Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  From the degree of extension, I could sense that the medium within this dimension was even thicker and closer than the fourth; it was filled with heavy darkness, and some force or obstruction filled the area around Earth's home continuum.

  The relation sense told me that, like the hypersphere, the particles here had such high volume for their surface area, that they could not be deflected from their straight-line motions by any contact with each other's surfaces. The surfaces were simply too small. Imagine if all space were filled with infinitely hard, dense points of neutron-ium. They could not interact.

  On the existence level, I was hearing the underpinnings of the universe. The universe was somehow false: It did not "exist" as much as, it was not as real as, the void over which it was constructed.

  I heard Vanity scream. The moral strands connecting me to my friends all went rigid. The moment I had spent looking into five-space had been long. How long? The time might be different between 3-D and 5-D.

  First problem. How to pick up a five-dimensional hypersphere?

  I said, or perhaps only thought, to the sphere, "Collapse into xt+yt-zzr" It folded from the hypersphere into a sphere, and then into a crystal disk about the size of a saucer. It was too thin to see with my eyes or touch with my hand, but I reached down with part of my manipulator-structure, and lifted the disk an inch into the "red" direction. It glowed like a lamp in my hand.

  That light showed me what was around me. In the fourth dimension, I could see the wheels within wheels of Miss Daw, issuing musical concentric spheres, expanding; I saw a conical giant made of hands and arms, surrounded by waves of overbearing pressure. My other senses were confused; there were tangles of world-paths rippling and distorting from all objects in my view, blinding and blazing, as if all probabilities had gone wild, all time were bent out of joint. A tidal wave of Phaeacian space-distortion was also raging over the whole area. In the visual gibberish, I could not see where my friends were; I could not see what was happening,

  I closed my higher eyes against the blazing noise and followed the jerking morality-lines coming from my heart. I spread my wings and caught an energy flow leading toward my friends. Up. Straight up I soared, passing through floors and ceilings as if they were mist.

  Then I was on the roof. Victor was prone, either unconscious or dead. Colin had one arm around Victor, as if he had just caught him, and was lowering his body to the tiles. Vanity was drawing her breath to scream again, her hand protectively over the necklace around her neck. Azure blue sparks were streaming up over the side of the roof, passing through Quentin's body, and he had dropped his staff. The staff was sliding down the roof tiles, bouncing over the rain gutter and away.

  In front of us were enemies. Boggin, barefoot and shirtless in the cold, wearing nothing but his purple pirate pants, was landing on the peak of the dome, not ten yards away, his red wings pumping energetically, his fists spread wide. One leg was crooked, one leg was straight, toes reaching down to the capstone of the dome.

  To the east, among the moonlit clouds behind Boggin, three other winged figures flew: black Notus, whose wings were shaped like a seagull's, and falcon-winged Corus, armed with a bow, and an owl-winged man with streaming silver hair, who carried a rifle.

  On the lawn below us, advancing with huge steps, were two giants, their heads fifty feet high. Six or ten arms sprang from the knotted muscles of their shoulders; cloaks of mist and cloud streamed from their backs, and a dozen more hands and arms reached out from the folds and billows of these clouds. Their black fingernails were the size of shields, their fingers were timber beams, their palms were courtyards.

  In one of the palms of the nearer of the two giants, the one-eyed, skull-faced version of Dr. Fell stood, Telemus, his feet planted wide, one hand resting against the thumb of the giant, as if the thumb were the mast of a pitching ship. From him came the azure light that struck Quentin.

  I knew Miss Daw was in the area, but I could not see her.

  Behind us were enemies. Several of the hands of the giants, larger than lifeboats, were issuing from a white mist that had blotted out the roof behind us. One hand descended toward Vanity, its palm down and fingers curled like the bars of a prison gate. In the palm of another of the hands was Mr. Glum, leaning on his makeshift crutch.

  The moment Glum's eyes fell on me, his face lit up with dark delight, and reality hiccuped. My wings were gone, my higher senses dimmed, and I felt the upper dimensions vanish from my memory like a dream upon waking. My winter coat and pants seemed both tighter and prettier.

  Boggin was speaking as he landed. "Well, now that that little romp is over with, we can…"

  I hit the button on the disc player. Miss Daw's lovely music floated from the tiny speaker, very quiet in the wide night.

  The screams of the giants were cut off in mid-shout. The hands all vanished in blazes and explosions of red sparks. Mr. Glum toppled headlong; Dr. Fell grabbed the thumb he was clutching, and he disappeared into whatever place the hands were being yanked. The clouds of mist the giants produced erupted into red sparks, turned transparent, and were gone.

  Glum struck the roof tiles, slid, and grabbed on to the rain gutter with both hands. Whatever his desires were at the moment, they did not include concentrating on me. In the fourth dimension, my crystal disk shone and gave off light.

  You will never be without light…

  And I could see my wings again. I rotated them back into this level. Shining blue-sparkling feathers fanned out to either side of me.

  Colin roared. He ran forward, snatching up Mr. Glum's hoe. He moved faster than was possible, as fast as runners desire to run, which was faster than they do run.

  He shouted as he sprinted past me, "Save them!"

  He jumped to the peak of the dome in one leap.

  My higher senses picked up Boggin's power beginning to radiate from him; morality and probability were warping, building up some sort of massive time-energy, as if fate itself were being wrenched from its moorings and used as a weapon in Boggin's hands.

  But Colin was too quick for him. Colin clouted him over the head and shoulder with the hoe. Boggin snarled and slapped at Colin, cracking the hoe in two when Colin raised it to parry the blow.

  Boggin's wings pumped furiously, and he began to rise. Colin threw himself heedlessly through the air and tackled him. Boggin began to draw in his breath, and, even from yards and yards away, I could feel the air getting cold. Colin, his legs dangling in midair as Boggin lifted off, drove the blunt end of the broken hoe-staff into the pit of Boggin's stomach. Boggin doubled over and coughed, but continued to rise, higher and higher.

  I took a step, raised my wings, but looked back. Victor was not moving. He did not seem to be breathing. Vanity was sitting on the roof tiles, looking in horror at Mr. Glum's hand, which had gotten a grip on a roof ornament, and was lifting Mr. Glum into view. Quentin was looking hopeless and lost, his magic gone again, and he was still clutching his hand that the key had singed.

  Damn, damn. A leader cannot abandon her people. But now I had to, one or the other. Either Colin, or the rest. Which? I had less time than it takes to take a breath to decide. As soon as Glum raised his head, I would be just a girl again. If I could have thrown something at Glum, or run down to him before he could raise his head, and pitched him off the roof to his death, I would have. But there was nothing to throw.

  The giants were not the only ones with other hands. Mine looked like sparks and motes of energy when I rotated them into this time-space, and they swirled around Victor, Vanity, and Quentin; and perhaps my hands were not so strong as the giants' were, but I could negate the weight of my friends, so they were all feather-light.

  I selected a very fast-moving energy path, caught it with my wings, and we all were swept off the roof at high speed. The path I took dipped down off the far side of the roof from Glum, putting the mass of the building between him and us for a moment.

  I heard Boggin's voice crying out from above, "Stop! Stop!
Stop! Or you will kill us both!"

  Colin, his voice wild with glee, "No, teacher! Just you!"

  I saw them outlined against the moon. They were very far away from me. There was no way I could get there, no shortcut through the fourth dimension to reach there; the distances were longer through four-space.

  Boggin's three brothers were racing toward him, their wings like storms, but they were also simply too far away.

  Colin was on Boggin's back, his legs around his neck. He had one hand yanking up Boggin's left wing.

  With the other, he flourished the broken hoe-shaft.

  Colin shouted, "This is for every kid who hates wearing a tie!"

  And he brained him. He struck the Headmaster forcefully enough to knock him limp. They both tumbled from the sky, down and down…

  There were bright moonlit clouds behind them. I saw the two tumbling silhouettes. As they fell lower, only dark horizon was behind them, tree shadows, the gloom of the earth, and I saw nothing.

  Or perhaps it was tears that clouded my vision.

  2.

  Dawn. The sun was not yet above the sea, but the western clouds were all aflame with red, and bands of pale and distant yellow light peered through the bands of cloud. A low retaining wall of gray stone ran the length of the seafront, and above this were the shops of Waterside Street, quiet as ghosts in the dawn.

  There was a boardwalk on our side of the stone wall, and piers ran out on tall posts into the dark, murmuring water.

  The four of us were huddled on the wide pier next to Lily Lilac's motorboat. There were crates lashed down under tarps on two sides of us, sheltering us from any view. On the fourth side was the sea. There were other boats moored here, too, but the fishermen either had not risen yet, or were taking Christmas Day off.

  I had realigned Victor's monad, which had been twisted by Miss Daw to render him inert. His body had been stiff, without any heartbeat or breathing, but when I put him back to normal, the mechanical processes of breathing and circulation merely started again. It was so eerie, so inhuman, that I was having trouble remembering this was Victor, my Victor of whom I had dreamed so often. It was like seeing a computer or something, restored from a tape back-up.

  Victor, in short order, had opened his third eye, and "remagnetized," as he called it, the "parts of Quentin's nervous system" which "allowed him to create magnetic anomalies." In other words, he turned Quentin's magic back on. The beam he used was more golden than blue.

  Quentin poked around in the rubbish in some trash bins near the dock and found an axe-handle with no axe head, which someone had thrown away. Now he held it tucked under one arm like a baton. The first thing he had done with it was draw what he called a "circle of silence" on the planks of the dock where we hid, to allow us to talk, rather than pass notes, while Boggin's air spirits were listening for us.

  The bus station was less than one hundred yards from where we huddled. It had taken me five minutes to walk up to the closed and locked door, slide "past" them, find the locker. I did not bother opening the door; I was wary of using keys. I stuck my head in, lowered the hyper-sphere into this space, so that its light shone on the inte-rior of the locker. Here were papers and an envelope with money, as promised.

  I would have brought Vanity, whom I now thought of as our trap-detector, but I was unwilling to experiment with what might happen if I drew her through the fourth dimension.

  I drew out the papers and tickets and the envelope, and wafted through the wall. I folded my wings and assumed my secret identity as a girl again, and walked back down the street to where the others were waiting.

  There were tears in my eyes by the time I got there. "Assume my secret identity" was like a phrase Colin would have used.

  I stepped back into Quentin's circle, and the sea noise grew hushed and remote, as if cotton were blocking my ears.

  I showed them the papers. We had visas and passports, and about £5,000 of Mr. ap Cymru's money. I was not sure if that was a little money or a lot, but I thought it was a lot. There were pictures of us, but I did not recognize the photographs; I had no idea when they had been taken.

  There were papers for Colin, too, and there he was, a devilish half-smile to his face, looking out at me from his passport.

  Victor said, "How long do we wait, Leader? Our chances of being spotted from the air have just gone up tremendously, because we waited till sunup."

  I said, "I don't know and I don't care. You decide. This time I am quitting and for real. I resign as leader."

  Victor said, "Not wise. You still have a lot of information we don't know yet."

  I said stiffly, "When a leader loses one of the men under her command, she can resign."

  Quentin said softly, "We do not know for sure he's dead."

  Bitterness crept into my voice. "You're right. He may only be captured."

  And I wondered how much of his memory they would have to erase to blot out all memories of us. All of them, I suppose. They would have to turn him back into a baby. Which, for all practical purposes, would erase him as a person. It was the same as death.

  Quentin turned and looked at Victor. "It still seems like we need a leader. Someone has to decide how long we wait, whether we go back to look for his… to look for him, or where we go."

  Vanity said, "And what about me?"

  In my heart, I had to agree with Vanity. Why was Quentin automatically assuming Victor would be leader if I was not? I said, "Good point! Why can't Vanity be leader? Are we just all assuming girls can't do anything right? Is that it?"

  Vanity looked embarrassed. "Um, actually, I mean, what about getting my memory back? You said something in the safe might help me. We haven't even looked at that stuff yet. Where do I fit in on your table of oppositions, Amelia?"

  I sighed, feeling an immense weariness. I had been awake now, for how long? Two days? I lay back on the dock and tucked my hands behind my head, staring up at the sky. The zenith was mauve and dark blue, and the armies of the sunrise had not yet defeated that last rearguard of night. A star was there, faint, but not yet blotted out. One last holdout against the inevitable.

  I just wanted to rest. I just wanted someone else to do the thinking for the group. I just wanted…

  I just wanted Quartinus not to be dead. Once, at one of the irregular birthday parties Mrs. Wren used to throw for us (we had had three that year, I remember, and none the year before) Quartinus had been frightened by a party balloon. It had deflated, spitting with a rude noise, and when he ran from it, it flopped at random, here and there. Blind chance had made it seem to come after him, at least for a moment. Then he had cried, because the thing was limp, and he thought it was dead. He had been very young. I had held him in my lap and fed him a slice of birthday cake, and wiped his tears___

  I said dully, "Of the four powers, two of them are equal and opposite to each other. Me and Quentin; Victor and Colin. I had the hypothesis—really just a guess in the dark—that the two other powers we know exist, the Olympian and the Phaeacian, are combinations of two opposites. The Phaeacians seem to be able to bend space. I do not know by what mechanism. Dreams, or other levels of consciousness might be involved. They find shortcuts through some sort of dream-universe, where distances are meaningless. The Olympians clearly have something both in common with my paradigm and with Quentin's. They operate on moral principles. You have to break a promise to them, or break a rule, for them to get power over you."

  Victor commented darkly, "That explains why religions have rules no one can follow. If everyone is a sinner, by definition, everyone is under their power."

  "But they also control the fabric of time. They can bless and curse; they can create destiny. Hermes

  'created' coincidences to make me visit him. I think the things Boggin can do are similar. In Victor's model, time is an absolute; it is not an object. It cannot be manipulated or affected. In my model, time is one aspect of time-space, it is relative, and certain conditions, such as proximity to event horizons, c
an distort time. On a quantum level, the arrow of time is ambiguous."

  Vanity said, "Losing audience. Come again?"

  I shook my head. "Sorry. I just think Olympians somehow combine Quentin's morality-based magic and my multidimensional time-space manipulation. If Phaeacian power is a combination of the other two—and don't ask me how pure materialism and pure mysticism can be combined!—but if it were, if the two of them worked together, they might be able to…"

  The two of them were Victor… and Colin.

  My voice trailed off. The one star that had been holding out against the dawn had been vanquished. I could not see it any longer.

  I closed my eyes.

  Vanity said softly, "Then, I'm not getting my memory back… ?"

  Quentin said, "Is she asleep?"

  I was not asleep. I just did not feel like talking at the moment.

  Victor said, "We should decide how long we should keep waiting."

  Quentin said, "I vote for you to be leader. Do we have any other candidates? Vanity, unless you want the job again?"

  Victor said, "We have a chance to talk things out; let's not pick a leader till we need one. How long should we wait?"

  Vanity: "I don't know. Is there going to be a time, you know, like noon and we know he's… Colin's not coming, but at eleven fifty-nine, we think he still might be coming? How do you pick a time like that?"

  Quentin said, "We all have powers. Maybe I could read the cards, try to get a clue as to what is happening."

  Victor said, "Does that create a signal of some sort? Is it detectable?"

  Quentin sighed. "I don't know. I don't think tarot cards are radioactive or something. But I don't know.

  They clearly pick up influences from their environment. That is why they have to be kept in a cedarwood box."