Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  The twist of space was shining like a jewel in her hand, and yet it was made of memory-substance, not matter.

  "Take this parting gift from me," her soft voice cooed, "which I give to our ancient foes, the dark and horrent Lord of Dream. Morpheus will bring to you this dream, and emplace within your frame of reference, selecting a point in the time-stream when your consciousness might be reached."

  "What is it?"

  "Hope! Hope I give you! Once you are free of your captors, the greater things you are destined to accomplish will be made real. Were it not for Man, nobler souls than any the demiurge could have made (Saturn did but capture and demean them) all Myriagon would rise as one to oppose your downfall. The primal beings, more crude and more ancient than the bright children of your father, who dwelt in this place before us, hang thick as clouds about the tiny, dim spot of the material world, ready to close with it and crack it open like a seed, should any word of you come forth: Phlegon our bold cousin will prepare the Thousand-Dimensional Object!

  "Remember that from our point of view, those of us who love you, you have already escaped and been welcomed with rejoicing arms back to us: Happiness and freedom are inevitable. Any world path you select will lead you back to us; your task is merely to find the shortest. Let this thought buoy you while you labor in that world where despair is absolute: Your first duty is escape.

  Accomplish that."

  I woke with tears in my eyes.

  I rolled over and shook Vanity awake. "I volunteered! I volunteered for this!"

  Her hair was mussed with sleep, and her eyes half-closed. "Mm? Why are you crying, Amelia?"

  "Because I'm an idiot!" I sobbed, "I volunteered! I could have stayed home!"

  Work and Days

  Swimming time! My way of mixing business with pleasure was to follow Victor's example and perform my experiments underwater. Morning, noon, or evening, it was always a good time to swim.

  I could hold my breath longer than a three-dimensional person (hint: a volume is only a cross-section of a hypervolume), and even when I dove deep, the pressure was less than the crushing oily thickness of hyperspace.

  I did not have a book to read in my dreams, or a new body to build. But I could see how quickly I could switch my body sidewise into the fourth dimension, or rotate another aspect of my complex origami-folded body here and there into the environment, or find how far the curvature of local space would let me reach a limb. (From beneath the waterline, I could pluck a coconut from a tree ashore.)

  And so I dove.

  Not only was the water relaxing to swim in, but I could float on my back under a sky wider and bluer than any sky of England, and practice coordinating my internal energy signals: turning my senses on and off in different combinations, getting information bundles to take bypaths through hyperspace, or bouncing photons off the interiors of closed boxes, trying to pick up the usefulness and interior nature of distant islands, things like that. I had at least seven extra senses, not to mention internal kinesthetics. I looked at things.

  The reef was colored more brightly than anything in the whole British Isles. I come from a gray place, after all, all drabs and duns. Here was something as strange as I had ever dreamed in youth of seeing; this was indeed the island beyond the horizon. Tropical fish as colorful as flowers would dart by, shining in the green sunlight, or all the red-gold worms of the reef would poke their heads at once back in their bone-crusted homes, so that the whole coral breathed white and pink.

  Segmented armored invertebrates would scuttle in the slow-motion underwater murk, stiff as knights, or insect-things with delicate eyes would peer from gem-hued rocks or cast-off shells, furtively imitating the beauty around them, camouflaged, in the midst of weird beauties of the undersea, moving from war to war. Jellies as lacy as a lady's parasol drifted by, in the same lazy warmth where I was drifting. It was the sum of all delight.

  Or not quite all. You see, we'd reached a place where someone had been before. We were not at the edge of the map, not yet. Amelia Earhart would not have been content. Neil Armstrong would have won no fame for discovering Vanity Island.

  I wanted to plant the Union Jack on some spot no Englishwoman had ever stepped before.

  I wanted Mars.

  When I wasn't performing my own experiments, I would go by to watch Victor. His experimentation area was a little ways offshore in ninety-five fathoms of water. He said he wanted the water to dampen out any escaped high-energy particles, and for coolant mass. His underwater skin was a thick, almost metallic, bluish hide, with goggle-eyes and extra horns and antennae for picking up microwaves and radioactivity.

  (He still looked handsome to me. I could still see his unchanged internal nature. There were many advantages of possessing a multidimensional girlfriend, if only you would notice them, Victor!) He would just anchor himself, motionless, near his gigantic coral-grown tube-shaped mechanism, which lay stretched along the seabed like a whale made of armor. No bubbles left his body; he had built some sort of exchange filters between his lungs to circulate carbon dioxide back into oxygen.

  Only the azure ray from his brow would dart here and there. His tools, varying in size from invisible clusters of artificial molecules to metallic caterpillar-shaped manipulators with as many arms as a Swiss Army knife, swam around him, and drilled, and bit, and severed, and jointed, and glued, and started chemical chain reactions. Around him there were always flares of burning substances, kilns and molecular sieves where he made new substances, little underwater volcanoes that sent columns of steam rushing surfaceward. The fish avoided the place.

  The inside of the giant tubelike mechanism was clear enough to me: an amazing labyrinth of geometrical shapes, lines of lenses, carbon fiberoptics, energy cells, alternating layers of cathodes and anodes, rings of electromagnets, shells of lead and ribs of titanium-hard ceramic, lumps of heavy water held in special bladders, webs of controlling and sensory tissue, crystals like a million snowflakes interlocked into a dazzling complexity.

  "What is it?" I finally asked him.

  "My new body," he said. "If it works out. Or rather, a model of the instructions needed to make it.

  Get behind that lead shielding."

  A mouth like a vise opened in the forward part of the structure, and a set of metallic lens-shapes clicked into place in the aperture. A line of white-hot steam erupted in the midst of the waters, joining the lenses with a distant sunken wreck Victor was using for target practice. I was momentarily blinded by the shock wave. When I could see again, I noticed the wreck had been cut in half, and an undersea mountain five miles farther beyond now had a neat hole drilled into it, large as the entrance to a coal mine, from which bubbling steam and mud poured.

  He sent off a set of magnetic signals, which one of my higher senses could interpret. "Amelia, you are throwing off my results. When you are around, I cannot accelerate particles faster than that velocity you arbitrarily designate as the speed of light. Instead the energy required for the acceleration simply increases. My beam focus is distorted."

  I could not answer him on his own wavelength, but I could dip a tendril-tip from the fourth dimension into his ear to carry sounds. "You are not taking into account that the accelerated particles increase in mass as they approach light speed."

  "Illogical. Nothing comes from nothing; how could the particles be picking up mass without picking up additional substance? No, your paradigm is overwriting my results. I should be able to focus a beam more tightly, and use the different velocities of light-atoms so that the reflections of the faster-moving light-atoms will attract and correct the paths of the slower-moving light-atoms."

  "Light doesn't come in atoms," I explained. "It is a wave-particle, which, to outside observers, all seem to travel at the same speed in a vacuum. It-"

  "Please, Amelia," he interrupted. "You are throwing off my results. We are short on time."

  He was right I turned and sped off in a rush of accelerated water. Our final exam was only a week away
.

  I am sure I was not crying. It's stupid to cry. Besides, the water would have hidden it.

  The three weeks were nearly done. My reports at night were even more incomprehensible than Victor's or Quentin's. Simply, no one could follow what I was saying. They could not imagine a hypercube, or follow the math used to describe one. I was tired of Vanity and the boys giving me funny looks: I had to try experiments whose results they would understand. Something plain.

  Something clear.

  Once I tried playing with the fishes. I reached into their governing monads, the point of nonbeing where their material and mental states overlapped, and tried to give them more free will. Free will is always good, right?

  Five days later, the last Saturday before Vanity's dreaded exam, came a strange night. A school of my fishes levitated out of the water, glowing with unearthly fire all over their scales, and the coral growths they drifted across turned into bubbles of some substance harder than jade.

  Colin was on watch; we woke to the sound of him screaming in panic. Rushing out of the tent stark naked (who uses a nightshirt in the tropics?), I was in time to see a line of twelve bloated sea-forms, glowing like fireflies, bobbing toward us through the trees, their little mouths opening and shutting.

  Quentin tapped on the ground with his staff, and words like slithering snakes shivered from his mouth. A dark thing it was not good to look at too closely reached out from behind the trees and began snatching up the little fire-fishes, one by one.

  Victor said, "Leader, should we keep them for study?"

  Vanity, crouched in the tent flap, said in a shaky voice, 'The world, the universe, is not paying attention to them right. They're not... right. I think the laws of nature don't like them. Kill them."

  Victor waved his hand. Nails bent awry during early, unsuccessful experiments in carpentry, Victor had not thrown away. Now they came out of a neatly labeled pouch on his belt, flew through the air at twice the speed of sound. The shrapnel splashed fishy guts across the trees, where they glittered with unnatural gemlike fire, dripping against gravity.

  He also picked up a dropcloth and draped it over my shoulders, and wrapped it around me, very gently.

  Colin, for once, had not been staring at me. He was watching the little fiery silver shapes dissolve.

  "We can deform reality, can't we?"

  I nodded. "Yeah. We're dangerous people."

  Victor said, "Good. Maybe if we are dangerous enough, we can kill the enemy, and stay alive.

  Leader, do you want me to gather those fish? As a food supply?"

  Vanity shivered, and shook her head. "We're not eating those. Amelia, was that your handiwork?"

  I nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I increased the inclination of the latitude of action. I was trying to splay the number of possible futures to give them more free will."

  "Colin, since it was Amelia's paradigm, you're on burial detail. Quentin, if Colin needs to be inspired with how to keep the dead fish... normal... you know, not enough free will to move around as icky corpses or something, can you inspire him? Do you have a spell for keeping fish, um, fishy?"

  Quentin bowed, touching his forelock. "Yes, Leader. I can tell him the true name of the first salmon."

  To me she said quietly, "Keep the trick in mind to use against an enemy weapon or something. But don't be rash, Amelia. Work with Colin if things get out of hand."

  (Work with Colin? Colin, the walking bag of sperm? No, ma'am, thank you, ma'am.) Vanity added, "And, Amelia..."

  "Yes, Leader?"

  Loud enough for the others to hear, she said, "This episode will not go on your permanent record, but our final exam is in three days. I am hoping for better results than this! Please keep that in mind, Miss Windrose."

  Something clear. Something plain.

  That was when I decided to see how high I could fly. Oh, yes.

  Oh, yes indeed. I waited till no one was around.

  Dawn. The layabouts were still asleep. The air was crisp and the morning sea breeze was still cool.

  I stood on trampled ferns, and the scent of bruised grasses mingled with the ever-present smell of coconut palms.

  I pulled on my leather flying jacket and donned my lucky aviatrix cap, buckled the chin strap, adjusted the goggles over my eyes. And the long white scarf: We mustn't forget the scarf! A lady pilot is practically naked without it.

  I bent the world-lines to minimize gravity. I rotated my wings into Earth's three-space, so that fans of shining blue-white light seemed to be to the right and left of me. Little glints and highlights shone from the leaves around me, and I could feel the tickling warmth of higher-dimensional reflections on my cheeks.

  And, then, a deep breath, bend the legs, and a little jump in the air. Up, up, and away.

  The greedy Earth with its mindless, massive pull held me no longer.

  The palm trees' crowns were below my toes, a feathery green lawn that soon dwindled to the toy garden a child might make with moss in a shoebox. The island was a streak of green and brown lost in a wide empty waste of water, blue and gray, crawling with ripples of white: Then it was a pebble; then it was a speck. The sheer space, the wild wideness of the ocean, was exhilarating, almost frightening.

  But I was heading for an ocean wider and emptier far.

  The thin white plumes of the clouds were below me now, a dazzle of white that seemed to rest on the indigo bosom of the ocean. The air had a width to it, a whiteness, I had not seen before. There was nothing around; the nearest island to us was still behind the visible horizon, even at this height.

  I did not head straight up, as that was not the easiest way to gain altitude. I picked a spot above the horizon, bent the energies of gravity and timespace around me, and soared.

  As I rose through ever-higher strata of atmosphere, I had to keep adjusting the contours in my fourth-dimensional body. This was a delicate balance of several factors.

  For thrust, I was swimming in the heavier medium of four-space, being carried along by supermassive particles in that parallel continuum. The flows of heavier-than-matter substance in the fourth dimension were not even. From time to time I sensed (shining with utility) favorable currents in the thick medium, things like updrafts. I could sail up these not-quite-thermals with my blue-shining wing surfaces no three-dimensional wing could reach, and ride the current upward.

  When I reached the top of the not-thermal, I had to start pumping wings again. To get the best speed, I had to flatten and fold as much of my many-dimensional body as I could into the "plane"

  of the Earth's continuum, but I had to keep enough wing in four-space to grip the medium. This increased my drag.

  For lift, I was not shooting rockets out of my boots or anything like that. I attempted the thing I had seen my sister Lampetia do in the dream: forming a lapse in space.

  The resistance of the earthly gravity made folding space impossible at first. Then I discovered if I attempted a lapse on a submicroscopic level, where the position of particles of known mass was uncertain in any case, even the nearby mass of the Earth did not bother to hinder the effect.

  You cannot really call it "falling up." It was a series of perspective adjustments taking place more rapidly than the acceleration due to gravity: My frame of reference was moving upward more quickly than I was falling downward within my frame of reference.

  Imagine the space like a bit of paper. I fall down nine meters per second: I fold ten meters of the paper and introduce an uncertainty as to my location, and move up one inch across the fold. I snap the paper open, and find myself ten meters up: net gain of a meter.

  In reality the effect was too small to see, a million times per square inch in continuous ripples down my body as I soared aloft. I could see little nets of light and dark shimmering down my limbs, as my submicroscopic-size, submicrosecond-long space warps were deflecting photons from their straightline paths. Even in the air, I looked like a swimmer in the water.

  Spacelapsing is not so tiring as it sounds, and
I was in good shape. It was like long-distance running. I was glad I put in all the hours at the gym at school: Whoever says athletics are unladylike-come, sir, and try to catch me in midair!

  I thought it would be cold this high, but the faster-than-sound friction of the ascent was heating my cap and jacket. I had to keep rotating several bodies (actually, three-dimensional cross-sections of one body) into and out of the three-space to give the skin of one body a moment in hyperspace to cool down before plunging it back into the screaming hurricane of air. (For obvious reasons, four-dimensional objects lose heat more slowly than three, but I found a heat-dispelling geometry.)

  I could see the utility shining from my velocity. Too dim. Not useful. I was not achieving the speed I wanted.

  I tried a new technique: finding the monads or controlling principles of the incoming air molecules. I granted them free will and asked them nicely not to buffet me. Oh, and while they were at it, could they form a cloud of breathable atmosphere at a temperature and pressure comfortable for me around my face? Thanks, and you are all darlings, little molecules.

  This was a luxury, I admit. I had a dolphin-shaped fourth-dimensional body I could use in hyperspace that did not need to breathe. I could have used it, I suppose. But what girl does not like the feel of wind in her face? And my human face needed oxygen, so I asked the air molecules, and they did not seem to mind providing for me.

  Of course, little things with free will could choose whether to be grateful, and some did not. But the statistical majority of them did as I suggested and did as their neighbors were doing, and there seemed to be a general drop of the amount of free will as peer pressure brought the halo of breathable air into conformity. My own little pressure suit without the suit But it is the nonconformists who pull the stunts.

  The air around my head flared up with strange light, and I saw I was leaving a contrail of multicolored smoke and swirls of glitter behind me. Some of the air molecules, granted their freedom, were deciding to turn into light or diamonds or notes of music or Cherenkov radiation. I had a tail like the aurora borealis shining behind.