighter snow behind him. He was stepping sideways down the slope, carefully and quickly placing one foot after another.

  A shadow passed across the face of the moon. I looked up.

  It was Dr. Fell, levitating.

  The tails of his white lab coat floated and flapped around his legs. He had neither hat nor overcoat, as if cold meant nothing to him. Like a shark diving through cold, black waters, he dropped feetfirst out of the night sky, heading toward Colin and Quentin.

  He was a hundred feet up. I saw a blue spark appear on his brow. He had opened his third eye.

  An azure beam darted from the eye, stabbing down. Somehow, impossibly, Colin moved faster, and threw Quentin down with himself atop. The beam struck Colin. I was expecting, I do not know what, an explosion or something, but the beam seemed to do Colin no more hurt than a flashlight.

  On my table of opposites, I wasn't sure how Colin's paradigm matched up against Dr. Fell. Neither one trumped the other. Were they roughly equal? Or were they both immune to each other? I didn't know.

  Dr. Fell hovered lower. I could see, under his lab coat, he was wearing a jacket of chain mail. I had seen those chain-mail jerkins every day of my life. It never occurred to me that anyone except the mannequins in the corridors could wear them.

  He shouted down, "Mr. mac FirBolg! Move aside, or I will be forced to deal with you!"

  Colin answered him by holding up two fingers. Not a victory sign. Fuck you with horns on, buddy.

  Dr. Fell took a syringe out of his jacket pocket, filled it from a vein in his arm. He held the syringe for a moment before his face; an azure spark flickered between his metal eye and the tube.

  He closed his third eye, and he opened his hand. The syringe hung in the air a moment, unsupported.

  Then it turned end over end and darted toward Colin.

  Colin slapped the speeding thing out of midair just before it touched him, clapping his hands together like a man swatting a wasp. His clasped hands jerked back and forth for a moment, as if the wasp were still alive. Then, with a funny look on his face, Colin slumped over in a faint.

  "Well, that was not difficult, was it?" Dr. Fell asked himself.

  Vanity and I were simply too far away to do anything. I was not sure if I should call out. Neither of us, apparently, had been seen yet. But I was stepping quickly down the slope, and Vanity followed me.

  What was I supposed to do once I got closer? Maybe I could make Fell weigh more, and drag him down out of the air.

  Quentin was on his back, awkwardly holding Colin's body between himself and Fell.

  Fell looked at a coil of electrical cable that was resting next to the diesel generator; then he looked at where Colin was slumped over atop Quentin. The cables unwound and reached across the snow like arms of an octopus. The cables must have had copper cores he was manipulating magnetically. Loops of cable snaked around Colin's shoulders and legs, and yanked him to one side.

  "Now, then," said Dr. Fell. He opened his third eye again.

  The battery of lights atop the stone door swiveled around in their brackets, and turned on, a silent explosion, dazzling. Dr. Fell did not blink, but he jerked his hand up to guard his forehead, where the metal eye—his real eye—was.

  I saw Victor, now far below me, not twenty yards from the entrance to the howe. He was covered from head to foot in snow. Behind him, in a straight line reaching back up the slope, was a crease of snow where he had (evidently) flung himself headfirst down the side of the crater, using his stomach as a toboggan. He was not ten yards from the empty truck and the other crates and equipment of the archeologist's camp.

  Dr. Fell's head swiveled like a gun turret toward Victor, and his third eye gleamed with blue light. Firefly dots of azure blue streamed out along the beam.

  Victor raised his head; the flesh along his forehead creased and puckered and opened. A metal eye appeared on Victor's head. His eye was a deeper, purple color, and streaks and sparks of gold flickered through the beam that issued from it.

  The beams did not pass through each other, as light would have done. Instead, where they met in midair, the tiny motes of gold and azure canceled each other out with a flash like heat lightning.

  Dr. Fell called down in a dispassionate voice: "I ask you to surrender."

  Victor called back in a voice also calm and matter-of-fact: "Impossible. I can be killed, but I cannot be defeated without some act of consent on my part. I do not consent."

  Dr. Fell said, "That strategy limits your available range of options. You lose the opportunity to minimize unfavorable outcomes and maximize favorable ones."

  Victor replied, "Only in the short term. Over the span of all possible future interactions, positive as well as negative, a declared policy of no-surrender lowers transaction costs by deterring zero-sum situations."

  Fell: "Your policy renders the present interaction negative-sum."

  Victor: "I am taking that into account."

  "The cost to you will be higher than to me."

  "My cost-benefit calculation also includes my companions, who may survive whether or not I die, into the satisfactory outcome definition. Your satisfactory outcome range is more limited."

  "But my strategic options are far greater to begin," said Dr. Fell, and he raised his hand.

  Again, both their metal eyes lit up. There was an exchange of lances of fire, a strike and a parry.

  I could see the internal nature of the charged particle packages being sent out.

  Dr. Fell had emitted molecular engines designed to enter Victor's body, find his nervous system, and send a shutdown command to his motor centers. He had ionized the particles and accelerated them by means of a magnetic monopole he had generated in certain specialized centers of his nervous system.

  Victor's response was to ionize the air in the beam path, so the molecular engines lost their charge.

  Neutral, they could not be accelerated. They were still dangerous, but now they were drifting quite slowly, like a little cloud of dust motes, down, up, whichever way the Brownian motions of the air carried them, a spreading vapor of fine ink.

  Victor's metal eye flashed fire; this time it was Dr. Fell, still standing in midair high as a treetop, who ionized the space around him. A counterthrust and counterparty. Nothing done. Neither man was vulnerable to attack at that level.

  Vanity put her hand out to stop me. "What are we going to do when we get there?" she said.

  I slowed down. It was a good quest
ion.

  Victor pointed at the cables still wound around the motionless Colin. Colin spun over in the snow, a human yo-yo. The cables jumped off Colin and snaked up into the air, lassoing Dr. Fell.

  Two of the four arc lights went dark as the cables from the generator jumped skyward at Victor's gesture. The generator cables fused (in little hissing flares of acetylene light) to the dangling ends of the cables winding around Dr. Fell.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Fell's metal eye dilated. A shower of motes flickered across the snow to every side of Victor. I saw the meaning of what was happening. The internal nature of the snow—cold and nonmflammable—was being disintegrated into hydrogen and oxygen—flammable. It was chemically impossible; the energy of the reaction needed to split a water molecule into atoms and recom-bine them into 0 and H was not present——-

  2

  4

  The snow at Victor's feet glowed red, writhed like a living thing, and then exploded. The flame was not red; it was blue-white, and an outer, hotter flame rushed over it, and popped like a balloon.

  Fell lowered his head, and the blue beam narrowed like the cutting torch. I saw motes stream out from his pupil, molecular machines programmed to break apart the chemical bonds of anything they touched. It was a disintegration ray. His chin touched his breastbone.

  With a screaming hiss, the ray began cutting through the cords wrapping his arms.

  I saw Victor, coated in flames, step forward out of the globe of pale fire. His skin had been replaced by a diamond crust, which he had collected out of the atmospheric carbon. He raised one diamond-gleaming hand. The diesel generator's switches flipped. The turbine turned on.

  Fell had cut through the insulation, but had not yet severed the copper core of the cable. The voltage arched between the bare copper and his coat of ringmail. There was a flash like a photographer's bulb going off, and a smell of ozone permeated the air.

  The dazzling afterimage in my eyes showed a purple banner of smoke, thin as cigarette smoke, hanging between the spot where Dr. Fell had just been hovering, and the wreckage of the truck, struck in two by the impact, with a crater of splashed snow in a wide circle around it.

  The remaining two arc lights failed. I heard the diesel engine whine and splutter into silence. I could smell burnt insulation.

  The white fire surrounding Victor fluttered and was gone. My eyes were blind. I waited for them to re-adapt to the starlight.

  In the darkness, Vanity cheered and clapped. "Fell fell!" She cheered. "Hurrah for our team! Go, Victor!

  Victor, go!"

  I said, "Fell is not hurt."

  "How far was that? That was at least as tall as a ten-story building!"

  "He altered the internal character of his muscles and bones into something like wood. He splintered, but the pieces are regathering. His nervous system was not harmed…"

  She said, "Can you see? I can't see a thing."

  "Vanity, I don't know what to do. Should we run up and try to help?"

  "Help with what? Help how?" she said. "I don't even have a baseball bat…"

  The headlights of the truck turned on. The bulbs, trailing wires like the eyestalks of a crab, rose up out from the grille, and turned toward the wrecked truck body.

  Dr. Fell stood up out of the wreck. He did not stand up the way a man would, bending his legs, squatting, putting a hand on the ground. No. Stiff as a corpse, as if pulled upright by invisible wire, he went from being prone to being upright. Imagine a man stepping on the tines of a rake, and seeing the handle lift suddenly upright, and you will know what it looked like.

  The prosthetic he wore for a face was torn and burnt. An impatient hand pulled at the tattered mask and threw it away. The integument underneath it looked as hard as bone. The mouthparts looked like the mandibles of an insect. There were no eyeholes, only one central orb, gleaming and turning, in the forehead, like the headlamp of an oncoming train.

  The two exchanged radio signals. I do not know what higher sense of mine detected and interpreted the rapid pulse of meaning between them, but I heard it, somehow: Fell: "If defeat-conditions cannot be reached, then the core value for our interaction matrix is null."

  Victor: "I am treating this as a single instance of an infinitely repeatable set."

  "A child cannot harm me, but I can deliver any harm up to but less than death, which will involve unacceptable repercussions."

  "I am no longer a child, Dr. Fell. I am Damnameneus of the Telchine."

  "I am Telemus, one of the Cyclopean Archons. Our race defeated yours in times past; that instance has application here."

  "There is still an information cost associated with determining the truth-value of your assertion of invulnerability."

  "Let us proceed to the demonstration…"

  The hood of the engine flew open, and the engine block, pistons, cylinders, battery, and shaft rose up into the air and spread apart, as if being laid out on the three-dimensional blueprint. Then wires and parts of the engine began reconstructing themselves, as if evolving into some new machine.

  Where the diamond statue of Victor stood, a greenish smoke began bubbling up out of pockmarks in the snow. Fell was gathering and recombining the chlorophyll traces in the winter grass beneath the snow to make chlorine gas. I could sense Victor altering his body chemistry to compensate, shifting into a nonbreathing form.

  Vanity could see Fell, illuminated by the spotlights of the truck headlamps, but Victor and the poisonous gas were invisible to her.

  The petrol tank crumbled suddenly, and gasoline drenched Dr. Fell.

  Fans of molecular machines spread out from Fell in each direction, reaching under the ground. I saw where nitrates, like bubbles forming in lava, were being drawn out of the soil to combine and create explosives.

  I said, "We better get farther away. Colin and Quentin…"

  Colin lay on a heap, motionless, limp as a rag doll. Quentin was gone.

  Gone.

  The lights from the truck splashed enough illumination to show me the dimple shadows of one set of footprints, leading directly into the burial mound.

  I said, "Look to Colin! See if he is alive!"

  And I ran.

  2.

  I do not know if Vanity was trying to disobey me, or if I was no longer leader, or if she was just scared, but she ran after me for about half the distance between me and the stone door, farther behind with every step.

  The stone door loomed before me, a cold mouth, gaping. I bent double and began slithering, crawling, and duck-walking as fast as I could into the mound. To me, it was not as dark as a natural mound would have been. The original purpose of these prehistoric mounds was to bury dead kings. It was still carrying out that function; to my eyes that could see the utility of objects, it seemed to have a faint glow.

  Vanity, behind me, stopped at the stone door. "Amelia… ?" she called in a quavering voice.

  I put a point of view behind her, and looked at her. She turned, and in the light of the gasoline explosions coming from the direction of the truck, she could see Colin's motionless body. Vanity went toward him.

  I could see through the wall of the mound. There was a spiral crawlway, lined with massive blocks, leading to a domed chamber in the center. I could see a strand of moral force running from my heart to a silhouette lying prone. It was my moral obligation to help Quentin.

  There was a tangle of other strands and lines of moral order, or disorder, strung throughout and past the chamber walls, like a spider's web, twisting and twisting.

  I reached the inner door. The chamber inside was dark to my eyes. But the utility…

  No. The chamber here was not useful to the long-dead kings. It was useful, very useful, to someone else.

  Someone here.

  One moment, she was invisible. The next, I could see her bent silhouette, her pointed hood and shapeless cloak, as a group of moral force-lines issued from the distaff she held in her hands.

  She said, "High diddle doubt, my candle's out, my lit-
tie maid's not at home; saddle my hog and bridle my dog, and fetch my little maid home. Why are you so far from home, my little maid?"

  The voice was so strange, I almost didn't recognize it. Perhaps what I thought was her normal voice was merely a put-on, an act. "Is that you, Mrs. Wren?"

  A dry laugh. "There was an old woman dwelt under a hill; and if she's not gone, she dwelleth there still."

  I said, "Not Mrs. Wren, then. You are Erichtho."

  No laughter, this time.

  She said, "You cannot take my name from me. That art you do not know. You do not name me, little girl.

  You know not whence I came or whither I go."

  The darkness was silent for a moment, as if she were waiting for a response from me, some sort of verbal parry. I could think of nothing to say.

  She laughed again, a noise like dry leaves crumpling. She said, "There was an old woman tossed in a basket seventeen times as high as the moon, but where she was going no mortal could tell, for under her arm she carried a broom…"

  I said, "Undo what you've done to Quentin!"

  "Or else, what, my little maid? Will you send young Colin in to chop me with a great sharp axe?"

  I said, "I didn't say that!"

  I could see the strands looping and weaving back and forth in the chamber.

  "No word of greeting, no kiss on the cheek, for the old nurse, the old granny, who raised you from a kitten? The hands I taught how to play pat-a-cake are raised now to strike me, is it? The feet I taught their first steps to, are raised high to kick and run away? The food I fed, the strength I gave you, now is turned against me, eh?"

  As if they were fibers of wire or rope, I saw the strands loop around my arms and legs like nooses. One went into my heart. One went into my stomach. I felt nothing, but a cold sensation passed over my limbs.

  She said, "Woe is me! Oh arms, oh legs, oh strength! Hear me!"

  I ran forward at her, thinking I could knock her down or stop her mouth before she spoke her spell. The silhouette I thought was her crumbled in my hands when I touched it, and something, rings or a crown or something, slid off the disintegrating skull and bounced away.