Fugitives of Chaos

"Victor!" Quentin spoke firmly. "I've warned you that my science, the true science, cannot fix you once you render the humors in your brain impure; your disbelief in magic casts a negative ward around you.

You are a soul who has convinced himself he has no soul; damage your brain, and that silly belief may turn out to have a self-fulfilling character, my friend."

Victor, still smiling his small smile, said to me confidentially, "Quentin now is convinced he knows everything, because he has read the first three chapters of his book. I tell him the book is just gibberish, and he is only reading it in his dreams, and he agrees with me. Perhaps I have not drawn out the implications of my comment with sufficient clarity."

Vanity was probably also not used to the idea of Victor kidding around. She reacted as if he were serious, saying hotly, "The book is just great! The first chapter tells about the creation of the world; chapter two is the hierarchies of eternity and those ions and emissions .. "

Quentin said gently, "Aeons and Emanations. Gnostic words referring to angelic reflections or subdivisions of the divine."

She turned to him. "Chapter three was the bestiary, right?"

Quentin said, "The names Adam gave to beast and bird, crawling things and swimming things. But each name is a true name, and contains the tale of the beast, the history of the first two of each of their kind, and how long they stayed in the garden in Eden after the departure of Man. The hour and the gate of their departure defined their roles in the world. The hound and the horse, the swine and the kine, left with him, through the gate called Peace, but the cat actually left before him, sniffing out the ground, which is why those domesticated beasts, the sons of Cadwal and Rahal, Ghiuor and Muor, retain their loyalty to humanity, whereas the sire of all cats, Greymalkin, was granted a degree of independence, a reward for his curiosity. The serpent, Issrashah, most wise of beasts, was the last to depart. There are several references and tales about creatures of great beauty and power, who I am assuming were wiped out during the deluge of Noah."

Quentin smiled, looking young and handsome and eager, and he continued: "I am looking forward to chapter four tonight. I hope it contains the original language of Enoch, who built the first of the cities of man on Earth. I will also have to learn the lore of Tubalcaine, to be able to cast influences on things man-made of metal and brass; and likewise for Jubalcaine, in order to influence the doings of poets and singers."

I wondered if Quentin's newfound boldness came from his memory, now restored, of nerving himself and defeating his shyness to kiss sweet Vanity for the first time. I think he did it three times, and he got me, too. Not to mention, he now recalled spitting in the eye of the Lamia bent over him to kill him. All those bold memories were part of him now, back where they belonged, and it was forming part of his character.

6.

Victor said, "Enough about the past. Let's discuss the immediate future. First, which way do we go? A point is approaching where Vanity will have to decide whether to head for Australia or America, straight across the Atlantic or south to the Horn. Second, Vanity's memory. Third, Colin's body. And apparently his brain, too, because he does not seem any smarter than a bird in that shape."

Vanity said, "Colin's body before my brain. I am only missing a few days. I can function. If we get assaulted by—which one is it, sirens?—if we get assaulted by sirens, we have no defense."

Quentin said, "Besides, we need Colin to do Vanity."

Vanity and I both giggled, while Quentin looked puzzled. "What did I say?"

I said, "Nothing, ah—nothing. So Colin is going to do Vanity, right?"

Quentin looked at Victor, who shrugged. Victor said, "Colin, then Vanity. When we got aboard the ship just now, we all used what powers we had to check for bugs and spies and seeking spells, and Vanity said we were clean, at the moment. What happens the moment we are not clean? Remember in Amelia's story, how certain ap Cymru was that we would be found again. Why? Why so certain? We need to prepare for the next attack. An addendum to point four, the ring of Gyges. What do we do with it?

Vanity also says it is clean, and Quentin detects no spells. I can see it is not giving off any radio signals on any wavelength."

I said, "Can we do point two first? Colin might want a say as to where he is going to be living next."

Quentin said, "Point five. What about our parents? Our families? Our homelands? Vanity's ship could take us there right now, couldn't she? They are experts at all this stuff we are just learning. But—there is a problem. A big problem. It is that important matter I was starting to discuss earlier, having to do with the oath I swore to Bran."

Victor said, "We are out of England now. You swore not to hurt England. I do not see the application."

Quentin drew a deep breath, and actually looked scared for a moment. Scared of Victor? But he was also looking at me. That was more than a little surprising. Even though, according to Boggin, I was the

"dangerous one," I did not see how anyone could be scared of me.

Vanity saw his expression. She laid her hand gently on his back and said, "Dear, maybe now is not the time. Let's wait till Colin is whole again, you know? Otherwise, we have to tell them twice, and stuff."

For a moment I felt annoyed. It was obvious Vanity and Quentin had discussed something that they were keeping from the rest of us. Weren't we the Three Musketeers Plus Two? Why was there suddenly this barrier of silence splitting the group?

Then I put my hand in front of my lips and suppressed a smile. I am sure my eyes were shining. What in the world was I thinking! And me, still wearing a wedding dress under my stolen clothes! What else could it be? What other secret surprise would two young lovers have to announce to their friends, that they wanted to keep hush until everyone could hear it at once?

I smiled and patted Quentin on the shoulder, leaned in and gave Vanity a hug, "Oh, congratulations!" I said. "And I am sure you are making the right decision!"

When I let go of Vanity, the look on her face told me I'd guessed wrong.

Quentin was not so observant, and so he was saying: "It is a very tough decision, but I do think it is indeed the right one. I did not know you would be so happy about it, though, all things considered. Well!

This is a re-lief…" Vanity touched his arm and gave him a little shake of the head. She said, "Later. After we fix Colin."

7.

Victor did not seem interested in talking about things not on the topic, and he was clearly not curious about what was up between Vanity and Quentin. All he said was, "Destinations? Remember, we can also pick unknown worlds. I'd recommend against it, because they are unknown."

I said, "I can speak for Colin. Ireland. It's English-speaking. He thinks of himself as Irish."

Quentin said, "But he's not Irish."

I said, in a tone sharper than I wanted to use (okay, maybe I was still smarting about being left out of whatever secret Vanity and Quentin were sharing): "He picked Irish! That's the nationality he picked."

Vanity said, "Do we all get to pick nationalities? I'll be Spanish."

Her tone of voice was so light and gay that I had to laugh. So, I can't stay mad at her. I said playfully, "A Spanish redhead?"

"Everyone knows the Spaniards are the most romantic people on Earth. Spanish women get to knife their unfaithful lovers"She said to Quentin, "Nemo is Latin. I guess that makes you an Italian."

Quentin said, "Don't I get to pick, myself? The Ro-mani, whom you call the gypsies, retain the remnants of the Egyptian lore. All the true practitioners of the Art these days are Romani."

Vanity looked at me. "What about you, Amelia?"

"Easy," I said. "American. Neil Armstrong, Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers, and Sally Ride. What do they all have in common? Americans."

"Yuri Gagarin was Russian," said Vanity.

"Women in America carry guns and own businesses. They kick ass and they use rough language like

'kick ass' and nobody looks cross-eyed at them. American women are the greatest."

Vanity said, "Victor… ?"

Victor said, "We are picking a destination, not choosing nationalities. This conversation is irrelevant"

Vanity said, "Wherever we pick, we might be there for a long time. We may have to become natives. So which nationality would you pick, if you had to?"

Victor decided to play along. He did seem more easy and relaxed than the Victor I knew. Of course, the Victor I knew had spent every minute of his life inside what he thought of as a prison. Maybe this Victor was new.

He said, "Logically, from the way the question is asked, given that wording, only Amelia's answer is correct."

"Thanks!" I said. "But how can there be a right or wrong answer to a question of opinion?"

"The question was asked, which nationality would I choose? The question contains a false-to-facts assumption. Every nationality—with one exception—is something you are born into. It is not a matter of choice. One must be born Spanish to be Spanish, born Gypsy to be Gypsy. Americans are a self-selected group. Americans are people dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal. It's a matter of choice."

Vanity said, "Can I be Spanish-American, then?"

I said, "If we are really going to pick a destination… ?"

Victor said, "I don't mind being back on topic. Yes?"

"I do not want to go to Australia."

Quentin smiled, and said, "It is not really peopled entirely with criminals, any more than Cornwall is all smugglers."

"A woman cannot own a gun there," I said.

"Why is that important?" said Quentin. "I hope we're not planning to shoot someone."

I said only: "The next Grendel gets it."

There was a moment of dull silence after that.

Victor said calmly, "I vote with Amelia. Only an armed man is free; anyone else is the ward or dependent of such a man. Besides, America is richer than Australia, bigger. Easier to blend in. We can hide."

Vanity said, "Hollywood. Everyone in the world watches the movies made in America. We can be famous:?

Quentin just laughed, and spread his hands. "The only people on Earth with no tradition and no lore, a people utterly cut off from the ancient masters. A land famed only for its materialism and lack of high culture. Fine. Not only am I outvoted, but we all are going to go wherever Vanity wants, because she is the only one who can steer the boat."

Vanity sat down on the bench, closed her eyes, took a deep breath. She meditated for a moment, or maybe she slept, or maybe she entered another state of consciousness for which I have no name.

The Argent Nautilus leaped about, and sped like an arrow in another direction.

A ship—as huge as a city floating on the water—was spotted off the bow, came abreast of us, and was far astern in a matter of moments. I saw the giant ocean liner astern, a shadow on the bright horizon behind us, only a dot.

Vanity smiled, opening her eyes. "I asked for the biggest ship I could find, heading for New York. The Queen Elizabeth II Do you think they'll pick up four kids and a bird in a stranded motorboat? They might make us work, but maybe we have enough money to pay for tickets. Ap Cymru gave us a lot. A whole lot. I wonder why he gave us so much?"

1.

It was a palace.

I found it hard to believe that mortal men, the same race that lived in such humble circumstances in the fishing village of Abertwyi, could construct something so fair, and yet so mighty in size. If someone told me later that it was the handiwork of immortal elves, or the proud sons of Atlantis, I would have been less surprised. Of course, it was made by Englishmen, who probably have more than a touch of the blood of magical races in them. How many a sailor out of Bristol brought back a mermaid as his wife, whose fishtail dropped off, replaced by legs when the church bells rang on her wedding day?

Since the gods destroy the memories of men, we can be certain of no answer.

And do not tell me the sea people don't lust for their air-breathing cousins ashore! I came so narrowly close to being Mrs. Grendel Glum I nearly choked.

2.

Our suite was gigantic, at least five hundred square feet. Was that normal for cabins, or did other people have smaller ones? It was done all in a tan-and-gold color scheme, with two marble bathrooms and a salon separate from the two bedrooms. There was a staircase. We had our own staircase in the suite.

Aboard ship, there were at least three restaurants, a bar and grill, a discotheque, the most enormous swimming pool I had ever seen occupying deck after deck. My mind boggled at the idea of carrying, aboard a ship, a body of water large enough to row a boat across.

And there was a beautiful, beautiful gymnasium. The spa occupied at least a third of the deck, and I would estimate the deck area to be at least a thousand feet stem-to-stern and one hundred feet wide.

The vessel carried its own row of shops, and not just any shops. There was a Harrods on the promenade deck.

A library. Did I mention that the floating palace had its own library? A theater. Both a film theater and a Broadway show production, as if we had already arrived in New York, and were carrying part of that metropolis with us.

There was a statue made of gold in the middle of the restaurant dining room.

There was a series of lectures being given by authors. I attended one, but it was strange to think of an author being alive, and not being Greek or Latin. The author talked about things I did not understand, and the other people in the audience laughed at his witty comments, which made no sense to me. I assume they all knew about things, famous people or events, I had not been told about.

There was a parking garage for people who wanted to carry their cars across the Atlantic. I counted at least fifteen elevators, for people who did not want to walk up and down the ten decks. This vessel was taller than the Great Hall on the estate, taller than the church steeple in Abertwyi, taller than any building I had ever seen.

And there was television! There was no one to stop you from watching it if you went over the one-hour-a-week limit. There were over one hundred channels. The television in the room had a little box you could hold in your hand and make it change channels and control the volume. Victor could lie on his bed, and did not need to hold the little box in his hand to switch channels; he could emit the signals from his nervous system.

There was another television, just as large, with another little box, in our room. There was a telephone, so Vanity or I could telephone to the boys in the other bedroom, if we did not feel like shouting across the suite.

I had read many plays in school, but I had never actually seen a play until the night Vanity and I went down to watch the show. There was dancing and music along with it, and the people sang to each other; I did not know whether that was normal for plays or not.

Victor said our rate of speed was twenty-five knots. There was no chop, no sensation of motion, even when the seas got rough. You could lie on your bed, your enormous, enormous bed, and look out the porthole in the morning, and watch the rising sun come up red and gold over the sea, and watch the restless waves flow by, minute by minute and hour by hour, always changing, never changing.

And as far as the eye could see, there were no obstructions, no obstacles, no one to block us or hem us in. The horizon was so far away, so very far away.

I was in love with that horizon, and I never tired of looking at it.

3.

To get from the Argent Nautilus to the motorboat, Victor carried Quentin, who said his "friends" were made nervous by the sea, Mid would not come to his call. I carried Vanity piggy-back, because I could manifest my wings without touching her, even though she was occupying what seemed to be the same space.

Vanity then closed her eyes and napped (or something) and told the silvery ship to go circle Antarctica. I waved good-bye as the ship sped away, swift as a seabird skimming the waves.

We had a while to wait while the rescuing cruise ship traveled from the horizon to our position, and I filled up the time talking. I did almost all the talking, because they wanted to hear the details of everything that had happened to me that I had not had a chance to tell them before. I had a million questions myself, but kept putting off asking them, thinking I would have time later.

As it turned out, I only had time for one question. "What happened to you all after Colin was flung by Miss Daw off the cliff? Where were you kept in jail for that week?"

Quentin said, "Boggin breathed on Colin as he was falling and floated him to the ground. Rather nice of the old fellow, actually, considering that Colin was a would-be axe murderer."

Victor said, "None of us were in jail for a week, or even a day. We all had our powers neutralized by Fell and Wren and Daw, and were subjected to one or more memory-blocking techniques."

"Why was I singled out?"

Victor: "They needed your keeper, Mr. Glum, and he was not available."

Quentin: "Glum wasn't exactly inspired to help Bog-gin. Other things on his mind, you know."

Vanity: "And later, he was in hospital, recovering from leg amputation."

I wanted to ask them how they discovered this, but by that time, a motor launch from the ship was coming abreast of us, and we had to wave and shout and look lost.

4.

Our first chance to be alone did not come until sunset. We said good-bye to Miguel, who was very kind to us and did us favors. He wore a white jacket, and I am not sure what you call a butler or waiter at sea.

A steward? A cabin boy? Whatever his rank, both he and everyone had been so very kind to us, it was hard to believe.

In fact, I did not believe it. As soon as Miguel was out the door (and I looked "past" the door to see that he was moving away down the plushly carpeted corridor), I put my back to the door, and turned accusingly to Quentin.

"You hypnotized them, didn't you? Captain Warwick and the others? The bursar."

Quentin, Victor, and Vanity had finished their initial inspections of the suite. Vanity had ooh'd and ahh'd over the luxury, hopping and clapping her hands, while Victor had probed the walls with rays, looking for electronic bugs. Now they were all seated in an impromptu picnic in the middle of the carpet, pulling open the savory packages Miguel had brought us from the galley. There was food of a kind I had not seen before, with meat or fish salad rolled up into a flat unleavened bread. At least, I think it was bread.

Vanity had already dropped crumbs on the carpet, crumbs someone else (not us!) was going to clean up.

Victor was inspecting a bottle of soda pop, a brand he had not seen before, something with an Italian label in a green glass bottle.

Quentin was also seated cross-legged on the carpet. He carefully brought his hands out from beneath his voluminous cloak, and twisted them in midair. One moment, his hands were empty; the next, he had the ring of Gyges in one hand and an exasperated-looking eagle in the other. The eagle was no longer seeping any blood. As far as I could tell from a one-glance inspection, he seemed entirely recovered from wounds which should have killed him nine times over.

The eagle hopped from Quentin's hands and drove his beak into a sandwich, which was lying on a napkin on the floor.

Quentin looked up. "It wasn't me. I don't have that art. I think chapter seven might tell me about the vapors and humors affecting the intellectual and passionate psyches, but even that would only influence moods, not control minds."

I said, "Well, someone did something. Why wouldn't they just radio for a coast guard or something? Or call back to England and tell Boggin?"

Vanity said, "There are a lot of people in England. I don't think they all know each other's names yet.

Maybe after Christmas. Hey! Try these potato things. They have some sort of spicy stuff baked into them."

Quentin said, "We did pay a great deal of money for a cabin that otherwise he had not rented out for this crossing. Besides, isn't it a law of the sea that one must rescue stranded blondes and redheads?"

Vanity said, "They would have been quicker to pick us up if Amelia and I had been in bathing suits, like I suggested."

I sat down and tried the potato things. They really were quite good.

Victor said, "I did it. I used a cryptognostic technique on the captain. Every time his nervous tension levels started to trigger a glandular reaction, I interrupted the stimulus cycle in his hypothalamus.

Whenever one of us spoke, or he looked closely at us, I lightly stimulated the pleasure center of the brain. I did not have long enough to establish a true operant conditioning cycle, but apparently it was enough to influence his judgment in our favor."

I was upset by this news. "That's terrible! You can't go around tinkering with people's inner thoughts that way! What makes you any different than Corus, the brain-eraser? Or Dr. Fell?!"

Victor said in a dismissive tone, "The process would not affect the judgment of people who did not make decisions on an emotional basis."

I said hotly, "I think we need to discuss how we are going to use our powers, and whether normal people should be off-limits!"

"Fine," said Victor, taking a bite of the wrapped-up food roll-thing. (Maybe it was a Mexican food?) He chewed and swallowed, and said, "Let us add it to the agenda right after point five, which I believe is tabled until we restore Colin. Restoring Colin is the topic that has the floor at the moment. Any theories as to why Quentin's true-shape charm is not working? Amelia… ? Anyone… ?"

Vanity said, "Colin is not a witch flying on a rafter. Don't look at me like that! That was in the poem he said."

Quentin said, half to himself, "That little poem' is the words of the High One."

"Besides, the little poem Quentin said is meant to prevent witches from returning to their day-shapes, isn't it?"

Quentin just sighed, and said to Victor, "I am sure that someone versed in the true science could restore Colin swiftly. I am an apprentice without a master, working from a book."

Victor said, "Do you have anything else you could try?"

Quentin sighed, and looked at the cabin ceiling for a moment. "I could ask Marbas, who is a great president, and governs thirty-six legions of spirits, and who also can change men into other shapes—but that demonstration would require that I accomplish the figure of memory first, which I can only do on the new moon…

"There are a number of basic steps, amulets, and phylacteries I should have been using since long ago, and certain consecrations I ought to do before attempting anything more. Like you, I don't have some basic tools my book talks about. I've been using a butter knife for my athame. I do not have any sort of athanor or any way to make one. It is all going to take time I do not think we have.

"And if I did something wrong, as Vanity says I did, I might have trapped Colin in that shape by mistake."

Vanity said, "You said chapter two had the bestiary in it."

"It was chapter three. Chapter two is the celestial hierarchy…"

"Whatever! You know the true names of the lord of eagles, and the true name of Colin, so why can't you just zap him?"

"Well, watch…" Quentin put out his hand. We had not yet unpacked, so all the Paris clothes boxes and scuba gear and stuff was simply lying piled on the divan. The white birch wand jumped across the room from the pile into Quentin's hand.

He touched the wand to the bird first with one end, then with the other. 'Ter! Remove this false shape from one who is not your son. Phobetor! Return to your own human shape, without hurt or pain, and stand before us. I charge and compel you in the name of the Third of Choirs: Eliphamasai, Gelomiros, Gedobonai, Saranana, and Elomnia!"

Vanity looked at the bird curiously. "Was something supposed to happen?"

"There is a tiling called the Almadel I am supposed to make, but I haven't gotten the chance yet. A square of wax written with holy names and bearing the Seal of Solomon. So, I guess I am not doing it right. But even without that, if there was a curse keeping him in this shape, I should have just revoked it."

Quentin put his white stick down beside him and reached into the food again. "Hey! This is soup in this container. Smells wonderful. Did they give us spoons? Oh, and before I forget…"

He tossed the ring of Gyges across to me. I caught it, but I said, "Don't give it to me! I am the only one here who doesn't need it. I can step half an inch into four-space, so that photons slide past me without touching. I can do better than invisibility."

Victor was pouring ketchup on some potato things, which (in my opinion) defeated the whole purpose of having them baked with spices. "Not me," he said, "I might demagnetize it by mistake. I think all that thing really does is interfere with the visual centers of the brain, anyway."

I tossed it to Vanity, who caught it. "What!" she said. "Am I the cripple in the group or something, the only person not from Chaos, so I need to be able to turn invisible? It is obvious that Colin has to get this ring, and for the same reason Grendel wanted it. If Colin wears it, he can stop Miss Daw, but Mrs. Wren cannot stop him. If Grendel is dead, they can't mount an effective attack on us. Amelia is now our trump card. No one can neutralize her. She neutralizes Dr. Fell, and with Fell out of the way, Quentin can blast them with magic."

Quentin murmured, "Not exactly 'blast.' I can tell them the true name of the first Salmon."

I said, "Maybe I was wrong about who stops whom. If someone other than Quentin tried to unstick Colin…"

Victor said, "You are not wrong, Amelia. Quentin, show her the diagram."

Quentin said, "I cannot believe they did not give us spoons. Does anyone mind if I just drink this straight out of the container? I mean, if no one else wants any…"

Victor said, "Quentin, the diagram, if you please."

"Oh, sorry. Here." And he took his grimoire out from an inner pocket of his long cloak, waved his hand over it in a mystic gesture, while unlocking it with his other hand (I saw him do it), and opened it to the frontispiece.

"There it is, right in the beginning," Quentin said. "Your table of oppositions. The four houses of Chaos and their relationship to each other."

I saw a diamond, whose opposite corners were connected by the arms of a cross. There were heraldic signs surrounding each corner, and writing along the lines in some sort of crooked, cursive script. The script did not actually change when I was looking at it, but I kept getting the strange feeling that it just had changed.

I said, "I cannot read the faerie letters."

Quentin said, "Don't worry about that. It correlates the houses with the four elements, the four seasons, and so on. You can still look at the pictures. The apple blossom symbol at the top is your people. The pomegranate at the bottom is mine. The poppy flower to the left is Colin, and the mistletoe to the right is Victor's group, the Telchine. Here is what is interesting. The horizontal line connecting poppy to mistletoe, marked with a white lily, represents the Phaeacians; the vertical line connecting pomegranate to apple blossom, marked with a red rose, represents the Olympians, although you can see a thyme leaf where the Olympians touch you, and a sage herb where it rests on me…"

All these flowers were confusing me. Apple blossom? Why was I an apple blossom?

I interrupted, "So what is the deal with all this? What's it mean?"

Quentin said, "We think it means your table of opposition was a correct theory, and that you guessed right about the two non-Chaotic powers. This chart implies that the Olympian power is a mean between multidimensionalism and the True Art, your paradigm and mine. A second implication is that the Phaeacian power is a mean between or combination of materialism and mysticism, Victor and Colin."

Vanity said, "It was Miss Daw and Mrs. Wren who were tending me when I had pneumonia. The so-called pneumonia."

Victor said, "Which means we need Colin to fix Vanity."

Vanity said, "Maybe Colin is stuck because he still wants to be stuck. I mean, did he really enjoy himself when he was a boy? Sometimes, I do not think he was very happy. It's hard on a fellow who is stupider than everyone around him."

Quentin frowned at her, his face dark, and real anger in his eye. "Don't say such things again. You were brought up better than that!"

Vanity said, "Why are you standing up for him? You were the one he always picked on!"

Quentin said, "Colin? He never picked on me. Where do you get these ideas? I won't have you speaking such ill of him, especially as you are the one he is going to save, once we get him back. Don't let such words pass your lips again!"

5.

The scene of mild-mannered Quentin browbeating the bubbly Vanity over what was obviously just a light-hearted joke made me uncomfortable. (Besides, Colin did pick on Quentin, all the time. How could Quentin not see it?) I stood up. "Listen—I am going to go to my room and change out of these Grendel things. I cannot believe I have been wearing them all day. You guys keep talking. Figure something out."

I gathered an armful of dress boxes and the things I wanted to put on.

Vanity leaped to her feet, all smiles. "I have the answer! I have an idea! I've got it!"

I had my hand on the door to my cabin, and I turned to see Vanity, the Colin eagle resting in her hands, come skipping after me. "Come on!" she said to me.

"What?" I said.

Bird in one hand, she urged me into the bedroom. She paused to stick her tongue out at the boys, and danced into the room, closing the door behind. The lights had a dimmer switch, and she turned them only to a dim, golden half-light. Everything was touched with soft shadows and rich textures in that light.

Vanity put the eagle on the headboard of the bed. 'This is such a good idea. I know it is going to work!"

I put the boxes and stuff on the foot of the bed, and started to unbutton the first of the two shirts I was wearing.

Vanity came dancing back, grinning, and put one arm around my waist. She turned and smiled at the eagle.

She said through her teeth, "You're not smiling!" This came out sounding like: lour nn't sn'lingk!

"I am entirely convinced you have lost your mind, Vanity," I said. "What are we doing, here, exactly?

And move your hand so I can take off this smelly shirt."

She skipped a step back, still grinning. "Okay! But do it more slowly! And look like you are enjoying yourself."

She started to unbutton the top buttons of her blouse, too, but she was swaying her hips and rolling her shoulders, as if dancing to music I could not hear. I wondered if she were under some sort of spell or hex cast by the enemy.

"Do—what? What are you going on about?"

But now her eyes fell upon the transparent misty top of the fairy dress I was wearing, which became visible as I shrugged off my second shirt.

Vanity said, "You are going too fast! And— Wow! What is that?"

I bent to push the two pairs of pants off my hips. They were so large and baggy that I thought I could just slip them off without unzippering them, once the belt was gone. It was a little tight, but I wiggled and slid them down my legs.

"Now, that was really good!" said Vanity. "But you should be the other way around…"

I straightened up and put my hands on my hips. Vanity had her shirt off and was standing there in just her skirt and stockings. The bra she had bought in Paris was a lacy black thing with the tiniest little red bow deep in her cleavage. I don't think I had ever seen black underwear before, not in real life, and the bra must have been a padded support bra, because her breasts looked even larger and perkier than normal in it. I thought it looked very pretty, though maybe peach would have gone better with her light complexion.

"Vanity, what the heck is going on?"

Vanity bent down, pouting seductively, and with little, teasing tugs, tugged her skirt off with a slow, very sensuous motion, and it clung for a moment to her hips and buttocks, and dropped gently to the floor.

She was now posed with one hand on her knee, one hand caressing her own hip, and the shining curve of her slip exposed to the soft, sepia-toned light.

Why was Vanity smiling over her shoulder at me? Why were her eyes half-lidded, as if she were aroused by some deep romantic passion?

We undressed in front of each other naked every single night of our lives. Why was she making such a big production number out of it tonight? But there was no mistaking her attitude and gestures. She was doing a striptease. She…

She was not smiling at me. She was smiling at the bird. At Colin.

I turned my head. The bird was staring at me with bright, bright yellow eyes.

Vanity pouted and said softly, "Are you sure you don't want to be a man, Colin? There are soooo many things men can enjoy that birds can't! We'll both give you a kiss if you turn back into a man…"

I was wearing a floating cloud of fairy vapor, which exposed my nipples. My pubic hair was visible as a faint bluish triangle, at which all the pearl strands running through the wasp-waisted corselette pointed.

The bodice of this dress was webbed with something like a fishnet body stocking, exposing every curve and making them curvier. This dress left nothing to the imagination, except where it hid just enough to make the imagination of an aroused man more aroused.

And I was standing in it, naked, worse than naked, in front of Colin mac FirBolg.

I shrieked and yanked up the skirt Vanity had discarded, trying to hold it over me, yanking it high to cover my top, yanking it low to cover my bottom, and probably not covering very much.

Victor's voice came from the other room: "Is everything all right in there?"

Vanity called out gaily, "Yes! We are all fine here! Just fine!" She reached over and pinched me.

"Ow!" I said. "Stop that!"

Vanity said, "You've got to help! Why aren't you helping?"

"This was your plan? To wiggle and strip in front of Colin mac FirBolg? The world's only walking bag of hormones, the guy who uses testosterone rather than neural fluid to convey charge across his brain cells?"

"You know how much he wants to fly. We have to offer him something he wants more. Something he can't get when he is a bird! You are the one who told me his powers are based on desire. So!" And she took the skirt out of my hands and tossed it on the bed. "Start acting desirable!"

I stood there, my mind a complete blank. "How do I do that?"

Vanity said, "I don't know. Dance around a bit. Flirt. Make eye contact."

I tried striking a few poses. I tried folding my arms behind my head and arching my back. I wiggled my bottom at the bird. I gave him my best smile. The eagle stared at me with his yellow eyes.

I put my arms down. "I feel silly."

Vanity said, "Just do what comes instinctively. Girls know what turns boys on!"

She leaned over the footboard, pouting and making kisses toward the eagle, drawing her elbows into her abdomen so as to squeeze her breasts dangerously close to popping out of her black bra.

Looking at her sidelong, I imitated the same pose. "Is this instinctive?"

She tilted her head to one shoulder, then to the other, pouting and batting her eyelashes. And she was straightening one leg and relaxing the other, and then reversed, so that her hips cocked from one side to the other, over and over, a little sort of dance rhythm. It did not look particularly sexy or unsexy, one way or the other. More like the kind of thing a person did on an exercise bike.

She answered me: "You should know instinct girl stuff instinctively!"

"Remember, I am actually a squid with wings. I don't think I have those instincts."

"Well, he's staring at you. Project sincerity. Look at him sort of sideways and lower your lashes. Hmm.

More sincerity. Tell him you want him to rip your clothes off."

"Colin, please rip my clothes off, if it's not too much trouble…"

"No! No! No! Tell him with your eyes!"

"What? Blink in Morse code?"

She straightened up and put her hands on her hips, and her eyes flashed and her nostrils flared. "Amelia!

You're being obstreperous! He's trapped that same way you were trapped by Grendel! He rescued you, even though he got hurt! You can at least try to rescue him!"

That comment struck home. Here was Colin, my comrade-in-arms, who had jumped on Boreas the Wind god with nothing but a stick in his hands, risking his life so that we could get away. And he lost his life, his human life, at least, his ability to think and reason.

And when he was left with nothing but the miserable life of a bird in the wild, he risked that, too, and let himself get mauled by a bear in order to save me. The first feat had been to save the group. The second had been just for me, Colin's personal gift to me. My freedom and my life were from him.

Vanity was saying with angry passion, "Think of Colin! What would he do if you were stuck? If he thought stripping half-nude and wiggling his fanny at you would save you, he'd do it!"

What's funny is, I thought she looked prettier when she was angry. That stuff she was doing before looked silly and fake to me. But, if she knew what she was doing…

"Okay! Okay!" I pouted. "Just tell me what to do. I'll do anything you say."

"Well… it's clear we have to pull out all the stops… hmm…" She slipped out of her slip, so she was only standing there in her garter belt and panties.

"Hey, is that a garter belt? Why didn't you get normal stockings?"

She held out her leg, showing off her stockings, and looking pleased. "I thought Quentin might like it. Feel the fabric. Look at how sheer!"

I caressed her upper thigh. "That's nice. I'm sure he'll like it. Pretty color, too. I wished you had bought some for me." For the moment, we had both forgotten about the Peeping Tom with feathers.

Vanity glanced at the eagle, and I saw her face light up. "Oh! I've got it! I've got an idea! Here! Kiss me!"

I leaned down and gave her a peck on the cheek.

"No, no, a real kiss!" i straightened up. "Vanity, I am not going to give you a kiss on the lips."

She rolled her eyes in angry exasperation, stood on tiptoe, and threw her arms around me, holding me tightly. "This will work! Guys think this stuff is kinky!"

"How do you know what stuff guys think is kinky?"

"Colin told me! Come on! You promised!"

Well, I had promised.

Vanity stood on tiptoe with her hands on my shoulders, her head tilted back, eyes closed.

Kissing a girl was odd. Her lips were cool, and I could taste a hint of the lip gloss she used. There was nothing particularly interesting about it.

Of course, maybe that was the way kisses were supposed to go; my only experience was Quentin trying to shut me up in midair, and Grendel giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

When I pulled my head back, Vanity looked up at me in surprise. "You don't close your eyes when you kiss."

I said crossly, "Quentin got to kiss me before Victor did, and now you. I'm kissing everyone I don't want to! Life stinks." And I turned my head to scowl at the bird. "Change back!" I snapped.

But he didn't Colin was being stubborn.

Then, to Vanity, I said, "Arrgh! He's faking. He could change back any time he wanted! He's probably watching and enjoying all this."

"We're getting close! I can feel it! Here! Try this!"

Vanity kept one hand on my shoulder and put her other arm around my waist She raised her left knee to the level of my hip, struck a pose, and said to the bird in a husky whisper: "Oh, Colin… ? Amelia and I have been lesbian lovers few years! In bed, at night, she forces me to pretend I'm you, and has me spank her bottom…! Turn back, and we'll show you… ?"

Exasperated, I shrugged her grip away. "Oh, stop it Spanking isn't kinky, or sexy, or anything. It just hurts and it's humiliating. Like getting your foot caught in a slamming door. Vanity, this is really not working. Let's get dressed."

Vanity said, "One last idea. And this one I know is going to work! Please? You did promise."

"Okay, what is it?"

"Here. Turn toward the door. Let me put my arms around you again…"

"Okay, fine. Now what?"

Vanity suddenly seized my wrists and pushed them behind my back, crossing them and extending them toward Colin. "Quick, Colin! Amelia wants you to tie her up! She's into that sort of thing!"

I threw my arms up, so that she stepped back, off-balance. "Oh! That's the last straw!" I said. My face felt hot. I was blushing with anger or embarrassment, or both. "What a terrible thing to say! You owe me a big…"

But Vanity's face was slack with shock; her eyes were round as saucers. I heard a noise behind me. A rustle. Something larger than a bird was on the bed.

Vanity screamed.

I turned. I don't know what I expected to see, a monster or something. It was Colin. He was standing on the same bed where we had thrown our clothes, so we could not exactly get to them. There he was, large as life. And naked as a jaybird.

And erect. I didn't know they could turn purple colored. Like a big, sort of, tree, I guess, coming out of a fuzzy black bush.

I screamed, too. It seemed the thing to do at the time. I suspect my brain had sprung a leak at the sight of a naked Colin.

We both ran out the door, shrieking with the shock of it, the unadulterated embarrassment.

Victor and Quentin had just got done leaping to their feet by the time we nigh-unto-naked girls came running into the room, jiggling, I am sure, and wiggling all sorts of exposed surfaces we normally keep covered.

Even Victor, the unflappable, looked flapped at that moment. Quentin had his mouth open as the two-girl train of unclad beauty drove toward him, and I could see he did not know whether to laugh or cry or just drool.

We hopped behind the boys. I got behind Victor, and Vanity was behind Quentin, which, in hindsight, was good, because had it been the other way around, my chin would have been on Quentin's head (making him feel not very protective) and Vanity would have been unable to see what happened next, with Victor's shoulder blades blocking the view.

Victor, his eyes on the door, put his hand back in that cliche protective male gesture to make sure your woman is behind you. Whether by accident or design, the hand touched my nude hip (or maybe there was a wisp of mist draped over it), and I could feel all my little goose flesh hairs stand up. His fingers were warm.

Quentin was having trouble swallowing. He, too, kept his eyes on the door, but Vanity was huddling much closer to him than I was to Victor, had her arms around his waist and chest, and her breasts were mashed up into his back. I don't know much about men, but I knew enough to know that every one of Quentin's nerve signals was concentrating on increasing the sensitivity and reception from that area of his upper back.

Victor said sharply, "What happened?"

Vanity could not talk. She had just realized (I could see it on her face) that she was standing in her panties and bra, with her risque French garter belt, silky stockings and high heels, in a position where, if either boy moved, they would see her. Again. She could not get back to her clothes without being put on display. Again.

So she was blushing. It was almost fun to watch, because her whole face glowed red, and her neck, and shoulders, and even the tops of her breasts. That is the price you pay for having such a clear complexion.

We girls with tans, at least during the summer, can hide shame better.

I said, "It worked as planned."

Colin, from the other room, called out, "Don't shoot me! It's me, Colin. Or maybe it's some horror from the pit who learned to impersonate Colin's voice."

Quentin asked (quite reasonably, I thought), "Shoot you with what?"

Colin shouted back: "Where the hell am I?"

Victor said, "You are in the Caledonia suite on deck four of the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II, one day out of Bristol, bound for New York. What happened in there? Why are the girls wearing costumes?"

"I think it is part of an important master plan. Send the naked girls back in, and I will investigate, and then report back. What happened to Boggin?"

Quentin shouted, "We don't know. What happened to you?"

"Ah! I put myself in a situation where I really, really wanted to fly. My thoughts became, how to put it—?

Focused. Very focused. You should try it some time. How long has it been?"

I said, 'Tell him it's been twenty years. It'll be funnier that way."

Colin shouted, "Is that Amelia? Nice dress, Amelia. I think your dressmaker just saved me from the doom of eternal birdhood. Thank you."

I was trying really, really hard to see the humor in this situation, but there are certain things that are just too embarrassing. I put my head down and pressed my closed eyes into the fabric of Victor's shoulder. I could feel hot tears beneath my lids.

Colin shouted, "And your breasts, of course. They saved me, too. I did not realize how large your aureoles were. I would like to thank your breasts more personally, later."

Colin appeared in the doorway. We all gawped at him. He was wearing Vanity's skirt, with the frilly top of one of my outfits from the dress box over him like a shirt. The top was too small for him to button.

He looked down at the clothes, and squinted.

Quentin said, "Colin, this will sound like an odd question, and I want you to think it over before answering. Why are you in drag?"

Colin was red-faced when he looked up. "Ah. Hum. I thought that the bird thing was so successful, you know. The key to my powers. If you just want something hard enough, right? So I thought I could turn this into my clothes, if I… you know… I really, really do not want you to be seeing me dressed this way… And I thought… well, I'd rather die than have my friends see me this way, so… and, there weren't any clothes in the drawers in there——-Whose room is this? Are we on a ship?"

Victor shrugged out of the long buff jacket he was wearing and, without turning his head, passed it over his shoulder to me. His chain mail glinted and gleamed in the light from the cabin fixtures.

Victor said, in the exact same tone of voice as before: "You are. in the Caledonia suite on deck four of the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth //, one day out of Bristol, bound for New York."

Colin said, "Nice room. Do you guys have any spare, um, boy clothes?"

I said from over Victor's shoulder, "We thought you were dead."

Vanity had recovered a little, and she dug her fingers into Quentin's ribs. "Hey! What about me! Get me something to wear."

Quentin said, "Well, I mean, you are wearing something."

She poked him again, and stamped her foot.

Colin craned his head to one side, trying to catch a glimpse of more of Vanity's bestockinged legs.

Quentin's normal "mine not yours" guy-instincts turned on, and he swirled the huge black cloak from his back and gathered up Vanity in it.

Quentin escorted Vanity past Colin back toward our room. Vanity said over her shoulder, "Colin, I got you some things. When we were in Paris. I bought you clothes."

"You went to Paris? Without me? And you thought I was dead? You thought I was dead so you went to Paris to buy me clothes, without me? You bought clothes for a guy you thought was dead, so you went to Paris?"

Vanity waved her hand toward some of our boxes on the couch. "Just because you were dead doesn't mean I wouldn't get you anything! What kind of person do you think I am?"

1.

I tried to get Victor to escort me back to my room, but he just pointed at that door and inclined his head slightly.

Once we were both back inside, I turned to Vanity angrily, intending to claw her eyes out for embarrassing me so thoroughly. Or at least give her a severe tongue-lashing. But at the same time, through the closed door, came Colin's voice, soft and young with wonder: "You mean… we're free … ?

We made it… ?"

Victor's voice, calm and measured: "Amelia arranged the escape and got us this money, passports, and once we were at sea, Vanity called her ship…"

Colin interrupted with a huge long howl of triumph, like something from an Old West movie: "

Yeeeeeaaaaa-haahhhh!"

All three boys started singing a Christmas carol, something full of sound and joy, peace on Earth, goodwill to men. It was a happy thing to hear, and it made me smile. And I admit being pleased with Victor's comment: Amelia arranged the escape.

After that, I did not have the heart to stay mad at Vanity.

2.

I was sure that the "wedding dress" from Grendel would be hexed, or impossible to take off, or something, so it came as a pleasant surprise that it just unlaced in the back and slipped off over my head.

I folded it carefully and packed it in tissue paper, and put it in one of the empty dress boxes.

Vanity donned her blouse and skirt and was back into the other room. At one point, I heard Colin's voice suddenly get louder: "You bought scuba gear? You thought I was dead, so you went to Paris without me and bought scuba gear? Without me? To Paris? So this scuba gear is… French?"

I selected a slim black dress with a necklace of pearls, black shoes with silver clasps. Once again, examining myself in the mirror, I was puzzled as to how much money we had spent, how much things cost, how much Vanity had bought.

I came back out into the salon; Colin, seated at ease on the divan, with his feet up on the chair facing him, was staring at the pamphlet that came with the room, which explained how the television worked, listed the ship's computer-use fees, gave the menus, and so on. He had the rebreather of the scuba unit in his mouth, which he puffed like a hookah.

He was wearing a white loose shirt with puffed sleeves gathered at the wrist, and cream-colored whipcord riding breeches that showed off the muscles in his legs. He looked like something between a flower child and a king's musketeer. I was surprised Vanity had not also bought him a hat with a plume.

Colin looked up when I entered, tried to wolf-whistle but could not, and tried to applaud, but could not, his mouth blocked by the rebreather, his hands by the menu.

Quentin was picking up some of the litter off our carpet from the impromptu picnic, and was staring in puzzlement at a clearly labeled box of spoons.

Vanity was sitting in a chair with her eyes half-closed; Victor had one hand on her wrist and was looking at his new watch, like a doctor taking her pulse.

Colin spat out his rebreather. It hissed at him. He said, "Don't you clean up pretty, Amelia? Nice dress."

Quentin glanced up from his spoon-frowning activity. "Yes. Very attractive, Amelia."

I said thank you and turned around with my arms out, giving them a little catwalk spin.

Colin said, "The other one was nice, too. The breast-exposer dress, I mean. Very Minoan."

I made that noise one tends to make in one's throat when Colin talks, a sort of half-gargle, half-sigh, as if one is preparing to spit out a bad taste. "Well! Enough about me! Let's see to item number two on our agenda. Vanity's memory. What do we do?" I said.

Colin emitted a short, high laugh, and put his re-breather back in, bending his head over the entertainment listings.

I gave Colin a sharp look. "What? What?"

Quentin answered. "It's done. We're done. Victor and Colin performed the operation while you were getting dressed. It didn't take long."

Victor looked up at me. "Colin impressed his view of Vanity onto her while I sent a cryptognostic probe into her long-term memory areas. The enemy could not seem to actually destroy the memories, but they misfiled them."

Colin spat the rebreather out again. "He's telling it wrong. Miss Daw increased the amount of time surrounding each memory, so it happened a million years ago, instead of last week. No wonder Freckle Fox couldn't remember anything! And Mrs. Wren cast an enchantment on her, so it seemed like a dream, and faded."

I was still blinking. "So… you already did it? It's over?"

Quentin said, "Our part is over. Vanity is on a spirit quest. She may be gone all night."

Missing something because I had been kidnapped, that was one thing. Missing something because I had paused to get dressed, that seemed downright rude, somehow.

I said, "Well? Are you going to tell me what happened? What did you do to her?"

Victor said, "There was almost nothing to do. Quentin's book, the chapter on the Ancient Art of Memory, described a method of approach. Vanity was subconsciously hypnotized into believing in

'magic,' and so she was the one actually suppressing her own memories, due to her faith in, Mrs. Wren's so-called spell. Once nerve paths were opened between her cortex and the hypnagogic areas of her brain, she became aware of the deception."

Colin said, "I will translate from Victor-babble into the common tongue of Westron. Miss Daw thrust a million years of time-energy into Vanity's brain. Once Vanity realized that time is an illusion, the million years went away. There was also some sort of spell, too, but Victor neutralized it with his magical anti-magic ray that magically pops out of his head and magically shoots out magic beams of blue magic."

Quentin said, "There is no such thing as magic. Victor does not believe in magic."

Colin said, "Victor does not believe in magic because that mind-set is one of the ingredients in the magic spell he uses to throw magic blue beams from his magic third eye. It's just an ingredient, like having eye of newt or toe of frog."

"It's not magic," insisted Quentin.

"Guess I was fooled by the big blue extra eyeball! Extra eyeball! Or didn't you notice he has an extra eyeball? Count them. I get at least to three before I get confused. Isn't that one more than you or me, and two more than Popeye the sailor? Check my math here."

Victor spoke without looking up from his watch: "Your dispute is terminological. Check your definitions."

3.

We all sat or stood, watching Vanity breathing. She breathed deeply and slowly. It did not look to me as if she were asleep.

I spent more than an hour trying to catch up Colin on some of the things he'd missed while he was a bird, including hordes upon hordes of information I had already told the others while we all were waiting in the motorboat.

He seemed disinterested after a while, and I let the conversation lag. Eventually things trailed into silence, and we sat watching Vanity. In, out. In, out. I assume the guys got more fun out of seeing her chest rise and fall than I did.

4.

Quentin looked up from his grimoire (where, I assume, he was only looking at the pictures) and he said to Victor, "I notice that three of the paradigms, Vanity's, Colin's, and Amelia's, do not seem intellectual in nature."

I stirred from my lethargy and said, " It is so intellectual in nature! What I do? It's geometry."

Quentin said to me, "How did you give the molecular engine living in my bloodstream free will?"

I blinked. "Um. I turned the moral energy strands back on themselves to form an infinitely recursive fractal loop. Once the awareness was self-reflexive, it was self-aware. See? That was a very intellectual-in-nature thing to do."

Quentin said, "And how did you know to do that? How were you able to 'turn' this moral energy?

Manipulate it?"

I said, "That's not really a fair question. An eyeball cannot see itself. No mind, by definition, can be aware of the subconscious foundation of its own thought; nor can any mind exist without such a foundation.

How can I de-scribe a process when I am part of that process, and the act of making up a description changes the process? I have limbs and organs and energy-manipulation systems in the fourth dimension.

They do things. I am not a biologist; I cannot tell you the mechanism."

Victor said, "I am a biologist. It takes a child months or years to learn to develop nerve paths to control a limb or organ. If you discovered a new hand grafted to you tomorrow, it would take you months or years to learn how to use it, because you would have to develop the nerve structures and reflexes one at a time, like a child."

I said, "So what are you saying?"

Victor said, "Those nerve paths must have been impressed upon you without your knowledge."

Quentin said, "Or you have always had them, you and every member of your race. Or maybe I should say, everyone who follows your metaphor of the universe." To Victor, he said, "Amelia is basically agnostic; she has theories about the limitations of human knowledge, she believes in the uncertainty principle. All knowledge is relative to a frame of reference. For her, 'Chaos' is that which by definition is unknown and unknowable. The fourth dimension is her metaphor for it."

I said, "It's not a metaphor. I've seen the fourth dimension."

Quentin spread his hands. "And I have seen aetheric spirits dancing in palest raiment by the light of the moon around a mushroom ring, and I've heard the harps the Four Living Beings play who ward the dancers sacred to Endymion. Where those light feet had passed, I drew up a residuum through a wand of willow-wood, into an alembic, and sealed those vapors there by virtue of the key of Solomon. Explain my experience."

I said, "I can't. What cannot be explained is a given, like a premise."

Victor said to Quentin, "Undeveloped sections of your nervous system were reacting to energies around you, and presenting childlike images to your cortex in response. A sufficiently detailed examination of the motions of the atoms in your brain would reveal what causes these images to arise."

Colin said, "Examinate, exschmaminate. You saw what you wanted to see, Big Q. It was magic."

Quentin raised his finger. "And that is my point! Amelia, Vanity, and Colin operate without conscious thought.."

I sat on the divan, murmuring, "I could have told you that about Colin years ago…"

"But what you and I do, Victor, requires specific knowledge and liberal arts. Natural sciences, knowledge of the correspondences between herb and constellation, phases of the moon, and their angelic governors and principles. And these molecules and atoms and void and what-not you believe in. Specific knowledge."

Victor said, "Is this comment leading to something?"

"Note the symmetry in the table of oppositions. The Phaeacians tie together you and Colin: one intellectual with one nonintellectual paradigm. The Olympians, likewise, with me and Amelia. But the Phaeacians, or at least Vanity, operates without conscious knowledge. She does not know how she creates secret passages. She does not even believe it is she herself doing it!"

"So?"

"So, assuming the symmetry is maintained throughout the whole table, the Olympians must operate by a specific science or body of law. Once we know the law, the specifics, we can stop them. A technology can be foundered on the rocks of detail, in a way that emanations from a nonintellectual force cannot be."

Colin stretched his arms and yawned. "I prefer the terms esprit de finesse and esprit de geometrie. I'll just wish our foes into oblivion! I really, really want that. By the way, has a busty cat burglar in skintight black with a whip shown up yet, or Seven Year Itch girl? Amelia and Vanity in their underwear don't count."

Quentin said, "According to the book, your power doesn't work that way."

Colin straightened up. "Since when? Amelia said…"

Quentin came across the salon from where he had been sitting and settled in the chair opposite me, saying, "Ah! Listening to Amelia in this one case was a mistake."

"Hey!" I said, feeling a little put out.

"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Amelia!" Quentin said. "But what is going on is— Ah, wait, I will show you. Colin! Ready for a question?"

Colin shrugged, looking curious. "Ask away."

"Do you understand what it is I do? My 'magic,' as you call it?"

"Sure. You wish for things to happen, and they do. You go through a lot of rigmarole with wands and chalk and candles and junk because it impresses the ladies. Or maybe you need it as a crutch."

"What could I do to do it better?"

"That's obvious, Big Q. If I were you, I'd throw all that mumbo-jumbo away and just do it by concentrating. I mean, it is obvious you already have the power, but you are wasting energy by putting power—putting belief— into things like wands."

Quentin grinned and turned toward me. "Did Colin give me good advice?"

I said, "I don't think he knows what it is you do. Not that I do, either…"

"He gave me the worst advice imaginable. Do you know what they call a practitioner of the Art without his wand?"

"What?"

"Unemployed." Quentin turned and hooked one arm back over the chair. "Just out of curiosity, Victor, what would your advice be?"

Victor said, "To do what?"

"Be better at what I do?"

"Define'better.'"

"Oh, come now. More able. You know what 'better' means."

Victor said, "You are the victim of a complex cryptog-nostic trick. A set of nerve paths has been instilled in you, each one of which creates a distinct reaction in your environment when they are triggered. Each nerve path runs through your hypothalamus and reticular formations, and affects and is affected by reaction-complexes from symbols embedded there. Your specific pseudo-science relates to discovering which symbols create which reactions. So, first advice: learn all the symbols and their correlated reactions."

Quentin said, "That is basically what's in the Oneiro-critia. What else?"

Victor said, "The things you call 'spirits' are electromagnetic entities of specific voltage, wavelength, and properties, who have been programmed to react to certain commands given in certain ways, gestures and so on. They are made of matter just as everything else is.

"Also, the molecular combinations which make up this world—Mulciber's world—have been impregnated with command and control codes to react to signals passed through the electromagnetic entities.

"Were I you, I would use your symbol codes to condition certain selected bundles of entities to react to a separate and simpler set of symbols, a set specific to your personal nerve structure, rather than taken from general mythological themes. This will make your commands simpler and more flexible, and prevent interference from other practitioners of your art."

Quentin looked considerably impressed. He turned to me. "And his advice? Was it good or bad?"

I spread my hands. "I can't tell. You'd have to try it and see."

"No, I do not have to try it. He just revealed, in his own quaint metaphor, of course, what it is each practitioner does when he becomes a master of the One True Art. All knowing is reflected in all other knowing. He just told me to find and construct my own mythology, my own special runes and tools, which expresses my personal relationship to the infinite, and to have a cadre of cacodemons and eudemons swear personal fealty to me."

I looked skeptical. "Victor, is that what you said?"

Victor looked up. His answer surprised me. "Yes. Of course, I said it in precise terms, and Quentin is speaking in the sloppy metaphors he uses to express himself , but his symbols were fact-to-fact associations."

Victor looked down again, but continued talking. "Also, Quentin, the other thing you should do is discover the programming language for the electromagnetic entities. Since they react to a word-and-gesture code, they must each have a listing of their codes embedded in each entity."

Quentin looked very impressed. "You refer to the Enochian language in which the Creator's Word spoke the universe into being?"

I snapped my fingers in front of Quentin's face. "Hey! Hello! You were going through this big long digression to tell me why Colin should not listen to me, when I told him how his powers work."

Quentin smiled. "Because you have no idea how his powers work, you told him all the wrong things, and, what's more, you will never understand how his powers work any more than Colin will understand mine, or I will understand Victor's. Our paradigms each have a blind spot. It influences our psychology."

I pointed at Colin. "So you tell me. How does Colin's power work? What can he do and can he not do?"

"He is a shaman, what Victor would call a psychic. He comes from an earlier tradition than mine, before the boundaries between man and angel were established."

I said to Colin, "Can you translate that from Quentin-speak into the common tongue of Westron?"

Quentin answered me. "Colin is psychic. Telekinesis, telepathy, mind-over-matter, metamorphosis."

Colin said, "I can't make things fly through the air like Victor can. I've tried."

"But you can metamorphosize objects at a distance. Turn a knot into something no one can untie, for example. Grendel could turn cold iron into a lightweight metal."

"And I can't read minds."

"Not when they are awake. You are Phobetor, Prince of Nightmares. I suspect those starlets in Hollywood went to sleep before they were influenced to write back to you."

Colin: "Okay. How's it work?"

Quentin: "Not by desire. Not by willpower."

Colin said, "But it is so by willpower! It worked! When I was falling from the sky, boy oh boy, did I desire to fly. And Amelia was—well, you are too young and innocent to know what she agreed to let me do to her. It turned me back into a man, though."

"Colin, I room with you. No one stays young and innocent who talks to you every night after lights out.

But you don't know what you are talking about. It's not desire. Or, I should say, it is not just desire."

I said, "Okay. So what is it?"

"It's inspiration."

I looked at Colin. "Translate. Inspiration is a type of desire, right? It's a driving passion from your subconscious mind."

Colin looked like an idea was forming in his head. He said, "I think Big Q is using the word literally.

Inspiration. Spirits come in."

Quentin nodded at Colin. "The reason why Amelia misidentified what she saw is that there is no category for this in her paradigm. To her, a genius is a man who is particularly brilliant. To me, a genius is a spirit who inspires a man to brilliance.

"Look at the cases we saw," Quentin continued. "Just now, Vanity and Amelia tried to inspire, ahem, manly feelings in you. I suspect what they actually did was summon a cupid into the room. Invisible lust energy, if you will. The energy passed through your soul, and it wanted you to turn into a man.

"Your soul acts like a conduit between the physical and the spiritual realm. Normally spirits cannot affect matter, not directly. But any spirit that passes into and through your soul, can, and does.

"Second case: falling. I remind you that you were riding the back of the master of the gods of the winds, with other wind gods coming to save him. Every spirit in the area was thinking about flying."

I said, "What about the time I tricked Grendel? When his desire to have me remember being kidnapped by him outweighed his desire to erase my memory, his attempt failed. Only Dr. Fell's medicine had any effect, and it did not affect me very much."

Quentin said, "I suspect it was your pity for Grendel, and not the lust you tried to instill in him, which drove away the spirits which otherwise would have given him power over you."

I said, "You are trying to interpret it in terms of good and bad. Pity is a finer emotion than lust, so it wins, is that your idea? But that is not the way psychological reactions work. The mind is a self-referencing infinitely regressive set of meanings; there are any number of possible relations within that set."

Colin said, "And what about my getting better? Amelia said Grendel kicked my ass, but here I am fit as a fiddle!" He raised his arms and tensed his muscles, our own private Charles Atlas.

Quentin said, "Good point. Third case: rapid healing. You tried to heal the splinters that struck you when Amelia blew up the safe. Nothing happened. Not ten minutes later, you are riding Boreas down to destruction, like Ahab clinging to Moby Dick. Actually, you were doing a little better than Ahab, but not by much.

"You had broken the wing of Boreas. Maybe there was some healing power in the area, being thrown on him by his friends to fix his wings. When you changed into a bird, your wings seemed to be healed first. I am thinking

Boreas' allies released essential potentates of Aesculapius into the area, what you would call healing energy."

I said, "No. That was something else. The rapid healing."

"What was it?" asked Quentin.

"I, um, I did that. I really, really did not want Colin to die when he was a bird, and I asked him to get better."

Quentin squinted at me. "That, by itself, would not do it. Just asking."

"I kind of, um, promised him that I would do something for him, if he got better. Would that summon a spirit? Build up this energy you say passes through his body?"

Quentin said, "I do not think he has a body. He is made of aery substance, not matter. That's why he can bridge the veil. What did you promise him?"

"I'd do him a favor…"

"What kind of favor?"

Colin was looking on with great interest. "You were not wearing that little white number during this promise-making, were you?"

I blenched. Actually, I had been wearing that dress, hadn't I? Or had Grendel stripped it off me by then?

"I think I was naked under a bearskin rug."

"Oh, this gets better." Colin smiled. "And your promise was, what, again, exactly… ?"

"Oh. I, um, don't feel like talking about this now. I need to go stick my finger down my throat or something right now." I jumped to my feet.

Colin said, "While you're up—is there anything to drink in this stateroom?"

I said, "There's an automatic bar thingie. I think it charges room service when you open the little door."

"Well, I'd ask you to get me some liquor—but…" He grinned at me wickedly. "I don't want it to count as this 'favor' you still owe me. We are talking about sexual favors, aren't we? Was Vanity telling the truth about you in there? You know…"

My face was turning red; I could feel the heat in my cheeks. "The part about she and I being lesbian lovers is true, of course. But I don't make her pretend to be you before the nightly spanking sessions. She pretends to be Quentin, I play you, and we act out what everyone knows you English schoolboys do at night in your dorm rooms!" And I stomped off toward the wet bar.

Colin said, "Actually, I'm Irish."

Quentin said softly, "What does she think we do at night? I mean, aside from listening to Victor tell you to shut up and go to bed."

"I don't know, loverboy. Maybe she noticed the missing hamsters."

"The missing what?"

"Never mind. I told you how to improve. According to your theory, you understand my power better than I do— hey—!"

"What?"

"I should understand Amelia better than she does. I mean, if this all goes in a circle around the diagram."

"Try doing what you do when you shut her powers off, but do it in reverse."

"What about me, Big Q, my guru, mojo macho master of the mystic arts, necromancer of naughty gnosticism?"

"What about you? You are a babbling dunderhead. The great Oz has spoken."

"Thank you, mystic master. Seriously, did you have a real idea how to improve my powers? I do not want to have to jump on Boggin's face every time I want to turn back into a bird."

"Amelia told you exactly the wrong thing to do. One hundred eighty degrees wrong. You have to learn to meditate, to relax, and to let the spiritual energy flow through you and inspire you. You must be like a crystal window. Your own thoughts and desires cloud the window. The real you, your oversoul, stands in the light beyond it."

This little bit of nonsense seemed to impress Colin deeply. He looked at Quentin with awe and wonder on his face. Since I had never seen that expression on Colin's face before, I assumed he was just suffering from a bit of upset stomach.

5.

Vanity was still sitting. She breathed more. Victor was still monitoring her pulse. He did not look bored. I do not think he has any circuits in his brain that do the "bored" function. Maybe he had them removed.

I drew up a chair and sat down. I had three bottles of beer in hand, which had come out of the automatic wet bar that came as part of the room. Colin looked interested, and I passed them around.

I called across the salon. "Victor? I couldn't find the fork screw. Whatever that thingie is called… bottle opener. Would you… ?"

Quentin said, "I think these twist off."

But it was too late. Victor, without looking up, waved his hand in our direction. Bottle caps sprang away from bottle necks with a loud noise and hovered in the air.

"Never tried this before," said Colin. He and Quentin clinked bottles, and both quaffed.

"Blech," said Colin. "It's gone bad."

Quentin was puckering and licking his lips. "Is it supposed to taste that way?"

I also took a sip, and put the beer in the same category as the coffee I had had earlier that day. Why do adults drink foul-tasting stuff? I said, "It's not champagne, that's for sure."

Colin said, "This is our first night of freedom. Let's get some champagne!"

"There's the phone," Quentin said, reaching up to pluck the three hovering bottle caps, one after another, from the air. "You just call, a guy named Miguel brings it. Oh, and you hide in the closet, because you're not supposed to be in here. We did not buy a ticket for you."

Colin said, "Oh, come on. Hide in the closet?"

"Aha!" I said. "You will be the master of hiding! I have a present for you, Colin! Victor? Where did Vanity put it? The ring?"

Victor plucked the ring out of Vanity's pocket and tossed it across the room to me.

I held it out to Colin. "This is for you," I said.

'This is all so sudden," he said, sniffing. "I—I don't know what to say. Of course I will many you, but you will have to give up other women…"

"No, you moron!"

"Shouldn't you be kneeling?"

I proffered the ring to Quentin. "You give it to him."

Quentin waved it away. "And run the risk of another round of English schoolboy jokes? Not me. No.

No, thank you."

I said in anger to Colin, "It's a magic ring!"

"Of course. I expected that. What's it do?"

"Turns you invisible!"

"I expected that. Of course. Does it inevitably corrupt the ring-bearer?"

Quentin said, "It's from Plato. It's a symbol of absolute power corrupting absolutely."

"And I am getting this fine, fine gift of corruption, why, again, exactly?"

Quentin said, "Dwarfs make less noise when they fall than giants. You know, less distance to the muck.

So when the word 'corruption' popped up in conversation, the name 'Colin' sprang up on our lips almost of its own accord!"

I said, "It will protect you from Miss Daw's magic. No more being flung off cliffs. You'll be the strongest person in our group. It won't really corrupt you."

"I'll be the strongest person in the group… ?"

"Yes," I said.

"And it won't corrupt me… ?"

"One never knows."

"Will I be able to command the Nibelungs with it?"

"Do you want it, or not?"

"You are sure about the 'no corruption' thing, right?"

"Do you want me to stuff this up your nose?"

"No. Give it here! It already seems very precious to me, yessss… Precioussss… Is anyone hungry for fisssssh or is it jusssst me?"

"Will you stop fooling around?"

"Ach! They hates us, my precious! Nasty elfish blondes!"

1.

Colin slipped the ring on his finger. "Well? Am I invisible yet? I want to know when I can start taking off my clothes."

Quentin said, "The clothes turn invisible, too."

"Yeah, but I get to walk around in the buff, with no one staring. I can pick my nose, scratch my bum, you know…"

"Um, well. In cold weather, you can put on clothes, and your socks will no longer need to match,"

Quentin said.

"What about things I pick up? What if I just lean against something, and pretend I am picking it up? If I turn a laser beam invisible, can I make it harmless? What about radio waves? Am I also stealthed to radar? Can I blind an enemy by making his retinas invisible?"

I looked impressed. Actually, I thought they were good questions. Smarter than I expected Colin to ask.

Maybe he had been hanging out with Victor more than I noticed.

Quentin said, "I would guess it relates to objects directly related to identifying you, such as clothing or footprints. When you turn the collet of the ring toward your hand, you see, that acts as a symbol of the hiding of your seal, or, in other words, your public or outer self."

"Ah! I see! It is all clear!… Except…"

"Except…"

"What the heck is a collet?"

"That thing there."

"Aha! On—! Off—! On—! Off—!" Colin twisted the ring on his finger, round and round. He vanished and reappeared, vanished and reappeared.

I noticed that something other than being permeable to photons must be creating the effect. Not only did his clothing vanish, but the seat cushion where he sat was not depressed, or did not look depressed, when he was unseen.

Colin flickered and reappeared. "I am trying to get it exactly halfway between turned in and turned out, to see if I can make only my left disappear. Here! Watch this." He vanished. "Tell me when you see the beer turn into urine. Ready?"

When he picked up the beer bottle, I was expecting to see a floating beer bottle, like in every version of the movie The Invisible Man I had ever seen. Instead, I saw the bottle, I knew it could not float by itself, saw the fingers, and traced the line of his arm back up to his face. His features were dark and clouded with shadows, as if light were avoiding him.

I stuck out my tongue and waved at him. "There is a limit on what you can do," I said. "If you attract attention, people can see through the illusion you're casting."

He looked at Quentin. "Can you see me, Quentin?"

Quentin had his face turned toward Colin's chair, but his eyes were unfocused, like a blind man's. "Not at the moment. I cannot see the beer bottle either. It was there a moment ago, but I do not remember seeing it fade out or wink out, or anything. I must have blinked just when you picked it up."

I said, "How many people do you think you could lift, Colin? I mean, if you can pick up a beer bottle, you can pick up Vanity. Maybe the whole group could vanish, if need be."

He said, "In my elephant form, or as a human?"

"Do you have an elephant form? When did you get an elephant form?"

Colin twisted the ring. A sort of pressure in my sinuses and eyes relaxed and faded. It was a small thing, and I was not aware of it until it went away, but something, some hypnotic compulsion, had been trying to get me to look away, or blink.

Colin said to Quentin, "Okay, great and powerful Oz, how do I get an elephant spirit to come and flow through my crystal window?"

"The true name of the father of elephants is Tantor."

"Great! What good does that do me? I am not a necromancer. I cannot summon up spirits by calling on their names."

Quentin said mildly, "Are you sure?"

"Okay!" Colin put the beer bottle aside and stood up, making a dramatic gesture with his hands,

"Sim-sala-bim! Size of… an eleph—"

" No!" Quentin and I shouted together. I jumped up and grabbed Colin's arm. "If you turn into an elephant in the cabin, you'll crush the deck up and smash everything! Are you crazy?"

Colin sat down again. "Doing a Quentin-type spell would not work for me, anyway. I do not believe in that stuff, so it wouldn't work."

Quentin said, "Actually, what I do works whether I believe in it or not."

Colin picked up the beer bottle and gestured with it: "Aha! You believe that, don't you? So it's true for you."

Quentin turned to me. "Amelia, help me out…"

I said, "Don't look at me! I believe every statement has truth-value only in relation to its frame of reference. An Englishman and a Chinaman pointing 'up' both point away from the center of the Earth, but if you extend the lines from their fingers indefinitely, they get farther and farther apart…"

"No, that wasn't the help I was asking for. Look at the ring of Gyges. What does the ring look like to you? I am curious as to how you see it."

I opened my higher senses and looked.

2.

The ring was the center of a webwork of morality strands, which extended throughout the entire nearby area of time-space. Major arms of the strands extended to some place I could not see with merely four-dimensional senses.

I "lifted" my hand out of Earth's continuum and plucked my hypersphere from where it rested in my wings, and I rotated it from circle to sphere, and then to four-sphere, and then to a five-sphere.

It grew immensely heavy in my hand as "hemispheres" of crystalline energy popped up into existence

"below" and "above" the (now flat-seeming) plane of hyperspace. It began issuing concentric pressure waves into the solid neutronium medium of five-space.

The range of echo response in five-space was very short, so I had to touch the ring with my other hand to be able to "sense" it. The sense was more like hearing than sight. Sort of.

Even though my hand was five-dimensional, and Colin's was only three-dimensional, he closed his fingers around my hand when I touched his ring. The fingers felt normal to me, not flat They were round, warm, strong. I could feel my sense perceptions beginning to slip, as if I were about to collapse back into three-space, but I used an energy-balancing technique to let the ring affect my lower vision centers. If I did not "look" at the impossible hand-clasp Colin had me in, the uncertainty wave would not collapse, and he would not collapse me out of my shape back into 3-D girldom.

Instead, I looked at the ring.

I could no longer see the morality webs—they were too thin and insubstantial to be seen, since they were merely made of flimsy four-dimensional material—but I could sense the extensional, relational, and existential measurements of the ring of Gyges.

Hie ring's extension degree was congruent with the light-cone it gave off, and it reached to all observers.

The relation degree was a moral one. Apparently the ring imposed an obligation onto any onlookers not to look at the wearer. Anyone who violated that prohibition was penalized by being forced to obey the imperative to look away; but, logically, also had to "look away" from the fact that he was being forced to look away. By definition, a person is always unaware of what he is unaware of The existence degree was metaphorical rather than literal. Although I could no longer see them, I now knew where those longer arms of the morality strands were leading. They were going into the place behind the walls of the tunnels Vanity created. They were going into the dream continuum. But whether they were reaching in the dreamlands surrounding Earth, or the dreamlands of some unknown sphere or region of matter-energy outside the star-filled universe of Earth, that I could not say.

I tried to explain this as best I could to the boys. My explanation seemed to confuse more than it illuminated. I said, "The ring may have a weak spot. Innocent eyes will not be deceived by it. A person who bears you no ill will, or a child perhaps. Someone without sin. Eye unclouded by hate."

"Oh, great!" said Colin. "Now I know what my friends think of me."

I folded up my sphere and pulled my hand back "down" into three dimensions.

3.

Colin held my hand for a moment longer than he should have. I tried to yank it "up" into the red or

"down" into the blue continuum. That would have worked on anyone else in the universe, but his fingers still seemed real and solid, no matter what.

I looked at him, "Let go of my hand, and I'll tell you the answer."

He said, "Tell me the answer, and I'll let go."

I said, "Music."

Both the boys looked at each other, saw their mutual confusion, and looked at me. Colin said, "Great.

Now tell me the question."

"How do you get Tantor to come? How do you attract spirits, since you are not a warlock, and cannot call them by ritual? Music."

"You mean, I play 'Elephant Walk' for elephants, and 'Flight of the Bumblebee' to turn into a bug, and maybe theme from 'Batman' to change into a bat…"

"I'm serious. Quentin, tell him to let go of my hand."

Quentin said, "Be nice, Colin, or I will have the girls do another striptease for you."

Colin said, "What is the downside of that, again, exactly?"

"They will have to do it to return you to human form," Quentin said darkly. "Remember, don't make promises you don't intend to keep. It makes you vulnerable to certain operations."

Quentin's stick flew from across the room and into Quentin's grasp.

Quentin reached the quivering wand toward Colin's hand, and the look on Quentin's face was so grim and so un-pitying, that even I said, "Quentin! Wait a minute! We can't just use our powers on each other—! Quentin! Stop! Stop!"

Quentin did not stop. The wand drew closer.

I shouted, "Victor, do something!"

Victor, across the room, did not look up. "Check your premises."

Quentin touched Colin on the knuckle with the wand. Quentin's lips did not move, but we heard a voice, a thin version of Quentin's voice, begin to mutter and chant: " Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres!

Arma virumque cano! Res ipsa loquitur.…"

Colin's nerve broke. He dropped my hand and jumped back as far as his chair would allow. "Keep off!

Keep off! Damn! He's gone mad with power!"

Quentin smiled and put his stick aside. "Yeah. Be careful, or I'll tell you the name of the Father of Salmons."

"Hey! I've got this ring! I am supposed to be immune to magic powers now!"

"Yes, Colin, but I have said before I do not do magic. I only seem to. It's a trick done with mirrors. Your ring cannot stop me from pulling a rabbit out of my hat."

"You… tricked me!"

"Ah, grasshopper! You have learned everything there is to know about magic! Now you shall be the master! Go, and rule the world in my name!"

"Don't single me out for your magic curses. I am not the only one! Amelia made some sort of promise to me, she's not saying. What about that promise?"

"I can tell her the name of the Father of Salmons, too. It's Gwion. Now listen to what she has to say."

" 'Music'… ?" Colin looked at me.

"The Lamia said it. Remember, Quentin?"

Quentin said, "I would say, there are some things you just don't forget, but I think I forgot that scene twice." He shivered and looked unhappy. "I remember."

"In the story you told us? The Lamia was complaining that right under everyone's noses, Boggin had been teaching us the paradigms we needed to control our powers. They taught me Einstein, and Newton to Victor, Aristotle to you, and to Colin…"

Quentin muttered, "'He taught music to the wild prince of Night and Dreams…'"

Colin said, "That doesn't make sense. Not only do I hate music, but Miss Daw is the music teacher, and she's the one who uses Amelia's paradigm. Daw is a four-dimensional squid with wings, right?"

"Actually, she looks like wheels within wheels with eyes on every rim," I said. "But, you are wrong about one thing. She used her music to stop me. That's not part of my paradigm. That's against my paradigm."

I turned to Quentin. "Could she be something, I don't know, sort of halfway between my position and Colin's?"

Colin said, "Glum did not use music."

Quentin said, "But he did use a bearskin to turn into a bear. That was his beast-shape-cloak, his bear-sark. He was doing a shamanistic thing. It also sounds like he had a fetish."

I rolled my eyes. "I'll say!"

"No, I mean a real fetish."

"It was a real fetish," I said.

Quentin gave up on me and turned to Colin. "It sounds like Grendel used some shaman props to work his art That would put Grendel halfway between you and me, sharing some of the properties of both."

Colin said, "Who else fits where? And why does everything have to be so complicated?"

I said, "If things were simple, everything would have been solved long ago."

Quentin said, "At a guess… ? And this is just a blind guess, I'd say the Hecatonchire are a cross between Victor's people and Amelia's. And who knows? I can't think of anything that could possibly fit between me and Victor. He and I have nothing in common, really. No overlap."

I said, "Maybe the Cyclopes. I've been assuming Dr. Fell is just like Victor, but maybe he actually does semi-magical stuff like potions and alchemy as well as molecular engineering. Some of the enemy called his stuff 'potions.' We don't have any evidence either way."

I leaned back in the divan, wondering if, all this time, Vanity had gotten the best catch out of the three.

Victor was unapproachable; Colin was crude. But Quentin…

I said, "When did you become the Answer Man, Quentin? Why do you know all these things all of a sudden?"

He picked up his gold-and-silver grimoire, and pointed to it. 'Warn et Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est.

Colin's Dad told me. He wrote this book. You know, this might have been the talisman meant for Colin, except… Happy birthday, Colin! More powers for you."

He took out the little brown envelope, on which was written in Boggin's crisp, wide-looped penmanship, Remember Next Time Not to Look,

"My talisman! You and Victor got instruction books on how to use your powers. I guess my instruction booklet can be written on the three-by-five card." Colin opened the envelope and took out something about the size of a playing card. The back was embossed with a design of a poppy blossom. "Oh, great,"

said Colin, looking terrifically unimpressed. "What's it supposed to mean?"

"I don't know what it means," said Quentin. "I don't know what is on the face of the card."

"What do you mean? Look" Colin held the card toward him facefirst.

Quentin flinched and put up a hand to block his vision. "No, no, no! Don't show me. We all played around with looking at that card. Thanks, but no thanks."

I said, "Why? Does something terrible happen when you look at the card?"

"Amelia, can you hear me now?" asked Colin.

I said, "Of course, why shouldn't I be able to hear you?"

Colin looked at Quentin and whistled. "Wow."

Quentin said, "Same thing happens to me and to Vanity. Victor is unaffected. That doesn't make any sense on our table of oppositions, because I should be able to trump your powers."

I said, "What's going on? Is there something on that card I can't look at?"

Colin said, "You want to see it again?"

"What do you mean 'again'?"

"Here, look."

"I am looking. Hold up the card." I turned my head. Quentin was now sitting on the divan beside me, and Colin was in the chair Quentin had been in.

"Good trick," I said to Quentin.

"Here is a better one," said Quentin, handing me a piece of paper.

On the piece of paper were words in a flowing, delicate handwriting: Picture shows a man standing in black robes, stars in robe, cup of sparks in hand. Crowned w/

crescent moon. Cup tilted, sparks fall into pool at feet. V. pretty woman kneels by pool. Crowned w/poppies. Crying. Tears fall in pool. Basket in pool. Baby in basket.

Behind them dark forest, tall tower of wh spiral. Unicorn horn?

Heraldic emblem top of card. Winged horse w/ head dragon, rampant, propre.

It was my handwriting.

I looked up. "What does it mean?"

Victor from the across the room said, "The card is an artifact from Quentin's paradigm, not from Colin's.

It interferes with the time-binding function of the cortex."

I said, "I assume I was not asleep… I wrote this?"

Quentin said, "The thing that happens when one wakes in the morning, to make one forget one's dreams, is in that card. It does not affect Colin, because he is entirely made of dream stuff. It does not affect Victor, because, well, not to sound mean about it, Victor is a robot. No offense meant, Victor."

Victor replied, "None taken, puny flesh-slug."

I said, "He's not really a robot."

Quentin said, "But I don't think he has any part of his being made of dream stuff. I mean, that sums up all the differences and similarities between our four paradigms, doesn't it? Colin is all spirit, and Victor is all matter. I am both, an immortal spirit trapped for a time in a mortal body made of clay. You… Gee, Amelia, I do not know about you. Both? Neither?"

I said, "It's actually pretty simple. I have a controlling monad which is the final-to-mechanical causality nexus for governing other lesser nexuses, each of which has its own meaning axis and the non-meaning axis. What you call matter is an extension of non-meaningful relationships. They are objective and devoid of self-awareness or purposeful behavior. The other axis informs meaningfillness. Meaningful things are subjective. The meaning axis forms the context, the frame of reference, in which the non-meaning axis operates. Perception presupposes a perceiver and a perceived. The final cause of our perceptions, the reason why we have them, is to render matter meaningful; the mechanical causes of perception are the sense-impressions which arise from matter."

Quentin turned to Colin. "Can you translate Amelia glossolalia into the Common Speech of Westron?"

"She thinks matter and spirit are two parts of one underlying flung, I think," Colin said.

"No," I said. "I think questions like that are, by their nature, unanswerable and ultimately unaskable. Life requires us to adopt dualism, at least in our actions. We move thoughts by thinking, we move matter with other bits of matter. Matter is what we call those filings we cannot control with our thought alone. If everything was matter, everything would be inanimate, and there would be no deliberate action. If everything were thought, everything would be omnipotent, perfectly tranquil, and at rest, for there would be no need for action.

"Logic says there must be one underlying reality, a nexus of cause and effect, by which final causes relate to mechanical causes. This is called a monad. It cannot be investigated by introspection alone, because it is not made of thought alone. It cannot be investigated by material science alone, because it is not made only of matter. Therefore, we cannot investigate it at all. We know it must be able to influence and be influenced by thought; we know it must be able to influence and be influenced by matter. That is all we can ever know about it."

Colin said, "I said that. I said what she just said. She thinks mind and body are part of one underlying thing. How come no one listens to me?"

Victor said, "Everything is inanimate, if by that you mean things that operate according to cause and effect. Free will is an epiphenomenon, a misjudgment impressed upon us and sustained by the actions of brain molecules in motion."

Colin said, "Are we going to do philosophy? Everything is animate. Cause and effect is illusionary. We are all omnipotent, perfectly tranquil, and at rest. Our real selves. But we are dreaming. In our omnipotency, one of us or all of us conceived the desire to meet a challenge equal to our strength. Since we could have everything we wanted, voila! One of the things we must have wanted was not to be able to have everything we wanted. We got trapped in the illusion. Be careful what you wish for."

Quentin said, "You folks know what I think. The pituitary gland is the point where the spirit is connected to the flesh."

Colin said, "Since it is my birthday—I am the one getting presents here—I officially ban all further philosophy until further notice. Amelia is going to start talking in equations if we don't cut this off.

"And we are never going to agree," Colin continued. "In fact, I think, if any two of us did agree, one of the two would lose all his powers. Okay? Instead of figuring out the nature of the universe, let's figure out the nature of this card. It is smaller than the universe, and should be simpler to figure out, and we are all bright guys with big brains, so what the hell does it do? Do I eat it? Rub it on my head? Sleep with it under my pillow? Burn it? It seems like pretty much of a dud, to me. I got gypped."

I said, with some surprise, "Colin? Didn't I tell you who is on that card when I was under its amnesia spell?"

Colin shook his head.

"Ohh…" I did not say it aloud, but I knew why my earlier (and now lost) version of me had not said anything. I wanted to see and remember his reaction when I told him.

"You know something about the card?"

I said, "I recognize the man. He is your father. That's Morpheus. The beautiful woman lowering the cradle into the water must be your mother. I don't know her name. The baby is you. This is your family.

This is what it looked like when your parents lost you. They were forced under threat of death to turn you over. That landscape in the background is your homeland, where you were supposed to grow up and be happy. That white spiral tower is your home."

Colin took out the card and stared deeply into it. A haunted, lost look came into his eyes. The look of a baby who lost his mother, a toddler whose parents never saw his first step, the child who spoke his first words to strangers, the youth who was robbed of his life and his loved ones, the man who was robbed of his true identity. And then the expression stiffened, and it became the look of the prince who was robbed of his kingdom, his fatherland, his people.

Tears came next.

The tears flowed down his stiff cheeks like water trickling over iron. He did not bother raising a hand to wipe them away. It was strange and horrible to look on Colin and see him as a man so grim and fell.

Now that I had done it, I was sorry I waited to tell him. I would have preferred that this scene be blotted from my memory after all.

"What's happened to you, Colin?" I said softly.

"I am still the same Colin," he said in a voice like ice. "But now I'm… inspired."

I did not want to ask him, Inspired with what?

He must have sensed the unspoken question, because he answered anyway. "I feel like I'm turning into your crystal window, Quentin. My real self is on the other side. He is fire and the firelight is shining through him. He has a question for the group. When is the enemy going to show up next?"

It was Vanity who spoke next: "They are going to try to kill us, the next group that finds us."

We all turned to look, some with surprise, some slowly. There she sat on the chair with her eyes open.

"How'd it go?" asked Quentin.

She said, "I had to travel back a million years to find my memories. Boggin hid them a long way away.

He let something slip in front of me, and I figured it out."

Victor said, 'Tell us."

"Boggin wants to find out which group sent the Lamia. So we are being left to dangle out here in the wide outside world until the Lamia feels safe to strike again. We have our powers now, so she is going to have to get someone very strong—in other words, her boss—to come kill us. Boggin wants to find out who that boss is. Boggin has some way of finding us again, or driving us back to him. We are not free. We were let go. We're bait."

1.

Vanity told us her tale.

She had been sitting in Boggin's office while the Headmaster, peering down at her from behind his huge desk, with jovial threats and smiling intimidations, was trying to get her to agree to promise not to attempt escape again. Vanity sat and nodded, agreeing to nothing, and saying, "Go on," each time he came to a full stop.

Mr. Sprat had called on the intercom, an urgent voice warning Boggin that he had a guest, who could neither be delayed nor denied.

Boggin had evidently not wanted Vanity to be seen by the guest. A switch in his desk had opened a panel behind the portrait of Odysseus.

Boggin took Vanity by the elbow and roughly hustled her in through the secret panel. In she went. The door slammed shut behind her and locked with a click.

Inside was a narrow room lit by an even narrower window. There was a cot, a washbasin, several locked cabinets, a locked rolltop desk.

If this was the inner sanctum of the Headmaster, he certainly did not coddle himself. The room was spartan. There was no fireplace, no heat; the cot was hard.

The only ornament in the room was a cabinet containing a miniature shrine. Behind the cabinet doors was a nine-inch-high statue of a stern and kingly figure on a throne, an eagle on his shoulder and a crooked lightning bolt made of brass in his marble hand. There was a cutting board and knife rack before it. The cutting board was bloodstained, and there were tiny bits of down and feather littering the surface.

Vanity was certain that an evil mastermind like Boggin must have an escape exit from his inner lair, but the only thing she found was a hidden hatch leading to a defunct dumbwaiter shaft. She stuck her head into the hatch. There was a skylight high above, and the shaft below fell sheer into darkness. No one without wings would be able to use this route.

She also was curious about the conversation she was not able to overhear, and wondered at the identity of the guest Mr. Sprat dared not to stop nor delay. Evil masterminds simply had to have methods of listening in on what happened in rooms adjacent to them. They had to! It was an article of faith with her.

Sure enough, when she looked for a peephole hidden in the panel behind the Odysseus portrait, there one was. There was a mechanism for listening, basically a bell with an earpiece, sort of a crude stethoscope.

2.

The visitor was standing. Boggin was kneeling on one knee before it, with his mortarboard in his hand, his long red braid of hair, normally hidden, now trailing down his back.

The visitor was thin and tall, like a leopard or a jaguar might look if standing on hind legs. Parts of its skin were made of bronze, or perhaps metal plates had been fused to its chest and back, metal scales along its upper arms and metal greaves on its lower legs. Because its neck was long and flexible, its head looked small. It had long hair like a woman, but its teeth were sharp like a lion's teeth. Its lips and cheeks were so plastic that it could flex its mouth from a tiny pink rosebud to a white grin whose corners touched the spot where, on a human, there were visible ears.

It wore a scarlet cloak. In one hand it gripped a short stabbing-spear with a metal head and a wooden shaft, a weighted spike at the butt end; in the opposite elbow it held a narrow-cheeked bronze helmet with a drooping red plume. As a gratuitous anachronism, the warrior-creature also carried a stub-nosed submachine gun of squat design at its hip, a bandolier of magazines looped over its shoulder.

Vanity did not hear the beginning of the conversation.

The creature was saying, "… Uranians have demonstrated that they could escape your confinement. A second escape is likely to be believed. The Lamia will no doubt make a second attempt at that time. Our military intelligence department estimates the chance of Lamia making a second attempt while the Uranians are still in custody to be a small one."

Boggin spoke in his normally hearty and self-interrupting fashion. He did not speak as a kneeling man should. "Ah… ! I am certain, my dear Centurion Infantophage (and a fine name you have chosen for yourself!), that the military intelligence department of the Laestrygonians—are you familiar with the word

'oxymoron'? No? I thought not—a department that enjoys such fame, or, one is tempted to say, such notoriety for the accuracy and timeliness of its predictions and warnings, well, such an august institution is one with which it is certainly, ah, futile, if not to say, pointless, to remonstrate."

The creature's eyes glittered with hate. "You are mocking us, air-blower?"

Boggin lowered his head, but his voice was still rich with good humor: "Oh, my dear Centurion Infantophage (a most excellent name, have I said how well it fits you?), certainly I would not wish to be understood by you if I were mocking you to your, ah, shall we call it a face? To your face. No, indeed. I hold the Laestrygonians in the greatest possible respect! The greatest, indeed, possible to grant to Laestrygonians. Your fine military intelligence department was charged, I believe, with the duty of bodyguarding the Lord Terminus, was it not? During the battle of Phlegra. The late Lord Terminus, I should say. The late, departed, once-alive but now-dead, which is to say, no-longer-alive, Lord Terminus. No doubt the sincere grief of your master, the Lord Mavors, at the departure of his father Lord Terminus was modified, if not ameliorated, by his joy on discovering (no doubt, to his complete surprise) that he stood to inherit the throne of heaven. The rulership of the entire sidereal universe must be a heavy burden."

"My master does not care for the throne. He assumes it as a matter of duty, no more and no less."

"What an unlucky day that was for him, then, when the Laestrygonians failed to protect his father from Typhon of Chaos! I am certain that the punishments visited upon the Laestrygonians by Lord Mavors when they fail at their duties are as great as the generous rewards he heaps upon them when they succeed!"

"Lord Mavors is harsh to those who fail him, but just. He is a good leader."

"And may I also take this opportunity to congratulate you and your department for its recent elevation to the status of the Praetorians? The halls and palaces that you now occupy on the lower slopes of Olympos are indeed splendid, as well I know, since I and my brethren inhabited a very similar station of rank under the rulership of Lord Terminus."

"I do not see how that comment is relevant to this conversation."

"Of course not, Centurion. Of course you would not see. Forgive my digression. What in the world could I have been thinking?"

"You will arrange the release of the Uranians. Lord Mavors has laid a malediction upon whoever should kill one or more of them. The nature of Olympian curse allows the maledictator to become aware of opposition or resistance to the malediction…"

"Ah, indeed?" muttered Boggin. "I am grateful, certainly grateful for your instruction upon this obscure point. You will tell me more about the operation of the Olympian art of destiny-manipulation when you have opportunity, I hope, Laestrygonian."

"Enough! Why do you speak with such insolence?"

"Every teacher learns lessons from his own students, Centurion."

"You, are insubordinate."

"As the term is usually used, Centurion, in fact, I am not. I am not under the orders of Lord Mavors, nor does he have authority to command me.

"Indeed," continued Boggin in that same hearty tone, "Lord Mavors is asking me to go directly against the last orders I received—one might, without undue exaggeration, almost call it the dying wish—of Lord Terminus. 'Protect those infants!' Those were his last words to me, Centurion: 'Your life, and the life of Cosmos itself, is forfeit, if they are harmed.' Actually, his very last words to me were: 'We shall impart further instructions by Our next messenger."

"Well, that never eventuated, did it, my dear Centurion? His last messenger, Lord Trismegistus, had (so to speak) turned in his two weeks' notice, and was busy showing the Phaeacians where to go to ship the hulking mass of Lord Typhon of Chaos to the foot of Mount Olympos at the time, and Lady Iris was busy trying to run his errands for him.

"I do not recall receiving any message from Lord Terminus saying, 'Obey Mavors, he is Our royal heir,'

or anything like that. The present situation might be more, how shall I say, unambiguous, had a message of that nature been received by any party."

The Laestrygonian smiled, which was a truly alarming sight. (Vanity was reminded of a shark opening its mouth.) "Lord Mavors says this is the only method to arrange for the safety of the hostages. Until the traitor is identified and rooted out, they are not safe here, or anywhere. It will reduce rather than increase the danger. Lord Mavors is not contradicting your previous orders."

Boggin said, 'The traitor could be anyone, could he not?"

The Laestrygonian nodded his graceful head. "You are above suspicion, Boreas. You have had too ample an opportunity to kill the hostages in the past, if that were your scheme. But the traitor must be someone who wishes to break the present truce with Chaos."

Boggin might have been tired of kneeling. Or perhaps he felt there were some things that one must stand on one's feet to say.

He rose up, and said, still in a pleasant and good-natured voice, "Well, well, who could it be? If war broke out, to whom would everyone turn to lead us in war against our mutual foes? I do not think it would be the god of the toy-makers, would it? It is surprising how quiet fraternal discord becomes, when an enemy none of us can resist separately marches against us, burning planets as it comes."

The Laestrygonian's eyes glittered like the eyes of a cat in the dark, and its shark grin dwindled to an amazingly small pucker of disapproval.

"You suspect Lord Mavors of favoring war?"

"Well, they do say it is the quickest time to rise up through the ranks, wartime. Success in war carries many a general on the shoulders of clamoring crowds to Caesar's purple."

"And failure in war leads to bonds, stripes, imprisonment, crucifixion, and the death of one's baby sons and lady wives. Mavors knows we cannot prevail against the Chaoticists, divided as we are, if the foe makes a coordinated and intelligent attack. Even a victory would make the Cosmos suffer losses in men and territory we cannot spare. You are said to be quick-witted, lord of the snowy winds, a lover of intrigue: Does your crooked mind find no more likely candidate than Lord Mavors for the power that sent Lamia to attack young Eidotheia, child of the Gray Sisters?"

"You are, as the expression goes, too kind for belief, Centurion. Were I a real master of intrigue, I would not have the reputation for being a master of intrigue. As for who it is? The person I least suspect would be Lord Mul-ciber. He has a smooth pathway leading him to the purple; why should he shoot arrows into his own shoe?"

The Laestrygonian sneered, "You overestimate the chances of the god of toil and stench. Which one of us prefers to have the horseshoe-maker lead us in glorious war, rather than the horse-master?"

"Who prefers to have the master of creating be the master of creation, rather than the master of destroying? Not everyone savors the smell of burning villages, or prefers the clash of iron to the clink of gold."

The Laestrygonian made a dismissive gesture. "Let us agree the Lame God is beyond suspicion."

"As if our agreement mattered, my dear Centurion…"

"I do not bother suspecting the Unseen One. If he wished for the throne of heaven, he could take it by force of his terror. Even my master, Lord Mavors, admits that no one can stand against the Cold Lord of the House of Woe; every soldier slain on either side during the fray awakens on the next day, marching beneath the black and unadorned banners of the God of Eternal Torments."

"Let us, as they say, work down the list from oldest to youngest. Lord Pelagaeus is next in age after the Lord Who Wept But Once. Pelagaeus, or the Earthshaker, if I may so call His Lordship, has always opposed the rule of Lord Terminus, and always sought to increase his own kingdom. Remember the deluge of Deucalion?"

"He is a candidate. And yet one of his principal grievances against Lord Terminus was that the quarrelsome and short-lived humans were given dominion over the fertile and beautiful dry land, while the peaceful and long-lived nymphs, naiads, nereids, and sea elves were forced to live amid the muck and filth of the sea bottom, exposed on several borders to attacks from Pontus. Ever since the petrification of Phaeacia, however, Atlantis has grown in wealth, power, and prestige. Neptune's continent now covers an area equal in extent to all the lands of all the worlds; and all his peaceful sea folk enjoy pastures of surpassing splendor. But notice that it lies between Olympos and the likely attack routes from Pontus and Chaos beyond. Lord Pelagaeus would be the most to suffer, and the greatest to suffer, should the truce between Cosmos and Chaos fail."

"Ah… really… ? I suppose you are right. What a funny coincidence…"

"You are the one who recommended to Lord Terminus the grant of the fair continent of Atlantis to Lord Pelagaeus, and who suggested the position. Are you still dismayed at how little the intelligence branch of the Laestrygonian discovers? You can rely on us to remind you of things you have forgotten."

Boggin said, "Pelagaeus is still a suspect. Suppose the Chaoticists offered to let him keep the living sea and the island of Atlantis, if he would help them tear down the sky and sink the lands and mountains occupied by human beings into the brine? The offer would tempt him."

"He is not the only suspect. Of course, the Vine God would welcome war between Cosmos and Chaos; he is a creature of madness, drunkenness, revelry, disorder."

Boggin said, "And yet he also presides over public festivals and feasts, and soothes the weary toil of man with the refreshments and pleasures of the vine. Some say there is none who delights more in the happiness of mortal man aside from Dionysus. He is a strange fellow, but I would not head my list of warmongers with his name."

"He was one of the three who conspired with Chaos against Heaven."

"I did not say he was off the list. I just would not put him at the top of it."

"Who would you put?"

"That remains to be seen. On the one hand, Lord Trismegistus, the Swift God, the Father of Lies. He has no hope of gaming the purple by any peaceful means. He was the second of the Three."

"If he were not in Tartarus, I would suspect him. The fact that he is dead excuses him."

Boggin said, "Did you see his dead body with your own eyes, fingerprint it, check its retinal eye patterns, put your hands into its wounds?"

"Of course not. Lord Trismegistus fell into the Abyss, with the silver arrows of the Huntress sticking into him."

"Then do not count him dead. That could have been an actor, or a wax mannequin. Or the Huntress could have conspired with him, and shot him with blunt trick arrows into bladders full of pig's blood he had beneath his robe."

"Put him on the list then, if you fear the work of those who no longer exist." The Laestrygonian sneered again.

"No. I still put Trismegistus at the bottom of the list. He had concourse with Chaos before any other of the Triad; he knew the royal families in Chaos, he loved their people, and adopted their ways. They say he had a wife among them. Would he kill the children of his friends just to start a war where more of his friends would die? A war that, I should add, would put him no closer to the purple. Does he want to rule the wreckage of creation, once all created things are dead? It does not sound like him."

"Who else is on your list, then? So far the Vine God is the only suspect."

"Good Infantophage, you have not mentioned the third leg of the Triad. Dionysus and Trismegistus are but two. What of the Gray-Eyed Lady, the Wise One? What of the Lady Tritogenia?"

"She is a woman."

"Does the word 'Queen' or 'Empress' not exist in your limited vocabulary, my dear Centurion? Lady Athena Tritogenia would make a better ruler than your master. She loses battles less often."

"She is a virgin. How would she establish a dynasty? The Huntress is crippled in the same way. I suspect they are sterile, or lesbians. Why else would they don armor, and fight and hunt? Besides, if a woman could take the purple, why has not the Queen of Heaven taken the throne? Both Mulciber and Mavors would support the claim of the Queen Mother, Lady Hera."

"So are you putting all three ladies on the list of suspects, good Centurion?"

"No. The Huntress has no following worth mention; she slays Chaoticists when she finds them and skins them like beasts. She would not welcome war. The Gray-Eyed Lady I think is too wise to let war loose upon the universe, for any cause. She wins more often than my master because she fights like a woman, timidly, and only when she knows victory is with her. No son of Uranus would cooperate with Lady Hera Basilissa for any reason whatsoever. From the first moment of time, they had no greater foe than the Queen. Rule, Law, Good Order are her watchwords. Even Lord Terminus was wild and chaotic, compared to her."

Boggin smiled. "I see you share your master's good opinion of the Queen of Heaven."

"There would be neither grain nor roads nor laws without her. Do you dispute this?"

"I was one of the ones she sent to harass Aeneas, who, as far as I could see, had broken none of her precious rules. But no matter! The Queen and two virgins are not on the list. Do we need to discuss the Goddess of Households, or the Goddess of Love?"

"Lady Hestia is the eldest of all of them, older even than the Unseen One. What she did in the before-times, or what she learned from Rhea, no one knows. There is a power in her she keeps hidden.

My master Mavors respects her."

"And he shows his respect for the institution of marriage by getting together with the wife of his brother, no doubt to sing hymns to the Lady Hestia, while holding hands chastely."

"Do not mock the Lord Mavors!"

"Me? Why should I? When the very existence of Archer, the young Love God, advertises the virtue of Lord Mavors for all the world to see? What need have I to add to that mockery? I would plunge my manhood between the silky thighs of the Lady Cyprian if she wanted me to plug up the hole of loneliness she feels in her life, and I would never fear the consequences. Mock him? I envy him! Indeed, I will not put the Love Goddess on any list, or even speak ill of her in a whisper; she is the one who made me fall in love with Orithyia, and look at how that turned out. She wants her son on the throne, and she wants all wars to stop, forever, so everyone can get on with their mooning and sobbing and waiting and mating. I would suspect myself before I would suspect the doe-eyed Aphrodite. Of the women goddesses, who is left?"

"The Queen of Grain."

"Unimaginable."

"Agreed," said the Laestrygonian softly. "Even I (and I am as loyal as his own right hand is to Lord Mavors), I would embrace my own spear before I would raise a weapon against the Lady Mother Demeter. The only one left is the limp-wristed poet."

"I thought we were listing goddesses."

"We are."

"We are speaking of the Bright God, the one they call the Destroyer?"

"The Flaming Solar Faggot, I call him. His hand is on the harp-string these days, not the bow-string."

"You amaze me, Centurion, in the breadth, or shall I say, the depth, of your wisdom. It is like a hole without a bottom. You must have studied for years to learn the art of forgetting every lesson in history.

The Destroyer is the greatest god of us all, invincible in war, a master of all arts and sciences, a philosopher, learned in letters, a prophet who sees the secrets of the future___Do you recall that he shot one million arrows at the Telchine demon called Phython, when that monster was nigh to destroying all of the established Earth? Alone and without aid, the Destroyer fought him on the sea and in the air, burned him with arrows of fire, and broke his back over his shining knee. So great was that battle that some of those ar-rows are still in flight through the upper heavens. When they fall to Earth, they make a streak that men call falling stars, and they are held to be a sign of good luck."

"A million, you said? How many missed? In my company, we get a stroke of the rod for every arrow that misses the target."

"The Destroyer is not on my list at all. He does not want the throne; he does not want for there to be a throne at all, but prefers we had the demos vote, as they did in Athens."

"He is also not on my list. The boy-kisser does not have the balls it would take to conspire against my lord Mavors."

"Well, then, who is left?"

"The young Love God. The Archer. Remember? Our Emperor. The one the Three Queens assigned to rule over us now that Lord Terminus is gone."

"You mean Lord Eros, son of Mavors and Cyprian. I recall him well. We endured the rule of Love in Heaven for all of thirteen years, during which time he disbanded the army, emptied the treasury, trampled on all of our ancient rights and privileges, turned the tablets of the laws on their heads, so that the innocent were punished and the guilty were spared. They say the English who lived in this land, during their years of darkness, prayed to their god to spare them from the fury of the Norsemen. Were their god a real one, I would pray: 'Spare me, O Lord, from the Compassion of Reformers!'"

"You think the Archer would kill the hostages?"

Boggin said, "I do not know what Lord Eros is capable of. He may have been in the pay of Chaos all this while. If he had been setting out to do as much damage as possible to the strength and dignity of the Sovereignty of Heaven, I do not see how he could have done more. If he was not in the pay of Chaos, then I congratulate their wisdom: they saved money."

The Laestrygonian said, "You said you would not put the Vine God at the top of your list, but you have removed nearly everyone else from the list. That puts him at the top, does it not?"

"So it seems."

"We will assign watchers to keep eyes on the Vine God; your task is to arrange a likely-seeming escape for the Chaos pups you have here. Do you understand?"

"I think there is very little chance that I would misunderstand the situation to the degree and in the way that other people in this room might have done, my dear Centurion."

"When will the escape be carried out?"

"Oh, but my good Infantophage, such things require great delicacy! We do not want the children harmed, do we? That would defeat the purpose. I will keep you informed as events progress."

"Do not toy with the idea of disobeying the Lord Ma-vors."

"Oh, I would never toy with that idea, my dear Centurion. Not toy with it. Oh, no. I greet the orders (albeit, the word 'suggestions' comes to mind as one that may be more apt in that context) of the Lord Mavors with the most grave, and, shall I say, sober deliberation. I daresay I put as much thought into obeying his instructions as he put into formulating them, or, since any finite sum exceeds zero, I am tempted to say, more. He certainly knows how children should be treated! What a fine job he did raising the Lord Eros from a spoilt, immature, mewling baby to a spoilt, immature, mewling tyrant… well, to someone who was occupying, that is to say, taking up space on, the very throne of Heaven itself!

Mavors must stay awake nights thinking about what a fine job he did raising Lord Eros"

"Lord Mavors did not raise Lord Eros. The child was born a bastard out of wedlock. What in the world are you talking about?"

"Ahh… ? Hm… ? Well, perhaps I was thinking about someone else. I understand your orders. There may be delays in carrying them out——-We cannot be too careful in these matters, eh?"

The moment the Laestrygonian had gone, Boggin turned and smiled at the peephole, sucking through his teeth a great, hissing indrawn breath. A gale-force wind sucked the panel door open and pulled Vanity flopping headlong into the room.

Boggin seized her about the shoulders and drew her up. Her legs kicked, unable to touch the floor. "As one of the few people endowed (may I say blessed?) blessed with the power of the Phaeacians, I find it unduly, even absurdly, useful to be able to tell when people are spying on me, my little Miss Fair. My fair Miss Fair. No harm shall come to you, however, my pretty little sneak-mouse. But when you intrude your perky little nose into business of your elders, it is regrettable, and I do regret, that certain steps must be taken, to preserve your life and, indeed, the lives of all the other young women in the universe, women not so very attractive as yourself, of course. I will not ask you to forgive me—My! You do wiggle quite a bit when you struggle, don't you?—no, I will not ask, not because I do you no wrong—I fear it is a great, one is tempted to say, a calamitous wrong—but, rather because, in the future, I hope that, in the kindness of your heart, you will put this whole incident from your memory. To help you with this process, we will go inquire after our good Dr. Fell, perhaps with some help from our own dear Miss Daw and our own not-so-dear Mrs. Wren, if she is not stinking drunk today. Shall we?"

And he tucked her over his shoulder, Tarzan-carrying-Jane style, and walked out of the office with her.

3.

Because Vanity had just been stimulated in her memory by a molecular engine of Victor's, aided by a psychic energy by Colin, her memory of this event was crystal clear. She was able to report it word for word, in perfect detail.

She stood in the room, pacing back and forth, showing us the expression and mannerisms of Boggin and his thin guest. She did such a lifelike impersonation of Boggin's hemming and hawing that we all laughed, until Victor shushed us to hear the grim words Vanity was repeating.

Miguel arrived with the champagne about then, and Colin twisted his ring for the moments while the steward was in the room.

We passed around the shining and bubbling wine and drank toasts, led by Colin, who stood atop the table in the center of the cabin, one after another, to every class Colin had been behind in, every upcoming test he had been dreading.

We talked over Vanity's story for what seemed like a long time, though perhaps I was merely sleepy and thickheaded with champagne.

Victor believed that Boggin was cooperating with the Laestrygonian, and had arranged our escape, merely by picking certain coincidences and placing them in our future. Perhaps the Olympian power of destiny control allowed for this. Perhaps not.

I argued the other hand. If Vanity were accurate in her portrayal of Boggin's tone of voice, his supercilious expressions, and lilting sarcasm, it was clear to me that Boggin had no intention whatsoever to cooperate with Mavors. The Laestrygonian had expressly said that the Lamia would not attack us while we were still on the estate grounds; Boggin said his mission was to prevent us from being attacked.

All he had to do was continue to make one excuse after another to Mavors, saying, whenever he was asked, that the escape attempt was not quite ready yet. He could play such delays interminably. I thought we had escaped all on our own, and everyone but Victor seemed willing to believe me.

My main argument was this: If Boggin had helped us escape, he would have put some sort of tracking device on us.

Vanity said slowly, "But he did. He has one on you. Your promise to him acts as a consent to be found by him."

I put my hand toward her. We held hands. I asked, "Is he tracking me now?"

Vanity closed her eyes. For a moment, I thought perhaps the champagne had sent her to sleep, but then she stirred and said, "Maybe he is still in the hospital, or maybe he's not thinking of you. He's not aware of you. Not right now."

Victor handed Vanity the little box that controlled the television. He turned his back to her and asked her to point the little box at him. She did, giggling, and we all joked she was raising and lowering Victor's volume and so on.

He turned and came back. "Could I sense you when you were not sending a beam toward me?"

Vanity pouted. She said, "He's right. If they have a bug on us, or on our clothes, and it's not broadcasting at the moment, I would not sense that we were being watched. If they were tape-recording our conversations, and they hadn't gotten around to playing the tapes back yet, I do not think I would sense that either."

Victor said coldly, "We would be fools to assume, after a warning such as this—a warning which, by the way, we can assume Boreas could arrange fate to make us stumble upon—we would be fools to assume we are safe. The next attack is going to be lethal. We don't know when it will come, or where. We are like the farmers who lived on the slopes of Vesuvius: We know the eruption is coming. I suggest we stand watches tonight and that we do not go out of this cabin for the remainder of the voyage.

Furthermore…"

But the rest of us were not as worried as Victor. Colin, for example, had already nodded off; Quentin was yawning, and Vanity had put her head on his knee and had her eyes delicately closed, her soft lips parted, her own red tresses a thick pillow beneath her ear.

I leaned over and tugged Vanity's shoulder till she stood up, blinking. I said, "Okay, Victor. You boys stand watch over us helpless girls. If anyone comes into our bedroom, we'll both scream. How's that?"

Three days of sailing passed without incident. Surrounded by the luxuries and entertainment of what was certainly the finest ship afloat, we simply could not take Victor's worries seriously. We tried to keep watches at night, and the boys did not mind taking turns staying up late, watching the miraculous television.

There were two or three channels that had nothing but rock-and-roll, to which half-nude starlets jumped up and down to truly primitive jungle-drum music. Colin was fascinated, and spent hours absorbed in music television.

Quentin thought the act of casting his circle of silence might attract more attention than it deflected, and he asked us to rely on Vanity to tell us if the wind were listening to us. And yet he also seemed relaxed; he dreamt he read his book at night, and his book hinted that, over the sea, the gods of land had less authority, less power.

At Victor's insistence, we always traveled in pairs, or stayed within shouting distance. More or less. I mean, a person can really shout a long way, right? This was not really a burden, either; Vanity and I did not want to be alone when we explored the ship, and we sort of needed each other's protection to ward off the gallantries of passengers and crew, all of whom seemed old, so very old to me.

1.

It was our own fault. Vanity had bought us both bathing suits in Paris. Hers was a peach bikini the hue of her skin, that made her seem nude at five paces; mine was a black one-piece, but hardly demure, for it had lace panels down the sides, with a neckline that opened almost to the belly button. And it tied up the back and front with such a thorough web of laces that I am sure Grendel's opposite number among human bathing suit designers had drawn up the plans.

We went swimming the first day in a nearly empty pool. By the afternoon, the pool was crowded with onlookers and men and boys splashing near us and trying to show off. The handsome young lifeguard came by every few minutes to make sure I hadn't drowned. I also caused a sensation just by swimming laps. I do not know what I did wrong or did differently from anyone else, but if I could swim faster than a human being, or hold the pace longer, or hold my breath longer, it might have been obvious to them and not to me.

I jogged on the deck and played some games they had there; I visited the spa; I played racquetball with a handsome young man named Klaus, who owned his own business doing something with computers or telephones, or both, which he tried to explain to me while he was trying to get Vanity to go away so he could molest me.

I saw a movie in a real movie theater, and found out I could borrow movies on tape from the ship's library and watch them in the stateroom.

There was one, a black-and-white Western starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, about a man who has to save an ungrateful town from four bad guys coming to kill him. Everyone tries to talk him out of it, his friends, his newlywed wife, everyone. She leaves him. In the end, when he does away with the bandits, they don't even thank him. It made me cry. I don't remember the name of the film, but I hope it won an Academy Award for its year. Marshal Kane was the character's name. I told Vanity that this was the way I wanted to act: to do what was right without fear of failure, without expectation of reward. The wife came back, in the end, Grace Kelly's character.

We rang in the New Year that night. The ballroom was splendid with decorations. I found the images of Father Time with his scythe a bit sinister, though. We went dancing, both swing-time dancing and formal ballroom dancing. Victor is always fun to waltz with because he never loses the beat and never makes mistakes, but Colin was fun to waltz with, too, and he seemed almost polished and polite when he spoke.

Colin and I spun around the dance floor to the lilting strains of "The Blue Danube" by Strauss, and I said,

"Have you been replaced by a Colin-shaped robot duplicate?"

"What's the matter, Amelia?" He smiled down at me. His eyes were blue and warm.

"A whole hour has gone by, and you haven't used the word 'breast' or even 'nipple' once in the conversation. You said 'Please' earlier this evening. I heard it. It's like seeing a wild boar use a litter box.

Has someone domesticated you?"

He grinned his normal the-devil-may-care-but-Colin-does-not-care grin and said, "Well, Amy, being poked by Dr. Fell and sneered at by Boggin and ear-pulled by the porcelain Daw, and ruler-whipped by baggy Mrs. Wren gets to a fellow after a while. I was never the teacher's pet like you were, and I couldn't be the iceman like Victor. And I couldn't even shut up and keep my head down like Big Q.

Vanity could hypnotize the male teachers and staff with her industrial-strength, king-sized breasts, of course, or threaten to hose down rioters with milk from her nipples. What did I have? I could take the heat for you guys. So I took it."

"Took what?"

"You know. When you guys got in trouble, I would throw myself on the hand grenade for you. When you broke some small rule, I'd break some huge rule, and you'd get off with a little delicate slap on your little delicate wrist while I went into the hotbox."

"Hotbox" was Colin's word for solitary detention in the library, which, in summer, was quite hot.

'Then when I got out of the hotbox, you guys would be finishing up some game I was too late to get into, or you'd be playing tennis doubles and there was no room for me. If I didn't make a fuss, you guys ignored me. And if I did make a fuss, Amelia the Great Blond Valkyrie would kick my ass. That was back in the days when your arms were longer than mine."

"You must be from a parallel universe, Colin. None of it happened that way."

"You think I made trouble for myself because I like trouble? You think I enjoyed having Mr. Glum threaten me with an awl?"

"When did Mr. Glum ever threaten you with an awl?"

"The time he thought I stole his pornography magazines he had hidden in his tool shed."

"You did what?"

"Now you are doing it again, Amy. Instead of, 'Thank you, Colin, for deflecting trouble from me,' now you are trying to change the subject to Mr. Glum's pornography. Anyway, that is why. Every day before today, I've been under someone's boot Now the boot is gone. I'm a new man. Want to feel my new manhood, Amy-doll?

I said, "Don't call me Amy."

"Melly?"

"No."

"Melanomia."

"No."

"Melon breasts. Megamammary."

"You just turned back into the boar. The dance is over."

"The music is still playing!"

"The dance is over for you and me. Take me back to my chair."

He walked me back, frowning.

But then, at the chair, I turned and I kissed his cheek, and said, "Thank you, Colin, for deflecting trouble from me."

He said, "You're welcome. Oh, and, Amelia…"

He kissed me on the lips. Before I could decide whether to pull away or not, he just kissed me, just like that. He was certainly a better kisser than Quentin in midair, or Vanity. It was warm and nice, and I felt my limbs go soft, so he put his arms around me to hold me.

He pulled his head back.

"Damn you," I said. I had been trying to save at least one of my first few kisses for Victor.

He just grinned his little half-grin. "You are welcome, too. Thanks for breaking us out of Devil's Island."

"Let go of me."

He put me back on my feet. "About that favor you owe me… ?"

I looked at him. "Yes?"

"What did you promise exactly? And did it involve a can of chilled whipped cream, warm fudge, and a lot of licking?"

A girl can only take a finite amount of Colin at a time.

2.

There were more wonders aboard the finest ship afloat on the second day. One of the meals (breakfast or luncheon, I do not recall which) was served buffet style, so that I could eat what I chose, as much as I chose, and go back for seconds without asking anyone's leave. They had slabs of peach pie with ice cream for breakfast (or perhaps it was lunch). I ate my dessert before I ate my meal, and was certain that Caesar's concubines in all their pampered luxury did not know such a sheer decadence as that.

More swimming; more sporting; more time in the spa. I discovered the delight known as the Jacuzzi, which is a heated tub where warm, warm water bubbles and massages your limbs. I had been cold, so cold, for so long,

shivering in my dorm room at night, plunged in icy waters, naked in the snow, that I determined now that the goal and pinnacle of my life, indeed, my purpose on Earth, was to luxuriate in the Jacuzzi till the end of time. If Grendel had only had a Jacuzzi, I would have stayed with him. I know a girl should have her standards, true, but on fee other hand, in life, there seem to be certain temptations that a girl cannot resist Vanity finally saved me from my circle of admirers, oglers, and onlookers. She had picked a rather flattering bathing suit for me, hadn't she?

Dinner was a formal affair, and she and I wore our nicest dresses from Paris, and nice polite young men in long white coats saw to our every need and pleasure. They poured us wine when we asked, and we did not need to speak in any sort of pass-the-whathaveyou code.

Quentin still did not talk of any serious matters when the waiters were too near. He saw no reason to involve the human beings in our affairs. And if any Olympian had made it "fated" for men to be kept in ignorance of immortal matters, he might detect the event, even an unwitting one, which sought to undo his decree.

When the waiters were not near, Quentin said, "I spent today in the library. I tried to look myself up. I am sad to report that, according to what I found, Proteus had two sons and one daughter. Both sons were killed by Hercules in wrestling matches; the daughter was named Eidotheia. She is the one who betrayed her father's secrets and taught Menelaus how to capture him. Apparently I am a girl."

Colin looked up from his food. 'The mold of clay into which your soul was poured may have had a different shape back then. The poet says so."

Quentin said, "I beg your pardon… ? What poet?"

Colin surprised me (and, I think, surprised us all) by saying, "Milton. Book I. Lucifer marshals his forces on the fiery plain. The poet recites the names by which the Damned were known in times after, as pagan gods and goddesses. Some are male and some are female.

He says:

For Spirits, when they please

Can either sex assume, or both; so soft

And uncompounded is their essence pure

Not tied or manacled with joint or limb

Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones

Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose,

Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,

Can execute their airy purposes,

And works of love or enmity fulfil.

Vanity gaped in astonishment. "Is that Colin? Reciting poetry…?"

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You are the one who helped me study for my examination on that one, Freckle Fox. You know I knew it."

Vanity gaped in astonishment still greater: "Colin remembered something he crammed for a test?"

I said to Quentin, "I do not think you are Eidotheia. We have undone all the memory-erasing tricks done to us, but no memory of former lives has come back. I don't think there was anything to bring back. I think we were children when we were taken."

Vanity said, "But we overheard Lelaps also calling me a 'daughter of Alcinuous.'"

I said, "He was speaking in poetry at the time. He may have meant it the way Quentin called human beings the 'sons of Adam/ or Greeks are called the 'Helenes,' you see?"

Colin said, "I like the theory that Quentin was a girl better, personally. It explains why I had such trouble turning him into a man."

Vanity said, "Quiet! Or you will set off another round of English schoolboy comments."

Colin said, "Has anyone got a flaming fag to smoke? I'd like to put one between my lips and suck."

Quentin said, "If you like the girl theory, you'll love this. Victor is supposed to have flippers for hands and the head of a dog. That's what myth says the Telchines are."

Victor looked interested. "Anything else about the Telchines?"

"They forged the adamantine sickle with jagged teeth Saturn used to castrate his father Uranus."

Colin said, "I love old myths. So very graphic, you know? Just the thing for small impressionable children to hear."

Quentin said, "One myth says they reared Poseidon. They discovered iron and the art of working metals by fire, and were the first to cast bronze statues of the gods. When they slowly turned into vicious magicians, and took up the practice of pouring the water of the infernal river Styx mixed with sulfur upon animals and plants with the purpose of destroying them, the Telchines were cursed and scattered. Their city of Ialysus was destroyed by Zeus and flooded; another version says Poseidon, out of tender regard for the good they did to him once, despite their present crimes, took the city underwater, but the people were preserved as fishmen."

Colin said, "And how about you, robot-man? What have you been doing all day, Victor?"

Vanity said, "I saw him. He was napping."

Victor smiled, an event I no longer thought of as rare. "Not quite. I went up to their business call center here on ship. They have mechanisms for allowing computer uplinks through satellite systems to ashore-based stations. So that businessmen can send electronic mail, I suppose, or encrypted phone calls. I studied the wave-forms and the 'handshake' procedure, till I thought I could imitate it just with the neurocircuitry in my head."

Colin said, "Oh my God! Victor was surfing the Net! He was downloading porn! Go, Victor!"

Victor said, "Not quite. I did not have an account. I only had limited access. But there were still other channels of radio traffic being used by the satellites, and my signals were traveling faster than the pulses they use to talk to each other, so I was able to dither them and break in. I was listening in on military satellites talking to each other."

I said, "What do you mean, faster?"

"Their broadcasts were only moving at 186,000 miles per second. I simply added more velocity to my return signals."

I said, "But nothing moves faster than that."

"Of course it does. Light is only made of atoms, like everything else. Little hard pellets. Any object, no matter how fast, if you add speed, moves faster. I do not know why they all limited themselves to that one speed. It allowed me to intercept their lock-and-key signals, so I could hear what password they wanted me to give back before they could call down to their synchronous command center to get confirmation."

Colin saw I was about to start arguing physics, and he waved his hand to me to shush me up, saying to Victor, "You believed in your ability to break in more firmly than they believed in your ability to keep you out. What did you find out?"

"Branshead estate does not exist. I saw reconnaissance photographs, and examined electronic maps.

Everything is mapped on this planet, down to the meter. There is no village called Abertwyi. There is a town called Rhossily in about the position our village is supposed to be. But there are no huge burial mounds to the north, no tall hills to the west, no forest to the south. Arthur's Table is in a place called Tefn Mawr, which is about fifteen miles away. The highways are there, but in the wrong positions. There is an Oxwich Green, a Swansea, and a Bristol, however."

Colin looked very smug and leaned back in his seat, and said, "I am the only one who has a right not to be surprised by the news. Didn't I always say the Earth we were learning about was not the Earth on which the estate stood? And I knew that a village with a dumb name like Abertwyi was something made up by Boggin. And I bet he let Mr. Glum make up that dumb island called Worm's Head. That cannot be a real name."

Victor said, "Worm's Head is real."

Quentin said, "It is the skull of the dragon whose spine forms the land throughout the peninsula." Then he muttered to himself. "I wonder on what world I stood when I opened the old mound at midnight? Or what king he was, who rose up before me, pale and glimmering in the moon?"

3,

I made a new discovery on the third day; there was a place to rent something like a roller skate, but the wheels were lined up in a line, like the blade of an ice skate, and the whole affair was encased in this huge plastic boot with snaps and clasps going halfway up one's thigh. Helmets and elbow pads and knee pads and thick gloves completed the kit, so the skater looked like some crazed warrior who had thrown away his breastplate, but kept his gauntlets and greaves.

There were only certain places and times where one was supposed to skate. Being released from so many arbitrary rules in my life, and not being Colin, I obeyed the traffic laws and stayed on the track and certain areas of deck set aside for this sport.

It was my turn to buddy up with Victor that day. I provoked him into racing me on skates. I won the first lap, but he figured out an energy-conserving glide step to use, and he had more mass to throw into the sharp turns. Awkward at first, he mastered the skill with effortless grace, as he did every thing he put his mind to.

Afterwards, over lemonade, I brought up a topic that had been gnawing at me.

I began with an apology. He just looked puzzled. We sat at a small cafe table, which was set along a balcony overlooking the indoor swimming pool (or "the great lake" as it should have been called). Sharp echoes reflected from the roof. Below us, there were sedate old men and women moving with timid pleasure through the water.

Victor had a towel around his neck, and he glowed from the sweat of our skate-race. A thin shirt of skintight stuff showed off the sculpted planes of his shoulders and chest. He was muscled like a swimmer, built for streamlined endurance, not for bulk. Yellow sunlight slanted through polarized windows and gave his contours a hard look, as if he were a statue of cast gold, or fine copper, machine-lathed to a perfect shape and hand-polished.

I said, "I'll never question your leadership again. If it hadn't been for me—"

He said, "Is this about the thing on the dock? Glum's attack?"

"If we had all gotten in a circle like you said, he would not have been able to carry off both me and Vanity. If he had only gotten one of us, you could have stopped him. I saw him turn visible when you demagnetized the ring of Gyges…"

"I'd like to point out that you are merely speculating about might-have-beens. Were we in a circle with our backs to the spot where he smashed up through the boards. It might have gone better or worse if you had been closer; I don't see that your conclusion is at all clear."

"If we had all been in the boat as I said, he would have capsized us and maybe killed us all."

"Possibly. On the other hand, we don't know what his swimming speed was. Again, you are speculating.

Since the situation is unlikely to rise again, the speculation does not seem to be one to lead to a provable theory one way or the other. Is there some experiment you can think of that would settle the question as to whether things would have gone better or worse had we acted otherwise?"

"Quentin was right, and I should have listened to him! I should not have been arguing with the leader!"

"I am not sure, legally, I was the leader at that moment in time. We attempted to settle the question of leadership by vote, and came to a tie. As far as that goes, everything was done by proper Robert's rules.

My only criticism against you is that you resigned leadership before an unambiguous next leader was chosen." He looked thoughtful, saying, half to himself, "Although, since you had appointed me second-in-command previously, I do not know if resigning your commission would have elevated me to leader or would have acted as my resignation, as well…"

I broke in on his ruminations: "You are our leader! Our chief. Only you; you always have been. There was no ambiguity."

He smiled and sipped his lemonade. "Amelia, when we were young, you and I had to be the ones leading the others, just because we were older. We had the self-control they lacked; we knew things they didn't.

I don't think those conditions obtain anymore. If anyone, Quentin is the natural leader at this point; the information in his book is giving him insights the rest of us don't have. I have made several suggestions as to how to defend ourselves against the next attack, which we have reason to believe will be a lethal one.

Mostly, I have been ignored." His eyes twinkled, and he threw back his head to drain the sour and sweet dregs of the lemonade.

He stood, as if preparing to have us depart. I put my hand out and took his hand. It was still warm and sweat-touched by the exertion of skating.

I said, "Wait. There's something I want to ask you."

He looked down at me, his gaze level and patient.

"It's about—oh! Can't you sit down?"

"You wanted to ask me whether I can sit down?"

"Please sit."

He resumed his seat.

"Victor, I have an important question to ask you."

He looked attentive.

"I—I—"

"You…? You…?"

"It is about us."

"Define'us.'"

"'Us'means'us'!"

"The whole group, all five, or just you and me? English is ambiguous when it comes to inclusive versus exclusive first person plural."

I said crossly, "This would be easier if you would at least try to guess what I am about to say!"

He leaned back in his chair and regarded me with what I can only call a Boggin-like expression. "What wavelengths can your brain generate? If you have a way of broadcasting a signal I can pick up, it would be very useful to secure communications practice."

I sat in miserable silence for a few moments. "Well—"

I could not ask him. I groped for some different question to ask.

I finally said in the most lame and insincere tone that has ever come out of a girl's mouth, "I was wondering if you knew what Vanity and Quentin were keeping from us… ?"

"Of course," he said in a tone as bland and certain as could be. "It's obvious."

"What?"

He seemed a little surprised. "Quentin does not want to tell us that we ought not go home."

4.

I blinked. "Not… home… ?"

He favored me with that Victor-raising-an-eyebrow look I knew so well from my youth. "Back to Chaos. Myriagon. Ialysus. Cimmeria. Phaeacia. And wherever Quentin's people hail from. We ought not go back."

"Why can't we go back? We don't even know what's there. It's unexplored terrain!"

"I did not say we could not. Obviously, we could jump on Vanity's boat as soon as she can summon it here, and, if the Argent Nautilus functions as promised, and nothing stops us, we could be in those places within a day. I said we ought not, not if we want to preserve the human race and the organized universe from attack. Our enemies, even when talking among themselves (in a situation we have every reason to believe was not arranged for our ears) seemed honestly to think this was the most likely outcome of our escape back to Chaos. I think we cannot ignore that opinion without some clear proof that is it false."

"But what about seeing our parents? Our families?"

"Good question. The people whom the war would kill have parents and families, too. Now then, they are just mortal men, or, as Corus would say, 'cattle.' But since you seemed to think it inadvisable for me even to influence the captain's glands while he was thinking, I assume you do not share the view of Corus on this matter."

I said, "I certainly do not share Corns' view on the matter. How dare you think that of me?"

"Well, there is also the matter of the promise you and Quentin and Vanity made to the Head of Bran.

Quentin takes such promises very seriously; broken promises directly interfere with his abilities to manipulate his magnetic entities he calls 'spirits.' Need I say that, if the universe is destroyed, it is unlikely that the British Isles will be preserved? You at least would need to exact a promise from our relatives to spare England from general and universal destruction before we went home and triggered the general attack from Chaos."

I sat there, a sinking sensation in my stomach. I had been hoping to see my parents, whom I had never seen. Helion and Neaera. I am sure Quentin felt the same way: people who would understand us, for once; people who would be on our side, for once; people around whom we would be the normal ones.

Our people.

People who would be glad to see us.

Loved ones.

Colin did not even know the name of his mother. I don't think we knew the name of either of Victor's parents.

I said in an empty voice: "But—what else can we do… ? We cannot go back to the school."

Victor shook his head. "As long as we put a higher priority on freedom than on staying alive, no one can imprison us again."

He meant that we should kill ourselves rather than be captured again.

Sometimes I love how calmly he puts things. A "higher priority," he calls it.

5.

He continued, "Besides, I am not certain you have exhausted all the cases. We could remain at liberty on Earth. We could return to Chaos in disguise. We are alleged to be shape-changers, although I have not noticed Quentin or Colin practicing to see what new shapes they could form themselves into. We could hire actors and actresses to impersonate us, and have them go back to the school in our stead, so that the Chaoticists will continue to be reluctant to attack."

I said, "I don't know how likely any of those options are." Victor said, 'The most likely scenario is one that has several severe disadvantages. As I see it, the enemy obviously thinks our aid, given to one side or the other, could allow a clear victory in the coming civil war. I am not sure why they are so optimistic; myself, I do not see how I can do anything Dr. Fell cannot do, for example. I think, by the way, there is still a mystery here as to what they so fear from us. I have been assuming they were afraid of something personal we could do that they could not. Although, the more I think about it, it is more reasonable to assume that they are simply afraid that we can summon aid from the various armies of Chaos."

"What about your 'most likely' scenario? You didn't say what it was."

"Sorry. I thought it was obvious from context."

"Mate it more obvious."

"We could select which faction among the Olympians to help, and use our powers or position to set one of them on the throne of Heaven. Once there is a strong leader, an army, and whatever else the Olympians need to fend off an attack from Chaos, we are no longer an issue in any way. Then we can go home."

"And if we are not willing to help the Olympians maim and murder each other? That is what we are talking about. War is murder, king-sized."

"If we are not willing to help the Olympian civil war, there is always life. Life on Earth. We may have more than one Earth to choose from, if Vanity's boat does what she says it does. There is also the possibility that Vanity can go home; her situation is not exactly parallel to ours (if my understanding of the situation is accurate, which, I admit, it may not be)."

I looked around at the wide swimming pool below our balcony, at the windows and balconies around us, the tastefully appointed corridors I could see, the chambers and shops beyond that. I smiled and said,

"Life on Earth does not sound that bad to me, considering—."

I turned to him and leaned forward on the table, and said, "What are your dreams, Victor? What do you want to do with your life on Earth?"

He looked a little surprised at the change of topic, but he answered, "I think I want what all young men want: a wife, a home, and a family."

I had to smile at that. "The average young man wants a harem, a beer, and a pot of gold, or maybe a race car."

"And how would you know what the average young man wants?"

"I've never heard any young man say he wants a home."

"And you've met so very, very many young men…"

"I know. I know what the average young man wants."

"And what does he want?"

"He wants the egg of the Roc. He wants to find the lost city of El Dorado in the Amazon. He wants to ride the decks of a man-o'-war and give the pirates blast for blast, even while the scuppers fill with blood. He wants to plant the flag upon the desert sands of Mars, and leave the first footsteps of Man upon that frigid, rust-red world. He wants to cross blades with Cyrano de Bergerac and match him rhyme for rhyme, blow for blow, parry, riposte, and counterparty! He wants to slay the dragon. He wants the Most Holy Grail."

"So I take it all men are unhappy and frustrated, except for Sir Percival, Saint George, and maybe John Carter of Barsoom and Captain Horatio Hornblower, right? Is there anything else men want?"

I looked at him from under my lashes. "There are other things a man wants. He wants Sophia Loren and the Queen of Sheba and Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe in a little white dress, her skirts blown up around her knees."

"I would add Joe DiMaggio and Menelaus to my list of non-unhappy men, except that, as I recall, things did not turn out so well for either of them. Once these men have Helen of Troy, do you know what they expect to do with her? Even Paris took her back home to live with him. I think you are describing what Amelia Windrose wants in life, not most men. How would you know what anyone else in the world wants, but you?"

"I've read books."

"The books we read in school? I am not sure they are a representative sample. The young men in those books divide into three camps: those who want to defeat Napoleon at the battle of Borodino; those who want to defeat the Persians at Marathon; and those who wish to live lives of temperate virtue, untroubled by the clamor of the senate and left in peace by the spies of Caesar. Un-less you want to talk about the plays we read, also? All the Shakespeare comedies end in mass marriages. So don't tell me men don't think about marriage. What is the first thing Romeo and Juliet did?"

"Achilles chose a short and glorious life rather than a long one. He was a hero."

Victor said in a saturnine voice, "Among all your heroes and demigods, Amelia, you seem to forget that Odysseus was doing nothing but trying to get home to his wife and kid, and Aeneas was trying to find a new home for himself and his people. And they were men, heroes, some would say, more heroic than Achilles, by a long shot. The whole poem was about nothing but his lack of self-control."

"So what is your goal in life, really, Victor?"

"All living organisms desire to reproduce. It is programmed into us at a fundamental level. Likewise, thoughts form 'memes' or self-replicating mental viruses. They desire to be passed on also. A stable environment, a family, in fact, is the only way to pass one's memes and genes along."

"That sounds sooo romantic. A robot factory manufacturing another robot factory."

"What is your goal?"

"I have found my calling in life. It is to spend as much time in a Jacuzzi as possible. Like Socrates, I want to live a life of reflection and virtue. I just want to be warm and wet while I am doing it."

"Very Epicurean of you. You have another two days of such a life. I assume you have thought beyond that point?"

Actually, I hadn't. Why does Victor always make me feel so stupid?

"Two days… ?" I said.

"Well," he said sardonically, "this trip is a reckless expense, and we are almost drained of the absurd amount of money Mr. ap Cymru gave you. I did not know it at the time when Vanity picked this boat to hitch a hike on; I would have objected. We should have found a tramp steamer."

"What's wrong with this boat?"

"Nothing, were we not paupers. I am sure our enemies have not found us simply because their brains would not accept the idea that the first thing we would do with the only real money we have ever had in our lives is blow it all on one pleasure cruise."

"Are we out of money? Nearly out or all out?"

Victor let out a loud laugh when I asked that. He actually slapped his knee and laughed.

I said, "What is so funny!"

Victor pressed his lips together to smother his laugh, but his eyes still twinkled. "Yes, Amelia, we are nearly out of money."

"Was I supposed to know that? You are the one keeping the envelope in your jacket!"

"Actually, I altered my skin to make a watertight pocket, like a marsupial. I am keeping the envelope in my pouch. And yes, you were supposed to know that. I assumed you could do math."

"What are we going to do?" I asked, eyes wide.

He smiled. "Get jobs."

"Jobs?"

"I am afraid that something as glamorous as the film actress career Vanity has her heart set on might attract the attention of the enemy. It is, of course, her risk to take. I was experimenting last night with using a molecular sieve method to collect gold out of seawater. That might tide us over until I can find a more promising career."

I said, "I don't think you can own gold in America. Franklin Roosevelt took it all away, or something."

"Hmph. And it advertises itself as a free country. It is supposed to be this great paragon of the free market. The subjects there cannot own money?"

"They have paper money."

"An oxymoron. Paper is IOUs never intended to be repaid. Only metal is money. Well, I will have to find something else to do."

"Like what?"

"Dig ditches. Draw water. Chop wood. Tote barges. Lift bales. You know: work. The capacity to move mass over distance. Work."

"Hmmm… Doesn't sound very appealing. Is there any job I can get that does not require moving out of the Jacuzzi?"

"I can think of two, playwright and Playboy model, depending on whether you are willing to have people photograph you in the water as you bathe. Come on, Amelia. We are not really British. We do not have to look down our noses at honest labor."

"Digging ditches is not my idea of a bright future."

"Those who work are free. There are only three categories of nonproductive people: babies, beggars, robbers."

"I still do not want to dig ditches."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want to be the first girl on Mars."

"Without moving out of the Jacuzzi? That will be a feat"

"How much money is left?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I want to spend some of it before it is gone."

He laughed. I was beginning to think I liked Victor better before he was so happy and at ease.

I said crossly, "I have not ever seen it! I have not spent a dime. Vanity was in Paris; I haven't bought anything in the shops here on the ship. I didn't even rent the skates we are wearing; you did! Don't I get a cut of the money?"

His flesh rippled, and a pair of lips formed near his belly button. He stuck his hand into the lips and pulled out an envelope.

He passed it to me. "It's all yours."

I said, "What? Only one fifth of this is mine "

Victor said, "How do you figure that? You got it from ap Cymru. None of us did anything to get it. As far as I am concerned, that is your property. I was only holding it because you handed it to me to count when we were standing on the dock, and then Mr. Glum attacked." Victor could count faster than any of us.

I said, "Well, I'm ceding it to the group. Four fifths of it. No, I don't even need that much. I guess we'll have to rent a room in New York when we get there, won't we?"

Victor jumped to his feet, slamming his hand down atop the envelope. He stood, looming over the table.

I shrieked and flinched backwards in my chair, shouting, "What? What? What is it?"

But he was not looking at me. Face blank, his eyes were scanning left and right, right and left.

He said, "There is something invisible in the immediate area. I hope it is Colin. Colin… ?"

No answer.

Victor opened his third eye. The metal orb, shining, came out of a seam on his forehead. Blue sparks began to glow in his depth, brighter and brighter as the nested spheres began to align their irises, one after another…

I looked in the fourth dimension. A web of spider-lines? No; it wasn't there. But had I seen it for a moment?

Colin appeared, right hand curled around his left index finger, twisting the ring collet-out. "Okay, okay, smart guy. You got me. Put your eyeball away before someone sees it."

Victor closed his third eye. "Don't play tricks. We are about to be attacked by people who want to kill us rather than capture us."

"Sorry. But you guys are the ones who told me not to go around attracting attention. On account of I don't have a ticket, see?"

"By not attracting attention, I meant stop pulling the ice sculptures of mermaids off the buffet tables and waltzing with them."

"My date walked out on me. Are we going to divvy up the loot?"

"If Amelia says it is okay. Myself, I think we should pool our resources. I doubt if this is enough to rent a room, even a poor one."

"Oh, come on!" said Colin. "America is a rich country. They are not going to let people starve there! I mean, Margaret Thatcher's not running the place, is she?"

I put my hand on Victor's hand, saying, "I'll be happy to dig ditches with you, if you want, Victor.

Anything is better than being a baby, a bum, or a robber." I favored Colin with a dark look.

Victor said, "How long were you listening, Colin?"

Colin said, "Keeping secrets from me? I heard you guys talking about not being able to go back home."

Colin returned my dark look and made it darker. "Or was this one of those mixed doubles things, where the fifth guy from the hotbox doesn't get to play?"

I said, "Maybe absolute power does corrupt absolutely. What are you going to do for a living when we get to the States? Be the world's greatest pickpocket? Walk through girls' shower rooms? Strangle the president?"

"With great power comes great responsibility," said Colin earnestly. "I will dedicate myself to ridding the world of evil! I will use my great powers of invisibility to fight crime! Maybe I can catch the Catwoman. I sure as hell am not going to end up waiting tables for tips. That is your future, you know, Dark Mistress.

Or should I say: Dark Waitress."

"I don't think so," I said haughtily.

Colin grinned one of his slimier grins. "Yeah? What marketable skills did Boggin teach you in that fine school we just fled from?"

I stared at him in silence, unable to think of anything to say.

Colin said, "Maybe you can recite the Iliad in Greek on a street corner and leave a hat out for people to drop dimes into. 'Of wrath sing, oh goddess…!'"

"We learned other things…" I said, pouting.

"Astronomy? There is big money in calculating the orbit of Jupiter using Ptolemy's Almagest these days.

Philosophy? Get yourself a cardboard sign: Will think for food. You'll be on the dole with me in no time.

Then we can have our argument about Margey Thatcher again."

Victor put the envelope of money into my hand. "Don't starve yet. I still say this is yours, not ours. If you want to split it up once we are all together, fine."

Colin said, "That should be in about one minute. Quentin sent me to go get you. He was playing around with calculating the orbit of Jupiter in hexadecimals, and he was using a system in that book of his.

Apparently there are four more planets in the dream world than there are here, and he can get better results if he takes their motions into account, too. Anyway, tonight is the night."

Victor said, "In what way? The night for what?"

Argh! Victor is so slow sometimes. I said, "Vesuvius erupts tonight."

Colin gave me an odd look. "No. Not at all. The attack is coming tonight. We are going to be attacked.

What is all this about Vesuvius?"

Colin is slower.

1.

Vanity was with Quentin in the cabin when we arrived. Quentin was seated cross-legged on the floor, wearing a dark opera cape of rich material. It was an article of clothing I had not seen before; I assume it was a Paris acquisition. He had his tarot cards spread out in a half-circle before him, along with two candles, his white staff, a wineglass, a steak knife.

Vanity was seated on the couch. She had gathered some of her clothes and mine, and was moving things from a pile on her left to a pile on her right. Some of the boys' clothes were there, too, as well as some of the camping gear, scuba gear, and climbing gear we had brought along, or bought along the way.

The first thing she said was, "I'll bet it's the ring. Hand it over, Colin."

Colin, at the door, said, "The precious? Our birthday present!? I gave it to this German chick I found sleeping in the middle of a circle of fire___Kidding! Just kidding! Here it is. I knew the damn thing was bugged when you gave it to me. Good old expendable Colin!"

He pulled it off his finger and tossed it across the air to Vanity.

Victor followed Colin into the room. "Why did you think the ring was bugged?"

Colin said, "Because I was listening when Quentin explained how magic works. In order for the Olympians to curse someone, that someone has to do something wrong. Well, stealing a ring is wrong.

Mr. Glum stole it from Mrs. Wren; he said that to Amelia, right?"

Quentin looked up from his cards. "Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It has to do with obligations being kept or violated. It has to do with rules being broken or not broken. Being in debt.

Owing a favor. Any rule. The rules don't have to be fair; they just have to be rules. For example: in Amelia's story, Sam the Drayman got cursed with amnesia by Corns. I assume the rule Sam broke is that mortals are not supposed to look at gods."

Vanity (who was, I assume, still annoyed at how Sam had been treated) said sharply, "When was that a rule? Who made that a rule? Where are these rules written?"

Quentin looked a little puzzled, as if he had never thought of those questions before. "I don't know. But the sanctity of the gods is well established in literature. Paris, by asking the three goddesses to strip for him, committed an offense that cursed and destroyed his home city of Troy. Actaeon was turned into a stag and eaten by his own hounds for gazing at Artemis bathing. Moses could only look at the rear of God. There are other examples."

Colin flopped down on the divan next to Vanity and picked up a peach-colored satin bra from the pile, and looked at it speculatively. "Maybe God just had a real nice butt, and wasn't too happy about his face. You know."

Quentin put the ring on a piece of paper on the floor in front of him, and began inscribing, with compass and straightedge, a pentacle around the ring on the paper. I saw his tongue protruding a little from the corner of his mouth.

Quentin said to Colin in a mild tone, "Maybe you should not talk about things you know nothing about, Colin."

"Yeah, well, then I'd never get to say anything, would I?" Colin said.

Vanity snatched the bra out of his hands. "That's what we all pray for."

Colin dropped his voice into an intimate tone: "At night? In your nighties? On your knees? You're praying for me to do what again?"

Victor stiffly sat in the chair opposite them. "I know what she was praying for, Colin. If I could have prayed and gotten God to come walk into the dorm and shut you up at lights out, I might not be the atheist I am today."

Quentin looked up from his diagram. "Is that all it would take to turn you from a skeptic into a pious man, Victor? I agree that it would have been a miracle of Biblical proportions to get Colin to settle after dark.

But I always thought you would not believe in any superior beings, even if you saw them."

Victor said, "Define 'believe.' If the Martians of Mr. H. G. Wells landed in their tripods tonight, and started wiping out things with their heat ray, I would believe in superior nonhuman beings. They would exist. But I would not bend knee to them, nor to any other creature, superior or not, no matter what his threats."

"What if he were morally superior?"

"Then he would not be the bloodthirsty maniac described in the Jewish folk tales, would he?"

Colin gestured at Quentin with an airy wave of the hand. "Well, well, when did Big Q become a Christian? Is this the same fellow who woke me up at four thirty in the morning last May Day to go comb dew off of a hawthorn tree with a sickle he had me steal from Mr. Glum's shed? I don't remember that from the Common Book."

Quentin was frowning down at his piece of paper, tracing a line along a ruler. He spoke absentmindedly, without looking up: "I am not one or the other. I go where the True Science leads me. I doubt either neopagan or Christian would admit this, but the two traditions are the same, one growing from the other.

The myth of Christ is the same as the fable of Adonis, except that the Christian tales have the stern moral flavor and intellectual depth that the Neoplatonists, Stoics, and the late Roman writers added to them. All tales are one grand tale."

He straightened up from where he had been hunched over the ring. "Let me attempt a demonstration.

Amelia, if you will shut off the lights… ? No one talk; the spirits and aery humors released by your breath, not to mention the ambient charge on any names, words, or symbols you might express, will disturb the pattern of influences I am trying to establish. If Amelia starts to talk, somebody kiss her."

"I am on it!" said Colin, beginning to get up.

"Never you mind," said Victor.

I had walked in the front door with the rest of them, and had not yet taken a seat. As it chanced, I was standing near where Victor sat at his ease.

I stood there, blinking, caught between hope and wonder, doubting my ears. What had Victor just said?

Victor reached up from where he sat and, without asking, without even the slightest qualm, took me by the hand and steered me over in front of him. He put both his hands on my hips and pulled me down to sit on his knee.

I think Victor said something like, "Carry on," or maybe Colin made a wry comment, but I could not hear anything clearly. My heart was pounding in my ears, and I was afraid to turn around, as if maybe Victor would vanish if I turned to look at him, or it would all fade into a dream. Or, worse, he'd look at me as if I were his sister.

But he kept his hands on my hips. Firm, strong hands. I could feel how warm they were.

I sat there feeling pleased and foolish, wondering if I should lean back against him, if I dared. I missed what happened next, because I wasn't paying attention.

There was a noise like the chime of a bell, and I was not sure where it came from. Vanity waved her hand at Quentin and slapped herself on the neck. Bugs. Something was listening.

I had the impression that Quentin had just asked a question. Something or someone in the room answered him, because a shy, unearthly voice murmured very softly: "I am the hate of the voiceless wound; I am the blood which is not allayed; I am the silence of the broken word; I am the trust betrayed.

Erichtho laid her curse on Echidna's son, and took the ghost of his leg away; all other wounds of his knew how to close; the knowledge was lost; what was marred was to be marred for forever and a day."

Vanity slapped herself on the neck again, looking worried.

I looked into the higher dimensions and saw bundles of moral energy issuing to and from the ring. At right angles to all other right angles was a figure surrounded by the laws of nature of the dream continuum. It seemed to be a corpse, taller than a human being, clad all in bronze armor, and resting in a strange coffin, which was shaped in the form of a hollow brass horse.

Quentin said, " Ave et Vale"

The figure in the armor turned and looked at me, as if he could see my eyes, despite that I was looking from another dimension; he started to raise a gauntlet toward me, as if to speak, but at that same moment, the hollow brass horse came to life, and galloped away, with the corpse rattling and banging back and forth in the hollow vessel of its chest. It sounds perhaps comical to think of a man rattling around in a horse's hollow chest, but there was something so horrible, and so helpless, and so sad about it all, that I turned my higher eyes away before I could see more.

Quentin said, "Demonstration over. You guys can talk again."

I was aware only of a sinking sensation. I had missed my opportunity.

Why hadn't I started to talk out of turn?

2.

There was a brief discussion. I described the spirit I saw, and Quentin gave the opinion that this was the ghost of the original owner of the ring. Who or what it was, he could not guess.

Vanity confirmed that the ghost had been the only thing looking at or aware of us—except when he said the name Echidna. Vanity said, "At the moment that name was spoken, something very old and very powerful turned and looked at us. It is coming now."

Even as she said those words, fat drops of rain began to spatter against the portholes of our cabin. In the distance, a swollen red sun, balanced between low clouds and the dark western horizon of the sea, was being blotted up by thunderheads.

Quentin looked worried, and ashamed. "Maybe there were more precautions I should have taken. Is this officially an emergency? I'd like Victor to be in charge."

There were four votes for aye. Colin had not raised his hand.

I said to him sharply, "Is there some other candidate you'd like to propose?" My tone, I suppose, was less polite than it should have been, because I thought he was angling for the position of leader himself.

Colin, slouched like a panther at rest over the arm of the divan, regarded me with a lazy, mocking stare:

"I just thought the Dark Mistress had done such a fine job before——-Are you canvassing for a vote for Vic, Amelia?

What are you offering? I'll make it unanimous, if I get to have the blonde in my lap next time around…

No? Fine. Who am I to break with tradition, though… ?" He raised his hand anyway.

Quentin said, "Leader, I'd like to do a reading on the influences from the middle air and the upper aether.

Unfortunately, I already know from Vanity that there are actually spirits of some sort, princes of the air and darkness, who react when I read, and go somewhere and do something to fetch the answers to my questions."

Victor said, "You are thinking it might attract more attention?"

"Well, if I were Boggin, and I had the winds at my command, I'd have them watching the princes of the middle air. Why should it be impossible for spirits to spy on each other?"

Victor said, "This is your area of expertise. Make a suggestion."

Quentin started gathering his cards up off the floor. "Leader, two days of reading one book does not make me an expert."

"But you have an idea."

"But I have an idea. We take Colin's ring; we have Amelia look along these ropes or webs she seems to be able to see, we have you denature them—demagnitize them, as you call it, not the whole ring, but just one after another—to isolate which strands represent which obligations or which sense impressions.

Colin can add back in any influences you drive out—adding 'energy,' as he calls it. With each strand, as we turn it off and turn it back on, Vanity tells us if anyone is watching us. I do a reading with my cards meanwhile. We see if we can fine-tune it. Fine-tune the ring. If we are really clever about it, we may be able to have the invisibility cast its influence all the way around me doing a reading. You see my idea?"

Colin said, "Whoever the people are you are getting your information from, turn them invisible, so that Bog-gin's spies can't see them doing whatever it is they do when they answer your questions. Right?"

"Right."

"What if I cannot turn on what Victor turns off?"

"Then the ring is broken and worthless to us, and we have destroyed a great treasure for no purpose."

Colin shrugged and nodded, and said to Victor, "Is there a downside to this, leader-man?"

Victor said, "If we attract the attention of Boggin or the other Olympians, the worst that will happen is they might send some force to protect us from the lethal attack which is coming. And, by hypothesis, they already have such a force in place, and already have us under some sort of observation that Vanity cannot detect; therefore we lose nothing by this. No. There is no downside, aside from the value of the ring itself, and the general risks, if any, associated with Quentin showing command-symbols to the electromagnetic entities he calls spirits."

Vanity said, "I don't see why it can work at all. Only the ring-bearer turns invisible. How do you project it onto someone else?"

Colin said, "Step on them."

"I'm serious."

Colin said, "So am I. That ring is thorough. When you wear it, nobody sees footprints you make in the water puddles in the girls' locker room, or sees the shower water deflected from your body. Nobody sees the water displacement when you slip naked into a crowded Jacuzzi. No one hears the noises you make when you bump into something. Now, if you pick something up, like an envelope full of money, a person who notices details, like Victor, or whose brain is hard to fool, will spot you."

Vanity said, "Were you really in the girls' locker room?"

Colin rolled his eyes. "What? Do you think I was staring at all the old wrinkled hags they have here on this trip—yeech! But you understand what the logic of the ring has to be? If the ring-bearer can make it so that you do not notice sound waves coming out of my mouth, I don't see (if you'll pardon that expression) why it can't mask someone who talks back to me. If you hear them, you'll know I'm around.

How is that different from all the other clues that I am around it is erasing, such as light photons bouncing off me? I don't go blind when I put this thing on, you know. I must be casting a shadow."

Victor said, "Let us try Quentin's experiment, then. He may be able to generate additional information, which may enable us to survive the coming attack."

I said, "But they are not bugging the ring, then? I wasn't sure I understood what the ghost of the first owner said."

Quentin held up the ring. "Mr. Glum had a right to this ring. It was a wergild. Mrs. Wren cursed his leg so that he could not fix it—haven't you seen Colin simply shrug off mortal wounds, broken wings, things like that? But her enchantments trumped his psionics. She did him wrong by doing that. In retaliation, Glum stole this. At a guess, it would seem, that in the spirit world, two wrongs do make a right. Shall we try my experiments? Ladies? Gentlemen?"

Unfortunately, that meant I had to get up off of Victor's lap.

3.

The storm grew. The Queen Elizabeth II was so mighty a ship, her draft so huge, that she did not even slacken her speed when fifty-meter waves began to pound against her side, and gale-force winds blew nearly solid sheets of screaming rain across her decks. The captain informed the passengers that the hatches to the deck were being chocked, and no one would be permitted up on deck till the storm blew over. But within our stately cabin, there was no roll, no pitch, no sensation of motion. The vessel was simply too large for any storm to disturb her serenity.

But it was loud. Even through the decks and bulkheads, we could hear the sound, the outrageous sound of it, as if a voice of infinite strength and endless hate screamed and roared and yelled one long insane yell, never pausing for breath.

Our cabin portals were black circles. They might have been windows looking into an airless coffin, for all the light they shed. There was no sign of my far horizon, my horizon as wide as the sea. It was as if the portholes had been bricked over.

4.

We spent two hours investigating what turned out to be a dead end. After about forty tries, we knew twoscore ways to cast a spell to read the stars which could easily be detected by someone with Vanity's power.

At the end of that time, Quentin had covered about threescore sheets of paper with pentacles and hexagrams and septagons and octograms, and had burnt out his last wax candle. He looked up at Victor and said, 'That is about all I can do. If there was anyone bugging the stars, they heard us talking to them, and they know what we asked."

You would think, after all that, we would have gotten forty astrological charts' worth of information. But apparently, for real magicians, consulting the stars was a business as complex as the radar, radar-beam deception and counterdeception, radar-jamming, jam-breaking, and anti-jam breaking techniques of the electronic espionage of World War II.

"Here is what we now know," Quentin summarized his results: "The attacker is coming by sea, coming from a dark place where the stars never shine, and of which the stars know nothing. It is not the Olympians. It is someone who intends to kill one or more of us. It is not a Maenad—which might be significant, if Lamia is no longer traveling with the Maenads. It is definitely a female or females."

Colin said, "Or a guy in drag."

"Well, yes. Or an effete male. It is someone older than the established universe, or, at least, older than the stars, since the stars know no birthdate or nativity constellation for the attacker or attackers. She intends to kill many people, including any humans around us. She or they is carrying a talisman of great power with her. I should say 'she or they,' I suppose, since it could be a band of women, for example, amazons or something."

Quentin had written this all out on a little steno note-

book he was using to write down lessons from his dream grimoire. Now he flipped the pages shut with a sigh. "And, if our stars are being bugged, they know we know. The stars are also betting on the other side, and they give us about sixteen-to-one odds."

Colin looked up when he said that. "You are kidding about that last part, right? The stars don't really bet, do they?"

Quentin said, "Not the stars per se, but the mesoaetherians do—the princes of the middle air. They also cheat on their bets, and send omens and signs to people to change the odds of one fate winning out over another. That's why most omens are so vague—if the mesoaetherians are caught, they can always claim they were not really trying to tell the humans things humans are not supposed to know. What's the word from your spy novels, Colin?"

"Plausible deniability."

"Anyway, among the many other illegal things my friends do, they gamble on human suffering and the outcomes of wars and natural disasters. I told you they were like Mafia people."

I raised my hand.

Quentin pointed at me. "Yes? A question?"

"No," I said, feeling tired. "I was only indicating that it was me. I was the one you said that to."

"Oh. I told Amelia. Mafia people."

Victor said to Vanity, "Vanity, call your boat. How long will it take to get here from Antarctica?"

Vanity looked surprised, as if she had been caught unprepared for a pop quiz. "I—I don't—how would I know that? She might be on the far side of the Antarctic. I don't know her top speed. You do know Corus warned Amelia that they can tell when I call my boat?"

Victor nodded. "But the people watching the boat, Mestor and Boggin and his crew, want to keep us alive at all costs, and the people coming for us now want us dead."

Quentin looked down at his diagrams. "They want everybody dead."

Victor said, "What's that?"

Quentin passed him a sheet of paper covered with zodiacal symbols and crabbed mathematical calculations. "Not just us. Everyone. They want everyone dead."

Colin said, "Everyone on the ship?"

I spoke up. "I think he means everyone everyone. The whole enchilada. All living things that breathe.

Lamia told Quentin her master wants to start the last war, the Armageddon, between Cosmos and Chaos, remember? They want the stars torn down and the dome of the sky to collapse." And, before Victor could object that the sky was not literally a dome, I added, "They want to crack the planet like an egg and make an omelet, trigger a nova in Sol. That sort of thing."

Quentin sighed again.

Vanity leaped to her feet. "Oh my goodness!"

Colin said, "What is it?"

Victor said, "Is someone watching us?"

Vanity said, "I didn't get a chance to finish checking all our stuff! There might be a bug, just a physical bug somewhere, planted on us. I never finished looking!"

Victor had a stiff look to his face. I would not have recognized that look even a little while ago, but in my heart I knew what it was. Leaders who make bad decisions get that look. Leaders who think they may have endangered the lives entrusted to them. But what could he have done differently? We had needed Vanity in here to help with Quentin's experiment, which, had it worked, might have told us the nature of, or how to escape from, the coming danger.

Victor said, "Go look through our possessions. Prioritize your investigation. Check the things we got from Paris last. Anything that the enemy touched or handled is suspect. Anything we took from their hands, or…"

Colin said, "Passports. Money. The things Amelia got from ap Cymru."

Vanity said, "I checked mine…"

We all passed our papers over to Vanity, and I included the envelope of money. Vanity closed her eyes and began shuffling through the passports slowly.

I jumped up. It was obvious. So obvious. I said, "It can't be the passports. Those came from ap Cymru.

He is with the Olympians! It's not the Olympians attacking—Quentin just found that out! It's the dress!

My wedding dress!"

Colin said, "What wedding dress? Did you guys hear some story no one bothered to tell me?"

I was running toward my room. Over my shoulder, I shouted back to them, "It's not Lamia attacking. It's not Lamia! It's—"

At that moment, even over the mindless roar of the storm, we heard the hideous, tormented, long-drawn-out shriek and rumble of metal plates, vast and heavy metal plates, grinding and twisting, being torn, buckling under unimaginable, titanic pressure.