Fugitives of Chaos Page 13

  Cracked his knuckles loudly on the steel sides of the safe, and sprang back, yelping and waving his hurt hand in the air.

  Vanity said sweetly, "Illusion hurt you?"

  Colin gave her a dark look. "Bugger you. Nightmares scare people, okay? They are still not real. No one dies on roller-coasters, but everyone screams on them." He wiggled his fingers gingerly. He muttered to himself, "If Cat-woman had been in that safe, damn safe would have melted…"

  I said to the group, "I can touch the sphere, but for some reason, I cannot move it. Any theories?"

  Colin sat down on the desk, still nursing his hand. He said, "You know more than any of us do about what's happening here."

  I said, "Wait a minute. While we are waiting, let's catch up on what we intended to do."

  I looked at Victor, reached into his monad, and realigned it, so that it illuminated all the darkened sections of his nervous system.

  Vanity shrieked.

  "What?" I said.

  "You just stuck your hand through his head!"

  Colin said grumpily, "It only appeared that way!"

  Victor said, "I do not know what you did, but it seems to have accelerated some of what your molecule creature was doing. Quentin? May I experiment on you?"

  Quentin said, "There is something I need to do first. I don't know what you are going to do to me, but I don't want to get my memory back until I do this."

  He stepped forward and, with infinite tenderness and simple strength, took Vanity by the shoulders and dipped her back.

  She said in horror, "Let go of me, or I'll scream!"

  He said, "Then scream."

  But he kissed her, and so she didn't. She made sort of surprised noises in her throat, and waved her arms almost comically in the air, but then the throat-noises became warm and soft, and the arms twined around Quentin's neck.

  Colin said, "Me next."

  Victor said, "I cannot help you. You need Quentin to cast a spell to get your memory back to you."

  "No, I meant I get Vanity next. Pucker up, hot stuff!"

  Quentin straightened up, pushed Vanity slightly behind him with a gentle motion of his arm, as if to keep her away from Colin.

  Victor opened his third eye. With my higher sense, I saw the life-force of the puppy-like helpful nanite creature stream as a series of charged particles out from Vic-tor and embed themselves/itself into Quentin's bloodstream. Knots of moral energy that had been twisted around his heart and head went lax and slipped away.

  Quentin rolled his eyes. "Oh, I am an idiot." He touched his wand to Colin's head.

  Colin said, "Hold on! There is something I have to do before I get my memory back!"

  And he got up off the table and came toward me with an evil gleam in his eyes.

  I danced back. "Get away from me! I am not kissing some guy who just vomited! I don't even like you!"

  Victor stepped between Colin and me, saying, "Colin, leave your sister alone."

  That was like a bucket of cold water on me. Sister. If I was Colin's sister, then, according to Victor logic, I was Victor's sister, too.

  Colin must have seen the sick look on my face, because the sort of fun-and-games grin he was wearing slipped.

  He turned to Quentin. "Go ahead, Great and Powerful Oz. Zap me."

  Quentin said, "I did everything right, but I did not finish the demonstration. There were other people besides Mrs. Wren who did things to you."

  He tapped Colin on either shoulder, as if he were knighting him, touched him lightly with the wand on the forehead, and turned toward one of the walls (the west wall), saying in a loud voice, "Guardians of the Watch-towers of the West, it was only by Erichtho's evil that other forces and spells, potions and evils came to afflict Phobetor! You have washed him clean! He is unstained and whole! Morpheus, father of dreams, return the memories and thoughts that were lost to your son! I call upon Mnemosyne to make whole the spell! So Mote It Be!"

  Colin said, "Oh my God!"

  "What? What?" said Quentin.

  "I tried to chop up Mrs. Wren with an axe! And she kicked my ass!"

  Vanity rolled her eyes and made that little ugh! gesture she sometimes makes when Colin is around. She tucked her hand into Quentin's elbow.

  Quentin said, "What about Vanity?"

  Colin said to me, "Yeah. Vanity next."

  Vanity looked at me hopefully. "Yes? What about me? Is it my turn?"

  I felt a sickening, sinking sensation in my stomach.

  "Maybe something in the safe will help," I said. "If we could get it open."

  3.

  We talked over several options for how to get the safe open.

  Victor assumed the hypersphere was fixed in place by Mr. Glum's power, psionics, and that Quentin could release it, if he could cast a spell into the safe, which he could not. Victor said the safe was made of a durable nonmagnetic alloy, which would not let "magnetic anomalies," i.e., magic, through the surface. Maybe if I had Quentin's wand in my hand, and touched it to the ball?

  I tried that. Quentin and I practiced once or twice without reaching into the safe, just to get the timing right. Only the moment or two after I turned off the music, but while the sphere was still ringing, did I have a chance to act.

  I knelt before the safe, one hand on the disc player, one hand on his staff tip. He was holding the other end of the staff, standing behind me.

  I clicked the button. Mozart floated into the room. The sphere rang sharply, as if the notes were hammers striking it. Click. Music stopped. The ringing started to fade…

  Quentin looked nervous as one end of his wand turned ghostly, reddened, and vanished into the solid surface of the safe wall. I touched the staff to one of the surfaces of the many spherical volumes of which the curved hyper-surface was composed.

  I said, "Quickly." Each echo was quieter than the one before.

  He said quickly, "The Eloi Adonai gave to Adam dominion over all beasts of the field and birds of the air, the bugs that swarm and the fish that swim. In token of this, King Adam granted names to all living things.

  Force which binds: I am a son of Adam. You are a living thing of Earth. I name you, I dub, I christen you…"

  I said, "Faster." The echoing in hyperspace was fading, fading. The hyperlight dimmed, like a candle flickering out. It was getting hard for me to "see" in that direction. Hyperspace is so very dark.

  "… You are Er, the alone one, who grips these talismans. I call you by your true name! Release the talismans! And you shall no longer be alone…"

  Too long. The last glint of hyperlight went dark; I lost the direction. With a spray of red sparks and the thrust of pressure, both my hand and Quentin's staff were forced out of the safe.

  Quentin staggered back, looking at his staff, and at my hand. "Are you all right?"

  He was talking to me, but the safe answered, with a hideous, unearthly moan, "It hurts! It is so heavy!"

  Quentin waved his staff, and said several impressive things, but the voice did not speak again.

  After a moment or two, Vanity told him to stop. "It is not listening anymore."

  Victor said, "There was a magnetic flux near the point where the wand came out from the surface of the safe, but then it was smothered."

  Vanity said, "I think it… died."

  Quentin had been trying to mold the psychic energy into a living being, like drawing a face in clay. He had gotten the idea from what I had done to Dr. Fell's molecular engine, which I had given free will. His thought was that he could cast a spell on a being that had a moral nature, or at least talk to it.

  Quentin looked rather pale at this point. "I wasn't expecting it to die again. I mean… I wasn't expecting that…"

  Victor said, "I have an idea, though. In your paradigm, murder is bad, right? You could argue that Boggin was responsible for that entity being killed, and…"

  Colin, looking at Quentin, interrupted softly, "Hey, maybe the thing is still alive, but just, you know, trapped in the safe?"


  I said, "Um. No. There is nothing alive in the safe."

  The face in the clay had been smoothed over and rubbed out. Unfortunately, the force was still there.

  Quentin shook his head. "Why don't you guys try something else? Do it without me. I have to sit down."

  He went to sit behind the desk.

  Vanity said, "Quentin, I hate to say this, but we're in the middle of something right now. You have to help!"

  Quentin laid his head down on the desk. He spoke without raising his head. "Okay. Fine. Here's my help.

  Weight is the key. The force can barely hold the talismans as it is. Have Amelia make the thing heavier.

  Eventually, the force will break."

  Vanity looked at me and shrugged. "Go ahead and try it."

  I knelt down, turned the music on, waited for a nice running glissade to get the sphere ringing really voluminously, and put my hand "past" the safe wall, and touched the hypersphere.

  I could not manipulate the world-lines connecting its center of mass with the center of mass of the Earth. I was not sure why, but maybe the fact that it was a fourth-dimensional object, a perfectly regular sphere, made me unable to rotate it to alter its possible free-fall paths. Maybe my powers worked only because I had a higher dimension than the "flat" 3-D matter around me.

  But Miss Daw had implied that there were higher dimensions than just the four. Maybe I could manipulate them, if I could see or imagine them.

  I said half aloud, half to myself, "A five-sphere would satisfy v2+H;2+Jc2+y2+z2=r2. The 'surface' would be a set of hypervolumes made of hyperspheres, all equidistant from a single center-point. The 'volume'

  would be a su-perhypervolume, and…"

  Something happened. Quietly, quickly, unexpectedly. Not what I was trying to do. But something amazing.

  Under my finger, the sphere changed into a five-dimensional object. I saw it.

  The ringing damped even more quickly when that happened, and I yanked my hand away even as red sparks began to tremble across the safe surface.

  I said aloud, "Victor, you're good at math. What is the ratio of the surface area of a five-dimensional sphere to its volume?"

  He said, "I am not good at that kind of math. But the ratio is higher than that of a hypersurface of a globe to its content, much higher than a normal sphere surface to its volume. Remember the pie plate and the goldfish bowl. The more dimensions you have, the more water you can fill in, within the same given radius."

  I said, "The surface area for any number of dimensions is directly proportional to 2 pi raised to the power of nil, where n is the number of dimensions. It is inversely proportional to gamma times one-half n"

  Colin said, "Oh my dear lord, she is talking in equations again. Quentin! Get your gag back out! The spirits are demanding Colin be spared!"

  "I'll say it simply. This will sound odd, but the hypersurface area and content reach maxima and then decrease towards zero as n increases."

  Colin shook his head. He spoke in a voice of lilting sarcasm: "Odd? No. That sounds 'normal.' Why would I think that sounded odd?"

  I pointed at the safe. "If I raised the number of dimensions to six, and kept the same radius, the volume would decrease, and, for a seven-D sphere, it would get even lower. So I think I cannot make it any heavier than I just did…"

  It sounded like an explosion. The bottom crashed out of the safe with a noise like battleship armor being holed. Compared to the safe bottom, the wooden floor was matchwood. Boards and splinters flew up in a fountain. Whatever was on the floor below also exploded with noise of cracking boards, breaking glass, and screaming metal. Shocking reports like gunshots, snapping even louder than the general cacophony, stunned our ears.

  Victor had his hand up. There were holes like bullet holes in the wall above us, where metal shards had flown, but he had deflected the worst of it overhead. Quentin, behind the desk, was unhurt. Colin, once again moving faster than was possible, had thrown himself in front of Vanity, with his arms out, and was bleeding from two large splinters, which had cut his cheek and shoulder. I had flinched at the noise, moved half an inch in the "blue" direction, and let the matter pass "through" me without touching me.

  Victor said, 'They must have heard that."

  Vanity, who was looking scared, said, "I don't sense anything—"

  Victor said, "Then they must be jamming your attention-detector. Leader… !" Victor turned to me. "I strongly urge we just grab the stuff from the safe and go. We can pause to examine it later. Which way?"

  Vanity had her hankie out and was trying to wipe the blood off Colin's face. Colin was saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine. Ow, shit! These wounds are no more real than if someone painted ink on my face. Fuck! And I could get myself to believe that if it didn't hurt so damn much!"

  Vanity said, "You are spouting gibberish. Hold still. You can't believe what you don't believe."

  Colin muttered, "Not this me. The real me believes it. I wish he were here."

  "Yeah," said Vanity. "Because he would not be spouting gibberish. He would also hold still."

  I stepped over the wreckage of the safe, made it light, and pushed it over. There was a splintered hole in the floor. Below was a crater of what had once been a bookshelf. In the middle of the crater was a sphere. It gave off no light in three-space, but to my eyes, it was shining and pale.

  I said, "Quentin, if you know any healing magic, cast a charm on Colin. If not, Victor, can you manipulate the atoms his body is made out of, and stitch up his face? Vanity, collect the stuff from the safe."

  Victor said, "And you… ?"

  "I am going down after my sphere. Everyone else start moving to the roof now. If we get split up, we meet…"

  Damn it. I hated being leader. Leaders do not get to say things like, meet at the house of that tawdry, grasping Jezebel Lily Lilac.

  "… we meet at the dock where Lily Lilac keeps her motorboat. Quentin says it will go badly for us if we steal it. If we tap on her window at—jeez, what time is it?—at four o'clock in the morning, is she a good enough… um… friend that she would lend it to you… V

  Vanity stooped down at my feet and started looting the safe. There were no papers and no money, nothing but the four objects: a book, a necklace, a drug ampoule, a small brown card. Even in the dim light, the gold tracery on the cover of the book, the silver weave of the necklace, glittered and glinted.

  Vanity's coat had many large pockets. She zippered them carefully inside.

  Except for the necklace. After staring at its fine chain for a brief moment, she smiled an impish smile, reached under her hair to clasp it around her neck. It was studded with tiny emeralds, and there was a pendant, a green stone with silver wings. It looked nice on her.

  Victor said, "She said I could borrow it any time I wished."

  I looked at Quentin. "Would that count? I mean, I am sure no one means it literally when they say 'any time.'"

  Victor said curtly, "If she intended to convey a more precise meaning, she would have spoken more precisely."

  Quentin said to me, "I'm not sure. In fairy tales, though, it is the exact wording that counts, not the intent.

  We can take the boat." Then he smiled and gave out a laugh.

  Colin said, "I'm bleeding my face off here, and you're laughing. What's so funny?"

  Victor, who had stepped over to peer at Colin's face, said over his shoulder to me, "Leader, I do not think his body is made of atoms. I cannot really do much."

  Quentin was talking to Colin. He smiled a self-deprecating smile. "We should have checked the desk first… look here…"

  Vanity's head jerked up. " Wait—"

  "… I wonder if this goes to the safe…" Quentin picked a small metal key out of a drawer and held it up.

  "—don't touch it!"

  Quentin shouted in pain and threw the key from him. The key was covered with crawling sparks, and the metal surface was red-hot. It crossed the room like a coal from a stove, like a tiny meteor, and tinkled against
the far wall.

  Vanity said in the shrill voice, "Leader! I regret to report that my detection sense is not being jammed! It just went off! Several people just became aware of us."

  Quentin was clutching his hand. There were tears of pain in his eyes. 'Tricky bloody bastards, aren't they?"

  I said, "Roof, now! Run!"

  Quentin said, "I should stay with you…"

  I said, "No back-talk! Victor, you're second-in-command. Get everyone up."

  Victor said, "How are you going to get out?"

  I hesitated. I had no idea. But I was not going to leave my sphere.

  Colin said, "Hey! Don't you have wings? Winged squid? Remember? I just remembered. Wings? Can't you hear me? Wings…"

  I stared at him blankly.

  He said, "Hello… ? Well… ? Do they work?"

  I rotated part of my shoulder blade. Shimmering with higher-dimensional motes of music, glittering with thought-energies, pinions made of transparent blue, mingled with dapples of starlight and colors the human eye could not see, appeared around me, passing "through" the back of my coat, and yet not disturbing the fabric.

  I said, "Roof. This is a direct order." I made the floor insubstantial in relation to me, and dropped from sight as if through a trapdoor.

  I heard Colin mutter, "Great. Just great. Everyone can fly but me."

  They ran.

  1.

  The wings did not seem to operate by any principle of aerodynamics. I did not flap them. Instead, there seemed to be energy currents issuing from and rushing toward the core of the Earth, forming fast- and slow-moving streams. There was something in the wing feathers, an eye or a pressure-membrane, that sensed them. Gravity waves? Antigravity? Something else entirely? I wondered if I was detecting some abstract concept like "ownership" or "desire," because a wash of the gravity-stream ran from my heart to the hypersphere.

  I dropped down to where the sphere rested among the wreckage of the bookshelf. I put out my hand.

  There were other senses that opened in me when the fifth-dimensional vibration, shed by the hypersphere, traveled up my arm, throbbing. My teeth ached.

  Motion was impossible in the fifth dimension, and there was nothing like vision here, but I could hear the crystal ringing of tremors and shock waves, like whale-sound or heavy drumbeats, traveling through the medium. But it was not conveying knowledge of sound to me. I was "hearing" something else, something almost incomprehensible: degrees of extension, relation, and existence.