Titans of Chaos Read online

  But my speed increased, and the friction dropped. I also noticed that the thickness of hyperspace fell off much more quickly than the air pressure dropped. The difference between an inverse-square and an inverse-cube law, I suppose.

  Higher and higher. Vast, so vast, this wide world: at fifty-five thousand meters, eight hundred kilometers of ocean were in one glance beneath my feet. It might have been a floor of rippled bluish marble, only inches from my pointed toes. Below, the sea was dark purple, its color made bluish by the intervening masses of air. The horizon was curved, and seemed to have a glowing blue swath of light following its bow. And above! Above the sky was black, the freedom of unobstructed outer space. I could see the dim, un-twinkling lights of brighter stars, the colored points of planets.

  Here, only my earthly eyes were useful. I could not pick up the internal natures of the distant worlds and suns, and their utility to me was nothing, so far out of reach; I could sense no controlling principles, no degrees of variation or freedom, no bonds of moral obligations.

  Whatever dwelt among the stars had nothing to do with earthly concerns. I wonder if you will understand me if I said, staring at the indifference of the cold heavens, that I never felt less religious than in that moment, but staring at their majesty, the grandeur, I never felt more. Cruel Saturn's created world was worthy of awe.

  Lapsing space was easier this far from the Earth. The friction of hyperspace had dropped nearly to nothing, so that I could put more of my fourth-dimensional limbs into the act, grab wider sections of the fabric of space, and bend them more pliantly.

  The air was too thin, and I was ready to attempt speeds more immense than an atmosphere would permit. I was about to assume a shape something more like a dolphin made of light: It was a cross-section of mine I suspected might be spaceworthy. Vacuum and hard radiation form an environment more welcoming than hyperspace, and my body could adapt.

  A bright light below my feet and to the left pulled at my attention. I rotated back to my earthly form, which has the best eyesight, and pulled in my extra energy-fans, so that I was little more than a girl in a brown jacket and goggles, in free fall, weightless. My scarf fluttered overhead.

  I was seeing a glitter of the moral strands that tied me to some object below. In a moment, it became visible: a streamlined shape of golden metal, its blunt head reddish with friction, an aura of heat around it. With my upper senses, I could tell it was propelling itself upward by manipulating magnetic energy, powered by some sort of controlled hydrogen-fusion reaction taking place in the chest cavity. There was a trail of expelled metallic motes behind it: Where cosmic rays or other high-speed particles had disturbed the body on a cellular level, it had ejected the damaged tissue.

  And I saw its inner nature: powerful, masculine, rational, slightly worried, slightly impatient.

  Victor Triumph.

  We matched velocities, and the golden humanoid shape directed a beam of radio-energy in my direction. Like all forms of communication, I can read the internal nature and intention of the message, even if I cannot pick up the radio blips in which it is coded.

  "Amelia, this was gross negligence on your part. Your contrail is leaking exotic particles that don't exist in nature, some of them radioactive and highly visible. You may have given away our position. Come back down to Earth. We are going to have to sneak back to the island by a circuitous route. Vanity is going to have to arrange some sort of punishment."

  I would have been more in a mood to be chastised by Leader Vanity if I hadn't reported to her just as she was posing nude for little Quentin. Quentin had dug up some white mud that, with Victor's help (and of course I noticed that no one can get anything done without Victor's help, the man who should really have been in charge this whole time) had been transmogrified via molecular engines into a serviceable fine clay. Quentin had no kiln other than a corner of concrete with some parts of a stone wall still standing, but he had Victor to come by and superheat his clay figurines into porcelain.

  So there she was, kneeling with her hands up in her hair, elbows up and back arched, not exactly the pose of the Venus de Milo, and here was Quentin, wearing little more than shorts and a smock, all covered with clay, scraping with a sharpened wooden spoon at the five-foot-tall mass of white clay he had heaped up before him. To one side was a bucket of water in which a rolled-up shirt was soaking, an impromptu sponge.

  There were other figurines sitting in the shade of a tarp along a section of broken wall, about a dozen, and all were small: a seagull, a mouse, a fish, a snake, all perfectly realistic and glazed white. The face and shoulders only just now emerging from the clay mass did look remarkably like Vanity. Professional-level work. It was a skill I never would have suspected in Quentin.

  She saw me, and must have seen the dubious look on my face, for she stood and, with more dignity than I have seen her use before, excused Quentin. That's right; she told him to go and he just nodded his head, like a little bow, and went away without a word.

  Now she wrapped herself in a white towel, and with her pinkish-red complexion, under the tropic daylight, even in the striped shade of the palms, she looked flushed and hot and too freckled. I suppose the equatorial clime did not agree with her. Certainly her look was disagreeable.

  "Well, Miss Windrose?" she said, just as if she were a headmistress or something, not a girl younger and shorter than me wrapped in a towel.

  "I was just doing as ordered, Leader."

  "Breaking orders, you mean! Do you want to get us captured? Do you want to get us killed? No one goes off alone. That's the rule. All of you chaoticists have a weakness, a power you cannot stop. Suppose Echidn- I mean, suppose the fishmonger had just glanced up at you, just a glance, while you were flying off at Mach twenty-four! You would have just fallen to Earth and died! You weren't even wearing a parachute! Then your family, your kingdom, your creatures, whatever the heck they are, the fourth-dimensional people, attack the universe and destroy everything! Is that what you want?"

  "Leader, don't be silly," I said sharply. "We don't even have a parachute. Besides, at that speed, the reentry heat would have killed me much quicker... Say, did I actually achieve Mach twenty-four?" That was below escape velocity, but it was above orbital velocity, at least for some altitudes.

  "Victor measured it and yes it was fast and don't change the subject. What's your excuse?"

  "Do I need an excuse, Vanity?" I said back. Well, maybe I raised my voice a little. It was hot here, and I wasn't wearing a nice cool towel, but a heavy leather jacket, jodhpurs, gloves, scarf, and leather cap. "Do I need an excuse? You've been pushing me to try out my powers, to experiment, and now you're barking mad because I did what you said! You're snapping at me because I might have attracted spies, but did you say anything to Victor when he blew a hole in an undersea mountain with a death ray? You give one order and then directly contradict it, and you make these stupid work schedules, except Quentin never seems to have work to do: When is the last time he chopped down a tree?"

  "Mr. Nemo," she said in a voice so icy that it hardly sounded like Vanity, "has successfully discovered how to emerge from his body and assume an insubstantial form. This could prove to be quite useful to our little company. Last night, he entered the body of the fish he made from clay, and animated it, and he swam quite naturally and freely in the sea. He has discovered the secret of how his people, the Fallen, make new shapes for themselves. In the meanwhile, you have discovered how to moon around after Victor and take leisurely swims in your bathing suit."

  "At least I wear a bathing suit," I said with a snort. Okay, maybe I rolled my eyes a bit.

  "That comment was quite a bit out of line, Miss Windrose, and you will apologize for it immediately." I swear she sounded just like Boggin when she said that. No emotion at all. Not

  "you shall apologize," like a demand, but "you will," like a predicted certainty.

  No, not like Boggin. Like Nausicaa, a princess from a Bronze Age Greek culture of supernatural beings.
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  If I had been leader, and she'd caught me nude, I would have tried to make a joke out of it. I would have handled it better. I would have...

  But I was not leader. Right or wrong, I had to support the group. So I apologized. "Sorry, Leader.

  Please forgive me, Leader."

  "Apology accepted," she said curtly. "Let us say no more about it."

  "How did you get to be leader, anyhow?" I burst out. That kind of surprised me. If you had asked, I would not have said I felt any resentment. But no eyeball can see its own interior; no mind can know its own buried thoughts.

  "You were there. I cooked breakfast."

  "That's so... so... chauvinist! It is such a stereotype! The girl cooking breakfast. Victor's a better cook than you! Victor's better at everything."

  She crinkled her little freckled nose. "Is that what this is about? You think I am upstaging Victor?

  Listen, Amelia. The boys were all disorganized after our first campsite floated away. They needed something reassuring, domestic, orderly. I had to bring order to the chaos. I got things going, had firewood brought, found a clean pan. I notice when people are paying attention, what they are looking at. I notice details. I knew which foods each boy liked because I remembered what he had picked out in the stops during our supply run. Victor's a better cook, but he didn't think of feeding the depressed and disorganized troops.

  "Once I did that, I had to organize the schedule for training. I had to decide," she said gravely.

  "There was no one to ask. On the one hand, there is a chance that any use of our powers can be detected by means we can only guess. Oracular owls or orbital spy-rays or periscopes from dimensions even you don't have a number for. On the other hand, we have to get stronger. We have to get smarter. We have to figure out what it is we can do that makes them so afraid of us.

  That means everyone works on schedule, including tree chopping to break up the monotony of experiments. Tell me: Did you enjoy getting back to them, after all that mindless work? Yes? So that's how I got to be leader. That is what leaders do.

  "Speaking of what leaders do, I have good news and bad news. Bad news: I still have to assign you some sort of punishment detail, to keep order in the ranks. The good news is that we can throw you a birthday party after."

  "What? No one knows when my birthday is."

  "No one knows when baby Jesus was born, but there is a date all picked out for Christmas, isn't there? As leader, I can assign a date. Your birthday is the day after next. Then, the next bit of good news: the final exam!"

  "Leader, what is going to be on the final? I mean, the reason why I got in trouble flying off... Well, you should tell us what we should be preparing for, right?"

  "For the final, we are going to be sneaking back into civilization. Colin needs a piano or something. He should be practicing music. Quentin needs all sorts of supplies, everything from tarot cards to real clay. We need to replace missing mess gear."

  "That doesn't seem that hard." I remember a distinct feeling of disappointment.

  Now she smiled, and her eyes twinkled, and she knelt down again beside me to speak in a low voice. It is the kind of voice you use when you are telling a secret, whether there is anyone around or not. "We are going to see if we can help your old friend Sam. The drayman who gave you a lift."

  Less than thirty-six hours later, after an afternoon of punishment chores I do not want to remember, and the most charming birthday I do not want to forget, we five were aboard the Argent Nautilus, in a fogbound Irish Sea, rolling and pitching in the choppy waves, and the smothering cold was leaving droplets on our thick woolen sea-coats.

  Sam had mentioned to me that he had a nephew in an institution with a mental disease. I had once, half-jokingly, offered to grant him a wish. He wished for a cure.

  Now we would see what we could do.

  Pallid Hounds A-Hunting

  This trip, we had bought supplies with more forethought. We had drifted off the coast of the Isle of Man. Quentin had passed across the waves as silently as a shadow, to approach Castletown, on the south of the island. He returned with the sweaters and jackets and caps we wore, and a heavy backpack filled with chow. We were still low on some things, but he had restocked our larder.

  There was no piano to buy for Colin on the Isle of Man.

  "The severed head of Bran has not seen us yet," said Quentin as he stepped out of the shadows and down to the deck. "The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, merely a possession of the Crown. I saw the shivering ghosts of Vikings, still hungry for blood, but no sigils of Arthur, no ravens loyal to the spells of Elizabeth the First. Officially, I did not step foot on the soil Bran protects. Now, since we are coming on a mission of mercy, perhaps, even when we do, he will not inform the gods of our coming. Perhaps." He gave Vanity a look of doubt, but said no more. Very Victor-like.

  A few hours later, after midnight, we had crossed the rough North Sea and were approaching the opposite coast. Quentin, on the bow, summoned friends of his from below the waters, while we all huddled in the stern, trying not to overhear the sinister whispers. But that worked, or something did, and the fog thickened as we crept silently into the mouth of the river Wear, with the lights of Sunderland above us. A short way up the river were the ancient stone bridges and modern iron shipyards of Durham.

  Quentin hissed when we passed the peninsula where Durham Cathedral rose up against the foggy lights of the city. He announced that certain of his "covenants" would not operate here, since the bone of Saint Cuthbert scared his allies away.

  Edgestow is just north of Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Durham. We disembarked and sent the Argent Nautilus away to lead Mestor's needle somewhere else, and we spent most of the night tramping down roads, or occasionally crossing fields and climbing over walls and hedgerows.

  (Yes, hedgerows, just the kind you think they don't make in England anymore, but this was the Northwest.)

  It was a bitter January night, and the snow lay wet and thick on the ground, trampled into mud by the roads. The stars were hidden, but the moon rode veiled between tattered streamers of cold clouds.

  Between my higher senses, Quentin's divining rod, Colin's hunches, and Victor's tapping into the global-positioning satellites, without trouble we found the tiny institution just before dawn.

  We were all behind a snowy hedge, dressed in our thick blue coats and white turtlenecks, looking like a bunch of fishermen. Sneaky fishermen. The boys and Vanity were peering suspiciously down at an empty, snowy road- which looked sickly and yellow beneath the unflickering streetlamps-at the ugly cubical building of glass and concrete beyond.

  We could see the ancient buttresses and Gothic spires of some ancient buildings on our side of the street. Perhaps the mental ward had originally been associated with the medical college here; at least, the solemn beautiful architecture of the ancient buildings looked like a campus to me, and I know what a campus looks like.

  Orange light pollution lit the sky in one direction, and there was a dim noise of traffic elsewhere, but there was nothing in our immediate environment but those college buildings, an empty field we'd cut across, a white graveyard to one side, and beyond it, a chapel wearing a wimple of snow.

  I should mention there was a smaller graveyard at the crossroads, not on the chapel grounds.

  Quentin, following a croaking raven and carrying an entrenching tool, went off to do his spooky business there, while we shivered in the cold, waiting. Warlocks are something like doctors, I guess. No matter how much you like them personally, there is quite a bit of nasty mess involved in their line of work.

  By the time Quentin got back, Vanity was casing the joint through the snowy twigs of the hedge, and listening to Colin and Victor give her completely contradictory advice about a plan of attack.

  Vanity asked us all to report on what we could see.

  I was standing farther from the hedge, two paces down the slope. I did not bother to turn my head in the direction of the modern buildin
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  Now was my chance to show my time on the island had not been all wasted. I took my glass globe out of my pocket, unfolded it into a hypersphere. In that thick light, I could examine the immediate fourth-dimensional environment. A trick I'd learned allowed me to send the light down one of my limbs (a part of my body that looked like a strand of music) to shine it against distant objects. Down that same strand, I reached a cluster of sense-receptors.

  The three-dimensional building was laid out before me like a blueprint. To my fourth-dimensional eyes, it looked flat. I could see internal natures, utility, monads, all that 4-D stuff. But now, I could agitate the photons in the area, give just enough of them free will to ask them to carry information back to my eyes, so that the number of nonconformist photons who went giggling off as rainbows was relatively small. In effect, I had just made the dimensional periscope Vanity mentioned earlier. Into any one of the squares of the rooms or corridors, I could dip a photon-freeing note of energy and get a 3-D picture of what was in there, too.

  I reported my findings. "He's alone. Sleeping on a cot in a cell. Window has steel netting across it, and the door is locked. I can see wires on the main doors into the wing, but no security cameras or anything like that. The alarms back on campus were more sophisticated. There is one guy on guard duty, two floors down, and he is sleeping in his chair."

  Vanity said, "Can you confirm that this is the right guy?"

  To them, it must have looked like I merely reached my hand up into the air and had it bend strangely, turn red, vanish, and reappear. In my hand was a clipboard. I had merely picked it up with a gleaming whiplike tendril, pulled it "blue" an inch or two, and then pushed it "red" into the hand of my three-dimensional cross-section. One hundred yards in three-space, slightly longer than that in four-space, I could reach with some straining.

  "Mortimer Finklestein," I read off the top sheet. "List of the stuff they are doping him with. What he eats, when he cra-uh, goes potty. Hunh. Here is the diagnosis and history. He was out hunting in Teesdale. Wandered off by himself. When his friends found him, he had the mind of a five-year-old."