Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  Dr. Fell said drily, “They are organisms from Chaos. Pre-frontal lobotomies would have been the best way to keep them restrained.”

  “To you, I will not speak!” exclaimed the black man. “You are a thing of gears and levers, you. I do not call you a man! Bah! You, Thelxiepia, you are a gracious woman. You know the secrets which cause men to die when they hear them. Can you not prevail upon Boreas? Tell him we will take these children away if they are not well cared for! We have an agreement with the Uranians!”

  Dr. Fell said sardonically, “Why ask her, Notus? Boreas is your brother.”

  “Bah! Since I am not talking to you, I am not listening to you!”

  I suddenly had the fear that the scheme Boggin had told me, about how sternly we were supposed to be treated in order to convince the others that we were secure, was about to backfire.

  I said, “They really don’t treat me that badly! Boreas is really nice!”

  The black man had a look of slow horror come onto his face. Nothing I could have said would have convinced him more completely that I was being lashed and tortured.

  He let go of me, which made my arms suddenly feel quite cold. “It does not matter. You may not take her back to the cell yet. We need Dr. Fell to bring his instruments to take some readings, to localize the breach. Come, Telemus!”

  “I am not under your authority,” Dr. Fell said coldly.

  “You will come, or I will whirl you from here into the sea!” And the black man’s long shining hair began to flow and sway as if in the breeze, except there was no breeze. A warmth came from him as if an invisible oven had suddenly opened its door.

  Dr. Fell raised his hands, and said sardonically, “Well, your argument has some merit. It is what we call Argumentum ad Baculum, of course, but I am not prepared at this time to enter into the finer points of such a dispute. I will communicate with Mulciber about this.”

  “Bah! Again, I say my Bah! I am with the Lady Cyprian. I do not care for your Mulciber, Round-eye!”

  Dr. Fell put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Neither, by all accounts, does the Lady Cyprian.”

  Then Dr. Fell wiggled his finger at me, and to Miss Daw he said, “Watch her. Guard her. She is the dangerous one.”

  The two men walked away, Dr. Fell marching with his stiff step (almost like a goose) and Notus, with many a glance back at me across his shoulder.

  4.

  “Can we walk around the estate? Just up and down a few paths, or see the Library? I’d like to get a book. I’m so bored! Please?”

  Miss Daw just sat down on the bench that was there, a marble slab with feet carved into little cherubs blowing trumpets. Two dry rosebushes showed their thorns to either side. She patted the seat next to her.

  Slowly, I sat. Then I threw back my head, and laughed.

  Miss Daw looked at the horizon, and was preparing to take no more notice of me.

  I said, “You are not going to ask me why I laughed, are you? It’s because of what Dr. Fell said. He called me the dangerous one. Not Victor, not Colin, not Vanity, who can call a magical mind-reading ship from beyond the world’s edge. Me! Why am I the dangerous one?”

  I started kicking my legs back and forth under the bench. Maybe I should make a break for it? Pick up a rock and brain the frail Miss Daw over the head? She would probably go down harder than the unexpectedly brawny Headmaster Boggin.

  I decided to give talking one more chance: “Why did Boreas tell you not to talk to me? He cannot be afraid of me. I am not the dangerous one. You cannot be afraid of me, Miss Daw; you’ve known me my whole life. You know me. I am not a monster. Really, I’m not. No more than any other girl my age, I suppose.”

  Miss Daw smiled, a sad smile, a very far-away smile.

  I looked around on the ground. Here were patches of winter grass, mounds of snow lining the edges of the path, a little strip of leafless and barren garden to our left and right. No rocks.

  I could see the buildings of the estate all around me. Beyond the Great Hall was the main Manor House, with the Library to the North and the Stables and yards to the South.

  No one was around. I was hoping Victor might come along the path. But there was no one.

  “What are they doing in my cell?”

  Miss Daw’s lips twitched, but she did not answer.

  I said, “Miss Daw…?”

  No answer.

  “…how long am I going to have to stay there…?”

  She thought about whether or not to answer. Then she said, “Be at peace, child. Matters will soon resolve themselves. One way or the other.”

  I said slowly, “But they aren’t, are they? They are not going to go back the way they were. We’re too old. Everything’s changed.”

  Miss Daw said, softly, “Nothing is stable. Nothing is certain.”

  She hugged herself a bit. She murmured, half to herself, “Changes will come, but other changes will come after, wiping out each layer of change like waves on a beach, erasing the ripples in sand cast up by the previous wave. Everything is sand. There is only one rock to which we can cling.”

  I thought I knew what she meant. I said, “You saw me praying. What did you see?”

  Miss Daw spoke in her silver voice, her eyes still on the far horizon. “Your prayers flew up. There was an echo in return. The relational energy went somewhere. Where, I do not know. Someone heard you.”

  Well, here was a topic I could get her to rise to. I said, “What denomination are we?”

  She drew her eyes down from the horizon and glanced at me, a small quirk to her lips. “ ‘We’? Miss Windrose, that is an excellent question. What indeed are we?”

  “Well, then, what are you? High Church? Dissenters? What?”

  She smiled a half-smile, filled both with melancholy and with an aloof amusement. “I am of the body of the one true Church, and I am the last of that body. We called ourselves the Pure Ones. Others called us Donatists.”

  “And where was your Church?”

  Her face showed that she had flown in thought, far away, far down the corridors of memory. At last she said in a soft, distant voice: “Our Archbishopric was centered in Alexandria, at a time when North Africa was the most civilized and cultured spot in the Empire. The European and Asian provinces had been wasted in the wars between the Four Caesars.

  “We cast out from us the unfit, who delivered their scriptures and sacred vessels up to our persecutors under Diocletian; once the persecution was relaxed these traditors, these deserters from the duty of martyrdom, attempted to carry on as if their actions had not put them out of communion with the faithful. Bribed electors raised, and men outside grace ordained, a certain false bishop, Caecilian, above us; but we refused him, electing Donatus the Great from among the pure and faithful.

  “How the Bishop of the Chaff hated the Bishop of the Wheat! The impure said that their bishops had authority to choose our bishop, and that we were their cattle. The archbishop of Antioch turned Constantine against us. Constantine was one who hated our religion, but sought to harness the power of the faith of Christ and use it against his political enemies.

  “In time, Constantine declared himself Pontifex, and said his word ruled the Church as a matter of law. Him! Pontifex! As if the outcome of bloody battles made his the voice of God! The election of pagan and corrupt Praetorians could vest Constantine with temporal power, yes; but spiritual authority, we held, came from other sources.

  “They called us heretics and schismatics, but they were the ones who strayed from the true path. A splinter group which rebelled against the Greek Church grew to power amidst the decayed and corrupted remnants of the Western Empire. These are the ones you call the Catholics, who were rebels against the Metropolitan authority of the Greek Church. Those of us in North Africa who remained pure in our faith were persecuted again and again. Then a time came when the Paynims from Arabia swept over the land.

  “And that was the end of us.”

  She was silent for a while, lost in sa
d thought.

  She said: “Nothing of the true teachings now remains. Our books are lost. The Gospels of Thomas and Simon are gone, the Letters of Instruction, the writings of Symmeticus, Antonius Thaumaturgos the Elder, Antonius Pius, and the Epistles of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, and the Book of Tubalcaine from before the Flood, are all lost.

  “When a council was called by our enemies, to gather together the many sacred writings and the books which preserved the memory of Christ and His apostles, we were banned. Our gospels and epistles were not included in their books; and those gospels that they did include were voted upon to include or exclude by a show of hands. The Greeks drove away dissenters from the council, and so their hands were the ones most numerous.

  “And what did they vote into their Bible? Fables and nonsense. To this were added letters and boasts by Paul, who never met Christ, but had a dream of Him, and who invented, out of the speculations of the Greeks, a washed-down version of Platonic and Neoplatonic theogeny.

  “And forgeries not by Paul, but bearing his name, were added; as were letters written by several Greeks later said to be the writings of John and Luke, who were illiterate fishermen.”

  I said, “Are you talking about the Bible? I mean, our Bible?”

  She looked at me sidelong. “You yourself delivered a four-page paper on the Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline epistles, including an analysis of First Timothy, when we were discussing the Markian Hypothesis and the possibility of the Q document in seminar last year.”

  “Um… sure.”

  “You did not write that paper, did you?”

  “I wrote… part of it…”

  “You wrote your name at the top.”

  “Vanity sort of helped out with some of the wording. And Quentin, uh, checked my spelling, and… Well, what does it matter if I cheated on one little tiny paper! I am just going to be killed, or sold into slavery!”

  “You will not be killed, child. And an education is always important.”

  “It’s not doing me much good right now. You people have me locked up in a cell buried underground!”

  “Since you slept through our study of the Bible, you still have the pagan authors to comfort you. You have the solace of having read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You have read the Crito, and you know from Gibbon the dignity with which Julian the Apostate met his fate. Epictetus was a slave, and he knew how to bear his lot with dignity…” And now she looked quite sad again, and her eyes turned back to the horizon.

  I said, “What’s it like, being the last Donatist?”

  “Being the only one who knows the truth in the world full of lies? Every teenager knows something of the feeling.”

  “Miss Daw…? I’ve been wondering. How can you be a Christian if you are a pagan goddess?”

  “I am not a goddess. That word is reserved properly for the Olympians, who can influence the motions of the Fates, which I cannot.”

  “But how can you have faith in Christ? Is he one of you folk?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “The matter is complex. There are those among us who claim that some upstart merely wished to steal the worship due to Jove; and that Baphomet, a child of Phorcys and Ceto, was the man crucified at Calvary; or else Simon the Magician, one of the Gray Sisters’ sons. Still others say it was merely a man who died on Golgotha; still others say no one died, and that Christ is an invention of priestcraft. There are many of us who could make ourselves seem to die, and rise again from the grave; for that matter, there are humans who could perform some slight-of-hand, or swap a living body for a dead; and anyone can forge a document, or tell a lie. But none of us could raise a human being from the dead, or promise truly to raise all men; and none of us can forgive sins, or wipe the stain of wrong away.”

  “Why would one of you want to steal another person’s worship? Do you eat it?”

  She smiled. “Something like that. The Olympians receive their power from the moral order of the universe, but also from the laws of men, and the guilt of those who break those laws.”

  “Then how can you be a Christian, if you suspect Christ was one of you?”

  She shook her head. “I suspect no such thing; I merely report what some among the immortals say. But even their opinion betrays the deeper truth. If the Redeemer was a fraud, Miss Windrose, my question is this: Who was he impersonating? Whose worship, as you put it, was he trying to eat? If Baphomet was a thief, there must have been real gold he was trying to steal.

  “I am above humanity in the chain of being. The mere fact that there is a chain of being proves that there must be a top, a first link or Uncaused Cause from which all else emanates. Everyone fears and worships the thing that sets the circumstances and limits of his fate, as a hound might worship the master who owns him. Only something that is entirely without restricting circumstances, unlimited, infinite, can be called Divine. Unhindered, it would be motionless. With no wants and no lacks, it would be entirely serene.”

  I said, “That could be any god of any religion. What makes you a Christian?”

  She said, “In my youth I swam along the coasts of Carthage, and lured mortal sailors to their wretched deaths, promising them sweet kisses, and I laughed gaily as they drowned. A time came when the dying men called upon a strange and nameless God to save them, who was, at once, himself and his own son, and one of these forgave me as he died, though I was his murderess. Angered by the conceit, I determined to slay the next holy man of this new faith I came upon.

  “I spied one who walked along the cliff overlooking the sea. He was dressed as a beggar, and leaned upon a staff as he walked, and he praised his God with every weary step of his long road. I swam ahead of him and scaled the rock, so that he found me combing my hair with a comb of shell, dressed only in my beauty. I tempted him with kisses, and he rebuked me sternly, and had no fear of me.

  “It is our custom not to kill men until they fail to answer one of our riddles, because that failure shows their mortality and imperfection. So I asked the Holy Man if I had a soul, and if I could know salvation: this was a riddle to which I knew he knew no answer, since I did not know the answer myself.

  “He raised his staff, and said it was no more likely that the dead wood in his hand could put forth bloom again, than that a mermaid could have a soul.

  “No sooner did the words leave his lips, than the dry stick in his hand turned green, and flowers of unearthly beauty budded and bloomed all along the staff. I knew then that I was in the presence of a superior power: I dove from the cliff to flee from the saint.

  “Like you, I can see the many dimensions of the world, and so I knew what it was that reached down through higher space to touch that old man’s walking stick. It was a power above Saturn, older than Time, able to restore the dead and recover the innocence I had once and lost. Many a day I huddled in the darkness far below the wave, wondering and grieving.

  “And now I know that Eternity is beyond even the gods of Olympus. There is a shadow, a hint, of what Eternity is like within this world of time and death and decay: for if there were not, we would have no notion of perfection, no idea of beauty, no love, no hope. We would all be Dr. Fell.”

  “Do you believe in souls? Do you think everything has a soul?”

  “Only a creature with a soul could frame such a question.”

  I said, “Do you think I have a soul?”

  “Of course, dear child, and it is a bright one, despite your anger and confusion.”

  “If I have a soul, I cannot be a monster. Boreas cannot be afraid of me.”

  “I do not actually think he is afraid of you, child.”

  “Then why did he order you not to talk to me? This conversation is the first one I’ve had in seven days. If you don’t count the little scene with Grendel. I am so bored. Bored and tired and scared. Tired of being scared. Bored of being scared. Scared of being bored. I will do whatever you say. I will do what Boreas wants me to do. Just don’t put me back in that cell!”

  “We have little choice i
n the matter. Even Boreas has little choice.”

  “At least give me something to read or something to do. What about my lessons? I had a test this week that I missed because I was in jail. One of your tests: the Hawking formulations on Black Hole Theory.”

  “Naturally, I did not hold the test this week, Miss Windrose.”

  “Give me the materials so I can study! How often do you have a student begging you for work?”

  It seemed she was not listening. She said absentmindedly: “It would be a waste of time, child. No matter what you learned, you would have to learn it again when you come out.”

  “At least come talk to me during the day. You must be bored, too, if there are no classes being held this week!”

  She shook her head. Apparently she was not bored.

  I said in an angry voice: “Answer me! Boreas cannot be afraid of me talking to you.”

  “No, child. He is afraid I might take heart from your example.”

  “Take heart?”

  She turned and looked at me. Her eyes had been staring into the Fourth Dimension, and were still surrounded with a faint cloud of distance-negating energy, which, in the sunlight, made her eyes seem all silvery.

  Solemn and sad, she said in the soft music of her voice: “I am a slave. These people are my captors, too. I am not from here.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From home.”

  “What home?”

  “Home. Your home. My home. Our home. Myriagon.”

  22

  Tales of the Demiurge

  1.

  She said, “Like you, I was once collared and penned up. Upon my parole, I am allowed certain privileges, to walk abroad in the sunlight, to take upon myself a fair-seeming shape, to drink wine and eat savory food. And to play my music. That is the kindest thing I am allowed, and also the most cruel.”