Orphans of Chaos

1.

Victor and Colin stayed behind in the kitchen to loot it systematically. Victor wanted a certain amount of imperishable foods, lightweight canned goods, and other things like knives, all packed away and hidden before the escape attempt. The outside weather was cold, so even perishable food would keep for a while, hidden in the woods or the Barrows.

When Vanity and I were finally released from doting duty, she had to cut me out of my apron strings with a paring knife. I looked in wonder at the knot Colin had made. It seemed to have no beginning and no end, and have no place for slack to form: a topological impossibility. Perhaps he had done magic to it, “put energy into it,” as he would say. I stuck it in my skirt pocket for later study.

Buttons done up and skirts pulled down, Vanity and I, along with Quentin, made our way up to the Headmaster’s office without incident.

There was the antechamber. Mr. Sprat was not at his desk; no one was around. Beyond the door was the waiting room. As quietly as mice, we crept in. A low table of green marble squatted on heavy crooked legs of wood before the red plush length of the couch. Tall wing-back chairs, red as Catholic cardinals, looming solemnly, crowded close. The two clocks, ticking half a step out of time with each other, stood like sentries to either side of the far door. Two strips of light from the archer-slit windows, one to either side of a book cabinet with dusty glass doors, threw angular lines across the rectilinear shadows.

“This place is a tomb,” Quentin announced. “Someone is buried here.”

Vanity stole over to the other door, which was coated with soundproof leather and a pattern of studs, and put her hand on it. She pushed it open a crack. She sniffed sadly, turned, and came back.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Boggin is not there.”

“That makes you sad?”

“But Odysseus is in there!” she said. “The guy I rescued from the sea. What kind of people would do this to me? Make me read my own story about my own life as an assignment for Greek tutorial? I had to write those damn papers on the Odyssey! They were all laughing behind their hands at me.” She looked up. There were tears in her eyes.

She said to me, “Please tell me this will work on me, too.”

I said, “The dream did not say.”

Quentin said, “I found Apsu, pardon me, I found my walking stick where you had left it in the snow on the windowsill. I must say, I was mightily confused, before I heard your story at breakfast, as to why I had left it there. When I picked it up, it was heavier than normal. That usually only happens when a True Dream, a dream from the Gate of Horn, had flown by on owl-wing. Do you remember your dream with particular clarity? If it came at dawn, it may be a Phantasma Astra, a dream of prophecy rather than a Phantasma Natura, which merely records images or eidolons passing from your passive intellect to your active intellect.”

I repeated the words the egg had spoken to me in my dream. “ ‘Nausicaa must stand upon the boundary stone, and grant passage to the power from Myriagon, your home. Recall that thoughts are all recalled by thought and thought alone; undo the magic of mere matter, and the night of no-memory shall break.’ ”

Vanity said, “Why are we assuming he meant me to stand on a table?”

I said, “The Stone Table, the Boundary Stone Table, is what Boggin and his pals called the big green table in the Great Hall. Also, the Hundred-Hand Man said the table allowed his powers to work outside of his native land.”

Quentin asked me about the first stanza of the dream, and I repeated the words of greeting.

Quentin said, “And he said your name was Phaethusa?”

I said, “Either that, or I was supposed to pass a message along to her. Do either of you recognize that name from myth or books?”

Quentin said, “We’ve all read the same books, Amelia.”

“But we don’t all get the same grades,” I said, trying to preserve a look of dignity.

Vanity said, “Melly here would crib off me in Greek and Latin. And she did my math for me.”

Quentin looked shocked. “You didn’t do your lessons?” The idea seemed to astonish him. “I thought only, you know, kids on TV sitcoms acted that way. And Colin. But I thought he was a freak of nature, or something.”

I said, “We’re all freaks of nature.”

Vanity said tartly, “No, only I am a freak of nature. I am from the universe. You guys are freaks of Outside of Nature.”

Quentin said, “Amelia, turn your back.”

I blinked. “What? Why?”

Quentin said, “Or don’t, as you like.”

Vanity was beginning to look both suspicious and flustered.

Quentin stepped up to her, took both her hands in his hands, stared into her eyes for a long moment.

He said, “Vanity, no matter what we discover, now or ever, what I feel for you shall be unchanged and unchanging.”

“Quentin, I…”

“Hush. I am going to kiss you.”

Vanity blushed and looked at her feet. “You’ve drunk too much champagne…”

“I said, ‘Hush.’ ”

And he took her chin in his fingers, tilted her head up.

Vanity closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I have never seen a face look more sweet, before or since, than she looked at that moment. Or more trusting.

He kissed her.

I know I was really not supposed to stand there gawking, but wild horses could not have dragged me away at that moment. I had known, for months now, how Vanity felt about Quentin.

He stepped back, his eyes filled with emotion, but his face calm. The same way, earlier, I had seen an expression that made me think he was a five-year-old, now I saw what he would look like when he was twenty-five, when he was forty-five.

Quentin laughed for mere joy, and said, “Colin told me never to ‘ask’ a girl for a kiss, merely to inform her so she knows you’re doing it deliberately. I have no idea why he thinks he knows anything about women, since he’s never met any I haven’t met. But maybe he knows the right thing about women.”

Vanity’s face, all freckled and round and flushed, lit up like the sun coming out, and her smile peeped up, grew larger, kept growing. She said, “It’s not what you know about women. It’s the women you know.”

Quentin glanced at me. “You know why I did that, now?”

I said quietly, “I have a guess.”

He nodded, turned away from me, and said, “Let’s begin.”

The hand by which he held her he now raised to help her mount up to the stone. The dream had said she must stand upon it.

Vanity stood there, her black patent leather shoes turned ever so slightly inward toward each other, her hands toying with the pleats in her plaid skirt, her shoulders half raised in a shrug, her head half lowered in a blush. Even though Quentin was now standing below her, she seemed to want to look up at him, through the tops of her lashes.

2.

My guess was this: He wanted this to be his first kiss. At the moment, it was. If the experiment worked, and he got his memory back, this memory would still contain, nevertheless, in all innocence and all solemnity, love’s first kiss.

And then I had a bad thought. What if Nausicaa was already in love with someone else? Someone whom Vanity did not remember? Homer made her out to be pretty sweet on Odysseus, as I recall.

I had been assuming the spell, if it worked, was meant for Quentin. It had come in the middle of a dream about Quentin. But what if it worked on all of us?

And what about me? What if Phaethusa was, I don’t know, a murderess or an adulteress or an environmentalist or something? Someone who couldn’t do math, or who liked Tony Blair?

Did I want to be an adult, suddenly?

I did not think too highly of adults, not the ones I had met so far in my life. They seemed like the Upside-Down Folk to me, worrying about everything trivial and blithely ignoring everything great and fine and true in life.

I thought about what Victor would say about my doubts. First, he would look skeptical, and then his skepticism would deepen into a sarcastic grimace, and he would ask: “Is this the right thing to do?”

That is what he would have said. “Sorrow is merely an emotion. Pain is merely a stimulation of nerve ends. Neither one has any necessary relationship to what we have to do in order to survive. If our enemies”—and Victor always thought of them as enemies—“if our enemies make it more painful for us to do what we must do, that merely increases the wrong they do us. It doesn’t decrease our obligations. It therefore is irrelevant to our decisions.”

Thank you, Victor.

Aloud, I said, “I’m ready.”

3.

Vanity said, “I’m ready, too. What do we do?”

I said, “What do your instincts tell you?”

“Hmm… Let me think… Avoid falling from heights, dark places, and loud noises. Have babies.”

“I’m serious!” I said.

She looked at me with her wide, wide green eyes. “I am, too. What does ‘listen to your instincts’ mean?”

Quentin said, “The first thing to do in any ritual, is sanctify the area. Either the time, or the place, or the persons must be set aside, held pure, from other influences, chthonic or mundane…”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“Put on a white robe, or something. That way the spirits know you are about to initiate a transformation.”

“I don’t have a white robe.”

“Some witches go sky-clad…”

“What’s that?”

“In the nude.”

“You naughty, naughty boy!”

I said, “Enough banter! Banter fun, ha ha, very funny, you are both cute. Now stop. Quentin, I do not think your magic is her paradigm.”

“What is her paradigm?”

I spread my hands and shrugged. “You heard my theory at breakfast.”

“She interprets everything in terms of herself? Her own awareness? Hmm. I am not sure how one expands one’s awareness. Vanity, maybe you have to sleep, or chew peyote, or something.”

“I’ve drunk champagne. That’s all we have time for,” she said.

I said, “You could always just command the table to open a dimensional gateway to Myriagon. You know, say, ‘Boundary, Open!’ Or, ‘Path to Myriagon, Appear!’ Like that.”

Vanity tried a number of variations on this phrase. She tried singing the command, she tried sounding solemn, she tried asking nicely. She tried at least a dozen different phrases and tones of voice.

We two were getting bored.

Vanity looked up. “I am talking to a rock. Whose idea was this?”

I said, “Maybe if you tried harder; if you really felt, deep down in your soul…”

Quentin said, “No. That is a Colin paradigm. He is the one who thinks everything is done by an inspired effort of will. I do not think any two of us have the same paradigm.”

I spread my hands. “Suggest something.”

He frowned and looked around the room.

I said, “If Colin were here, he would make a suggestion.”

“Colin would suggest tantric magic,” Quentin muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Something sky-clad people do… Hang on.”

Vanity said, “What part of you am I to hang on to, then? If you’re nude?”

I said, “Enough banter! No more banter!”

Quentin was looking at the book cabinet. “What do we know about the Phaeacians? From Homer’s Odyssey? What does he say about them?”

I looked at him blankly. The only thing I remembered about the Odyssey was that it was harder to translate from Greek than Socratic dialogues (which were filled with labyrinthine sentences of angular complexity) and much harder than the New Testament (which was written in baby-talk Greek). “I… um… Wasn’t it the same island as Corcyra? The place where all that civil mayhem went on in Thucydides?”

Vanity looked embarrassed. “Gosh, I am supposed to be from there. I don’t remember a thing. Is that the place where they landed in a harbor and sent the messenger, and the messenger got eaten, and all the ships but one were destroyed by these bronze chariots? Nice, peaceful villages filled the valleys, but those people were actually just cattle for the man-eating men, the super warriors, from the hills?”

I said, “There was a Cyclops who ate people, but…”

Quentin was looking back and forth at us. “Uh, no. Vanity is right that there were anthropophages who dressed from head to foot in bronze, and destroyed the ships. They were called the Lystragonians. The Phaeacians were very hospitable. In fact, I always thought one of the points the poet was trying to make was to show the nature of hospitality versus barbarism, and the abuse of hospitality. The suitors of Penelope, for example…”

I said, “Rule number one: No banter. Rule number two: No digressions.”

“Fine. This is what I remember about the Phaeacians. I thought they were supposed to be fairies. Here’s why I thought so: The fruit was always in season there; their island never suffered winter’s cold or summer’s heat as did the mortal world. Their doors were guarded by dogs of gold and silver, made by Hephaestos. And their ships were magical. They sailed anywhere from any port to any other in a single night of sailing, and they needed no hand at the tiller, no oar nor sail, because the ships knew what their captains desired without a word, and a living spirit moved them. They also left Odysseus on the beach of his country surrounded by gifts, asleep, and stole away without seeing anyone or waking him up. Don’t you think that was strange? I mean, suppose the prince of, I don’t know, Sweden, were stranded on Dover Beach, and Princess Diana found him naked, and brought him to court to get a ride home. Don’t you think, instead of leaving him all alone and asleep, dropped off in a back alley of Oslo, Her Majesty’s Government would at least communicate with the government of Sweden to…”

“Babbling! Babbling!” I said. “Don’t make me make another rule!”

“Well, I am saying that’s why I thought they were fairy folk. They were shy of being seen.”

I said, “And the magic metal dogs didn’t give it away?”

Vanity broke in with a question. “Hey! Was there a range limit?”

Quentin said, “On what?”

“You said their ships could read minds. Did you have to be aboard the ship for it to work?”

Quentin simply smiled at her, and looked proud.

That smile brought a chill to my heart. No, I did not disapprove of what they felt for each other, nothing like that. It was just that I had feelings for Victor. And Victor never looked at me that way. He never looked proud of me.

4.

Vanity spread her hands and shut her eyes. She said aloud, “Ship! Whatever ship Princess Nausicaa once owned, I have forgotten you, but you must remember me, now! Or if any ship wishes the favor of the princess of the land which built you, listen to me! The boundary between…”

She opened one eye.

“Myriagon,” I whispered.

She closed her eye. “…between Myriagon, and this place, must be opened! Sail there, come here, bring my friend Amelia Windrose…”

Quentin said softly, “Phaethusa, daughter of Helion.”

“…Um, who is also known as Phaethusa, daughter of He-lion, her powers. You knew my thought before I asked! Let it be that you set sail two nights ago, so that you already have been to Myriagon, and are even now approaching with your cargo! I conjure thee, I conjure thee, I conjure thee!”

She opened her eyes and looked at us. She smiled.

I said, “Did you feel anything happen?”

Her smile faded. “Was I supposed to feel something?”

Quentin said, “Maybe we should go to the harbor, I mean, if there is a magic ship coming… Ack! Yikes!”

He grabbed Vanity around the waist and picked her up off the table.

She giggled and looked pleased. Does love make people stupid? Meanwhile, I said, “What is wrong?”

“Don’t you see it?” He was staring at the tabletop.

5.

The surface of the table turned translucent green, then leaf green, then clear as crystal. I was looking down a long tube or tunnel of crystal to something far, far below.

It was a head. A severed head, with its neck bones, torn throat-muscles and veins, all showing from beneath the matted tangle of the beard. The black hair was spread out in each direction from the skull, tangled and knotted around the green things growing to each side. It looked like someone had thrown a man’s head into the center of the ring of bushes.

No. Not bushes. Oak trees. Oaks trees set, not in a ring, but in a widening spiral with this head at the center.

I tried to estimate the size of the giant head, if a fully grown oak tree only reached the distance from the back of its skull to its ear, or its cheek.

It opened its dead eyes.

Like brown water in a rusty pipe, a voice, deep, slow, coughing and creaking, rose from far below: “Who trespasses the bounds I watch?”

6.

Suddenly, it seemed to me as if the tunnel of crystal down which I looked was not “down,” nor left nor right, fore nor back, nor any other direction that had a name. It was an opening into subspace, the low-energy direction I called “red.”

Quentin opened his mouth to speak, and then checked himself, looking at Vanity.

Vanity looked at the both of us, spread her hands, and shrugged. Some of the glow from the champagne was leaving us at that moment, and she looked frightened and clouded in her wits, as if she was having trouble concentrating.

She said, “I am not a trespasser.”

The dead mouth spoke again: “Burner of ships, daughter of virtue, I know you, though you do not. You stand with a fallen one born old before he was young, from lifeless seas beyond the seas of life; you stand with an unknown one born before the fall, from dark heavens above the heavens which hold stars. They are the foes of the Green Earth and the Blue Sea, of bright heaven above the world and dark underworld. At your word, I destroy them. Speak, and I let slip the Wild Hunt.”

She said, “These are my friends and I love them. Don’t hurt them.”

The dead face kept its motionless eyes turned toward her, quiet as a statue in a graveyard.

She said, “My friend Amelia is closer than a sister to me. She needs her powers from her home to undo a great wrong. Let her powers pass through to her. If any ship of mine is coming on my errands, let it pass.”

Vanity’s face was shining with sweat. In a cold room in the middle of winter, she was sweating.

Eventually the creaking, slow voice spoke again. “Cromm Cruich the Worm of Mist rose against me, and my songs threw him down. The Sons of Nemed, the Men of the Bolg, the Parthalonians, and the Giants of Fomor attempted these shores, and were driven back to Eire, or driven underground.

“Rome’s eagle stooped here for a time, clawing and tearing at this land, but Caesar lost his sword to Cymbaline, and Constantine called back the haughty legionnaires, departed never to return.

“I breathed a storm upon the Spanish King Philip, whose great Armada sank beneath the sorcery of the Virgin Queen; when the German Caesar sent his flying iron sky-things to hail fire and death upon this Kingdom, I spoke into the place where Arthur still recovers from his wound, and bleeding, he rose up, and drove the Huns away.

“This is my land. Her green hills and mountains, heaths and highlands, forests thick with red deer, rivers running blue into the channel or the iron-gray Northern Sea. The rain, the mist, the fogs are mine. The folk are mine, these proud, cold, silly, solemn folk, in whose bosom the first torch of liberty ever was found again, since the day the venial nobles in Rome allowed Caesar’s bloodstained hands to quench it.

“Crude Chaucer, and Milton most august, alike are mine; angelic John Keats and devilish George Gordon, Lord Byron.

“The victories at Waterloo, Trafalgar, and, yes, at Rourke’s Drift are mine. Even the massacres done to the helpless aborigines of far Tasmania are mine.

“All this island is, I am. Do you understand me?”

Vanity said softly, “Yes.”

“Then swear your most profoundest oath, swear by the blackest water of the River Styx, by the Cauldron of Arawn the Just, by the Grail of Christ the Merciful, by the Wounds of the Fisher-King and Spear that cured him, swear! Swear and bind those two you call your friends to the oath. You will never harm this island. No matter how this land offend you, nor what her crimes, nor even if all the Lordly Dead most beloved by you call with deepest tears, on knee, upon you, you shall do no hurt unto this island. Swear, and I shall let your ship pass by me.”

She said, “I swear.”

I said, “Um, so do I. God save the Queen.”

Quentin stepped over to where Headmaster Boggin had set out a box of cigars for his guests. There was an ashtray here. With the penknife used to trim the cigars, Quentin cut a strand of hair from his head, set the lock of hair in the ashtray, and ignited it with the matching cigarette lighter standing next to the box. The hair burnt with a truly disgusting smell.

Quentin said quietly, “May my life be cut as quickly, may I be burned as terribly, as this frail hair I cast into the flame, should I break this vow. I love England and will do the land no harm; no matter what crimes I am done, nor who calls on me. Black water of the Styx, Cauldron of Annfwn, Grail of Christ, Red Wounds of Alan le Gros, and Spear of Joseph of Arimathia, I pray you witness and enforce this oath, and never release me from it. So Mote It Be.”

The head said, “Done! For the span of time it takes to sing the Compline, the fetid stain of Myriagon shall be permitted to mar this place.”

The crystal tabletop darkened, transparent, translucent, opaque; and the head was gone.

I said, “How long does it take to sing the Compline?”

Quentin said, “Thirteen seconds. ‘Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night…’ ”

Even though the crystal tunnel was now opaque, I could still see it, like a green pillar issuing from the tabletop and reaching into the “red” direction. Looking at Quentin, I saw, stretching parallel to that, world-lines intersecting his nervous system, and distorting the natural flow paths of his thoughts.

“…and give your angels charge over those who sleep…”

It was the same effect I use to distort the at-rest mass-path of a heavy door to make it lighter. Something was distorting the at-rest state of the white dot at the center of his brain.

Vanity, seeing my face, shrieked and put her fingers over her mouth.

“…Tend the sick, Lord Christ…”

That dot was not, precisely speaking, “in” his brain. In the same way what we called a “song” was the terdimensional manifestation of a higher singularity, Quentin’s brain activity was an ongoing representation in time and space of the rotation of the surface of a fourth-dimensional object-event.

“…give rest to the weary…”

The dot was a monad. It was his noumenal self; the part of the self in which self-awareness resides.

“…bless the dying…”

Vibrations radiating from the monad formed six different types of energy, depending on what three-dimensional axis intersected them. Three were space, one was time, one was para-time, and the final one…

“…soothe the suffering…”

…It did not have a name. A new sense impression I had not hitherto been aware I possessed apprehended the nameless sixth vibration. The first five directions established relation and duration; this sixth gave self its self-ness. It was eternal, timeless, indestructible…

“…pity the afflicted…”

And it was tilted off-axis. The shadows it cast into Quentin’s nerve paths were deflected. I could see bright areas and dim areas in his cortex. Certain of his thoughts and memories were attempting to create a greater effect in the future. They had the potential for setting in motion chains of cause-effect which would influence his actions and change him. This was being blocked. I was looking, so to speak, at his happy memories.

“…shield the joyous…”

Bits of dark matter were also floating in his nervous system. They were the source of the blocking. It was very complex, a web of energy-interactions it would have taken years, centuries to trace…

“…and all for your love’s sake…”

But I did not have to. No matter how complex the web of matter was inside Quentin’s brain, whatever was not connected to the governing monad in which his noumenal self resided was, by definition, non-self-correcting. Only living systems can love themselves, change themselves, grow, correct themselves, put out new stalks and branches on the tree of possible futures issuing from their actions.

The dark matter, on the other hand, was inert. “Inert” equals “actions determined” equals “low probability.” All I had to do was…

I said, “Thoughts are known by thought and thought alone.” And I reached out with… something… and twisted his monad back into its proper alignment, to bring the blight areas along the thought-axis parallel to the para-time axis of the dim areas inflicted by the dark matter in his brain. And…

“…Amen.”

The universe collapsed on me, crushing me back into three-dimensional space. I still had my… call it a hand… outside of its normal volume, reaching into Quentin. I did not have time to fold up properly.

And so I (my body compressed at the wrong angle) screamed; Vanity (looking at me) screamed; Quentin (clutching his head) screamed.

We all screamed. It was not a good moment.

7.

I fell over and struck the floor. Whatever it was (A limb? A song? A thought? A psychic extension? A manipulator made out of solidified time?) that I had inside Quentin, slipped out as I fell, in the spray of reddish sparks.

I had not even been aware that I had a telescoping 4-D form meant to fold smoothly back into 3-D geometry until I was stuck half-folded. That sense of heaviness, of massiveness, which surrounded my hand when I tried to reach through the safe walls the night before was now spread unevenly through my whole body. Some organs felt compressed, others, distended.

I tried to look at myself, but my eyes were not working. Everything was afflicted with a blue haze. Instead, sense organs meant for some other level of reality were giving me information. I was receiving a sense of the internal nature of things from one pair of organs, and another organ told me how useful or useless certain objects and events around me were to my will.

Vanity’s internal nature was sweet and giving; Quentin was sad; the table was stern; the cigars were filled with malice; the doors to Boggin’s chamber were watchful and careful; the two clocks were bitter, filled with hate, and watching me.

Neither Vanity nor Quentin were of any use to me at the moment, my other sense informed me. That is, none of the world-paths issuing from me had any greater potential when passing near them.

But there was something shining with use-light coming quickly from a parallel area. It was either nearby in time or in space.

I twisted my head to see if I could bring another sense organ to bear. Through the wall, I could see two nervous systems, surrounded by glowing lines of superpotential, great usefulness, jogging up the stairs.

Then the first was at the door to this room. I could not see the door, but I heard it open, and the inner nature of watchfulness gave way to something masculine, selfish, disobedient, willful, lustful, and rough.

Behind the rough object was someone whose inner nature was logical, detached, dispassionate, stoic, skeptical about outer things, certain about inner ones.

I said, “Colin? Victor? Is that you?”

No words came out, but there was a rush of music radiation from me, flashes of wings of light.

Vanity screamed again.

Victor said, “Fascinating. Is that Amelia?”

Colin put his hand out. With a bump, the world snapped back into place. My new senses went blind. I was blinking.

I looked around. Everything was normal looking. No noises from subspace, no ripples of hyperlight thudding through skew planes. Just a room, and four friends staring down at me.

I looked down at myself. Honestly, I expected to see unimaginable horror, arms and legs twisted into Mobius strips, my body stretched into a Klein bottle, bones at right angles, lungs turned inside out, my head shaped like a question mark, with webs of flesh connecting me to older and younger versions of my body. Something like that.

But I was just normal. A girl in a plaid skirt, white shirt, black patent leather shoes, and a stupid necktie.

“What happened?” I asked.

Colin said, “You had too much energy in you. I sucked it away.”

I said, “How?”

Colin leaned over and offered me his hand. “I wanted you back the way you were. My desire was stronger than the desire of the world to keep you looking weird. I won.”

I put my hand in his hand. Instead of lifting me to my feet, he just caressed the back of my hand with little motions of his thumb.

“But—how did you know what to do?”

He smiled. “It’s not something I do consciously. It’s like lust. I mean, a man can’t ejaculate just by a silent act of willpower. He needs a girl to lick his…”

I yanked my hand away and climbed to my feet without his help. He started to brush off my bottom, and I clipped him one on the ear.

“Ow!” he said, clutching his ear and stepping back. “And you’re welcome for me saving your life.”

Quentin said, “I wish I had his paradigm. No fuss. No knives. No candles. No lists of names.”

Victor said, “Clap, and the dead Tinkerbell gets better, only if you really believe. Seems like a rather inflexible system to me. How can you perform experiments? If you can only do what you really believe in, you cannot be curious.”

Quentin said, “But look at how well he does with women!”

Victor said, “Does what? Annoy them?”

I said to Colin, “Thank you for saving me. Do you want me to say I’m sorry about hitting your ear?”

Colin, still rubbing his ear, said, “No, thanks. I want to stay mad at you, I’ll have an excuse later on for hiking up your skirts, turning you over my knee, and spanking you. Hit me again.”

Vanity said, “How come everyone starts talking about spanking when Amelia is around?”

Colin said to her, “It had to do with the shape of her butt. Some girls, you can just tell from the shape of their butts, that what they really want is a nice, strong…”

“Ugh!” said Vanity. “Just shut up! You’re the kind of fellow who thinks boogers are funny.”

“Well,” said Colin, looking a little puzzled, “Boogers are funny, most of the time. There is humor value both in the long, droopy kind and the hard, crumbly…”

“Speaking of gross things,” I said, “what did I look like? Just now, I mean.”

Colin said, “Big squid with eyestalks, just like you said.”

Vanity said, “It was gross. You got all thin and stretched, and these blurry lights and colors and sounds were coming out of you. I think you had wings. And tentacles—fiery tentacles coming out of behind your shoulders. There was a white spike through your head.”

Quentin said, “You had wings like an angel, and the horn of a unicorn. You looked like a centaur. From the waist down, your body was deerlike and very sleek. More like a dolphin, than a deer, actually. It was beautiful.”

Victor said, “I saw four legs, also. You had a long tail or flukes trailing behind that, which seemed to be embedded in the bookcase behind you. Although that must have been an optical illusion, because I can see the bookcase is unharmed. From the waist up you looked fairly like your self, except that your neck was longer and your head was smaller, and surrounded by a reddish haze. You had wings, or some sort of fans or vanes hovering behind you. They did not seem to be connected to any particular place on your shoulders. Streamers of energy composed of groups of light-dots were issuing from your arms and shoulders, and reaching to various points around the room. I also noticed a group of bulbs or globes floating in the air near your head, though some smaller globes were floating further away. You were also playing music, and filmy lights like aurora borealis were rapidly coming out from your wings in concentric ripples. There was an intense magnetic disturbance. I think the bulbs near your head were sensory apparatus. When Colin and I were still in the hall outside, we both saw a trio of bulbs appear in a splash of red light and move toward us. Colin told me you were looking at us.”

Vanity said, “Oh my God! She has floating eyeballs! Yee-uk!”

Quentin said, “I think you are being too harsh, Vanity.”

Vanity said, “You don’t understand! Girls get freaked out if we have a mole or if one breast is slightly bigger than another. Little things. A crooked nose. A blackhead. You know. The only thing you boys actually judge us on. So how do you think we should feel if we grow another hand out of our forehead or something? Even a nice-looking hand with long nails? And now she’s got energy and matter and music and God-knows-what coming off of her, and too many legs, and… Do you know a guy won’t look at you on the beach if you have one toe missing? One toe!”

Colin said, “You were never on a beach.”

Quentin said to me, “It really did not look that bad. There was something spiritual about the shape. It looked… hmm… more ‘real’ somehow and less frail, than the normal objects in the room here.”

Colin said, “There were other shapes, beyond what we saw. Maybe one for every different angle she can turn in this so-called ‘fourth dimension’ of hers, or whatever dumb visualization she uses to focus. There’s more. I sense the untapped energy.”

Victor said, “Shape doesn’t matter. Beauty is an arbitrary judgment.”

Colin said to me, “Look here, Amelia, a flat picture of a girl can be as good-looking as the 3-D real thing. Better looking, actually, if she takes off her shirt for the camera. So why can’t a 4-D picture of a girl look good?”

I said to him, “(A) I never said I thought I looked bad, only Vanity said that, so you don’t have to try to cheer me up, and (B) I thought you said I looked like a squid?”

He said, “A cute squid. What’s the problem? We’re all shape-changers. You just happened to be the first one to pop up a new shape.”

Victor said, “You also can manifest limbs at a distance. There was also a mist or cloud connecting various disconnected bulbs and wing elements around you. Wherever an object—I assume part of your body—was appearing or disappearing, there was always a puff of cloud and a visible light distortion. Parts of your body seemed to be energy fields rather than flesh and bone.”

Quentin said, “The misty clouds looked just like the ones we saw around the hands of the Hecatonchire last night.”

I looked at him in amazement, dumbstruck.

Vanity said, “How do you know that, Quentin?”

“Because I remember, now,” he said quietly.

And he smiled.