Orphans of Chaos

1.

The first words out of my mouth were: “The Greek gods run the school. We’re hostages in a war. They’re afraid to kill us, because our families will attack. Quentin can fly. They’re going to send us to Hell for safekeeping. Except Vanity is being sent to Atlantis. Zeus is dead and Mars and Vulcan both want the throne. Mercury was in the Common Room last night, and he knew I was in the wall, and he said he’d give us anything we wanted. Taffy ap Cymru is actually a goddess. And a cross-dresser, I guess. Taffy works for Mercury. I fell into the Fourth Dimension, and Miss Daw, who is actually a fourth-dimensional siren shaped like a wheel, played music, which forced me back into normal time-space, except I landed in a pile of snow.”

Everyone was just staring at me.

“Mercury made it destined for me to find a hypersphere that awakened my powers, which is locked in a safe in the Great Hall, where I was hiding because Dr. Fell caught him, because Boggin (whose real name is Boreas) was waiting for me, and he shined a blue beam of light on him and Quentin had this look on his face but I couldn’t tell what he was looking at that looked so horrible and I wanted to ask him but now he can’t remember. Someone in a dream told me how to break the spell. Vanity has to help. Her real name is Nausicaa.”

Everyone continued to stare.

I said, “You believe me, don’t you? Would I make up something like this?”

Colin said, “Did Quentin really tie you up? And make you kiss him?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and pointed at Quentin, “Big Q!” then he gave him the thumbs-up, “You the man!”

I said in exasperation, “It wasn’t like that! I was only blindfolded.”

Vanity stamped her foot. “You said he kidnapped you and threw you out the window!”

I said, “No, I said he picked me up and carried me out the window. We were flying, or levitating, or something.”

Quentin looked both pleased and sad. “It worked, then. It actually worked! I’m a genius!” Then he muttered: “The best night of my life, and I can’t remember it.”

Colin said to Quentin, “I am so jealous of you it is going to make me barf. How come you get the blonde? Dibs on the redhead.”

Vanity stamped her foot again. “Shut up your horrible face, Colin, or I’ll have Quentin turn you into a toad! Amelia is trying to tell us the most important thing we ever found out about what is going on here, and all you can do is jabber!”

Victor said, “Amelia, did you mean that the dream told you how to break the so-called spell on Quentin?”

“Yes. No. It was ambiguous.”

“We should hear your story out, but also try to get Quentin repaired as soon as possible. Two witnesses see things one witness misses.”

I said, “It’s a long story. I am not sure how long we will have the house and grounds to ourselves. There was some sort of party last night after the Board meeting, and Venus was running it. I think everyone is sleeping it off.”

Victor said, “Are you saying we should try to undo Quentin, first?”

“And maybe break into that safe I found. It’s on the way. The table in the Great Hall is the thing the dream said could break the spell.”

Quentin jumped to his feet. “Let’s hurry. Actually, let’s run.”

“Good idea. Race you.” Victor leaped to his feet and was out the dining room door, followed closely by Quentin. Their footfalls echoed in the corridor.

Vanity hesitated. “Are we just going to leave Mr. Glum laying here?”

Colin rose to his feet and was sauntering toward the door, in no great hurry. “You’re right. Let’s slit his throat now. Save us the trouble of doing it later.”

“You’re sick!” she said, and ran out the door.

Meanwhile, I was not relishing the prospect of an early morning run through the snow, so I was not moving any faster than Colin. I tried to tug my skirt back down into place, but the apron strings were tied so tightly behind my back that my skirt (which was hiked up high and trapped under it) was pinned in place. I was trying to undo the knot when Colin stepped up behind me.

“Allow me,” he said. “Thank you. It will be a relief to breathe again.”

“Here, suck in. I need some slack.”

I blew out my breath and then tried to make my waist even smaller, and Colin tucked and tugged at my back where I couldn’t see. He hummed happily to himself.

I should have been more suspicious, more quickly. I tried to turn, but he yanked, and the apron sash cinched even more tightly.

“You bastard!” I clawed at the small of my back, but the knot seemed to have somehow grown into a super knot.

He grabbed both my hands by the wrist just a moment before I was about to swing on him. He watched me struggling a moment, smiling darkly.

“I’m stronger than you,” I said, feeling foolish. “I can move huge iron doors you can’t lift.”

“Show me,” he said.

Because he was standing behind me, he simply twisted both my arms up behind my back. My possible options at that point consisted of arching my shoulders back as far as possible and standing on tiptoe.

Somehow, somewhere, Colin had turned from a little annoying boy into a dangerous young animal. I could not even really struggle in his grip; he had grasped me too cunningly.

I noticed that he smelled nice. And tall. When did he get to be taller than me? I hadn’t noticed. Had that happened this year?

And strong. And ruthless and confident.

I suddenly began to feel silly and out of breath. I told myself it was because Colin was holding me in an awkward position that I could not catch my breath. I tell myself a lot of things. I lie to myself a lot.

It was because Colin was holding me.

I had been trying to toy with Victor, and so I let Vanity, harebrained Vanity, talk me into one of her flirtatious schemes. I had hiked up my skirt and pulled down my blouse, thinking a little nectar would attract the bee I wanted. I had gotten a wasp instead. There was something dangerous and reckless about Colin that Victor did not have.

I do not believe a man can hold a girl, squirming and helpless, and not know the effect it has on her. I wanted him to do something. I wanted him to kiss me. But he just stood there, his grip getting tighter, his eyes like two blue embers glinting like the eyes of a devil.

I was blushing with furious embarrassment by this point. I told myself I was blushing with fury. Like I said, I tell myself a lot of things.

“Let go of me.” My voice came out in a husky whisper. That surprised me. He had only had his hands on me for a moment, no longer. I was in love with Victor. Wasn’t I?

“Why?” Little mocking sparks seemed to glitter in those blue devil-embers of his eyes.

“Because, from this position, I cannot kick you in the crotch, break your nose on my knee when you double up, and step on your neck when you fall over.”

Colin whispered in my ear, “Don’t make me jealous of Quentin. He’s my best friend.” I felt his lips brush my earlobe.

Victor and Vanity reappeared in the doorway at that moment, with Quentin looking downcast behind them.

Victor said, “What are you doing, Colin?”

There was a sharp snap in his voice I had never heard before. Jealousy…?

Victor’s eyes drank in the sight of me. I felt as if he were looking into my soul, reading my mind. He saw the rose blush to my skin. Unlike Colin, Victor knew what it meant. I could not hide the blush on my skin, the shortness of my breath, the dilation of my pupil, or the helpless quiver deep inside me. I could not even move my hands to cover my face because Colin was still holding me, helpless as some prize doe caught by a hunter, exposed to the penetrating gaze of Victor Triumph.

Victor looked in my eyes and he saw that I wanted Colin’s strong hands on me. I wanted to be helpless in his arms. He saw how pleased, how flustered I was by the sensation. He saw everything.

But that wasn’t the message I wanted him to see. It was your hands, Victor, I wanted; your strength I want to triumph over me.

Victor turned away, his face cold. My heart reached a nadir. If I could have died by a sheer critical mass of misery, I would have ignited into a ball of darkness, then and there, and taken most of the school with me.

Colin was oblivious to all this. He spoke in a tone of lilting mockery.

He said, “I was telling the serving wench what I wanted for breakfast.”

Victor said, “Well, if you two are done with your mating ritual, we have serious business.”

Colin let go of me and jumped back.

It felt strange, for a moment, to have my hands loose and free. The misery in my heart changed shape suddenly. It was as if it said in my ear: don’t blow yourself up in a ball of darkness! Just get Colin!

Good idea.

I carefully stepped over and picked up Mr. Glum’s hammer from the table.

“Tut! Tut!” said Colin, scampering back out of range. “Serious business to discuss!” To Victor he said, “She wants to hurt me!”

Victor threw himself down in his chair and put his feet on the table. “Probably serves you right. Amelia, make sure you get Mr. Glum’s fingerprints on his hammer after you do the deed.”

Colin backed up, pointing a finger at me. “You’re not going to kill me on an empty stomach, are you? None of us has eaten yet. This may be the only day we will ever have the run of the kitchen!”

Quentin smiled, and then laughed. He said, “That is true, Victor. Food first. Death later.”

Victor looked at Quentin, looked at his own feet on the table, frowned a little nervously, and sat up, putting his feet back on the floor. “True enough. Amelia, no skull bashing till later. Colin, stop acting like a jerk. Quentin, decide what you want us to make you for breaky. It’s the least we can do since we can’t undo your memory block yet.”

Well, I was not going to disobey a direct order from Victor. Besides, their lightheartedness was contagious. I reluctantly put the hammer back down on the table.

2.

“What happened?” I asked. “You were gone for only a moment.”

Victor said, “We could see from the front door that there were workingmen swarming all over the Great Hall. They’re pulling the roof apart to lift the table out. The table you say we need. If they pull it out the way they put it in, it should be kept under a tarp in the Blacksmith’s Shed until they can find a lorry big enough to haul it.”

Vanity said, “The good news is, no one else is up yet, though.”

Quentin said, “Maybe we should run, and run now. Just pick a direction and keep moving. Between Dr. Fell’s drugs and Mr. Glum’s hammer, and what little Amelia already said, we may be in a lot more danger than we know.”

Victor said, “Amelia? How dangerous is it? More dangerous than heading out along the highway without money? So dangerous that we can’t wait for you to tell us your story?”

I said, “The War God will kill anyone who kills us. And it would cause a war. And I don’t want to run without at least breaking into that safe. I can’t see into the new directions without the hyperlight it gives off. And I am not walking anywhere until someone helps me take this damn thing off!”

Colin said loudly, “I object! The serving girl is trying to get out of uniform!”

Colin was staring at my cleavage again. I made an angry noise and started to reach for my buttons to do them up.

Quentin said, “Wait a moment.” He looked at Vanity, who was also beginning to tug at her skirt, and to reach for her buttons. Vanity and I stopped.

Quentin looked at Victor. “I think we should have a ruling on this, Victor.”

Victor nodded, trying not to smile. “Quentin’s right. He has been viciously attacked, I dare say, wounded, by Dr. Fell. We all need to do our part to keep Quentin in good spirits, don’t you agree, girls?”

Vanity put her hands on her hips. “What are you saying? I only did this to distract Mr. Glum!”

Victor rose to his feet. “Very good. Commendable. Now stay like that until I say otherwise. You too, Amelia.”

Vanity and I looked at each other. She squinted at me, a little impish smirk begging to appear on her lips. She was waiting to see what I would do. I was waiting to see what she would do.

Colin stepped up behind me and swatted me across the bottom. “Go to, wench! Go to! Your kitchen awaits!”

He did not duck quickly enough to avoid my counter swing. Victor put his arms around Mr. Glum and unceremoniously dumped him on the carpet. He straightened and said, “You’re going into the kitchen, too, Colin. Only Quentin is excused.”

Colin was holding his mouth. “Of course. Wouldn’t miss it. Kitchen is where the girls are.”

Quentin stood and picked up his chair. “Since this seems to be sort of an impromptu birthday for me, I will come and watch. Whichever girl isn’t involved in some part of the cooking process will dote on me. Agreed?”

Victor said, “Agreed.”

Colin said, “And the other girl will be…”

“…Kicking you in the balls, over and over again,” I said. “Agreed?”

“Agreed!” said Vanity.

She took Quentin’s arm and I took the other one. We both pressed up against him, wiggling our bottoms and batting our eyelashes, as we escorted him to the kitchen.

Colin muttered, “Fie. And he says he’s not a magician.”

3.

How long does it take for happiness to be complete? I do not know how long we were in the kitchen. I suppose, objectively, it might have been as little as an hour, or even less. But it seemed to last all day. Like an endless vacation.

The kitchen was huge. All the brightwork gleamed, all the pots and pans and kettles and knives were ranked and racked and arranged by size. There were two little refrigerators and a big walk-in, and a stovetop the size of Scotland and Wales combined.

And we could have anything we wanted. For the first time in our lives, we made what we fancied in whatever way suited us. An omelette of a dozen eggs; beef that we fried in grease instead of boiling; slabs of bacon as thick as your hand; cooking sherry poured into measuring cups and drunk as toasts. Mostly, we made a mess.

Colin drank coffee for the first time in his life, the grownups’ drink. He made a face and pronounced it an abomination. But he drank a second cup, just because it had been forbidden him for so long.

Vanity had always wanted to taste a hamburger; she ground up several types of meat in the blender, and used toast for buns, and cucumber because we found no pickles. She put catsup mixed with horseradish on the resulting mass, calling it “secret sauce,” and claimed she had made a Big Mac. It looked like ground meat on toast to me, but when she gave me a bite, it was delicious. No matter what it tasted like, it was delicious, because she had made it with her own hands.

Quentin was juggling eggs with one hand, six, seven, and eight, while ordering me hither and thither for the various things he wanted in his giant omelette.

And, to my astonishment, Victor could cook. He took one cookbook off the shelf of ninety or so that Cook had, and flipped the pages as fast as his thumb would move. Then he measured and chopped and set timers and mixed with the precision of a machine, or a mad scientist. He was good at it. We ended up eating almost all what he made, because what we started turned out somewhat burnt, or raw.

We sat on the spotless floor in a big circle, plates and bowls and saucers spread about us in Roman luxury, eating everything with our fingers.

We had dessert before, during, and after the meal. Colin had discovered where the dessert pantry was—that famous pantry we had never been able to find as kids. It was locked, but Victor ran his hand over the jamb, and the lock clicked open of its own accord.

They had gathered all sorts of treats, meatballs, and cheeses, and little snacks in folds of sugar-fried bread. There was tray after silver tray of it, all gathered for some after-the-meeting reception, which, because Venus had shut down the meeting, the Visitors and Governors never got to. There were éclairs and pastries and a cake of seven layers. The things I remember best were these cupcakes made of chocolate foam, topped with froth of a different kind of chocolate, where the cups were not paper, but yet a third kind of chocolate, hard and crunchy, yet melting like a snowflake on the tongue. I had never seen anything like it before. Edible dishes! Like something out of a Roald Dahl book!

And there was a bottle of champagne.

Things became quite merry after that. Part of the reason why the boys were merry, I am sure, was seeing Vanity and me in our absurd impromptu maid outfits, waiting on them. Part of the reason was that we were lightheaded from sipping champagne.

But we were drunk on information. I had unearthed a treasure trove of secrets, secrets which had been kept from us our whole lives.

And I was merry because I was the center of attention during the first half of the meal. I talked and talked and not even Colin interrupted me. Quentin had found Cook’s account books and was writing notes on what I was saying on the back of pink receipt slips.

What a funny feeling. No one had ever thought what I had to say was important enough to write down before.

4.

Then came questions.

Colin asked: “Her name is Nausicaa or Nausea or something. Your dream called you Phaethusa. Did you find out my name? You didn’t, did you?” And he threw an olive at me, using his fork as a catapult.

Quentin asked: “Those creatures were Hecatonchire, weren’t they? The hundred-handed giants from Greek myth. They looked like humans, I am supposing, because something in the human world makes them. But they said the table gave them the ability to use their powers nonetheless. Notice this is the same table mentioned in Amelia’s dream.”

Victor asked: “Why did you fail to mention that the staff here thinks we will get sick and die if we get too far from the boundaries of the estate? That might be a good thing to test before we make our escape.”

Vanity asked: “Why did you keep slapping Quentin? It’s not like he wanted to kiss you!”

Colin asked: “Why was Mavors or Mars or whatever his name is carrying both a spear and a pistol? What the hell is the point of that? Are they magic items? Are there different laws of nature in different worlds?”

Quentin asked: “You said that when you were in the Fourth Dimension, you saw behind you both a wheel surrounded by a lesser wheel, and two cone-shaped things. What were those things—?”

Victor said, “I don’t understand this whole idea that they are mythical gods and goddesses. I mean, how is it supposed to happen? Homer sits down to write the Iliad, and some real god becomes immediately aware of it, and sends telepathic particles into the poet’s brain to make him write down what the facts are? If so, why didn’t these gods just publish newspapers? Of course, I am making the assumption that there was a man named Homer, and he did write a book called the Iliad. They might have made up that whole poem, just before they opened the school, just to teach us. Greek could be a made-up language, which they forced us to study just to annoy us.”

Vanity said, “Who eventually fell in love? At the ball?”

Colin: “And what the hell was Boggin actually trying to accomplish?”

Quentin: “The man whose head was off was Orpheus. Was there anyone else at the table who talked as if they were in his group? The Unseen One he is representing is Hades, the god of the Underworld. The Psychopomp is the guide and guardian of souls to the Land of the Dead. Hermes is supposed to be in that position.”

Victor: “Are we members of the same race? Were we adults before they made us into the shape of children? You know we must all be shape-changers, don’t you? Why else would they measure us every night?”

5.

There was one question in that mess I could answer: “It must have been the Hecatonchire. The cone-shaped things I saw behind me. I was looking through the wall at that point, and looking at the people around the table.

“You said it yourself, Colin, that they are giants in their own world. Why a cone? Imagine you saw a boy growing up into a man, but that you could see through time as a dimension. His three-dimensional cross sections would continually increase in the direction of future, continually decrease in the direction of past. A cone. Except in this case, I do not think the directions are past-future. I am calling them ‘red’ and ‘blue’ as one seems to Doppler shift light to higher energy states, and one to lower.”

Vanity asked, “What did you look like?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “In the fourth dimension. I keep trying to picture it, but all I can picture is that you would see yourself as a flat person. Her skin is a line rather than a surface. Her internal organs are flat, like an ameba’s. She only has one eye. Uck. Yuck. Just trying to picture it is gross.”

“No, you’re wrong,” said Colin, pulling up one of his eyelids. “It would only be half an eye.”

“Ugh! Ugh!” said Vanity, entirely discomforted.

Quentin said, “It is a bit unnerving. If you, Amelia, are like Vanity’s flat person in a plane, let’s say something like this floor, then by rotating in the third dimension—a dimension of which creatures living in the floor would have no conception—they would see you turn into a line. So what would happen in three dimensions? Would you become flat, like a picture?”

“No,” I said. “You’d see a cross-section. The man from flat-land, if tilted, would have only two points of his skin surface intersecting the world-plane. By analogy, three-D folk would see a tilted four-D person as a hoop of flesh surrounding a flat section of blood and internal…”

“Oh, please!” said Vanity. “Pul-ease, can’t we talk about something else while we are eating!”

I said to her, “But I don’t think I’m flat. I mean, I don’t think I do not have other three-dimensional surfaces embracing my volume. My hypervolume. What I saw of myself, I seemed to have streamlined-looking wings or fans reaching off in other directions. And branches, or lines of energy—bright things, made of sound, or thought, or music. Or something. I think what we call matter and energy are merely two different rotations of the same hyperparticle. I had other senses, too.”

Colin said, “So you looked like a squid with wings, and you actually have a cluster of eyeballs and dripping ears on the end of stalks hidden in n-space where we cannot see them. I will still think you are lovely, Amelia.”

Victor said, “You could poke your finger into someone’s brain without touching his skull.”

Vanity said, “Ugh! You people are as gross as toads! Can’t we change the topic?!”

Colin said, “Yeah, but we are only toads that have been run over by a car, and flattened. Amelia is a real fat 4-D toad. We can’t see what she really looks like because we flat folk only have… half an eye! ”

“Ugh! Uck! Make him stop!”

Quentin said, “One last question, then we can ask more about the pagan gods. Amelia, what was the sense of weight you said you saw coming from the safe?”

“It was the sphere. The hypersphere. And it’s mass, not weight.”

“Why?”

“Mass is an intrinsic property. Weight is a behavior of matter under…”

“No, no. Why was the sphere massive?”

“Oh. Simple geometry. Picture the amount of area covered by a circle. The ratio of the area to the circumference is pi r squared. Rotate the circle on any axis, and the area swept out will be a sphere. The volume of the sphere will be four-thirds pi r cubed. You see?”

“No.”

“Um. If I used a crayon to draw the circumference and another crayon to color in the area, the first crayon would lose a bit and the second a bit more. Use a third crayon to color the surface of a balloon, and a fourth crayon to somehow fill in the entire inner volume of the balloon. The first crayon loses a bit and the second crayon loses a whole lot. Rotate the balloon in the fourth dimension to create a hypervolume. The first crayon fills in the volumes of the six balloons that form its hypersur-face, the second crayon has to fill in a hypervolume raised to the fourth power. You see the difference would be enormous.”

Quentin blinked. “I don’t get it.”

Victor said, “Why six?”

I said to Victor, “Oh! You’re right! There are only six points on the hypersurface where the axis intersects it that form three-spheres. I guess I was confusing the number of right-angled intersections with the Kissing Number, which in the case of 4-D equals 24. I was fooled because I was thinking that if a sphere is all points equidistant from a given point, such that x2+y2+z2=r2, then a four-sphere would satisfy w2+x2+y2+z2=r2. This implies that for any values where one axis, let’s say w, falls to zero…”

Victor held up his hand. “Now is not the time.” To Quentin, he said, “The four-dimensional sphere is more massive for its volume than a three-dimensional sphere for the same reason that a fishbowl of water is heavier than a pie plate of the same diameter filled shallowly. See?”

Quentin shook his head, “I cannot picture it. I am sorry I was not there to look into this so-called fourth dimension. I had always thought such a thing would be spiritual in nature. I wonder if Amelia—no offense—is merely interpreting things in a geometry metaphor because that is what she understands.”

I laughed aloud. “We’re all doing that.”

Blank stares of incomprehension greeted me. Colin shrugged and passed the champagne bottle around again.

I said, “You’ve never noticed? All the understandable things we each see—tables, chairs, Vanity’s bosom—we each see in the same way. When we see the unknown, however, our brains each interpret it differently. For example, Quentin sees the Hektor-sherrys… ”

“Hecatonchire.”

“…as man impressing vital spirits onto an airy phantasm. I saw it as a multidimensional effect. Colin…?”

“Well, I wasn’t there, but it was obviously psychokinesis. They put their energy into moving the objects. They moved. We just saw Victor here use his PK on the lock to the pastry pantry, didn’t we?”

Victor shook his head. “I moved the interior workings of the lock with magnetic particles. Some organ in my body produces them. You cannot move matter without using matter to push it. Newton’s Laws, remember?”

Colin said, “How did you get such an organ?”

“Amelia’s story makes it clear our captors—and I think that is the correct word to use—consider us to be shape-changers. All that means is that our peoples developed a technology for moving and manipulating cellular and perhaps atomic structures, maybe with molecule-sized tools woven throughout our bodies. So why couldn’t they build organs which had other useful tool properties? Magnetic beams or limbs to manipulate things with? Amelia might have her brain programmed to tag such limbs with cartoon images in her eye, so she can see to manipulate them. What she sees seems not to be made of flesh and blood, she thinks they are in this so-called higher dimension.”

Quentin asked, “But, if that were the case, how could you be manipulating them, these so-called tools, with your thoughts?”

Victor said, “Nothing moves for no reason. If my hand is made of matter and my brain moves my hand, then my brain is made of matter, too.”

Quentin said, “Thoughts? Memories? Love?”

“Chemical reactions in the brain. Epiphenomena.”

Quentin smiled and shook his head. “Matter is material and thought is spiritual. How can it be otherwise?”

Victor pointed at the champagne bottle. “How can drinking affect your thoughts if thoughts are not made of the same substance, not in the same dimension, as Amelia might say, as the champagne? This is just an alcohol. A chemical. Carbon and hydrogen and oxygen atoms in rows.”

“It contains spirits. The blood releases more subtle spirits and humors into the blood. The blood carries it to the pituitary gland…”

Now it was Colin’s turn to join in: “You are both wrong. This champagne bottle is an illusion. It is a belief. You believe it will make you drunk, and you give it your energy. You give it enough energy and it has the power to rob your energy. What happens when a man is drunk? He lacks energy. That’s all. Matter is just an idea, and a bad idea at that. The fact that Victor here can turn locks without touching them and Amelia can walk through walls proves it. If such things are unreal, we only see them because our eyes lack power. Ladies and gentlemen, a toast! To the real world! The one where there are no locks, no walls.”

“Hear, hear!” we all called, raising our glasses.

After the toasting was done, and we were passing around the tub of ice cream we had found, making root beer floats with champagne instead of root beer, Vanity stood up. She had not had as much as the rest of us, but it made her cheeks rosy and her eyes glitter. Her skirt seemed shorter than it had been a moment ago, her neckline lower, her waist thinner. Was that the champagne? Maybe we were shape-changers, and she was feeling prettier, the way I had done when I used to stare in mirrors to turn my mousy hair blond and my brown eyes hazel, then green.

Vanity said, “None of you boys heard a word Amelia said. Not a bloody word. There are different versions of the universe. Different paradigms. Different states of mind. Each paradigm, each model, has something it cannot explain. Something unknown, dark, incomprehensible, irrational. Something it fears. Each philosophy has one question it cannot answer. A different question for each one, but at least one. You see? Chaos. We are from the question mark.”

Colin said, “What do you mean, ‘we,’ White Wench? They said you were one of them. A non-Chaos person. What would you call that? An orderist? An orderly? Neat Freak?”

Quentin said, “The opposite of Chaos is Cosmos. A citizen of the Cosmos is a Cosmopolitan.”

“Oh, God!” said Colin, taking another swig of champagne. “Say it after me. ‘Vanity Fair is a Cosmopolitan.’ ”

Vanity Fair struck a pose, her hands on her knees and her bottom stuck out, her elbows pushing her breasts even more dangerously further forward. “I’m two glamour magazines!”

Victor said, “What is her paradigm?”

I said, “Listen to the way she talks. She is actually a solipsist. She explains everything in terms of different states of mind of the observer.”

Quentin said to me, “How does she explain magic?”

Vanity said, “Magic is what we call the unknown.”

Quentin said to her, “And what do we call it once it is known?”

Vanity shrugged a bit. “The unknown is a blank spot on the map. How different people fill it in is different, I guess. Depends on their tastes, I suppose. Isn’t that what we are all talking about here? Different tastes in the way we choose to see the universe?”

Colin guffawed. “Sort of like picking out a new hat…? I do not like stars and planets; they are so very out of fashion this season! I want the lights in the sky to be little lamps carried by elves! All in favor say ‘aye’! Come on.”

Vanity looked outraged. “But you are the one who just said life is an illusion!”

“Yeah, but I said life actually, really, is an illusion, and that’s a fact. I have proof! Would Victor be able to wish a lock on a door open, if all this were real?”

Quentin said, “I hate to gang up with Colin against you, Vanity, but you are being a bit of a solipsist. Let me take an example. Suppose you climb a hill or go into a valley no one has ever seen before. The moment your eyes light on it, do trees appear?”

She shrugged, saying, “Who knows? Why assume trees you never saw before were there before you saw them? You can make any assumption you want. That’s what assumptions are. You fill them into the blank spots in your knowledge.”

Quentin smiled, saying, “Who or what decides how many leaves each branch of each tree has, or how many veins on each leaf?”

Vanity waved her hands at him. “Now you are being silly. Nobody sees every leaf in the forest at once.”

Quentin said, “Do you pick a number in your head before you look?”

Victor said, “The forests children see would have fewer leaves than the ones seen by, for example, professional astronomers, who can think in scientific notation. Hottentots could not see more than ‘three’ because they don’t have a word for any number higher than that.”

Vanity said, “You are both being ridiculous! We see dreams, don’t we? But we do not sit down with typewriters and write out a script before we fall asleep. We just see them. They must come from somewhere. For all we know, the number of leaves on a tree could just be the same way. It comes from somewhere. Maybe from the same place as dreams. I mean, nothing comes from nowhere for no reason, right?”

Victor said, “I move we shelve the discussion of the nature of reality until after we decide what to do with what we’ve learned. Right now, they don’t know we know. With Dr. Fell blanking out Quentin’s memory, they think they’ve covered their tracks. There are at least two factions, maybe five. Mavors, Mulciber, Trismegistus we know; they spoke about Pelagaeus and the Unseen One at the meeting. The Satyr was representing the Vine God…”

“Dionysus,” said Quentin, “And Pelagaeus is Poseidon.”

“…who may be in the same camp with Hermes, according to what Amelia overheard. Now then, they all think we can give victory to whatever side we help, and they are afraid to kill us because the threat to our lives as hostages is all that is holding back Chaos. For the moment, Cyprian has to talk to Mulciber to get his agreement to the plan to have us moved to the Unseen One’s control. Or, they might instead just decide to take Vanity and give her to the Atlantians. Does that sum up the facts?”

Colin said, “Suppose Hermes is on the level. He got in trouble—you said—for making a deal with our folks, the Urine People.”

“Uranians,” said Quentin. “Sons of Uranus. Titans.”

“Whatever. How do we contact him, if he’s the one we decide to go for?” said Colin.

I said, “He must have thought it obvious, so he didn’t say.”

Victor said, “Taffy ap Cymru. Also a shape-changer, by the way. Works for him. Hermes knows you know that. He gave us Taffy. As a gift. Don’t any of you see it? If Taffy doesn’t do what we ask, we turn him over to Boggin.”

Quentin said, “Boggin would have power over him. That is how one acquires authority over the soul of another. Get a man to break his word to you. Or break a law.”

Colin muttered, “Have them put their boots on the table.”

Quentin said, “Immorality is weakness. Virtue is strength. You can’t hex an honest man. That’s what Boggin wanted, Amelia. Permission to hex you.” Quentin looked around the circle. “Did anyone else promise him anything, when he talked to you?”

Victor said, “I asked him to define his terms. I said that if I were a child, he could not make a contract with me in the eyes of the law, and that if I were not a child, he could not keep me imprisoned here. I asked him which it was.”

Colin said, “I pretended that I had forgotten how to talk, except to say ‘Go on.’ Whenever he asked me a direct question, I said ‘Go on.’ I timed it, to see how long he could go on with me not saying anything. Forty minutes, ten seconds.”

Vanity said, “He didn’t talk to me.”

I said, “The people at the meeting seemed to imply that the Phaeacians can somehow open or shut the boundaries between reality.”

Colin said, “Meaning what?”

“When the boundaries are open, our various powers work. When they are shut, we’re just kids.”

Colin said, “How did you come by that notion, Bright Eyes?”

“Several things they said. Also, just seeing a sphere from my homeland enabled me to travel through other dimensions and walk through walls. I wonder if the other objects in that safe are similar reminders. Keys. To turn us on. They always meant to use us, right? The only question holding them back is not whether to use us, but who gets to use us, right? If reminders of our homes can do that to us, what happens when we find the boundaries between this dimension and our various homes? There are four boundaries to the estate, and four of us. Four Uranians, I mean. Vanity, or Nausicaa, rather, is from Phaeacia.”

“Very interesting,” said Colin. “But could you give me some milk?”

“The carton’s right by you.”

“No, no,” he said, putting his glass right under my breasts, “I meant, could you give me some…”

Vanity gave a little shriek and leapt to her feet.

Colin said, “What? What? It wasn’t that funny!”

“I’m Nausicaa! I’m that Nausicaa. The girl from Phaeacia who discovers Odysseus washed up half-dead on the shore! Don’t you see…?”

We looked at each other.

“I actually did those things. I had a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and maybe even a dog and a palace and everything. I had favorite foods. I had people I had fights with. A faith. Things I thought. Things I wanted to do. Maybe artistic talents or a lover or… They’ve taken it all away. All I remember is this place. They’ve killed me.”

And she started crying in earnest. Quentin went to put his arms around her, and said, “Shush, shush…”

Victor stood up. “I move we put memory restoration at the top of the agenda. We all add to our running-away caches, and we all steal money when we can, except you, Quentin. I don’t think we need to flee just yet; they don’t know we’re on to them, and I also want a crack at that safe Amelia saw. As for the memory thing, let’s try the thing in Amelia’s dream. Let’s do that right now.”

“But we need the table,” I said. “The great green table in the Great Hall.”

Victor smiled. “There is also a table made of a similar green marble in the waiting room in front of Boggin’s office. Is it the same? Let’s go upstairs and find out.”