Vanity said, “Who eventually fell in love? At the ball?”
Colin: “And what the hell was Boggin actually trying to accomplish?”
Quentin: “The man whose head was off was Orpheus. Was there anyone else at the table who talked as if they were in his group? The Unseen One he is representing is Hades, the god of the Underworld. The Psychopomp is the guide and guardian of souls to the Land of the Dead. Hermes is supposed to be in that position.”
Victor: “Are we members of the same race? Were we adults before they made us into the shape of children? You know we must all be shape-changers, don’t you? Why else would they measure us every night?”
5.
There was one question in that mess I could answer: “It must have been the Hecatonchire. The cone-shaped things I saw behind me. I was looking through the wall at that point, and looking at the people around the table.
“You said it yourself, Colin, that they are giants in their own world. Why a cone? Imagine you saw a boy growing up into a man, but that you could see through time as a dimension. His three-dimensional cross sections would continually increase in the direction of future, continually decrease in the direction of past. A cone. Except in this case, I do not think the directions are past-future. I am calling them ‘red’ and ‘blue’ as one seems to Doppler shift light to higher energy states, and one to lower.”
Vanity asked, “What did you look like?”
I said, “What?”
She said, “In the fourth dimension. I keep trying to picture it, but all I can picture is that you would see yourself as a flat person. Her skin is a line rather than a surface. Her internal organs are flat, like an ameba’s. She only has one eye. Uck. Yuck. Just trying to picture it is gross.”
“No, you’re wrong,” said Colin, pulling up one of his eyelids. “It would only be half an eye.”
“Ugh! Ugh!” said Vanity, entirely discomforted.
Quentin said, “It is a bit unnerving. If you, Amelia, are like Vanity’s flat person in a plane, let’s say something like this floor, then by rotating in the third dimension—a dimension of which creatures living in the floor would have no conception—they would see you turn into a line. So what would happen in three dimensions? Would you become flat, like a picture?”
“No,” I said. “You’d see a cross-section. The man from flat-land, if tilted, would have only two points of his skin surface intersecting the world-plane. By analogy, three-D folk would see a tilted four-D person as a hoop of flesh surrounding a flat section of blood and internal…”
“Oh, please!” said Vanity. “Pul-ease, can’t we talk about something else while we are eating!”
I said to her, “But I don’t think I’m flat. I mean, I don’t think I do not have other three-dimensional surfaces embracing my volume. My hypervolume. What I saw of myself, I seemed to have streamlined-looking wings or fans reaching off in other directions. And branches, or lines of energy—bright things, made of sound, or thought, or music. Or something. I think what we call matter and energy are merely two different rotations of the same hyperparticle. I had other senses, too.”
Colin said, “So you looked like a squid with wings, and you actually have a cluster of eyeballs and dripping ears on the end of stalks hidden in n-space where we cannot see them. I will still think you are lovely, Amelia.”
Victor said, “You could poke your finger into someone’s brain without touching his skull.”
Vanity said, “Ugh! You people are as gross as toads! Can’t we change the topic?!”
Colin said, “Yeah, but we are only toads that have been run over by a car, and flattened. Amelia is a real fat 4-D toad. We can’t see what she really looks like because we flat folk only have… half an eye! ”
“Ugh! Uck! Make him stop!”
Quentin said, “One last question, then we can ask more about the pagan gods. Amelia, what was the sense of weight you said you saw coming from the safe?”
“It was the sphere. The hypersphere. And it’s mass, not weight.”
“Why?”
“Mass is an intrinsic property. Weight is a behavior of matter under…”
“No, no. Why was the sphere massive?”
“Oh. Simple geometry. Picture the amount of area covered by a circle. The ratio of the area to the circumference is pi r squared. Rotate the circle on any axis, and the area swept out will be a sphere. The volume of the sphere will be four-thirds pi r cubed. You see?”
“No.”
“Um. If I used a crayon to draw the circumference and another crayon to color in the area, the first crayon would lose a bit and the second a bit more. Use a third crayon to color the surface of a balloon, and a fourth crayon to somehow fill in the entire inner volume of the balloon. The first crayon loses a bit and the second crayon loses a whole lot. Rotate the balloon in the fourth dimension to create a hypervolume. The first crayon fills in the volumes of the six balloons that form its hypersur-face, the second crayon has to fill in a hypervolume raised to the fourth power. You see the difference would be enormous.”
Quentin blinked. “I don’t get it.”
Victor said, “Why six?”
I said to Victor, “Oh! You’re right! There are only six points on the hypersurface where the axis intersects it that form three-spheres. I guess I was confusing the number of right-angled intersections with the Kissing Number, which in the case of 4-D equals 24. I was fooled because I was thinking that if a sphere is all points equidistant from a given point, such that x2+y2+z2=r2, then a four-sphere would satisfy w2+x2+y2+z2=r2. This implies that for any values where one axis, let’s say w, falls to zero…”
Victor held up his hand. “Now is not the time.” To Quentin, he said, “The four-dimensional sphere is more massive for its volume than a three-dimensional sphere for the same reason that a fishbowl of water is heavier than a pie plate of the same diameter filled shallowly. See?”
Quentin shook his head, “I cannot picture it. I am sorry I was not there to look into this so-called fourth dimension. I had always thought such a thing would be spiritual in nature. I wonder if Amelia—no offense—is merely interpreting things in a geometry metaphor because that is what she understands.”
I laughed aloud. “We’re all doing that.”
Blank stares of incomprehension greeted me. Colin shrugged and passed the champagne bottle around again.
I said, “You’ve never noticed? All the understandable things we each see—tables, chairs, Vanity’s bosom—we each see in the same way. When we see the unknown, however, our brains each interpret it differently. For example, Quentin sees the Hektor-sherrys… ”
“Hecatonchire.”
“…as man impressing vital spirits onto an airy phantasm. I saw it as a multidimensional effect. Colin…?”
“Well, I wasn’t there, but it was obviously psychokinesis. They put their energy into moving the objects. They moved. We just saw Victor here use his PK on the lock to the pastry pantry, didn’t we?”
Victor shook his head. “I moved the interior workings of the lock with magnetic particles. Some organ in my body produces them. You cannot move matter without using matter to push it. Newton’s Laws, remember?”
Colin said, “How did you get such an organ?”
“Amelia’s story makes it clear our captors—and I think that is the correct word to use—consider us to be shape-changers. All that means is that our peoples developed a technology for moving and manipulating cellular and perhaps atomic structures, maybe with molecule-sized tools woven throughout our bodies. So why couldn’t they build organs which had other useful tool properties? Magnetic beams or limbs to manipulate things with? Amelia might have her brain programmed to tag such limbs with cartoon images in her eye, so she can see to manipulate them. What she sees seems not to be made of flesh and blood, she thinks they are in this so-called higher dimension.”
Quentin asked, “But, if that were the case, how could you be manipulating them, these so-called tools, with your thoughts?”
Victor said, “Nothing moves for no reason. If my hand is made of matter and my brain moves my hand, then my brain is made of matter, too.”
Quentin said, “Thoughts? Memories? Love?”
“Chemical reactions in the brain. Epiphenomena.”
Quentin smiled and shook his head. “Matter is material and thought is spiritual. How can it be otherwise?”
Victor pointed at the champagne bottle. “How can drinking affect your thoughts if thoughts are not made of the same substance, not in the same dimension, as Amelia might say, as the champagne? This is just an alcohol. A chemical. Carbon and hydrogen and oxygen atoms in rows.”
“It contains spirits. The blood releases more subtle spirits and humors into the blood. The blood carries it to the pituitary gland…”
Now it was Colin’s turn to join in: “You are both wrong. This champagne bottle is an illusion. It is a belief. You believe it will make you drunk, and you give it your energy. You give it enough energy and it has the power to rob your energy. What happens when a man is drunk? He lacks energy. That’s all. Matter is just an idea, and a bad idea at that. The fact that Victor here can turn locks without touching them and Amelia can walk through walls proves it. If such things are unreal, we only see them because our eyes lack power. Ladies and gentlemen, a toast! To the real world! The one where there are no locks, no walls.”
“Hear, hear!” we all called, raising our glasses.
After the toasting was done, and we were passing around the tub of ice cream we had found, making root beer floats with champagne instead of root beer, Vanity stood up. She had not had as much as the rest of us, but it made her cheeks rosy and her eyes glitter. Her skirt seemed shorter than it had been a moment ago, her neckline lower, her waist thinner. Was that the champagne? Maybe we were shape-changers, and she was feeling prettier, the way I had done when I used to stare in mirrors to turn my mousy hair blond and my brown eyes hazel, then green.
Vanity said, “None of you boys heard a word Amelia said. Not a bloody word. There are different versions of the universe. Different paradigms. Different states of mind. Each paradigm, each model, has something it cannot explain. Something unknown, dark, incomprehensible, irrational. Something it fears. Each philosophy has one question it cannot answer. A different question for each one, but at least one. You see? Chaos. We are from the question mark.”
Colin said, “What do you mean, ‘we,’ White Wench? They said you were one of them. A non-Chaos person. What would you call that? An orderist? An orderly? Neat Freak?”
Quentin said, “The opposite of Chaos is Cosmos. A citizen of the Cosmos is a Cosmopolitan.”
“Oh, God!” said Colin, taking another swig of champagne. “Say it after me. ‘Vanity Fair is a Cosmopolitan.’ ”
Vanity Fair struck a pose, her hands on her knees and her bottom stuck out, her elbows pushing her breasts even more dangerously further forward. “I’m two glamour magazines!”
Victor said, “What is her paradigm?”
I said, “Listen to the way she talks. She is actually a solipsist. She explains everything in terms of different states of mind of the observer.”
Quentin said to me, “How does she explain magic?”
Vanity said, “Magic is what we call the unknown.”
Quentin said to her, “And what do we call it once it is known?”
Vanity shrugged a bit. “The unknown is a blank spot on the map. How different people fill it in is different, I guess. Depends on their tastes, I suppose. Isn’t that what we are all talking about here? Different tastes in the way we choose to see the universe?”
Colin guffawed. “Sort of like picking out a new hat…? I do not like stars and planets; they are so very out of fashion this season! I want the lights in the sky to be little lamps carried by elves! All in favor say ‘aye’! Come on.”
Vanity looked outraged. “But you are the one who just said life is an illusion!”
“Yeah, but I said life actually, really, is an illusion, and that’s a fact. I have proof! Would Victor be able to wish a lock on a door open, if all this were real?”
Quentin said, “I hate to gang up with Colin against you, Vanity, but you are being a bit of a solipsist. Let me take an example. Suppose you climb a hill or go into a valley no one has ever seen before. The moment your eyes light on it, do trees appear?”
She shrugged, saying, “Who knows? Why assume trees you never saw before were there before you saw them? You can make any assumption you want. That’s what assumptions are. You fill them into the blank spots in your knowledge.”
Quentin smiled, saying, “Who or what decides how many leaves each branch of each tree has, or how many veins on each leaf?”
Vanity waved her hands at him. “Now you are being silly. Nobody sees every leaf in the forest at once.”
Quentin said, “Do you pick a number in your head before you look?”
Victor said, “The forests children see would have fewer leaves than the ones seen by, for example, professional astronomers, who can think in scientific notation. Hottentots could not see more than ‘three’ because they don’t have a word for any number higher than that.”
Vanity said, “You are both being ridiculous! We see dreams, don’t we? But we do not sit down with typewriters and write out a script before we fall asleep. We just see them. They must come from somewhere. For all we know, the number of leaves on a tree could just be the same way. It comes from somewhere. Maybe from the same place as dreams. I mean, nothing comes from nowhere for no reason, right?”
Victor said, “I move we shelve the discussion of the nature of reality until after we decide what to do with what we’ve learned. Right now, they don’t know we know. With Dr. Fell blanking out Quentin’s memory, they think they’ve covered their tracks. There are at least two factions, maybe five. Mavors, Mulciber, Trismegistus we know; they spoke about Pelagaeus and the Unseen One at the meeting. The Satyr was representing the Vine God…”
“Dionysus,” said Quentin, “And Pelagaeus is Poseidon.”
“…who may be in the same camp with Hermes, according to what Amelia overheard. Now then, they all think we can give victory to whatever side we help, and they are afraid to kill us because the threat to our lives as hostages is all that is holding back Chaos. For the moment, Cyprian has to talk to Mulciber to get his agreement to the plan to have us moved to the Unseen One’s control. Or, they might instead just decide to take Vanity and give her to the Atlantians. Does that sum up the facts?”
Colin said, “Suppose Hermes is on the level. He got in trouble—you said—for making a deal with our folks, the Urine People.”
“Uranians,” said Quentin. “Sons of Uranus. Titans.”
“Whatever. How do we contact him, if he’s the one we decide to go for?” said Colin.
I said, “He must have thought it obvious, so he didn’t say.”
Victor said, “Taffy ap Cymru. Also a shape-changer, by the way. Works for him. Hermes knows you know that. He gave us Taffy. As a gift. Don’t any of you see it? If Taffy doesn’t do what we ask, we turn him over to Boggin.”
Quentin said, “Boggin would have power over him. That is how one acquires authority over the soul of another. Get a man to break his word to you. Or break a law.”
Colin muttered, “Have them put their boots on the table.”
Quentin said, “Immorality is weakness. Virtue is strength. You can’t hex an honest man. That’s what Boggin wanted, Amelia. Permission to hex you.” Quentin looked around the circle. “Did anyone else promise him anything, when he talked to you?”
Victor said, “I asked him to define his terms. I said that if I were a child, he could not make a contract with me in the eyes of the law, and that if I were not a child, he could not keep me imprisoned here. I asked him which it was.”
Colin said, “I pretended that I had forgotten how to talk, except to say ‘Go on.’ Whenever he asked me a direct question, I said ‘Go on.’ I timed it, to see how long h
e could go on with me not saying anything. Forty minutes, ten seconds.”
Vanity said, “He didn’t talk to me.”
I said, “The people at the meeting seemed to imply that the Phaeacians can somehow open or shut the boundaries between reality.”
Colin said, “Meaning what?”
“When the boundaries are open, our various powers work. When they are shut, we’re just kids.”
Colin said, “How did you come by that notion, Bright Eyes?”
“Several things they said. Also, just seeing a sphere from my homeland enabled me to travel through other dimensions and walk through walls. I wonder if the other objects in that safe are similar reminders. Keys. To turn us on. They always meant to use us, right? The only question holding them back is not whether to use us, but who gets to use us, right? If reminders of our homes can do that to us, what happens when we find the boundaries between this dimension and our various homes? There are four boundaries to the estate, and four of us. Four Uranians, I mean. Vanity, or Nausicaa, rather, is from Phaeacia.”
“Very interesting,” said Colin. “But could you give me some milk?”
“The carton’s right by you.”
“No, no,” he said, putting his glass right under my breasts, “I meant, could you give me some…”
Vanity gave a little shriek and leapt to her feet.
Colin said, “What? What? It wasn’t that funny!”
“I’m Nausicaa! I’m that Nausicaa. The girl from Phaeacia who discovers Odysseus washed up half-dead on the shore! Don’t you see…?”
We looked at each other.
“I actually did those things. I had a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and maybe even a dog and a palace and everything. I had favorite foods. I had people I had fights with. A faith. Things I thought. Things I wanted to do. Maybe artistic talents or a lover or… They’ve taken it all away. All I remember is this place. They’ve killed me.”
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