Titans of Chaos Page 12

  Quentin said quickly, "Don't answer! It is a trap. What are your orders, Leader?"

  But the young goddess now turned her fierce gaze to Quentin. "A Fallen creature from the Pit?

  My! What craft your body has! I almost took you for a man, instead of one of mine. Every hair, every internal organ, is fitted in place. That is a masterpiece of sculpture. You even did the little veins and nerves. Well! Enough! Invite me into the wards, little magician-or else, by your silence, deny my right to step anywhere my hounds can track."

  Colin said to Vanity, "Leader! I think I can take her. Just say the word." With a clang of ear-ringing noise, he broke the metal strut off the foot of the bed and hefted it as a bludgeon. It would have impressed a mortal.

  The Huntress drew back her head: Her eyes were as cold and inhuman as arctic stars. "You think to lay hands on me, the Virgin, inviolate, divine, and sacred? This world, this human earth, this dirty spot within heavenly sphere, it is overwhelmed by all the bloodshed and pollutions of men, their stinking lusts, their cities a-drip with oil, their battlefields with carrion. Who told the Phaeacian to smuggle you into the world, sons of Chaos, dream things, Tartarians, soulless wights? Who discovered our weakness to you? Who told you of the madness of my adulterous Father, who did not slay the orphans of Chaos, those four children you impersonate? Was it Lady Cyprian? Was it the Whore of Heaven? Was it she? Who else is the enemy of purity? Who else hates the clean wilderness, the sacred chastity? Answer! Answer in the name of the untainted and fierce hatred only untouched maidens know!"

  I saw the morality strands begin to wind around Quentin. "Leader! Have Andromeda shut off all magic! Quick!"

  Vanity clutched at her stone. Green light throbbed through her fingers. The tendrils I could see were still issuing from the bow of the goddess, the substance of enchantment, reaching here and there, but they could not enter the room. On the other side of the locked door, a pack of hounds materialized suddenly in the moonlight. Also in the bed cells to the left and right of us, in the adjacent rooms.

  "Leader, I can see where the dog packs are! We're surrounded!"

  Quentin bowed and said to the goddess, "Diane Artemis, mighty Potnia Theron, Mistress of the Wild, who is called also Courotrophos the Nourisher, Locheia and Agrotora, Healer and Huntress, Shining One, Born of Leto! We have not forgotten your names nor ever held your shrine in dishonor! We proffer you no disrespect, and deeply do we genuflect to you, sovereign goddess, White Lady, Maiden of Heaven! We do not disobey the wise commands of any god or goddess, we do not meddle with sacred things, but in preserving the world, we do your will and do not oppose it..."

  "Phoebe," she said, waving her bow in the air as if to clear away cobwebs. "I am Lady Phoebe now. Call me that. Cunning, you are! How can you be disobeying me, without triggering the demands of fate?"

  Victor said to Quentin, "Don't answer. Tell the enemy nothing. Leader, orders?"

  Quentin said, "Lady Phoebe." Then he shrugged and smiled, and said to Victor. "Sorry, but that was worded as a direct command..."

  I said, "Leader, listen to me! I can see what is going on. The laws of nature in the room-"

  Vanity looked like she was about to break down. "Amelia is now second in command. Do what she says."

  Oops.

  All eyes turned toward me, including the penetrating, silver-white eyes of the girl hanging in midair outside the window.

  She smiled a truly chilling smile, as cold as the far side of the moon. "Come out, come out, prelapsarian. I part my hounds and give you a running start: You look swift. Your ham is firm and thigh is sleek. Am I not generous? Otherwise you are surrounded."

  I said, "Colin, Andromeda gave you this room and you gave it to me, right? In the eyes of the law, how far down, or how far up, do the boundaries go?"

  Quentin answered, "To the core of the Earth, and up to infinity."

  The moment he said that, the uncertainty collapsed, and I saw, like a forcefield, the lines flush with the square floor of the room. Four walls of light dwindling to a vanishing point far underfoot, and reaching upward like a slowly expanding cone overhead. The moral energy lines were gathered around it, trying to get in, but they could not cross the boundary. My property.

  Colin grunted. "What he said. Leader, let me rip her head off, huhn?"

  Victor said, "Leader, your orders?"

  "Everyone hold hands," I said.

  Lady Phoebe was right. I was fast.

  I pulled the suddenly weightless team "past" the ceiling, the attic, and the roof tiles without disturbing them. I was still directly above the room, still within the cone of my legal property, and accelerating straight up. Zero to Mach four in thirty seconds.

  Victor slid through without much problem, though it did kill him, until I tilted his monad back in place and the mechanical processes of his life started again. The fact that Colin had been able to make his deadly dream-environment friendly to me made me think I could do the same for Victor.

  (In hindsight, Colin should have been the one impossible to pull into the fourth dimension, but maybe he can turn off his anti-Amelia-ness somehow. Maybe he was inspired to pass through the roof.)

  I was two miles up, going Mach ten, before the dogs of cloud closed in on me. The blind, narrow-headed greyhounds were horrible to look at, and their teeth were like icicles. But they hung to every side of me, running straight up as I soared, some leaping ahead, baying and barking, some falling behind. I ignited the atmosphere around me to form a multicolored aura of free-willed air to protect my friends, and Vanity made a quick pass with her green stone to give us laws of nature favorable to our attempt.

  She must have done something clever, because the dogs still could not close with us, but our other abilities were permitted. Victor was turning to gold, his flesh peeling away in grotesque strips so that a harder integument underneath could take its place. A darkness gathered around Quentin, and he seemed to burn with black fire, but the acceleration was not hurting him, and his speed was as great as mine, or Victor's.

  Colin was hanging on for dear life. No, sorry, he was grinning like a devil, with one arm clenching my waist, and one arm around Vanity. He was slipping slowly downward, so his nose was somewhere pressed into my bosom, and Vanity was being likewise crushed up against his lusty self. Jerk. But he must have been inspired, or something, because the friction and acceleration were not even mussing his hair.

  Underfoot, I heard Lady Phoebe wind her hunting horn, a long, chilling note.

  At that noise, Victor pointed a finger, and an invisible beam punched a clean hole though the skull and breast of two of the clamoring dogs at his heels, passed through the clouds below, and left a circle in the cloudbank as neat as a mechanical punch might make. The Huntress must have been directly below. The horn-note squawked and died.

  Victor sent a radio beam toward me, a silent commutation that ignored the hurricane of wind noise all around us. "She is doing magic. I can hold some of it back, but she has millions of ergs of electromagnetic life-forms, many more than Quentin commands."

  Up. Straight up. There was nowhere else to go. I could not go right or left. If I went into the fourth dimension, I would be going much slower, and I could also see her dog things were partly in my paradigm: They were flickering in and out of the moonlight of earthland and dreamland freely. If I left three-dimensional space entirely, they might get me.

  The goddess was coming. She was not so fast as I was, not so fast as her own dogs, but I could see the winding strands of energy reaching into the past and future. I was gripped with the sick, sudden certainty that, in the same way that Mavors the Warrior could not be defeated in melee, Phoebe the Huntress could not lose her prey.

  Cloud. The dogs had the internal nature of clouds. They were made out of cloud. An atmospheric phenomenon.

  I could not reach escape velocity. Orbital velocity is a different thing. But...

  The air should have been too thin for speech, or life, at this altitude, but the free air blan
keting us, and Vanity's imposition of more Aristotelian laws of nature that did not worry about concepts like friction and air pressure, allowed us to talk.

  I put my mouth to Vanity's ear and shouted. "Call your ship!"

  She yelled back, "It's a ship, not a plane!"

  "Call your ship! That's an order!"

  "There is no water up here!" she said in a voice of misery.

  The dark world was underfoot. The pattern of city lights followed the coastlines of England and, across the channel, Normandy. A curving red line of fire defined the distant dawn to the east. To either side was thin stratosphere. And still the pale, blind dogs chased us. And overhead:..

  The shadowy form of Quentin pointed with an ebon finger. "I see a river," he said. By some trick of his, the words were clear and close within our ears, despite the raging noise of our terrible acceleration.

  Vanity's eyes followed where he pointed. There, mystical, wondrous, were the million gem-gleaming stars of the Milky Way, a stream of light.

  Silhouetted against the jeweled splendor of the Milky Way was the slender silhouette of a Greek trireme. The solemn eyes painted on the prow were looking at us.

  I said, "She has to match velocities with us, because we need to remain geosynchronous above the room. The dogs will have a chance to attack when we board. Um, everyone, if my bubble of free-willed air around us breaks when we cross to the ship, you'll get an attack of flatulence. Let it out, Chaucer-like, if you know what I mean, or else your internal organs might get damaged.

  Colin! I am counting on you to kill and slay and maim like Cuchulainn, or one of those heroes from your ridiculous Irish epics. Once we board, Vanity looks for a secret compartment that is airtight; Colin and I saw her find a trapdoor leading into a hold, so maybe she can find a pressurized cabin. And then, um, and then..."

  Quentin said, "Where can we go that the goddess will not follow? She will pursue us to the ends of the Earth."

  The word came to my lips without effort. "Mars!" I breathed. "The Red Planet!"

  I gave Colin a kiss on the top of his head. "Kill the dogs for me, Colin, and we'll go put the first footprints on the planet Mars!"

  When we engaged, Colin ripped the jawbone out of the first monster hound his hands found, and he beat the others to pulp with it, and gore was sprayed in slowly falling crescents of mist across the upper atmosphere.

  The Red Planet

  During those frantic moments when we had to cross several yards of high stratosphere to the hull of the ship, I think Victor actually killed more dogs, because they disintegrated into cloud when his azure beam lanced through them. But Colin fought like a demon, laughing. His skin was dark and hot as blood suffused it, and the hair on his head stood up like the arched back of a witch's cat.

  Yes, it was in midair, in the troposphere, and yes, Colin should have simply fallen to his death, like a parachutist with no chute, and should have suffered frostbite and decompression, but no, his paradigm did not work that way. He was inspired to slaughter the dogs. He went berserk.

  Vanity sought and "found" an airlock leading into a space below the hull, a wooden torpedo-shape, reinforced with iron ribs, pierced by small, round portholes above and below. It looked like the type of submersible Jules Verne would have developed. The upper deck and the mast could fold themselves into the dream-dimension (I don't know what that process looked like to anyone but me), and the whole ship, now a spindle-shaped cylinder of ivory, silver, and wood, darted like a slender fish through the troposphere.

  She still had a ram on her prow, painted eyes to either side. There were no lifting surfaces, or ailerons, no source of thrust in the spacegoing aspect of the ship, any more than there had been sail or steering board in the seagoing version.

  "Who built this ship?" I remember asking Vanity in wonder and awe. It was the perfect vessel to explore the universe in.

  Vanity fiddled with her glowing green necklace until she found and established a set of laws of nature amenable to our needs. Aristotle thought the air was a transparency that conveyed the potential for light to the eye, made of a continuous substance. No molecules, no partial pressures, none of the Pascalian air-has-weight stuff.

  And no oxygen-carbon dioxide cycles, not in a universe with only four elements. We did not worry about the air going stale, because that was not something that happened in the particular paradigm of the universe that currently obtained within the hull of our craft.

  The ship flew at the speed of dreams, and climbed to an altitude Victor announced was two hundred miles high. We were in low Earth orbit. All sign of pursuit was gone.

  My heart soared higher than any mere two hundred miles. Outer space was at my fingertips! Orbit is halfway to anywhere.

  The sensation of being in a falling elevator made Quentin puke. He was quick-witted enough to throw his cloak before his face and catch the mess before it formed a cloud, but the stinking drench was as disgusting as you might imagine. Ask someone who has small children what it's like. Now picture that floating in three dimensions.

  Other business was put on hold until Vanity found a set of laws of nature in her green stone that would allow for some gravity. Aristotelian physics had drawbacks: The ship, made of noncelestial substance, did not move in the divine circular motions natural to the crystal spheres of Aristotle's concentric heavens, but instead started to plunge back toward Earth, where her natural motion inclined it-and since she was a heavier object, she fell faster.

  We could not maintain orbit with Aristotle's physics: He did not believe in inertia, in centrifugal and centripetal forces. Vanity found something more Newtonian. Victor imparted a spin to the ship, magnetically adding angular momentum to the metal joists and bolts. The sunlight, unhampered by any atmosphere, shot blinding rays through the portholes, first above and then below, as if a lamp, un-endurably brilliant, were being spun on the chain just outside our windows.

  I found the easiest way to converse was to lie on my back between two port-holes, looking "up" at Vanity and the boys, who were stuck to the walls of the cylinder. It was like those rapidly spinning barrels you see in rides at the fair.

  Vanity resigned. "I am a peacetime leader, really, and I don't think my administration is that good in time of war. I mean, I could feel her staring at me, you know? Staring like she was picking out which wallpaper would look good on the spot in her house where she would nail my skinned pelt."

  Vanity shivered.

  I could tell from the looks on the boys' faces that Colin thought Vanity was being a sissy; Quentin was more forgiving. He said, "The Lady Phoebe may have known a weakness associated with the Phaeacian ability to feel that 'being watched' sensation. It is a sense impression of some sort. Why couldn't it be dazzled or deafened?"

  Victor had put his prosthetic face back on, but his expression, as usual, was composed and dispassionate. "In any case, we must decide our next course of action. We have no reason to believe the Huntress cannot follow us up out of the atmosphere. She is a moon goddess, after all."

  I said, "Mars! Who here wants to go to Mars? We'll be famous!"

  Victor said, "Well, for one thing, people trying to hide should not be famous."

  "If the gods are so secretive, they might not be willing to strike out against famous people, right?" I pointed out.

  Colin said sarcastically, "Yeah, look at how well things turned out for famous guys like Agamemnon and Ajax and Oedipus and Icarus..."

  I said, "Listen! We're free for the first time in our lives, and now is our chance to spread our wings, to test our strength against the odds, to attempt bold things, to sail beyond the sunset!"

  Colin grinned at that.

  I looked at Quentin and said, "To learn things never learned, to step where none have stepped, to fly higher than even the princes of the Middle Air."

  And to Victor I said, "Even if she follows us up out of the atmosphere, then Phoebe might not be able to achieve escape velocity. If she cannot, then the whole solar system, the whole unive
rse, is ours! What will we care then about the gods? What is Olympos but one small mountain on one small world?"

  The motion was carried, and I found myself in the leadership position once again.

  As they say, the devil is in the details. We need an Aristotelian paradigm in order to keep our air from going stale, but Aristotle did not allow for the Newtonian orbital mechanics we need to reach another planet.

  We discussed whether we could merely turn one cabinet, or a small area of deck, into an Aristotelian vest-pocket cosmos, and pump our carbon dioxide into it, and pump out fresh air, without having that cabinet be pulled to Earth by its natural motion. Vanity, based on the results of her research back on the island, seemed to think having two non-harmonious laws of nature right next to each other might cause problems. Colin was urging Vanity to use her stone to summon up something more primitive, pre-Ptolemaic; His argument was that Stone Age shamans did not worry about or know how the sky-people breathed or moved. No one wanted to take Victor up on his offer to grow specially designed algae in our lungs that would allow us to breathe oxygen and carbon dioxide indifferently.

  "Don't expeditions like this usually involve, you know, more planning... ?" asked Vanity. "Like NASA and getting food and space suits and all sorts of stuff? We have the knapsacks of gear lashed to the deck, which is in a vacuum right now, I should mention."

  Victor said, "I thought there were launch windows controlling the timing of space shots?"

  I was bubbling with enthusiasm. "Sure, Victor, there would be, if we were dealing with the rocket equation, and if conserving fuel were our main concern. In such a case, the most efficient method would be to begin from low Earth orbit, achieve a six-point-six kilometers per second delta-V, to put us into a Hohmann transfer ellipse, where its perihelion is tangential to Earth's orbit and its aphelion at Mars! In such a case, the next available launch date would be July ninth of this year, when Mars is past its closest approach by forty-five degrees, and the orbit out would take about two hundred fifty-nine days! After four hundred and fifty-five days on Mars, the planets would be in a good relative position, and we could make a second burn of seven point two kilometers per second! Let me show you how these figures are derived! First, remember that Kepler's third law states that for all objects orbiting the sun, the square of the orbital period is inversely proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis..."