Titans of Chaos

Other Tor Books By John C. Wright:

The Golden Age

Phoenix Exultant

The Golden Transcendence

The Last Guardian of Everness

Mists of Everness

Orphans of Chaos

Fugitives of Chaos

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NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

TITANS OF CHAOS

Copyright © 2007 by John C. Wright

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Talis Winterborn

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

Fifth Avenue

New York, NY

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5560-7 ISBN-10: 0-7653-5560-

First Edition: April

First Mass Market Edition: March

Printed in the United States of America

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Acknowledgments

The fragment used of the "Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo" is the translation by Hugh G.

Evelyn-White, based on the edition of T. W. Allen.

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Dramatis Personae

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The Students:

(Primus) Victor Invictus Triumph • Damnameneus of the Telchine (Secunda) Amelia Armstrong Windrose • Phaethusa,Daughter of Helios and Neaera of Myriagon (Tertia) Vanity Bonfire Fair • Nausicaa, Daughter of Alcinuous and Arete (Quartinus) Colin Iblis mac FirBolg • Phobetor, son of Morpheus and Nepenthe Quentin Nemo • Eidotheia, child of Proteus and the Graeae

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The Staff:

Headmaster Reginald Boggin • Boreas, of the North Wind

Dr. Ananias Fell • Telemus, Cyclopes

Mrs. Jenny Wren • Erichtho the Witch

Miss Christabel Daw • Thelxiepia the Siren

Grendel Glum • Grendel, son of Echidna

Dr. Miles Drinkwater • Mestor of Atlantis

Taffy ap Cymru • Laverna, Lady of Fraud

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The Olympians

Lord Terminus • Zeus

The Great Queen, Lady Basilissa • Hera

Lord Pelagaeus, also called the Earthshaker • Poseidon

The Grain Mother • Demeter

Lord Dis, also called the Unseen One • Hades

The Maiden, also called Kore • Proserpine

Phoebus the Bright God, also called the Destroyer • Apollo

Phoebe, also called the Huntress • Artemis

Lord Mavors • Ares

Lady Cyprian • Aphrodite

Trismegistus • Hermes

Tritogenia, also called Lady Wisdom • Athena

Mulciber • Hephaestus

Lady Hestia

Lord Anacreon, also called Lord Vintner and the Vine God • Dionysus

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Of the Four Houses of Chaos

The Dark rule dreams and phantoms of Old Night;

Cimmeria their land, Morpheus their king.

The Fallen rage in Tartarus, lamenting lost delight,

And that virtue, which, betrayed, lost them everything.

The Lost fall through th'Abyss, silent and serene as rain,

Typhon is their eldest, and nothingness his whole domain.

The Telchine are their serfs on Earth,

Ialysus their golden isle, rich-laden with treasures fine.

The Nameless live before all birth,

In Labyrinths of Thousand-walled design,

And, prelapsarian, still laws recall

That Uranus knew before his fall.

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Ships of Sable, Dark and Swift

It was our fault.

We fled the old gods; fleeing, we drew our pursuers after us, so that the frail and mortal men we hid among were in the shadow of destruction meant for us, to be whelmed by the fury of heaven, and malice of the deep.

Here was the great luxury liner Queen Elizabeth II, an engineering marvel of seventy thousand tons and nine hundred sixty feet, as wealthy as a palace afloat, more opulent than what antique kings in Nineveh lavished on their splendors. For many idle days we five children lolled among the passengers, giddy with freedom as if with wine, and the equatorial sun hovered, weightless gold, above calm, blue Atlantic waves.

That was then. Now it was night, and the stars hid, and the wind howled, and trumpets sounded, echoing across the black abyss of storm-lashed waters. Clouds like boiling floodwaters fell past overhead, and waves like thunderclouds rose and trembled and collapsed down below.

The gods we fled did not want men to see them. The Queen Elizabeth II was struck with slumber: As if that archangel who had entranced Adam on the day when Eve was born without pain from his side had shaken dark wings above the ship, the mortals were drowned in oblivion. No one, young or old, could stir, but lay where chance tumbled him, in cabins or passageways, or heaped at the bottom of ladders.

No one human. I was alert, gripping the broken rail and staring out into the utter darkness.

"Why did you two come back?" I shouted. "I ordered you to abandon ship! We will all die if we don't follow orders. My orders! Didn't you vote for me as leader?"

I have heard that there are grown-ups who do not take seriously the ideas about voting, obeying authority, or acting with purpose and discipline. Lucky them. What soft and comfortable lives they must lead! Lives without foes.

Vanity Fair was shorter than me, a dress size smaller, but with more generous hip and bust measurements. We were closer than sisters, having been raised in the same, well, you can call it a jail cell, since that's what it was. The freezing rain had plastered her hair to her head, and her thin coat tight to her body. She was shivering. Her real name was Nausicaa, of the mythic land called Phaeacia, beyond Earth's shore, but our real names had been taken from us in youth and, until recently, we had only the names we chose for ourselves as children.

"You are not going to run away and get killed!" She was a green-eyed redhead, and her eyes seemed to glow like emeralds when she was angry. I could see only her silhouette, but from her tone of voice I knew her eyes blazed.

"If the leader orders a retreat, you retreat!" (I was screaming louder than regulation for a British military officer, but I was still new at this, and was outshouting the storm-wind.) Colin mac FirBolg was blue-eyed, with unruly hair and ruddy skin, built like a wrestler. He gave me a stiff-armed Roman salute. "Sieg Heil mein Obergruppenfraulein! But we thought you were dead! Didn't Echidna kill you?"

Vanity hissed, "Stupid! No matter how far away, she hears whenever her name is spoken!

Speaking summons her!"

Colin shrugged. "Is she going to get through that fleet?" To me, he said: "Besides, Leader, we came to report that your dumb order could not be carried out. We are entirely surrounded, cut off, doomed, so we can't retreat! There may be time for a quickie, though, so if I can suggest, without seeming insubordinate, ma'am-I mean, you don't want me to die a virgin, do you?"

Thunder drowned out any words I might have spoken back. I slapped him. I could hear the smack of my palm on his not-quite-shaven cheek even above the storm.

"Thank you, ma'am! May I have another!" he barked out, unperturbed, still holding his Nazi salute. His real name was Phobetor, son of Morpheus, and he was a dream-lord of Cimmeria, the sunless world.

Even if he meant it in mockery, his stiff bearing reminded me I had no time for anger. We were within minutes of recapture, and if I was the leader, I had to invent the plan and give the orders.

If we failed, we failed under my leadership. It would be my fault.

Giddy with freedom, we had been! Because all our lives had been spent on the orphanage grounds, behind pitiless walls, under strictest watch, beneath the tutelage of Boreas. He could pass for human, but Headmaster Boggin, as we called him, had been the North Wind himself. My real father, a sovereign of some ulterior dimension, never knew his daughter, did not raise me: Boreas, my enemy, did.

A flash of lightning lit the sea for a frozen moment, dazzling, burning.

I was expecting to see Echidna. Echidna, the mother of all monsters, who had dragged the giant luxury ship into these unearthly waters, had been looming over the rail just a moment ago, her beautiful maiden's face cold with tearless grief and scaly snake-tail swollen with scorpion poison.

She had raised that sting to kill me, but had spared my life because I shed a tear for her dead son.

Then, she turned and dove beneath the waves when I whispered the name of the war-god who had slain him.

Perhaps she was somewhere in the deep, brooding on revenge, her huge bulk drowned in fathoms below fathoms, her long snaky body, furlong after furlong, writhing. But my special powers were blind, and I did not see her.

Instead I saw the fleet. There were at least a dozen barges, larger than oil tankers, built like stepped pyramids, with shields on every deck, and cannons, arbalests, catapults, and ballistae behind every shield, and both upper and lower decks had raised gangplanks with iron teeth built along the bottom, like a siege-tower at sea. The barges were made of some black wood or metal that shone darkly in the lightning flash, mountains of iron. Even from here I could hear the drumbeats counting time for the oars. At the apex of each tall barge, strung between two tall poles that jutted up and diverged, was a triangle of storm-beaten cloth. The cloth was black and on its field, in red, was a circle with an arrow coming from it at an angle.

It was the armada that Lord Mavors, whom the Greeks worshipped as Ares and the Romans as Mars, sent for us. Perhaps he was here, and Echidna hunted him; perhaps it was merely his men, and the unearthly flesh-eating Laestrygonians.

Between these barges and the ocean liner, slender as spears in the water, was a flotilla of black ships. They were as light and swift as racing sculls, but each one held fifty men or more, with shields hung along the rail, Viking-style. Each one had a sloping nose ending with an iron-beaked ram, and red eyes painted on the narrow hulls to each side of the ram.

Boreas raised us, I should say, in a second childhood. Either by magic, or by science unknown on Earth, we had been forced out of our original forms and made into children. Having robbed us of our memories and homes, the Olympians held us hostage against uneasy peace with Chaos. The plan would have worked, except that we adapted to human shape too well; the impersonation was so perfect that normal human biology, normal emotions, began to grow in us. The plan would have worked, except that we grew up.

The orphanage had been designed to contain monster cubs from Chaos: five children. It could not hold five adults, raised as human, with the dreams and ideals of humans, but armed with the strange powers of adult chaoticists. We grew up. We wanted our freedom. By stealth and cunning and violent battle, we had won it.

And the first thing we did when we won our freedom was... Well, we took a cruise. (Come on.

Wouldn't you?)

We should have just fled to a desert island. All these humans were about to die, and it was our fault.

My friends were about to die, and it was my fault.

I said to them, "Where are Quentin and Victor?"

Colin said, "Ma'am! They took off in a lifeboat, like you said!"

Victor had always been the one in charge, back at the orphanage, back when we were young students together. (How long ago had that been? A week? Less?) He was the logical one, cold-bloodedly brave, dispassionate, determined. Somehow I had won the last show of hands, and the group was now counting on me. So I had to be Victor.

So get a grip. Square your shoulders and start barking out orders. They don't have to make sense; they just have to get the group moving. Tell the troops the leader is leading. Say something.

So I said, "Vanity! Call your magic silver ship over to the other side of the liner. Once the three of us are on your ship, have her find the lifeboat Victor and Quentin are in. If they haven't been captured already."

She could summon her ship by thought alone. The Phaeacian ships had neither pilot nor rudder, but understood the unspoken wishes of their masters, and sped as swift as winged falcons, swift as thought, to their destinations. Vanity had discovered the Argent Nautilus was her very own ship, a Greek trireme with painted eyes port and starboard, and she did not need to be aboard to give commands to her.

Vanity said, "I don't know. The ship goes where I tell her. But if I say, 'Find Victor,' can she find Victor?" Vanity shook her head sadly and, for a moment, looked very sober and grown up. "We should have performed experiments, found out what we can and cannot do, instead of spending New Year's Eve on a cruise ship, living it up with the money you stole from Taffy ap Cymru!"

Taffy had been one of the staff at the school, a member of one of the several factions of Olympians seeking to take possession of us away from our headmaster, Boreas.

"I didn't steal it!" I protested. "I blackmailed him fair and square! Her. Whatever."

Taffy was a shape-changer like us: her real name was Laverna, the Roman goddess of Fraud. She had been the henchman (henchwoman?) of Trismegistus, the trickster god the Greeks worshipped under the name Hermes.

But I hadn't actually blackmailed the money from her. She had scoffed at my attempt and given it to me. Strange. That had happened just after Lamia, the Queen of Vampires, had attempted to murder Quentin. As if Laverna had wanted to help us escape. Why? And was she really working for Trismegistus or Mavors? Did Mavors want us to escape?

At some point, when I had time to think, I should puzzle that one out.

I turned to Colin. "Are your powers working?"

"Locked and loaded and ready to rumble!" Colin grinned, flexing his big rawboned hands as if eager for mayhem. Who understands boys?

Who, for that matter, understands any of us?

We each came from a different version of Chaos, a different paradigm. Our minds somehow interpreted the supernatural with mutually exclusive explanations. What looked to me like fluctuations of mind-body monads of time-space in the fourth dimension, Colin saw as passions, Quentin saw as magic, Victor saw as matter in motion.

We each could manipulate the Unknown in our own way: Colin's anger made him strong, his elation made him fly, and his disbelief made him able to unmake deadly wounds and brush them away; Quentin summoned up fell spirits from the night world with words of power, and bound them to his service in circles of chalked sigils and the scents of talismanic candles; Victor could electromag-netically reorganize matter and energy in his environment; I could deflect gravity, walk through walls, or send my many senses ranging through the higher dimensions.

Each one could negate one other. I could reach through the fourth dimension to alter the internal nature of any atoms Victor programmed, and he could neither see nor understand what I did. His Newtonian universe did not even have words for the relativistic principles I used. An azure ray from Victor's third eye could banish Quentin's thaumaturgy as quickly as a skeptic's question quiets a table tipper. With a wave of his charming wand, Quentin's unseen familiars could banish Colin's passions. And Colin could simply will my powers to stop.

Vanity was different. She was not a princess of Chaos held hostage, but a princess of allies the Olympians did not trust, an ancient and immortal race called the Phaeacians. She (and, we had reason to believe, her people) could find secret doors through solid walls, and passages beyond leading to distant realms. These secret paths always looked as if they were natural and contemporary, as if they had been built there long ago: And yet I suspected they were made, as suddenly as the details in a dream are made.

And the laws of nature varied from realm to realm, and the Phaeacians could erect barriers to prevent one set of laws from being enforced out of its realm, or part the barrier to permit it. One other power they had, stranger than the others: Phaeacians could tell when someone was watching, no matter what means were used.

Yet even all these superhuman, supernatural powers did not make them supreme of the races of Cosmos. They were a conquered people.

The Olympians could manipulate destiny as adroitly as the Phaeacians manipulated space. A god of Olympos need only decree the outcome he desired from the future, and somehow the step-by-step details, the coincidences needed to bring that chain of events about would be created to suit. With this power, they could dictate the desired outcome of battles and love affairs, the progress of industry, the direction of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the verdict of trials or negotiations... anything there was for a god to control, they could control. They conquered lesser races who had powers like ours, cyclopes and sirens, maenads and meliads.

In the same way I could overrule Victor's paradigm, so could a siren; in the same way Victor could negate Quentin's powers, so could a cyclopes. We were really safe only when we were together and used all our talents in combination.

Which meant that the first order of business was... Colin. He was the only one whose powers worked here, now. Colin was our best hope. There was a sobering thought.

"Colin! We need to find the others, if we have any hope of escaping this blockade. That means flying."

He blinked at me. "So? Can't you pop out those energy wing-thingies of yours? Oh, wait. We are not in the waters of Earth any longer, are we? We passed over a boundary when Echidna pulled the ship off course. Like when one dream turns into another, and a flying dream becomes a falling dream. Am I right?"

Instead of answering, I said, "If I run and jump off that rail, is your inspiration enough to turn into something that can fly, so that you can grab me before I hit the water and die?"

I started running for the rail without waiting for an answer.

Colin took five huge steps and threw his hand around my waist. "Never mind!" he said. "I feel pretty damn inspired as it is. Upsy daisy!"

He tossed me up onto his shoulder Tarzan-carries-Jane style, so the world was all dizzy and upside down to me, and my rain-soaked hair was slapping his firm little butt. He had his hand pretty near the top of my thighs, and creeping higher, so I said, "Watch the hand!"

"Oh," he said, and, "Sorry!" And he clamped his hand to cup one cheek of my buttocks instead.

"Hey!"

He said, "Kick your legs. It looks cute. You've got great gams."

Gams? Colin had been corrupted by Yank terminology.

Colin now came after Vanity. From the confused view I was getting (sort of a Colin's lower-back-eyed view) it looked like she was backing up and had her hands out in protest.

Colin said, "Leader! Will you tell the redhead to hold still so I can grab her? There is no time for games right now."

I am certain that my dignity as a leader could not be questioned while I was being hauled around, helpless and bottom proudly held high, like a cavewoman on the shoulder of your friendly neighborhood Neanderthal.

I said, "Vanity! Let Colin grope you! No time for games right now."

I saw Vanity biting her lips in disgust, but she came forward and held up her arms. Colin stooped (dizzying from my point of view) and put his shoulder into the small of her stomach. With a woof!

of effort, he straightened, two fair captives slung like booty over his back. (Actually, one fair and one redheaded.)

I put my arms around his waist (an odd sensation, since his belt was upside down to me), and Vanity did the same. The bare skin of our arms brushed up against each other. As well as we could in that reversed position, she and I huddled.

I turned my head so that my other cheek was pressed against Colin's back. Vanity was now hanging head-down only inches from me, her longer hair, also wetted and limp in the rain, slapping around Colin's knees. She was breathless. Her emerald eyes were so wide, so close to mine, and so alarmed, that for a moment, whatever the real purpose of letting Colin pick us up this way had been was lost to me.

For a moment, a moment with no context of before or after, I actually felt like a cavegirl who had been captured. I could feel the tense, strong muscles in Colin's body where I was pressed up against him, I could smell the clean, masculine scent of him, a young, strong animal, innocent and ruthless.

I am sure Vanity was only afraid of the prospect of being carried through the air by Colin, who had not flown before. But that is not what I saw. I saw a girl, like me, my friend, being carried off by a strong young man, frightened at her own helplessness in the face of his savage will and lawless lusts. Seeing it in her communicated it to me. In that one mad moment, I was certain with terror that Colin was going to carry us off to some place of his own choosing and ravish us, first one, then the other, then both.

A silly fear, and it was gone the next moment. But even after it faded, the echo left behind made me feel small and delicate.

Colin spoke, and sounded so pleased with himself that I somehow knew Colin knew my fears and inner feelings, and he smiled in his masculine pride, relishing the sensation of my vulnerability: as if, by carrying me, he had gained the power to know what quaked in my fast-beating heart.

Colin said, "Okay, ladies! We'll do the games later. Please! More kicking and squirming! Now, concentrate! Remember, girls, your job here is to inspire me, right? You are both Roxanne to my Cyrano, got it?" And I felt him rub his cheek first against my hip, then against Vanity's.

"Hey!" exclaimed Vanity, who began kicking and squirming in earnest, and pounding her fists into his back. I do not think of Vanity as being all that weak, and there are places on a man's back where one can do serious damage. I was sure he was going to drop us.

Instead he laughed. I felt his arm that clamped my legs, his hand that clutched my buttocks growing stronger, almost as if I could see muscles swelling, bunching up, growing like the limbs of a giant.

And suddenly we were not in Colin's arms anymore. The talons of an enormous eagle-or I should call it the bird from the Sinbad tale, the Roc-the talons of the Roc were around our waists, and his wings threw out hurricanes in a frenzy of beating.

There was no transition to it, no logic. Colin was gone and the Roc was here. We moved from being over his shoulders to under his talons all at once.

The deck dropped away down-or from our point of view, fell up and away from our heads. I could have kept my cool and been delighted with the sensation of flying, even in this foul weather, if Vanity hadn't screamed.

Vanity let out a piercing shriek, and suddenly I was not Amelia the leader being carried by loyal Colin, I was the helpless cavegirl again, except this time, it was not the Neanderthal who was carrying me off to the cave for some savage mating ritual; it was the pterodactyl monster who was carrying me off to eat me. (I realize that pterodactyls and cavegirls were not actually contemporaries, but I am saying how I felt.)

Well, I screamed, too. She screamed, I screamed, and the Roc raised its terrible cruel beak into the lightning storm and let out a shrill and blood-freezing cry that echoed from the clouds.

We all screamed. It was just a screaming sort of moment.

The Silvery Ship, luminous in the rain-swept dark, and winged with streaming foam, came darting like an arrow into view below us.

The Roc folded his wings, and suddenly we were without weight. Down we plunged. Vanity ran out of scream-gas, or maybe the talons, the zero-g fall, or the prospect of instant death by splattering drove the breath out from her. I do not think I was screaming at that moment, either, although I would not testify in a court of law to that fact I was paying somewhat more attention to the silver deck that was shooting upward at terminal velocity toward me. Terminal There is the operative word in the sentence.

But I heard more screams. Someone was answering the Roc's fierce challenge cry. It was horns: shrill horns and trumpets. The men on the swift black ships were shaking the air with horn-calls and challenges of their own, horns so loud that even the storm seemed quiet.

The black ships were leaping like sharks over the waves toward the silver one. If our Argent Nautilus was as swift as an arrow, they were at least as swift as javelins.

Had she been required to stop or slow, or even to drive through the waves in a straight line, surely the speeding black ships, racing on white trails of high-flung spray, would have overtaken her.

But the Roc cupped its titan-wings, creating a gale to catch us, and dropped to the tilting deck even as the silver ship jumped across the air from one mountain-size wave crest to the next.

Sploosh! Foam and cold spray showered in every direction, and I would have fallen, or been flung overboard, except that Colin (where had he come from?) had one strong arm around me. I was standing tiptoed on the deck, my face pressed into the neck where it met his shoulder, still weak and trembling with fright. Vanity was clinging to him, too, crushing her body into his, her arms tightly around him and tightly around one of my arms that was trapped under hers, since we were both using the selfsame man's torso as our anchor point. Vanity was screaming, still. Take two girls who have never been on a roller coaster before, sit between them, and make sure they are not brave when it comes to heights, and you will get an idea of the situation. We clutch and scream. It's a reflex.

"Ta-da!" exclaimed Colin. I could not see his face in the dark stormy air, but his tone was cheerful. "Nor rain nor storm nor dark of night, will stay this messenger. Whaddya think? Wasn't that great?"

I would have let go of him, except that the ship chose that moment to leap like a dolphin in the sky and jump to another rolling wave in the distance. I heard something scrape the hull below. In the confusion and gloom, I was convinced we had just passed over the masts of a pursuing ship.

In terms of keeping my footing, imagine having four Russian acrobats in tights grab the section of floor you are standing on and toss it to their cousins, who are also Russian, and also wearing tights, some hundreds of feet away. Being Russian, of course, they are morose acrobats, and do not care much one way or the other if you live or die.

Vanity said, "I hate you, Colin mac FirBolg!" And then she screamed again and grabbed him tight.

I held on to him, too. "How come you are not falling over?" I called out to him.

He replied in a loud, calm voice: "I do not want to fall over. And I am psychokinetic, or something, remember?"

He put his arms gently around us, hugging the wet, soaking girls in their wet, clinging, see-through shirts to his manly chest. Yes, yes, I bet he was inspired to stay upright. Very upright.

"Psychotic, you mean!" Vanity said. "Get us out of here!"

I assume the first comment was meant for Colin, and the second for Argent Nautilus, because the ship launched herself across the waves like a bolt from a crossbow, and we skipped like a stone from wave to wave.

Suddenly the storm grew quiet and the sensation of motion dampened. I could still see with my eyes that the ocean was bucking and leaping like an untamed horse, but the magic spell or the forcefield or whatever it was that had been protecting us from our own supersonic speed had appeared around the ship, enfolding us like a blanket.

I saw the light from my hypersphere. The laws of nature I knew had just turned back on. We had crossed back out of the ward. These were the waters of Earth.

Colin, answering Vanity's comment, said, "I am sure there is a place to go to get out of this rain."

She was still huddled up against his shoulder. I did not hear her muffled comment, but I heard Colin's reply: He laughed a loud laugh and said, "This is a Phaeacian ship! Do you really think there are no secret passages aboard?"

Vanity looked up, a glint of surprise in her eye.

I was about to ask Colin (now that the ship's bucking and jumping were no longer affecting us) to let go. His warm, strong, protective arm was still trapping my shivering body against his, and I wanted him to let me go. I think I did.

I never got the chance. Vanity smiled and moved her foot. Her toe clicked some hidden switch.

Maybe it did not exist until she looked for it.

However she did it, Vanity made a trapdoor open beneath our feet. We all screamed, except Colin, who laughed, and we fell from a seven-foot-high deck twelve feet to a large chamber that was simply too high and too wide to fit in a ship as small as Vanity's. With a loud poof! we landed on a mattress, which jumped and puffed around us.

There lay Colin, looking up as the leaves of the trapdoor clattered shut and cut off the rain, in the dark, two girls pressed up against him, still clutching him and shrieking (roller-coaster reflex, remember?), with his arms around us, in the dark. On a mattress.

Colin said in a voice of perfect satisfaction, "This is the best day of my life. Ever."

I did not even bother to try to move out of Colin's grasp. Instead I said, "Vanity, have the ship bear toward Victor and Quentin. If she cannot see where they are, have her go"-I pointed-"that way." With my powers back on, I could see strands of moral energy, perhaps representing the mutual obligations of the group, streaming off in that direction.

One of the objects that had been kept from me during my youth and imprisonment was a child's toy from my home, which could unfold from a point, to a line, to a disk, to a globe, to a four-dimensional hypersphere. It gave off, not light, but some heavier particle of hyperspace, which allowed me to sense the over-reality around me with senses that can barely be explained in three dimensions.

Hyperspace is dark. Energy falls off, not as an inverse square of distance, but an inverse cube.

Hyperspace is thick. Each particle has both volume and hypervolume, and therefore has much more mass crammed into a smaller area than its 3-D counterpart. Sound and light don't travel there very far.

But I had four new sense impressions, because the subject-object relations are very different in overspace. If an object was useful to my will, I could see the distortion in the time-energy caused by that object having more futures than a useless object had: Vanity's silver ship was ablaze with possibilities.

Likewise, if a person had a reciprocal moral obligation with me (for free will also distorted the time-frames), I could see it like a thread tying us together. Immoral acts were visible as tangles or snarls.

Every object had an internal nature: I could see the drunken anger of storm clouds, or the gentle melancholy of deep water, the placid ferocity of fish.

Every object-energy-event combination had a monad, a unity of mind-matter that could be rotated along four axes to produce more free will or less, open up pearly gray shining zones of quantum uncertainty, or collapse into hard bright lights of no-probability.

I did not try to open the hypersphere into its five-dimensional aspect. I have three additional senses operating there, fit for the harder-than-neutronium density of that environment, which can detect extension, relation, existence.

Looking "past" the hull of the ship, I could see we were in a vest-pocket dimension attached to the slim hull, in a little bubble of wood (containing the air and laws of nature of Earth) surrounded by the waters of the dream continuum, where distances and directions had no fixed measure. The intersection back into normal space was contiguous with the area of the trapdoor above us.

Outside, the seas of Earth met the seas of some other sphere of existence, and storms raged through both. There was no light, but I could dimly sense, at the far end of the strand representing the group, two internal natures: one methodical, self-controlled, calm, virtuous, fearless, tinged with a mild humor; the other quiet, thoughtful, resourceful, intuitive, confident. Confident... ?

Quentin's internal nature had changed since last I had seen him. Humor... ? Victor was changing, too.

Both of them had an aura of masculine power, which had not been there before; it was a nature that at once both sought to cherish, and sought to dominate; it was both gentle and fierce in a way I cannot describe. It was more forthright and forceful than anything I knew in myself, bold to the point of madness. There was something frightening about it. To think of the placid, icy-calm Victor or the polite, mild-spoken Quentin charged with such vehement, masterful, potent nature, not merely for a moment or two, but at all times, made me feel awed and aghast, and secretly delighted.

Colin said, "Leader! Can you see the black ships?"

Oops. In my voyeuristic peep into the male inward parts of Victor and Quentin, I had forgotten the danger.

"There are five of them closing in on us. One is within a score of yards, and men-lizard-men, really, Laestrygonians-are casting grapples. Have the ship jump to the starboard, now! Wow..."

"What are you seeing?"

"Those black ships are as fast as we are. Like speedboats. There are also men in the water. They are in green and blue and ultramarine scale mail, and they swim merely by pointing their toes and having space-time bend around them. Atlanteans. They are pretty fast, too. I just saw some go past Victor's lifeboat... That's funny. I bet they cannot see them."

Colin said, "Vanity, can you ask your ship to stop glowing in the dark? That has got to be the only reason why they can follow us-"

I shouted, "Vanity! Hard to port! Damn-"

Vanity said, "What happened?"

"One of those black ships shot past us while we were sliding down a pretty big wave. It shot over our heads like a rocket. I think we did that to one of them a moment ago. Boy, that looked scary.

Oops! There are Atlanteans aboard! Four of them! No-jeez-eight. They are swarming up the side, negating the distance to climb in one bound..."

Colin said, "Vanity, can you turn off the force field around the boat?"

Vanity said, "It's not a force field. The boundary for the laws of nature-"

"Can you?"

"Yes. It's done."

I said, "Two of them just got swept overboard."

Colin said, "Leader, with your permission, I'd like to go topside and repel boarders."

I said, "Granted. Don't get yourself killed, or your one-fourth of Chaos will attack the universe-"

He bent his head and kissed me.

He kissed me. Just like that.

It was warm and nice. His internal nature was as dark and fierce and masculine as any of the other boys' (I suppose I should call them men, considering) but he had a streak of loyalty, of wolf-pack love of comrades, that made his male power gentler than the others'. You would never guess it by looking at his outside, but Phobetor, the prince of dreams, had the soul of a poet, an almost feminine desire to be caught up and swept away by his emotions.

I yielded to that sweet hot kiss, and, before I knew what I was doing, I was pressing up to his hard, stern body with eager hunger, a yearning to surrender to him. There was a long, low moan in my throat I could not believe came from me. Only girls in movies, during kissing scenes, made that noise. Didn't they?

He kissed me till I was out of breath, and then he relaxed his arm, so that I collapsed onto the mattress, too warm and too happy to move.

I do not know if he was using a magic power on me to make me feel this way, or if all good kisses have magic in them.

Wow. I sort of forgot that I didn't like him.

Be careful about looking into the inner nature of people you know. It might surprise you. Close your eyes when kissing, and your higher senses, too.

I did close my eyes for a moment.

My lips were tingling. So was my whole body. Wow.

"Now, you," I heard. Then, a kissing noise.

I sat up. I sort of remembered that I didn't like him: "Hey!" I said, outraged. What a cad. What a slap in the face.

I heard the noise of a slap in the face, right at that moment. "Mm-mmmph! Get off! Get away! I belong to Quentin!"

"Oho. Never mind. Just hearing any girl say 'I belong to' is inspiration enough. Open those topside doors, Vain One, before I leap and make a hole through them."

"Hey!" I said. "I am not done yelling at you-! Bloody git! How dare you kiss me-!"

The doors opened and rain splashed down, and the laws of nature of Earth, including such things as momentum, must have splashed into the room as well, because suddenly we were shaken and pressed against the mattress by some wild acceleration, as if the ship were doing an Im-melman.

I could see Colin in the splash of silvery light from the deck. The laws of momentum were not affecting him. I suppose he could stand upright in a roller coaster doing a loop-the-loop, without getting his hair mussed, if he were inspired.

I saw the flash of teeth from his devil-may-care-but-Colin-does-not grin, and heard the chuckle in his voice: "There now, lass. Keep yourself simmering for me. I'll be back to claim my reward when I'm done knocking heads together."

And he jumped, in one leap, fifteen feet or more in the air, straight up and out of the hold. It did not look like a jump. It looked like a superhero taking off, or warrior angel taking wing, rushing to fight with the rebel angels.

(What am I saying? Colin Iblis mac FirBolg would be fighting alongside the fallen angels, not against them.)

Fight and Flight by Sea

The battle was exciting for everyone but me. It was over before I did anything; not that I mind not being exposed to more danger, thank you. Staring into the eyes of Echidna might not seem like much compared to what else the others did during those next ten minutes, but it was enough for me, that day.

Our Silvery Ship came upon (and sped past) the lifeboat containing Victor and Quentin in the waters of Earth. They had rowed to outside the ward, and their powers had come back on.

There were black ships burning to every side of Victor. I think he was precipitating pure oxygen out of the atmosphere or up from the water, and gathering trace amounts of phosphorous together from the glowing lamps of the undersea torches carried by the Atlanteans to make an incendiary. There was apparently enough chlorophyll in the plankton for him to make chlorine gas, and streamers of poison were issuing from the boiling water around him, green and horrid in the light of the burning ships. The trace chemicals in the enemy ornaments and weapons had been disintegrated out and recombined to make toxins and acids.

Despite all this, I did not see the moral energy snarls one would expect to see from committing murder. The Atlanteans were staying well away from the areas of water frothing with poison, and it looked as if the Laestrygonians aboard the burning ships were immune to fire. All this visible horror and destruction Victor was shedding was distraction. His real attack were groups of small molecular packages distributed widely over the area, which, if inhaled, influenced the central nervous system to send panic and fear signals to the brain, release adrenaline, cause selective shutdowns in the cortex and higher-reasoning centers. Apparently, there was a mechanical cause for determining which way a flight/fight reaction would go, and he was setting it to "flight."

Quentin was invisible-in all this confusion, he still was carrying the ring of Gyges, which Colin had handed him to perform his astronomy experiments. I never saw what he did, and he did not talk about it later, but I do not think he was simply hiding and letting Victor do all the work. Once or twice I saw a shadow moving on the black ships, silhouetted by the flames Victor was spreading, and it bent over any Laestrygonian whose helmet contained more plumes than the others. Those to whom the shadow spoke did not look at it, but cast their weapons away and jumped into the sea. Every time I tried to look at the shadow, my higher sense bent away, and I lost sight of it.

And Colin-it really was a good day for Colin. He picked up the first Atlantean he came across by the legs and used him like a baseball bat to knock the others reeling. They shot arrows into his arms and legs and he just laughed and ignored them, plucking them out and wiping away the red ink from his untouched limbs. They threw nets on him and he threw them back; they belabored him with truncheons and he plucked the staves from their hands and broke them over his knee. He was like one of those absurd characters from Irish folklore who doesn't need armor, cannot be hurt, and can toss around trained soldiers like dolls. He threw them off the ship one after another, shouting out my name each time he made a throw. I had become his battle cry.

They were not trying to kill him, and he returned the favor. Tossing Atlanteans into the water would not drown them; they were amphibious. I do not think he ever broke any limbs, except on people whom he recognized as having climbed back up the gunwales more than once.

Colin got his hands on the commander of the squad, or, at least, an Atlantean with nicer looking blue-and-green scale mail than the rest, and was holding him up in midair, shaking him by the throat, shouting at him.

Storm-winds and thunder crashed all around him as he paced the reeling, rain-washed deck, hauling the struggling man toward the rail. Then Colin mounted the prow, dangling the man over the water, shouting again at him.

This time, the thunder was less, and I heard what the shouts were about. Was it something like, Call off your men? No. Nothing so sensible.

"WHO IS THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD? SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY THE NAME I TOLD

YOU TO SAY!"

"A-Amelia! Amelia Windrose!"

"PRETTIER THAN YOUR GIRL?"

"Ye-yes sir! Much prettier!"

"GOD BLESS YOU FOR AN HONEST MAN!" roared Colin over the storm. "YOU GET TO

LIVE!" And he threw the man headlong into the raging sea, a hundred yards if it was an inch.

How sweet. I mean, really. It was sweet.

If you are wondering why, during all this, the Atlanteans and Laestrygonians did not unleash horrific magic upon us all, or blast us with space-age weapons from some futuristic parallel dimension, or even unlimber their deck-guns and blow a hole into our ship, the reason (as far as I can tell) is that Vanity saved us.

The Silvery Ship was skipping like a wild dolphin from wave-crest to wave-crest, and the sleek black ships were darting like dark sharks in her wake. But the moment we crossed the invisible line (invisible to all but me) separating the waters of the other sphere from the waters of Earth, the ward blocking our powers was crossed, and the green stone hanging around Vanity's neck began to glow. It was beneath her shirt, and only I saw it, I, whose vision was not stopped by merely three-dimensional surfaces.

It was glowing when she and I, wrapped in Colin's arms, fell through her secret trapdoor and landed on that mattress. It was glowing when Colin tried to molest her and she slapped him, and he went bounding like a super ninja movie hero on wires up out of the hold to battle the Atlanteans.

Before another word was spoken, Vanity, without bothering to stir from the mattress, clasped both hands to her bosom and bent her head, concentrating. The Silvery Ship skipped back across the ward, shutting down my powers; I went blind. I could hear the noise of rushing waters, and felt the bucking and leaping of the deck beneath me, and that was all.

Then, on again. The Silvery Ship was once more in the waters of Earth, and our pursuit, streaming fans of spray rushing from them as they passed the speed of sound, came bearing down on us. But, at the moment, the ward was between them and us. They were still in the waters of the other place.

Vanity did something. I saw lines of energy fold and sway; the intersection of the two universes quivered. Beyond that, I was not sure what it was she did.

Vanity said, "When they cross, their powers will shut off. I just did to them what Echidna showed me how to do."

"Will it slow down their ships... ?"

"I cannot do that without slowing down this one. I can make the gunpowder forget how to burn when it crosses from one jurisdiction to the next."

"How?"

"It is all based on attention. I can feel something look us over when we cross the line. It is something that makes objects act the way they are supposed to. The something gets confused when you cross things from one jurisdiction to another. It does not know which laws to apply.

During that moment of confusion, I can make the decision for it."

"Jurisdiction... ?"

"Um. Dreamscapes? Universes? What do you call a set of laws of nature?"

"Continuum. Can't the Atlanteans do the same thing?"

"If they have a stone like this, I suppose. And they would have to get in the first shot. Watch me.

Did it work?"

"I can't tell. What am I looking for?"

"Are the bad guys using guns or casting spells?"

"No." I peered through the walls. I could see Colin and Quentin in the distance.

"Then it worked. Do you think they can beat us just with normal weapons?"

Guess what the answer to that one was.

Five minutes later, we were all up on deck. Victor dropped down out of the sky, his chain mail crackling with ozone, and Quentin faded into view, twisting the gold ring on his finger. The storm was behind us, slowly shrinking backwards over the horizon, and we were skimming along the water surface under the moonlight.

Off our port and starboard stern, like arrows with fletch-ing made of white foam, came the black ships of the Atlanteans.

Colin said, "They are gaining, Leader. I suggest we let them catch up and we trash more of them." He was panting and shining with sweat and rainwater, happy as a player who has crushed an opposing team after a hard game. His eyes danced. He needed only a bottle of champagne to pour over his head to make the picture complete.

Even Victor seemed in good spirits. He stood on the stem, hands clasped behind him, watching the moonlit pursuit with a tiny smile on his lips. "Leader, I suggest not. We must assume that Mavors the god of war is somewhere among them, and we have no experience to tell us how to overcome his powers."

Quentin was leaning on his white staff, his dark cloak flapping and folding around him in the sea-wind like the wings of a bird of shadow. He spoke without raising his head, "Leader, our defeat is inevitable. I have seen the signs. When I was in the air, in the storm cloud, one of the thunder-children turned and spoke to me. Lord Mavors can control fate. There will be ships ahead of us, no matter which way we turn."

As if his words had summoned them, tall black triangles appeared on the horizon ahead, the mountain-shaped barges of the war-god. Dimly, in the moonlight, I thought I saw rippling trails of white foam issuing from ports along their bases, the slim black ships of the Laestrygonians cutting like torpedoes through the waves.

I sat down on the bench at the stern of the ship with my elbows on my knees and my fingers slowly massaging my temples.

Think, Amelia, think. It is like a game, like a puzzle. There are certain moves you can make, and certain moves your opponent, Mavors, can make. Unfortunately, one of the moves he could make was something like bribe the judges of the contest to fix the outcome no matter what you do.

I said, "Idea number one: If Mavors is controlling fate by means of something, a little 'bad luck elf named Murphy or something, then Murphy has to see or sense us to do his dirty work, right?

Maybe a combination of Vanity's powers and the ring of Gyges can deflect whatever sense impression Murphy is using to zero in on us."

Quentin said, half to himself, "I suspect Murphy's real name is Clotho, Atropos, or Lachesis."

"Idea number two: You all grab hold of me and I step into the fourth dimension."

Colin said, "Dark Mistress, idea number one is much better than idea number two. When you step into your 'fourth dimension,' you are only creating an illusion, and you haven't really gone anywhere. If he has got anyone like me among his staff, he can just penetrate the illusion."

I said, "Grendel's dead."

"Maybe. But if a low-level god like Boreas can have a psychic on his staff, are you telling me the God of Strategy and Winning Battles is not smart enough to go find someone who can trump your powers when he is setting out to hunt you down? Come on. Seriously, guys. All these gods must travel in packs of four, just like Boggin and his four flunkies. Jeez, even if he can't get Grendel, don't you think he can get a recording of Miss Daw's music?"

Victor said, "Leader, we have to assume the enemy has taken reasonable steps in calculating their tactics."

He still had that look of good humor on his face. Now I knew why he was wearing it: because he was not leader, and he did not have to make decisions in the no-win situations. Bastard.

I looked out at the ships. Closer now. Coming as fast as the fastest bird can fly-faster, even.

I said, "Idea number three: We put the ring of Gyges on the ship, like stick it on the mast or something, and turn the whole darn ship invisible."

Victor said, "Might work. But the same objection as to number two applies. If Mavors has any cyclopes aboard, they might not be fooled by mere magic."

Colin said, "Even you have trouble seeing through this ring, Vicky-boy."

Victor nodded. "But I am young and new at this, Collie-boy. It might work, though, if Amelia floated this ship into the so-called fourth dimension at the same time, which might confuse cyclopean detection powers."

Black ships astern slightly closer. Black ships ahead very much closer, eating up the miles.

I said, "Idea number four: Vanity zaps them with her power, so that those ships are not sailing through dream-waters, but suddenly find themselves traveling at the speed of sound in wooden ships in the waters of Earth. Momentum kicks in. They wreck."

Vanity said, "I cannot do that without having it happen to us. We'd have to slow down to Earth-speed first I mean, I can do it, I think I can do it, because there is a boundary around the railing of each ship. But I do not think I can do it unevenly. That's why Grendel's mom could not turn off Colin's power. Hey-you know what I just thought? Phaeacian powers must be something you can learn, or get, because people like Boggin and Echidna have them- Oops! Damn." Vanity jumped as if a bug had stung her.

Echidna could hear when her name was spoken, as Vanity had just reminded Colin.

Victor said dryly to a chagrined Vanity, "I thought we agreed to call her 'the fishmonger.'"

I said, "Okay, troops, I am open to suggestions. For one thing, how are we being tracked? Why did Mavors pick this moment in time to come get us?"

As soon as I had asked the question, phrased in that way, the answer came to me. I threw back my head and laughed and laughed, and the others looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

I put my hands overhead. "Victory is ours! Any of the ideas we attempt will work. All we have to do is make it look as if we are even half-serious. In fact, if we just point the prow of the ship between two of those black pyramids and make a break for it, with a little curving and dodging, I think you will find that the black ships will be strangely incompetent. For some reason they will fall behind."

Victor looked at me, puzzled. "Why in the world are you saying that, Amelia?"

"I could be wrong, and if I am wrong, we will all be captured again, have our memories erased, and get turned back into unhappy children. Maybe Vanity and I will end up as Boggin's sex toys, and Colin will have to marry the wrinkled old Mrs. Wren. So what do we have to lose? Vanity, set your course! Full speed ahead! Ramming speed! Just ignore the enemy. I am sure they will go away if we just don't pay them any mind!"

Colin said, "She's gone nuts. I vote we vote her out and put in a leader who is more on the non-nuts side of the nuts/non-nuts spectrum."

I pointed a finger at him: "You are still going to stand court-martial for your disobedience of a direct order, mister! So don't you give me any lip."

Victor was smart. I saw his eyes twinkle, and he snorted. "No. The leader is right. Vanity, just steer between them. They will part and let us pass." He looked at me: "Assuming they have not suffered a change in policy in the meanwhile."

I spread my hands. "I admit it is a risk. I am making an assumption."

Vanity raised her hand. "Ooh! Me next! My question! What assumption? What the heck are you two talking about?"

Quentin was standing with his head cocked to one side, as if listening to a whisper that no one else could hear. He had one hand on his staff, which was set firmly against the deck to help brace him, and the other hand was cupped in front of him. Perhaps he was reading the lines of his own palm.

Quentin said, "I think fate just altered. I would have to do a more detailed reading to get a clear result. Something just happened." He looked up at me, and looked rather impressed and rather surprised. "How did you do that?"

Vanity said, "Do what? What is going on? Is today just official Everybody-Picks-on-Vanity day?"

I said to Quentin, "A magician never reveals her secrets!"

Colin said, "This isn't funny! You're all going mad as March bunnies! And someone is going to tell me what is going on! I have a right to know!"

I stood up, giving Colin a cold and haughty look: "No! No you don't! You have a right to obey orders, which you never do, even though the rest of us do! It is damn hard to be leader, and I don't like it, and I am tired of you trying to make my job harder! So you don't get to know! And stop calling for votes and stop undercutting my authority, or I actually Will take a riding crop to your butt and I will enjoy it and you won't!"

Colin stepped back, amazed by my outburst.

Vanity raised her hand. "Don't I get to know? I promise to be good. Oh, pul-eese! You've got to tell me what's going on!"

I said, "Well, okay. But you were disobedient, too. You should have run away and left me when I told you to. Come here."

I leaned and whispered in her ear.

Vanity actually giggled. "Oh, that is so obvious! Oh, that is funny, isn't it?"

Colin said, "What? What?"

I said, "Today is hereby declared official Everybody-Picks-on-Colin day! The Dark Mistress has spoken!"

Colin muttered, "And this is different from every other day how, again, exactly?"

Twenty minutes later, with the dawn sun appearing on the horizon ahead, we heard a shrill horn-call pass from ship to ship, and banners rose in signal on the huge battle barges on the horizon astern of us. The speeding black ships curveted and turned port and starboard, leaving trails of foam hissing in the waters, like the palm-tree decorations in an Egyptian temple, parallel lines suddenly spreading and curving left and right.

The forces of Mavors fell astern and were lost.

I spread my hands and said, "Ta-da!"

Colin got down on one knee. "Please tell me. This is torture."

I said, "Maybe I want to torture you, little boy! The Catwoman brooks no defiance from her henchmen! The torture will continue until you learn how to hench when it is henching time!"

He clasped his hands in prayer: "Okay, okay. I'll be good, up until the moment you are no longer leader. Then I am going to find some excuse, I swear to God, to do a Boggin on you. An opportunity will come. I know it. You'll create one. But I am sorry I disobeyed, I won't do it again; I will be good! May I never see you half-naked again if I am forsworn of this oath! Please tell me what the hell just happened?"

I paused a moment, glaring down at him.

Well, he had chucked an Atlantis guy overboard for me, after making him praise me. That was worth something.

Besides, I wasn't sure what "do a Boggin" meant, but it did not sound decent, so I was inclined to avoid the matter.

"Fine," I said, "the Dark Mistress is appeased. For now. What happened is this. Grendel's mom really was about to kill me at one point. The curse of Mavors went off. Instead of sending one vulture, he sent his whole fleet. Since they had Atlantis people with them, the same paradigm Vanity has, they arrived in a few minutes. But Lamia was not here. False alarm. Mavors is the guy who told Boggin to let us escape, so he could follow us and trap Lamia when she came to kill us.

Remember? Mavors had to let us go; we still are the only bait he can use to lure out Lamia, and whoever sent her."

Colin got to his feet and brushed off his knees. "Great. So we are all still about to be killed. That makes me feel so much better."

Vanity pointed and yodeled, "Yoo hoo! Land! Land ho!"

Vanity pointed, and we saw the Golden Gate Bridge, rising, shining and splendid, from out of the waters of the San Francisco Bay. In the cherry light of the newly risen sun, tall buildings of steel and glass rose up behind it, a textured green at their feet. Climbing up the slopes beyond them rose, rank on rank like rectilinear cloud banks, a crumbled mosaic of white and pale gray squares, as red-tiled houses and buildings of stucco caught the glancing dawn-light. The hills rose up brown and tawny, like sleeping lions with bunched muscles.

I murmured, "I've never seen so many houses."

Colin said, "I guess that's why they call it a 'city.' Um- aren't we on the wrong side of the world?

How did we get to the Pacific? That's not New York."

Vanity, her green eyes wide and innocent, said, "Sure it is-that's the Brooklyn Bridge right there..."

Victor turned his head toward me. "What are your orders, Leader?"

I said, a hint of surprise in my voice, "But we made it. This is it. We can go off and do whatever we like. Get jobs, raise kids, fund a private space-venture to Mars---Right? We won. Game over.

Right?"

Within Sight of the Land of freedom

All three boys exchanged glances, a look of mingled superiority and worry on their faces. A look that said, Oh, come on. How come she doesn't get it? I guess she is more tired than we thought...

Vanity said, "Why don't you sit down, Amelia... ? You look a bit overwrought."

I sat down on the little bench of silver cushions in the stern of the ship.

Colin said, "If you want to appoint a second and third in command, Dark Mistress, you can take a break if you want..."

I said, "No, no. I feel okay. I guess the game isn't nearly over. Lamia is still looking to kill us, and Boggin still has some method of finding me, I guess at any time he wants, and Mavors can find us any time our lives are imperiled. We have not escaped yet. The Olympians have let us out on a leash. It's a long leash, but it is still a leash, and we are not free until we get the collar off."

Victor said, "We also know from your experience with Sam the Drayman that the Olympians routinely erase memories and falsify evidence to hide their presence from the human beings, whom they regard as cattle. I suppose we can expect to see headlines in the news about the accidental sinking of the Queen Elizabeth II some time within the next few days. I am sorry about that. We already speculated that there may be a spell or 'fate' in place to prevent the humans from seeing evidence of people like us. If so, any use of our powers in front of human witnesses may trigger an alarm, just in the same way Mavors gets an alarm when we are threatened with death."

Quentin said, "This ship, the Argent Nautilus, also can be detected when she moves, or when Vanity calls for her."

Colin said, "Yep, but apparently-correct me if I am wrong on this, guys-apparently only Mestor or some At-lantans have a whatchamacallit-"

"Magic lodestone," provided Vanity.

"-magic lodestone to find the ship in motion. If Lamia had one, she'd have come to get us all by now, right? Mestor hasn't come for us, because Mavors told him to let us run around till Lamia showed up to kill us."

Quentin said to me, "Leader, our experience on the ocean liner shows that we endanger any human beings we are around. I suggest we just turn around and find some deserted island somewhere."

I looked at the beautiful, tall buildings, towers made by human hands, human minds, works of fine engineering. Built by free people, who explored and conquered the new world not so very long ago. People in a land where women owned property, carried guns, ran businesses, worked in laboratories, became astronauts. People like what I wanted to be like.

"Live like Robinson Crusoe? For how long?"

Quentin spread his hands. "Tell me what our long-term goals are."

I said, "Well, gosh, I assume we all have different goals. I want to be the first woman on Mars.

Vanity wants to be a movie actress. Colin wants to get into my pants."

Colin actually looked embarrassed. "Hey!" he said. Then, to cover up his embarrassment, he tried to make a joke of it. "That was supposed to be a secret."

I was actually so puzzled by his reaction that I stared at him, looking into his inner nature, guessing what the lines of moral energy between us were supposed to mean, watching the little flickering ripples of usefulness travel on the sound waves he made with his voice, wondering what use those words were to him.

At a guess... ? He thought he had a chance with me. Before, it was all rude jokes because I was out of reach. Now I was coming within his reach, and it was serious. No more jokes.

Quentin said, "I want to solve the mystery of creation. Why did Saturn make the material universe? Why trap all the free and perfect spirits inside gross material bodies?" Quentin looked at Victor. "What about you, Victor?"

Victor gave the smallest of smiles. "I have an ongoing operational preference, rather than an end goal. I was raised in a prison, as a war hostage. War is illogical, wasteful. Wars become less frequent the more incentives rational beings have to cooperate rather than to compete. A free and peaceful commonwealth embracing all rational entities of this and every other universe, Cosmic and Chaotic, mortal and immortal, will deter wars.

"The primary requirement, however, is freedom: universal freedom. If there are other people out there, raised in imprisonment as I was, I have a duty to liberate them, for the same reason why I would have welcomed any outside liberator who would have attempted to free me. We were in the most pleasant prison imaginable. It was still unacceptable. The present condition of the universe is unacceptable. Anything I can do, large or small, along these lines, I will do. Other problems are secondary, and may resolve themselves once this primary problem is solved."

If Victor had said this in any other tone of voice besides his normal cold and methodical tone, I would have shrugged it off as a daydream. It would have been pompous.

But he said it so reasonably. Anything I can do, large or small, along these lines, I will do. Vanity was staring at Victor with sort of an awestruck hero-worship-type look in her eyes.

"Wow," said Vanity. "Pretty cool. You think it will work? Conquering all the universes?"

Victor put his hands in his pockets, shrugging a bit, and seemed relaxed and faintly amused in that nonchalant way he had about him now, which he never had had before. He did not look like a young god who had just declared war on the universe.

Victor said, "That depends on what you mean by 'work.' Miss Daw, for example, is as much a prisoner as we ever were. I know Colin hates her, but if I could, I would free her. I doubt the chance will present itself. Reality is complex. The most we can hope for in life is partial solutions.

And even such partial solutions as that are temporary, and may require irritating compromises.

That is why I defined my actions in terms of an operational process, not in terms of an end goal.

There is no end. Nothing ever ends. We do what we can when we can. Factors beyond our control-" He made a gesture at the horizon and the sky, a gesture that seemed to encompass the material world, humanity, the stars, the fates, the actions and opinions of other people, all of external reality. "-factors beyond our control... we disregard."

He turned and looked at me.

I have not said what color his eyes are. They are hazel, a penetrating golden brown, like eyes that could look at anything, large or small, and would never be afraid: eyes that could see through all the lies and fears of everyone around him, and penetrate to the cold and certain truth; eyes that would never blink and look away, never hold shame, never be uncertain. Victor had beautiful eyes.

He turned and looked at me and said something, but I was not sure what he said, because I was looking at his eyes.

The words penetrated: "But for now, our goal is to escape from the Olympians, who are apparently still so confident about their ability to recapture us that they are letting us wander among the human beings, whom they rule and control. We must prove that confidence to be false, and defeat Olympos. What do we do, Leader?" So it was back to that.

Well, just because I had been railroaded into being leader didn't mean I had to do all the thinking for myself. I said, "The floor is open to suggestions. We have already heard from Quentin. Go to a deserted island. Colin... ?"

He was standing with his arms folded, frowning toward the city. He looked up, startled. Perhaps he had not been listening. "What? What is it?"

"We are looking for suggestions."

Colin pointed at the city and said, "Is that Hollywood?"

I said, "What? The city? That's San Francisco. Don't you ever look at maps?"

Quentin said softly, "You know he never looks at maps."

Vanity smiled broadly, and gave a little clap of her hands together, and said, "Hollywood is somewhere in this area, isn't it? This is California." She rolled her enormous green eyes at Colin.

"He is thinking about his girlfriends. Those starlets he wrote letters to."

Colin said, "Boggin intercepted the replies. Who knows what they might have said? Anything from get lost to let's do it in the road. You can't blame a guy for wondering."

I said, "At the moment, we're wondering about what to do next. In effect, the question is, Where do we want to go to wait for Lamia to attack us?"

Colin said, "That's easy. We go home to Chaos. My dad, Morpheus, can protect us from Lamia, and from Boggin and Mavors, too."

Quentin looked both sad and stern. I could see he did not want to bring up his idea he had shared with Vanity, that none of us could go home. In fact, he looked so pained that I decided to spare him.

Vanity saw the same look and had the same thought, because she blurted out, "That will start the war between Cosmos and Chaos, and the material universe will get destroyed!"

Colin said, "So? What's so great about the material universe?"

I said under my breath, "It is where that nice stuff called 'matter' is, for one thing."

Colin did not hear. He continued, "How's this for a plan: We go home, I get my parents back, war starts, universe ends, good guys win and bad guys die, and we all live happily ever after. Roll credits."

Victor said, "This will sound unpopular, but I am afraid we cannot necessarily trust that our parents are on the right side. We have no evidence either way as to what they are like. We do not know who is in the right or wrong between Cosmos and Chaos. We ought not give loyalty or aid to any group until we know what they stand for."

I raised my hand in a commanding gesture. "The Dark Mistress hereby orders that we table this conversation for later. Mavors would not have let us go if he did not have a mechanism in place to prevent us from leaving the universe and going home. He let us go to act as bait for Lamia; he would not take the risk of triggering Ragnarok. So there must be something watching us, something that will swoop down and stop us if we get close to the gates at the edge of the world, or wherever you have to go to get out of the universe. Find out what the mechanism is and how to disarm it, or find out where the Gates at the End of Creation are, and who or what is guarding them, and then we'll talk about going home. Until then, let's talk about getting free and staying alive."

Victor said, "I would raise the same objection to talk of approaching one faction or another among the Olympians. Mulciber might help us escape Mavors, for example, and protect us from Lamia, but only if we promised to support his bid for the throne of Heaven. He also might simply imprison us and erase our memories. Or he might be the one who sent Lamia. The same is true of anyone else." To Vanity, he added, "Even the Phaeacians might start a war, or turn us back over to the Olympians, if we approached them. And we do not know who sent Lamia."

Quentin said, "But we are not perfectly ignorant. What about the three Olympians who were allied with Chaos? They are almost sure to be our friends: Dionysus, Athena, and Hermes. Or, to use the names they are using these days, Lord Anacreon, Lady Tritogenia, and Lord Trismegistus. They are all gods of wisdom and magic, mysticism. They have nothing to gain from the status quo. We could take precautions, make a careful approach."

Victor said, "My suggestion is to approach nobody, nobody, until we discover more information."

I said, "One suggestion for deserted island, one for back to Chaos and destroy the universe, one for find out more. Vanity? You are the only one who hasn't said anything yet."

Vanity said meekly, "Is going to Hollywood and becoming famous an allowed suggestion?"

I shrugged. "Why not? It is not any more unreasonable than the 'destroy the universe' suggestion.

But it is going to be hard to stay hidden if you are posing for Sudsy-Fun Soap and for Shine-Rite Tooth Grease, appearing in rock videos and on billboards or something. And Quentin has a good point. I mean, let's suppose you are there eating brunch at the Brown Derby with Elizabeth Taylor and Cindy Crawford and Cecil B. DeMille, and a blood-drinking vampiress with no eyes comes in to kill you. See the problem?"

Vanity surprised me. She is smarter than she sometimes acts. Her response was, "This is not a problem of how to get free or stay safe. This is a problem of how to find out how they are finding us. Mavors expects Lamia to find us. How? Mavors expects to find out she has found us, and further expects to find out who is sending her. How? You said Grendel's mother followed some sort of trail or signal left by the wedding dress. Did Lamia put anything on Quentin or in his bloodstream that would enable her to track him down? Let's find out how they are finding us."

I smiled. "A capital suggestion! But you cannot sense Mavors being aware of us, can you?"

She said, "Boggin is aware of where you are. Right now. He knows."

It wasn't news to me; I had been expecting it. On the other hand, it did not make me happy, either.

Vanity said, "I felt the moment in time when Mavors became aware of you. It was when you were alone with Grendel's mother."

I said, "When I was threatened with death. The object his curse is meant to protect us against."

Quentin said softly, "Call it a decree. A declaration. The word 'curse' implies malice; the Olympians can decree any number of things."

Colin made a gargling sort of sigh, something like the sound of a man preparing to spit. "Come on! The Olympians have to have a weak spot! There has got to be some limit to their power, something beyond their range."

I turned to him. "Like what?"

He said, "I don't know. But why didn't Mavors just 'decree' that the guy sending Lamia would write out a confession and then have a heart attack and die?"

Victor said, "The person who sent Lamia could also be an Olympian. They must be immune to each other's powers or, at least, able to resist."

Colin said, "Quentin detected that Mavors could manipulate fate, and make it so that his ships could outmaneuver us. Okay, fine. That's fine. He's the god of war; I guess one of his perks is to be able to dictate the outcome of sea combats. But apparently Boggin can't just decree that we'd all be good students and never give him any problems. Or else he would have done so. Maybe he's decreed we will always be caught each time we try to escape, but why not just decree that we won't even try in the first place? You see? You see what I mean? Is there a price they have to pay?

A limit? Do they only get three tries?"

I said to Quentin, "Are there any myths or legends about people who escape from the fates the gods set for them?"

Quentin smiled and said, "No. No poet would dare write such a tale, would they?"

Vanity said, "Yes there is. Wagner's Ring Cycle. Die Walkure and those other operas. Siegfried and Tod, or whatever the names were. Remember? The fates decree that Ragnarok will destroy the universe and everyone in it, but Wotan finds that if he can create a man brave and free enough not to be bound by any destiny, Siegfried, that Siegfried can break the magic spear of Wotan with his magic sword Nothung, and he frees the girls from the magic circle of fire, but drinks a magic potion by mistake..."

Colin said, "Isn't that the opera where everyone is stabbed and poisoned at the end, except the girl, who sings, jumps on a funeral pyre, has the roof fall on her, and the Rhine floods and sweeps the ashes away? Not exactly a happy ending."

Vanity said, "Two humans survive the death of all the gods, hiding in a beech tree. I thought that was the happy ending you were just wishing for. End of the universe. Roll credits."

I said, "Hold it. Dark Mistress hereby says we table the seminar on Wagner opera. The question raised by Colin is perfectly valid: What are the limits on Olympian fate-control, and how can we elude them? Vanity's question is equally valid, and I think it is brilliant. What are the limits on Olympian divination, and how do we hide from it? I am interpreting both of those as motions on the floor for the plan: go somewhere and find out. The question is, where? Who knows the stuff we need to know?"

Quentin said, "There are readings I could do. But I was not able to find a way to make them secure from eavesdropping."

" 'Star-dropping,'" murmured Colin.

Victor said, "We have as yet made no experiment as to the capacities of this ship, Vanity's ship, to carry us to places we cannot describe or name. Does it have a memory? A database of locations?"

Vanity said, "What happens if we say, 'Sail to the nearest person who can protect us from Lamia'?

Will the ship go anywhere? Do we need to know the name of the person or the place where he is?

Can we say, 'Sail us away outside of the range of the Olympian detection system'? 'Sail us beyond the range and reach of their spells' ?"

Quentin said gently, "I hate to keep bringing this up, but even if we decide to go somewhere and take horoscopes or experiment with the Argent Nautilus, do we dare do it in any place where the humans live? It is going to be one or the other.

"Leader," Quentin continued, turning to me, "if we are willing to live among the humans, let us go now to shore, find an apartment we can rent or a kindhearted farmer who will take us in or something, and hide, and do our experiments and investigations in secret. There are big advantages to getting help from the humans. We could hire scientists or detectives. We could get hot running water and cooked meals.

"If we are not willing to risk living among the humans, then let us turn this boat around now and seek some deserted place on this world or in another, and do our experiments where no human will see. But that issue we must decide now, before we decide anything else. Do we land here, and drag our boat ashore? Or do we sail away to a lonely wasteland? It is your decision, Amelia."

I sat for a time on the bench, one arm on the back and my cheek on my arm, looking back across the stern. The sun rose higher, burning off the mist of dawn, and the level beams of cherry light grew more yellow, bright, vertical, and strong. The mosaic of white and gray, steel and glass, grew more clear and particular as details emerged from the departing gloom. I saw the tiny sparks, red and green by turns, of streetlamps; I saw a surprising number (considering the hour) of cars crawling the roads, the bridge, the highways, made, by the distance, into a caterpillar of many-colored metal scales. I saw motion at the marina and docks, ships of many shapes and sizes, trailing white foam in their wakes, busy in the early morning waters.

I thought it was only a matter of time before the shore patrol or coast guard or whatever they called it in America would come by and demand to know what we were doing in an ancient Greek pentaconter off the coast of California.

And still I sat and watched the city, and still my friends stood nearby, silently or speaking but softly, awaiting my decision.

I had never seen a sight so glorious, it seemed to me, as the light growing strong across that city, as if some sunken island were rising to the surface of a sea of twilight shadows and, as the little rivulets and pools of reddish gloom departed, displaying proud and tall her alabaster towers, arrayed in the strong young light, with lesser buildings and well-made homes gathered like retainers about their knees.

If you have known cities or lived in them, or if you think only of their flaws, their crowded sleeplessness or crimes, I cannot explain the romance or beauty of what I saw to you. Perhaps a shepherd from some houseless hill-country, peopled by a dull-eyed and simple folk, whose only roads are muddy goat-paths, if he has spent restless nightwatches dreaming of a better life, and yearns to see and to know the arts and letters, the men of renown, artists and engineers touched by genius, women of grace, refined and fair, of civilized existence, perhaps that shepherd, when he at last, after long months of trudging ever-wider roads, comes by morning light to see the wide walls of Babylon looming above the colossal statues of the Ishtar gate, or he beholds by dawn the seven hills of Rome above the flowing Tiber, the aqueducts of Hadrian and the baths of Caracalla, and his rustic jaw drops because all words leave him, to that shepherd I could explain what seeing San Francisco by the light of a new day meant, at that moment, to Amelia Armstrong Windrose.

It meant all the things I would never have, all the life I would never lead.

I said heavily, "Deserted island."

No smiles greeted my decision. Neither Colin nor Vanity was too happy about leaving civilization; Quentin nodded, but was not pleased; Victor had his usual self-controlled expression.

I said, "Once there, we can perform certain experiments, such as seeing if Gyges' ring can make us invisible to other systems being used to track us. We can have Quentin take more readings from the stars and from the invisible people who live in the middle air. Victor can go through his blood library; Colin can try to learn music."

"Bleh," commented Colin. Then he said to Quentin, "Gimme the magic ring back, Big Q. I feel the need to disappear."

"Vanity can experiment with her green stone and discover what her capacities are. I can take up knitting or bird-watching or something. So wave bye-bye to the lights of the big city, people; we are going to go somewhere where there is nothing but sand, sand-fleas, sandpipers, and sand-crabs."

A moment of gloom hung over the group.

Vanity brightened up. "What about sandwiches?"

I blinked. Vanity sometimes acts the way she acts. "What witches?"

"I mean, we have to eat, don't we? We have to go ashore to get food! And supplies! And do some shopping! How much money is left?"

"Um... You have the envelope, don't you?" I asked Vanity.

"So I do! So I do! Well... ? It's not going to kill the humans if we just go ashore for a few hours, is it?"

"Well..."

I looked out over the water at the gleaming, brilliant city, the engineering wonder of the Golden Gate Bridge. I thought about hot running water. We had just been in a sea-fight, right? And I had missed the chance to shop in Paris, right?

"Well, okay," I said, finding myself beginning to smile, "but only until the noon high tide!"

Quentin said, "Leader, are you sure that this is wise... ?"

"Oh, come on!" I said, pouting. "I haven't even had a chance to spend a single pound-note of that money!"

The Creatures of Prometheus

We smuggled ourselves into the country.

Quentin and I were carried over by Colin first. We were standing in a little spot of greenery called Corona Heights Park, between Haight-Ashbury and Twin Peaks. Across the grass, I could see a little museum, austere and white. Across the street (which fell in dizzying straight steps toward the sea), I could see another park, shining with green trees, surrounded by houses and buildings with sharply peaked roofs of black slate, the ones nearer us carved with ornate gables and fluted columns. I had been expecting to see everything in California made of white plaster and red tile, Spanish architecture. The buildings near us had a Norwegian extravagance to them.

Across the other way, we had a perfectly breathtaking view of the metropolis; we stood on a tall hill overlooking the buildings, and only the tallest buildings (made blue by the distance) were level with us.

The air smelled differently than it did in England. It was warmer. A little bit, not much.

I said to Quentin, "Won't you get in trouble? Sneaking into a country?"

Quentin said, "Any other country, yes. Not this one."

"I thought you had to obey all the rules anyone makes, or else your spirit-friends turn on you."

"Some rules carry more weight than others. The invitation on the base of the Statue of Liberty-and I assure you that I am a huddled mass right now, yearning to breathe free, and I certainly am tired, poor, and homeless, not to mention tempest-tossed-that invitation opens the ward and acts as consent to permit me into the country. My friends regard that statue as a tribute to the reigning goddess here, no matter what the human lawmakers say or do. She is a symbol, and her name is Mother of Exiles. The spirit world pays more heed to symbols than to mere words. They would have to knock Liberty's arm off, or douse the torch, in order to revoke that invitation."

I hugged myself. "It is colder than I thought here."

Quentin raised his hand and waved at some joggers bouncing by, little electronic gizmos in their ears. One of the girls waved back. Apparently his sweeping black robes and five-foot warlock wand did not seem odd or out of place here. Did I mention we were not far away from Haight-Ashbury?

There was an invisible stirring in the air near us, the grass shivered and blew, and I suddenly became aware of a giant black bird carrying Vanity and Victor in its talons. Quentin pointed his wand at the bird, spoke a word in Latin, and Colin was there. All three sort of tumbled to the ground. Well, not exactly all three; Victor caught Vanity. All one tumbled to the ground.

"Ouch," mentioned Colin. "Warn me next time." He fiddled with the ring on his finger to make sure the collet was pointing outward. The ring had been on his talon claw a moment before, which should have been his foot. He had also not been dressed and had enjoyed a different mass. I guess his paradigm just did not worry about details like that.

First order of business was changing money. We spent an hour or so sight-seeing, watching trolley cars go by, that sort of thing, waiting for the banks to open.

Finally, we went into one. The metal detectors at the door decided not to go off when Victor entered, even though he was wearing forty pounds of chain mail under his long white jacket.

Guess how that happened... ?

The bank was enormous, bright with streamlined columns of gold, and a floor of shining marble.

There was an art deco statue of Atlas shouldering his globe in the center. A golden figure with a torch streamed across a high upper panel above the glassed-in counter. A repeating design of wheels with wings sprouting from their hubs ran to the figure's left and right. The place looked like a temple, but more grand.

And it was convenient. We did not have to show any paperwork or visas; the clerk at the exchange desk looked up the current exchange rates, explained there was a fee, took our British pound-notes, and gave us Yankee greenbacks. Voila.

I noticed, as the people waited in line, one underclass type, a poorly dressed day laborer from the look of him, who got waited on when his turn came. The clerks did not move to the more nicely dressed gentlemen first. That is not the way it happens in British shops. It was also hard to tell a person's class by how he dressed. The Americans all dressed pretty much the same. Even the bank clerks did not wear neckties. It was all so Bohemian and informal. I overheard one clerk calling his manager-a woman, mind you- by her Christian name, rather than by her family name. Small wonder they call this the New World.

It was not until we were outside again that I noticed one drawback. We were standing on the sidewalk, near a hot-dog vendor. I said to Vanity, "Can you buy me some breakfast? I've never had a real Chicago chili dog."

"This isn't Chicago!" she said.

"The sign says-"

"Oh, Amelia, that's just advertising.... Where is your money?"

"In the fourth dimension. I stepped in the bathroom at the bank and folded the envelope into my wings."

Vanity said, "Why put your money where you can't get it?"

"Isn't America full of footpads and crime bosses? That's what the telly shows."

Colin broke in, "Let me take care of it."

Colin bought me a hot dog with his money. It was loaded with so much chili and a yellow syrup pretending to be cheese that the bun would not close. He mock-solemnly got down on one knee and held up the little paper container it came in, a knight presenting the head of an enemy to his lady.

It was as drippy as the head of an enemy. The thing was greasy and disgusting, and I should have been disgusted. It was wonderful. I wolfed the sloppy thing down in huge and very unladylike bites, enjoying the sensation of being an American girl.

"Thank you, Colin," I said, daubing my lips with a napkin. I should have just wiped my mouth on my sleeve, I suppose.

He said, "You shall have to satisfy some hunger of mine in return, Dark Mistress. You see, I have this hot dog of my own which needs-"

Quentin (thanks be to Gabriel) interrupted the oncoming filthy double entendre by saying, "I was sure at any minute we were going to be arrested. In the bank. Did you notice the decorations? No one saw them?"

I said, "Atlas. Prometheus. Winged wheels."

Quentin said, "That place was a fane of usury, where they make gold, not out of base metal, but out of nothing. There was a power there. I was sure that armed men would come swarming out of the back rooms at any moment. This is Mulciber's place; this is the world of Mulciber, an ugly world of gold and iron."

I said, "They seemed friendly enough." Friendlier than English clerks would have been, I thought.

Quentin said darkly, "Talos also had a friendly smile."

Colin said, "Who... ?"

I said, "Well, lady and gentlemen, I suggest we make a list of what we need and a list of what we want, and go shopping."

We bought first what any self-respecting group of adventurers chased by ancient pagan gods and blood-sucking vampiresses would buy: cell phones.

The Americans make radio-telephones small enough to fit in one's palm, feather-light, which can be programmed to listen to your spoken commands and dial numbers for you; record, store, and forward messages; and probably walk the dog and change the baby. Only someone who has never held such a thing in hand before can appreciate the marvel of it. Buck Rogers himself would have been goggle-eyed.

Originally, we meant to stay for only a short time. Only until high tide, no longer. But there was no point in leaving America while we were still hungry, and so we decided to spend a limited amount of money eating. And there was no point in eating in some dull burger joint when we could visit a first-class restaurant, not for our last civilized meal. And there was no point in fine dining without wearing the nice clothes Vanity had bought in Paris, and the boys dressed up in their formal suit and tie. Vanity wore a peach evening dress, flattering to her figure, with a strand of pearls dripping down her cleavage. I wore that little black outfit with stockings and pumps, silver earrings, and a matching silvery choker. We looked like grown-ups.

We squabbled like children. After much debate, we finally decided on a restaurant called Gary Danko, which the guide we'd bought listed as number one in the local area.

Lovely place, all polished wood floors gleaming like gold, dimmed lights over cozy white tables, wood-slatted windows casting striped shadows from the setting sun across the silverware and linen. The fragrance of roses and of wine hung in the air. I suppose it was a small restaurant, compared with some, but to me it looked enormous.

They never starved us at the Academy, and they had staff to wait on us at meals, which I suppose is unusual, so you would think we'd be used to dining. But the difference here was that we got to choose our own food.

What food it was! It was served on little white dishes, looking almost too beautiful to eat. (I recommend the guinea hen breast and rillettes, though the lobster salad-I ate some off Vanity's plate-was quite tasty, too.) They served twenty types of cheeses from a cart, each one better than the last.

Imagine being able to eat as much as you'd like, without Mrs. Wren or Dr. Fell telling you no.

Freedom cannot be good for the figure. Are Americans fatter than Cubans because they're free?

I remember making some comment along these lines to the group.

Quentin looked glum and shook his head. "Unleashing the appetites is not freedom, but another type of slavery. Freedom in the absence of virtue will destroy a country as quickly as any tyranny."

Victor said, "Virtue imposed from without is not virtue at all, but merely prudence. A man who avoids lying merely because a law tells him to tell the truth will avoid telling the truth as soon as the law tells him to lie."

Quentin said, "The whole universe is built on a hierarchic principle, spirits being made of finer substances than gross matter, quintessence being finer than aether. A democracy flattens differences between men, and too soon they lose the distinction between better and worse, noble and base, good and evil. Have you seen what they call art here, compared to what we studied in school? These people need a queen. To bow to a crowned sovereign would teach them respect for great and ancient things, so that when, after death, they met things greater and more ancient than mere man, they would be ready."

Victor, who cared nothing one way or the other for art, said, "I believe in the principle of atomism: let each individual stand or fall on his own. The ancient things we are running from have done nothing to convince me the Americans, or anyone else, should bow to them."

I said, "Speaking of gross matter, what do you think, Colin?"

He raised his wineglass. "When Ireland gets the atom bomb, we'll see how well Q-man's

'hierarchic principle of the universe' holds out! Down with crowned head, on Earth, in Heaven, or in Hell!"

Vanity said, "You're not really Irish, you know."

Colin said, "So what? I like 'em. Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats."

"Do you know anything about Yeats?"

Colin looked pompous and offended. He jarred the wineglass down on the table. "Do I indeed, the colleen, she asks? And me a true son of the Old Sod? Faith! Hear this: When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Vanity was taken aback. "That's a beautiful poem." "To be sure, and it is!" declared Colin, lifting his wineglass again to his lips with relish. "I don't know what the first two stanzas are on about, but I've always wanted a crown of stars like the one Love hides his face in on the mountain. I assume he meant Cupid atop Olympos. Wonder how he knew Cupid was crowned King after Terminus fell? Quentin, can you summon up his ghost to ask him?"

Quentin nodded, and mentioned some of the disgusting things he'd have to get or to do to perform the necromancy. Victor said, "The poem said 'crowd,' not 'crown.'" Colin shrugged. "Miss Daw told me once that you can interpret a poem how you like, so I interpret that Yeats's pen slipped when he wrote that last line. I'm sure he meant to say 'crown.'" I said, "And what do you think of America?" Colin nodded at me. "I am suspicious of anything you like, Amelia, just on principle; but on the other hand, everyone says California girls are hot, young, wet, and eager, so the place cannot be all bad."

Vanity commented: "Ah! The echoes from the shallow well! Colin, I would call you a boor, except I know some boors who are quite nicer than you. She was asking what you thought of their system of government."

Colin spread his hands. "What? I've walked into a bank and ate in a restaurant. I haven't seen a race riot or a public hanging since I've been here, so I guess their system of government is holding up for this afternoon. What kind of question is that, anyway? That's all theory. Democracy or tyranny or communism or capitalism. It's all something someone made up in his head. It's not real.

The reality is that people will do whatever they want to do, and make up some excuse later why they did. Political economics is a list of excuses to use."

I said, "Well, God bless America, I say. These people are the freest on Earth."

Colin picked up his fork and jabbed it in my direction. "Which means they are the freest pigs in the sty. And the Olympians are the swineherds. It does not matter what these people do or do not do. The bloody gods and goddesses are running the show here. The freedom you see around you is a facade, a false face. If you care about freedom for Americans or Englishmen or Irishmen (the finest race on Earth, let me just say), then you have to declare war against Heaven and Hell, against wind and wave and fire, and every other place the old gods dwell."

Victor said calmly, "I do not disagree with what you say, Colin, but let us see to securing our own freedom first."

We all toasted that remark.

It was based on that conversation that I started to wonder-if the human world were a false face, what lay under the mask?

Why were the gods in hiding, if men were their cattle?

My cash was still trapped in my fourth-dimensional pocket, but I had no chance to go to the ladies' room and rotate it into being. Colin, with grand and solemn drama, swept up the bill when the waiter brought it, and he left a healthy tip, bankrupting himself for a gesture.

"Now you have to put out," he said to me with his crooked smile. "It's tradition."

Insults bubbled up to my lips (a natural process brought on by exposure to Colin). Victor spoke before I did, though, saying in the cool, remote voice, "I believe the American tradition, in cases where the gentleman propositions a lady after paying for her meal with money she secured for him, is to take him out back and drub him. Quentin, would you care to join me?"

To my surprise, little Quentin did step up to Colin and grab him by one arm, while Victor grabbed the other.

"Hey!" shouted Colin. Heads turned at the shout. Patrons of the restaurant murmured in alarm.

I said, "The Dark Mistress is amused by the circus of gladiators, but this is not the place! If you boys can peer through the cloud of manly testosterone you're emitting, note the approach of the maitre d'hotel! Don't do anything that will make them call the police!"

Victor nodded at Quentin, and in a trice, they had Colin hoisted up to their shoulders (lopsidedly, since Victor is taller than Quentin) and were singing, "He's a jolly good fellow! So say all of us!"

The patrons, relieved, smiled and turned back to their meals. One or two even clapped.

The maitre d' approached anyway. "What is the meaning of this?"

I said, "Well... we're British."

He blinked, but the answer seemed to satisfy him. Victor and Quentin staggered out under their load, who waved and smiled at the other patrons, especially the ladies. Once outside in the parking lot, away from other eyes, the two unceremoniously dumped him to the pavement.

"Ow!" Colin stood and tried to rub both his bum and his head at the same time, which had collided loudly with the pavement, also at the same time.

Vanity uttered a moan of disappointment. "There is a Dumpster not five steps away! You could have at least tossed him in the trash!"

By that time it was dark, and there was really no point in setting off into the sea at night, rather than wait till morning. And a comfortable bed in a hotel with room service and cable television was preferable to sleeping aboard the ship, right? And we did not have to save our money, since we were about to travel to some uncharted island, right? So why not rent the penthouse suite?

All were pleased with that decision, but less pleased when I announced, once we were alone in the room, the girls were taking one room and the boys were bunking in the other. Vanity scowled and wondered aloud when I had gotten so prissy in my old age.

I said sternly, "It is a matter of maintaining unit discipline, troops! Vanity, you will have to do your snogging with Quentin in the daytime, with no extramarital temptations to put added stress on this group. We were properly brought up little gods and goddesses, all except for Colin, and I see no reason to descend into lusty barbarism merely because we are in America."

That got me boos and catcalls (one catcall), but there were only two rooms in the suite, and I was not going to bunk with Victor and Colin.

Vanity said, "You sound like Boggin. This is out of your jurisdiction, Leader! What we do with our time off is not your business."

I shrugged and said, "Elect Colin leader if you like, but while I am Dark Mistress of the Merry Wee Titans of Chaos, we are going to maintain our dignity and decorum. Makes the boys fight harder."

Well, it was put to a vote of confidence immediately. Vanity voted against me, but could not bring herself to vote for Colin, so she voted for Quentin; Victor and Quentin supported me. I voted for Victor. Colin voted for himself, of course.

Quentin caught my eye and gave me a nod of approval. Quentin was no more likely to offend the sacrament of marriage than Grendel Glum had been. Humans might have some option about which laws to obey and which to ignore, but I don't think monsters and warlocks do.

"A clear and overwhelming plurality," I sighed. "That's it, people: While in America, we act like Puritans. It's tradition."

Vanity, at this point, asked if we could depart America as soon as possible. She started pointing out the advantages of camping out on some deserted island, and saying how our limited funds had been used for extraordinary extravagances lately.

"A quick trip to the all-night sporting-goods store, to pick up a few needed supplies," Vanity said,

"and then we should be on our way."

Colin nodded somberly and said, "By 'needed supplies,' you mean birth control, right?"

That was too much for Quentin, who did not want to see his beloved called a harlot. He muttered a curse under his breath and made a small gesture with his walking stick. Of course, when Quentin mutters a curse, it works: Colin hopped as if stung by a bee, yowling in pain and clutching his bum.

Yes, there was an all-night sporting-goods store in San Francisco. The store's loudspeakers were vibrating with energetic dance tunes, and the clerks working there were bright-eyed and hyperactive, no doubt as a side effect. They even had a little elevator just for the sports shoes to ride. What a country! The cash that Victor and Vanity still carried was enough to cover the costs of tents and tarps and sleeping bags made of shiny space-age materials I had never heard tell of.

Quentin paid for the cooking gear, knives, a hatchet, and an axe. Victor invested twenty dollars in a Boy Scout Handbook and a U.S. Army Survival Manual.

Vanity called her ship to her, and we all flew over to the deck, either levitating magnetically, or by warping space-time to deflect gravity, or by uttering a charm to the unseen spirits of the middle air, or by jumping off the docks with a scream that turned in midscream into the shrill of a hawk.

Vanity rode on my back amid wings made of flame-colored music-energy.

Of course she would have preferred Quentin to carry her in his arms, but the nervous shyness of his familiar spirits made that unlikely. She complained while we flew that she could have found a shortcut through a phone-booth door or something directly to the deck. Then she said I was too close to the water, and then that I was too high, yak, yak, yak. Backbone driver!

Through the dark clouds above the nocturnal sea, I saw the red planet, Mars, winking at me like a distant light above the far horizon, mysterious, untrod by man, and I wondered how high I could fly. These are questions every young aviatrix asks herself: How far, how high, how fast, under what weather conditions?

We lit on the deck with a swirl of gravitic rainbows, or levitated silently as if riding an invisible elevator, or stepped down from the shadows in the night air, or pretended to be a bird until tickled and kissed by Vanity and me back into being human. Jerk.

We stowed the gear in convenient cabins under the deck that Vanity found (or created) for us. The boys waited above impatiently while Vanity and I changed. I am sure they rolled their eyes and made boyish comments, but still, I was not going to go sailing in an evening dress. I put on a very sensible dark sweater, dark blue jacket, white slacks, deck shoes. And no reason not to accessorize, since Vanity had bought me a cute little necklace of fine gold in Paris. And no reason not to brush my hair, since it did not make sense for me to have my hair amess if I were dressed nicely, did it?

Back up on deck, Victor seemed not to notice how I was dressed. Second jerk.

But I looked all captainy and official. "Miss Fair!" I called out in my best Bligh voice. "You may weigh anchor and set our destination. Some fine deserted island, empty of men or gods, where we may tarry for a while in peace!"

Vanity raised her hands and closed her eyes, and intoned in a theatrical voice: "Argent Nautilus, beloved ship, vessel white to carry us to freedom! Find me an uninhabited island!"

The Silvery Ship raised no sail. Silently, with no hand at the tiller, we sped away under the stars.

Untasted Waters and Untrodden Sands

I suppose this has happened to everyone: It is easy enough to say to a magic boat, Find me an uninhabited island, but the first place we made landfall was a rock less than an acre wide, half-submerged at high tide, covered with ice at low tide. There were some tough-looking birds, their feathers gray as lead, who had built their nests among the frost-coated rocks. Nothing else grew on the rock but lichen and clinging green seaweed.

We were all shivering in the gray and snowy air, except for Victor, who did not notice cold.

"Vanity!" I said through chattering teeth. "Whose idiot idea was this? I told you to find some deserted tropical island!"

Vanity stamped her boot against the deck. "You did not! I said just what you said! A deserted island!"

Colin and Quentin were both looking at me. Oops. First lesson about being a leader. If it goes wrong on your watch, it is your fault. I could have given a different order, been more specific, said something else. Bossing is like an unwritten contract: The men obey your dumb orders without question, and in return you don't give any dumb orders. You use your brain. You make the plan. You're in charge.

"At ease, Miss Fair!" I barked out. "We'll say no more about it. Tell the vessel to find someplace warmer! In the tropics! Double time!"

Vanity squinted at me. Her red hair was being tossed about by the cold wind, and her lips were blue. "What does 'at ease' mean?"

"It means you don't have to stand at attention."

"I wasn't standing at attention."

"Good. Because you don't have to! Tell the Nautilus to find an island currently empty of man or god, spirit or spy devices, in a warmer clime, someplace large enough to pitch a tent. Someplace with grass and trees. Now, step lively, spit spot!"

"What does 'spit spot' mean?" Vanity asked.

Colin said, "It means Amelia thinks she's Mary Poppins now. Quick, send this boat to someplace warm, or she'll have us clean the nursery while she sings."

It is easy enough to say to a magic boat, Find me a warm and uninhabited island, but if you forgot to say, with a safe anchorage, then you might end up having to fly to shore at night. There was no opening in the reef, no safe passage. Well, I suppose a deserted island has to be deserted for a reason.

The necessity gave an excuse to be cunning: We sent the boat on her way, with instructions to visit the islands of Micronesia in alphabetical order, to lead any magic watching her away from us.

Beneath a midnight sky, in our various flying forms, we circled the island once and twice before landing. Victor said loudly through the night wind that he detected no electrical signals of motors, telephones, radios. Vanity (who was riding my back again) said she sensed no one looking. I gave the order to land.

Descending, I smelled green, growing things and heard the dry rustling of broad leaves. Funny, the leaves sounded different here than they do in Wales: like huge fans whispering.

But, ah! The warmth of the tropics! Why in the world would anyone live anywhere else? The land of endless summertime.

Victor had levitated down nearby. I heard him trampling through hissing grass blades toward me, and saw the dull blue beam from his metallic third eye. Against the stars and palm trees, his silhouette looked like that of a miniature lighthouse.

"Any idea where we are, Mr. Triumph?" I said, setting Vanity on her feet and refolding myself into human form. I felt sand and soil under my shoes, and long grass or ferns tickling my knees.

"About four hundred British nautical miles northwest of Tahiti, Leader," he said. "That is a rough guess based on star positions. I will need time to correlate and make adjustments to my internal instrumentation before I can interpret global positioning satellite signals correctly." A wry note crept into his voice. "My paradigm does not allow me to invent new sense impressions without knowing how they work."

Quentin spoke in the gloom, making me jump. I had not heard him walk up. "Leader, my friends tell me there are houses or huts, some place that lacked a lares or a lemur, not far from here."

I felt a sense of disappointment. No matter how far I traveled, I was still in the middle of the map, not at the edge. Always someone here before me. I said, "Vanity, I thought this island was deserted?"

Vanity said crossly, "Leaderwoman, you asked Silver to find a deserted island, not an undiscovered one. There is no one here now"

I was irked. "Are you sure your boat knows what she is doing?"

To answer, Vanity suddenly emitted a shrill, bloodcurdling scream.

"Lux fiat!" shouted Quentin, and a corona of flame appeared around his head. He had his walking stick raised high, shivering with eldritch power, his cloak billowing around him in a wind that was touching nothing but him. Victor rose slightly into the air, and tiny hissing dots of matter fled from his azure-flaming eye in all directions about us. I could not see them, but their internal nature was watchful and dangerous: some sort of prepared nanomachine package.

I did not flinch, of course, because I saw the utility and the inner nature of her scream. It was not a scream of fear or pain.

Colin stumbled into view at that moment and wrestled the bag hoodwinking him off his head. As leader, I bestowed on him the privilege of riding with Quentin, because Vanity and I were not going to do any naughtiness to restore him to lusty boy form. Colin scrambled on the ground for a moment, looking no doubt for a rock or stick to use as a club, but all he came up with was a handful of grass and fern. The bouquet of grass did not make a very good bludgeon, but his anger and shock made it burst into flame, which was pretty impressive, considering. The hairs of his head stirred and stood up, and the veins stood out on his neck as he screeched his war cry.

"WINDROSE!"

(I assume it was his war cry. He was standing only two feet from me, so I doubt he was calling for me.)

Vanity was making a little pirouette in the grass. "See?" she said brightly. "No one heard me. No one is in earshot, Leaderess. Deserted. Argent Nautilus did exactly as told."

Colin threw the burning twigs from his hand with a scowl. "Scared the piss out of me, Red! You owe me a pair of new silk boxers. And that is the last time I fly through the air with Quentin."

Darkness gathered itself up around Quentin as silently as a black silk handkerchief when he whispered the word to end his spell, and banished whatever fallen angel had lent him a blazing crown.

I said, "Let's find dry ground and make camp. We can look at the empty huts in the morning: groping into them at night is not a good idea."

No one moved. Victor said slowly, "I suppose we should look for higher ground, if we want it dry."

Did I mention that none of us were Boy Scouts? We had never been camping. We had never been anywhere on our own. So: take four young Titans and a young Phaeacian princess, set them in the middle of dark tropic scrub at night, and have them try to find a campsite. It was midnight, so those of us who get tired (everyone but Victor) were tired, and it was dark and tangled underfoot, so those of us who get cross (everyone but Victor) were cross. Everything we stumbled into seemed to have thorns and every patch that did not have thicket was flinty and hard, a rubble of rocks no sleeping bag could sit on. The ground was furthermore cut in places with some sort of drainage ditches or furrows, which threatened to stub toes, twist ankles, or break legs in the dark, and more than once we stepped in slime that Victor told us calmly was guano.

"At least," he said, "I assume it's guano. I can detect oxalic, uric, carbonic, and phosphoric acids, as well as earth salts and impurities."

"What's guano?" asked Colin.

"Bat crap," said Victor.

"Bat crap!" yodeled Colin, as loud as if he were helping Vanity check to see if anyone was in earshot. By some dull throb of feminine intuition, I was sure the phrase would turn into Colin's curse of choice over the next few days, and we'd be hearing a lot of it.

"Hold up, troops," I said in an exhausted voice. "Let's head toward the sound of the shore. Maybe we can find some nice, soft, sandy beach to make a tent."

"Pitch a tent," Vanity said. "You make a bed."

I was carrying all the gear, of course, in a large fold of my fourth-dimensional energy-wings, with the gravity world-lines all bent away, so that, for me, it was feather-light. When we found the sand, there was a shimmer of reddish light as I pulled the knapsacks and newly bought tents, tarps, and bedrolls into this three-space. I had it blue-side red at first, so all the lettering or trademarks on the fabric were mirror-reversed. I guess I was tired. I rotated the mass of it out of the hyperplane and back into it, and carefully flattened out the crinkles, so that everything was oriented right.

Well, we could not pound tent stakes into the sand, so I made the executive decision that we could sleep under the stars on a warm night just in our sleeping bags.

How soft the sand was. I nodded off, congratulating myself on my decision.

I dreamed I was back with Grendel Glum at the bottom of the sea. Waking up half-drowned, with a sodden sleeping bag twisted like heavy concrete about your ankles, in the darkness before dawn is not pleasant, nor is having half your gear carried off by the tide. We were all muddy with sand by the time we recovered what we could recover and retreated to the rocks above the high-tide line.

You see, I could tell you the fluxions Newton used to calculate the pull of the moon on the tides.

We had done them in math class. But I did not know what any seven-year-old who went backpacking with her father might know: Don't pitch camp below the tide line.

I lost the vote of confidence before breakfast.

Vanity cooked a splendid breakfast with some of what we salvaged from our foodstuff, and she managed to get a fire started with just one match, like a real Girl Guide, and when we were done debating and voting, she was in charge.

Her first decree was to name the place Vanity Island.

I got KP.

Six Score Leagues Northwest of Paradise

We explored the island in about, I dunno, fifteen minutes that first morning, some of us still dripping from our saltwater dunking when the high tide tried to carry off our rucksacks. There was something cute about an island that you can explore on foot in a quarter hour.

At sunup, a flock of seabirds took to the air from a nesting place atop the big rock in the middle of the island. We followed the raucous noise through the coconut palms to the nesting grounds, at its highest point maybe twenty-five feet above sea level. The birds screamed at us, but did not seem afraid. Too few generations of them exposed to guns, I suppose.

Colin aided their education by bringing one down out of the air with a rock and came trotting back with the feathery corpse dangling proudly in his fist. "It'll taste like chicken!" he assured us.

He looked around doubtfully. "Who here knows how to pluck and dress a bird, eh?"

Vanity set about looking for eggs to steal; I thought it was the wrong time of year, but no doubt she wanted to cook up a superb lunch to maintain her stranglehold on absolute power.

Meanwhile Victor, in his chain-mail shirt, levitated about thirty feet into the air, above the palm tree crowns, to get a commanding view of the island. I joined him in midair (obviously not because I needed elevation to see over objects).

Vanity Island was long and narrow, maybe three miles long and half a mile wide, a rough dagger of land with no springs or other freshwater sources. To my special senses the ring of reef all around the island was black with utter uselessness, with an interior nature that was coarse, crooked, treacherous. To the north, the reef extended nearly half a mile.

There were small lagoons filled with brackish water, and the sides carved by heavy tools: These were the remnant of some old excavation. Also black with uselessness.

I decided my race must be city folk. No matter how pretty nature's wild might seem to the human eye, every object in a cityscape is man-made and shines with human purposes, human uses.

We discovered a ditch of mud overgrown with weeds, marked by the stumps of man-made posts.

This formed the remains of a road or tramway running from a grove of coconut trees near the middle of the island down to the westernmost jut of the island. We followed the ditch to what seemed the ruins of a plantation. We could see the square discolorations, mounds of collapsed timber and tin overgrown with weed, grass, and fern, where there had been houses or barracks.

The ground here was overrun with brilliant flowers and edible plants whose ancestors had long ago escaped from decorative window boxes and vegetable gardens. Some of the flowers were European and had killed off the native flora.

Some of the weird bulbs dangling in heavy clusters from the trees shone brightly in my utility sense. They were useful to us. I looked inside the green husk and saw a golden oblong I had only seen carved in fruit dishes before. It took me a moment to figure out that these plants growing everywhere were papayas: We were not going to starve.

There was one place where the builders had poured concrete for a foundation: a blank square of gray surrounded by ferns and palm trees, empty except for the whitish stain where lead pipes had rusted to nothing.

I saw a spot beneath the ground where the texture was different, and, more out of curiosity than anything else, I moved into the "red" direction, pushed my way through the heavy medium of hyperspace, and stepped past the ground without moving through it. The interior volume of the earth was like a flat wall next to me. Embedded in it was a buried rubbish heap. I gathered the mass in my tendrils, picked it up (or, should I say, picked it "blue" since it was moving in a direction neither up nor down, left nor right), and hauled it up a few feet (and now I do mean

"up") to clear the surface of the soil, and pushed it redward into three-space.

It was rubbish. Victor and Quentin actually poked with some interest through the find, coming up with a rusted tin box, cigarette butts, a slender notebook. The interior papers had long ago turned to mulch, but the waxy leather cover was still intact. The notebook cover read mangare-VAN EXPEDITION, BISHOP MUSEUM, OCTOBER 1934. Also in the trove was dirt-caked remains of a stemwinder pocket watch. The round leaf of the timepiece was intact. Its inner face had been etched with the legend uss annapolis mcmvi.

"Well!" said Vanity. "They're not coming back anytime soon. We have the place to ourselves!"

Vanity outlined her three-step program: Step one, we were all to help build a serviceable campsite; step two, we were all to experiment with our newfound powers and abilities, making nightly reports on progress; step three, we had to be ready in three weeks for what Vanity called a final exam. When pressed, she gave no hint what she meant by a final exam, but she smiled a pretty smile.

"First step of step one!" she announced. "Amelia will help us all live like civilized boys and girls."

"Help how?" I asked suspiciously.

"Guess who I've picked to dig the latrine?"

Vanity divided all our chores into campwork and homework. Yes, we still had homework. Who says you get to leave it behind when you graduate?

My basic camp chore for the next two weeks, aside from dishwashing, was lumberjack.

(Lumberjackess? Lumber-jane?) Anyway, was chopping down trees. So, yes, I got the axe. I mean, I got to use the axe. I did it for maybe one, two hours a day in the mornings before it got really hot. Vanity used the excuse that I was the only one who could distort gravity to make certain the tree toppled in a safe direction. I thought it was a really unfair reason to give me the chore. I mean, it made perfect sense, so, as far as I was concerned, it was really unfair.

What did we need wood for? Practically everything. Firewood for heat and light, to save our limited supply of butane. A lean-to to act as a windbreak. A wooden foundation to pitch our two tents on, to keep us above the soggy, rocky, guano-stained soil. An A-frame to hold our tarp. A screen for the latrine, and guess who ended up doing most of the digging?

The excuse was that I could distort gravity to make the soil light, and see through the ground to avoid rocks and roots. So unfair.

To make matters worse, Colin came by during the afternoon when I was knee-deep in soil to watch me dig. It was hot in the tropics, so I was wearing my yellow one-piece bathing suit, and had my hair tied back to keep it out of the way. I was all sweaty and looked horrible, but Colin would stand in the shade leaning against a tree, chewing on the end of a fern and making unhelpful suggestions, and staring carefully at my bum whenever I bent over the shovel, giving me the wolf-eye like I was Miss Island or something. Jerk.

And I was mad at Victor. Why wasn't he coming by to stare at my legs while I dug? I slammed the shovel hard into the ground. Victor was a jerk, too. All boys are jerks.

In practically no time, we soon had a clean and serviceable campsite, with two tents, a suspended tarp that formed sort of a larger but unwalled tent, a windbreak, a fire pit with a tripod for the kettle, a laid-in firewood supply, a latrine, a Victor-built magic still for extracting fresh water from salt water, a laundry, and a place we called the "fishmarket," where our experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, in gutting and cleaning fish and shellfish we caught were performed.

We had brought nails, but the ones we had bought were too small (how were we to know?), and they bent into question-mark shapes when hammered into hard wood. So the camp furniture was clumsily lashed together with twine, at least until Victor discovered how to secrete some sort of resin or glue from his glands in a fashion I can only call disgusting.

Not bad for five kids raised in a mansion their whole lives, with servants and staff and jailers to wait on them.

It was ours.

Oh, the nights! Campfire tales! Marshmallow toasts! Sort of. We toasted chunks of papaya instead, since our marsh-mallows floated away.

The times when I did not mind having chopped so much wood were when we made blazing bonfires in our nicely stone-paved fire pit. Crawling red and black logs of palm-wood would send up a blaze, crackling with sap, and sparks would fly up like jeweled insects toward the whispering canopy. Between these leafy Venetian blinds, stars winked.

We would report on daily progress, those who made any, or talk about our dreams and our fears, or crack jokes, or make fun of each other.

Victor's reports were usually terse: He spent his afternoons underwater offshore, trying to build or, rather, grow a particle accelerator out of a coral bed into which he'd designed cells like those in an electric eel. He would be speaking one moment about peroxisomes and sphingolipids, alleles and demes, and the next about RF cavity resonators, Cockcroft-Walton generators or voltage multipliers, or plasma wakefield acceleration.

Quentin's reports were even more incomprehensible: He had covered the concrete floor of the abandoned cabin with chalk and paint, and each night he interviewed a different creature, and at report times, he could produce lists of the various felonies and enormities they could commit, "at the behest of the operator," or the liberal arts they could teach. He ended every report with a plea to Vanity to go back to civilization for a day, so he could reference books on goet-ics, or silver and tin to forge talismans, materials to build a proper anthanor.

It was like living on an island with Nikola Tesla and Johann Faust.

Vanity, being the captain of the group, did not give reports, but she had found a geologically impossible series of caves to the south of the island, erected different laws of nature in each, and was trying to tinker slowly with them. She ordered us to avoid the spot. The caves grew prone to odd noises and earth tremors, but Vanity did not quit. Being buried alive simply held no terror for her. "What are the odds the rock will be solid, and not have a hidden door?" she asked dismissively.

Colin refused to give reports. He would talk smugly about how his paradigm "... had no research, no astrology, no physics, no demonology. Focus my emotions, they come to a point, and everything I'm trying to do just clicks into place. I'm a point-and-click interface! User-friendly!"

"Music!" Vanity would say. "You should be practicing music! It's the key to your powers!"

"Gah! Music is my worst class."

"How can you tell," I chimed in sweetly, "among so many contenders for the honor, Colin?"

"I still haven't done my Mozart paper for Miss... Jesus nailed up a tree! I'm never going to have to do that paper. Not ever. No symphony in E-flat. No Baroque period, no Classical, no Romantic. I don't have any worst class anymore. Or a best class! I don't have any class at all!"

So he stood, with his eyes illuminated by the beatific vision of Life without School. His eyes were blind with happiness, and his mouth hung open in a smile.

I opened my mouth to make the obvious joke, but closed it again. He was just too happy.

On the third night, Vanity told me to take up my old office of Keeper of the Tales, and lead the group in the Telling once more: those dim fragments of memory we recalled from before our capture. The night became solemn. We each stood up before the fire and took our turns speaking.

It was strange, strange to hear those old words spoken, now, by young men and women, which had once been spoken only by children. Vanity's gold and silver dogs; Victor in space, making a worm out of falling rain; Quentin seeing a giant in the ice; Colin, urged on by his brothers, stealing a wolf pelt from the roofpole of his father's lodge, which held up the North Star. And me, remembering a pool like a globe larger than universes, in which the stars and worlds swam; and one small world was dark, a tiny world where time, death, and entropy were sovereign.

We spoke the words; we vowed not to forget. We promised each other we would escape and find our families again, our folk who loved us.

Colin said, "And we have not done it yet. We are still in prison. This world is not of our making."

Victor said, "I am not sure it is of their making, either. The Olympians seized control from an older being: Saturn, Father Time. He made this place. And what he seized to remake is a fragment of a larger, Uranian universe, a large volume, more disorganized."

"Disorganized, or free?" I asked.

Quentin said softly, "I think I understand my story now."

We all turned to look at him. He sat with his back to the fire, so that his face was a mass of shadow, and red light beat against his shoulders and back. "Certain things were explained to me by mighty spirits, Principalities, Dominions, and Potentates from places lower than Heaven. The chamber I remember in my father's house, the one filled with statues and chessmen, was my father's wardrobe. What looked like chessmen to me were figurines of human beings, who are naturally much smaller than my people. Those are bodies the Fallen can wear.

"The harp in his lap was the kantele, made of the bones of the leviathan and strung with the hair of fallen angels, who in grief and pride sheared their locks, as the ambrosial fragrance lingering there caused them the pain of memory.

"My father is Vainamoinen, who was an old man before he was born, spending seven hundred and thirty years in his mother's womb. The Greeks called him Proteus, the First, the Old Man of the Sea. The blind old women I remember are my three mothers, the Graeae, the Gray Sisters, white-haired hags from birth. They had but one eye and one tooth between them, which they had to pass back and forth: Only one at a time could see, or could chew."

He paused and wiped his eyes, perhaps in weariness, perhaps to brush away a tear. "I was supposed to help them. My mothers, I mean. To lead one around by the hand, when it wasn't her turn to use the eye; to moisten bread in wine for another to gnaw, when it wasn't her turn to use the tooth. My mothers were not godlike beings, not Titans, but cripples. Handicapped, I mean."

Victor said, "Did they also share one, um... I mean, how were you born from three women?

Physically, how was it done?"

Quentin scowled. "I assume I was born in sections and joined. Plato speaks of the three parts of the soul: the reason, the passions, the appetites. Certainly I feel always as if my conscience, my body, and my spirit are at odds, born of different mothers, as if I am pulled on a rack between opposites. I thought every man felt this way, like a fallen creature who dimly remembers he should be better."

Victor said, "I don't feel the way Quentin describes. One conforms one's actions to logic. There are no other alternatives."

Colin belched loudly, and said, "I don't feel that way, either. Should be better? If anything, I feel like I should be worse. You know, a drunk or something. A guy who gets in fights. To live up to my Irish heritage."

I said, "That is such a stereotype!"

He shrugged. "I'm allowed, that I am. They're my people, after all. Faith and begorra!"

"But you're not really Irish. You've never set foot in Ireland."

"Lassie," he said expansively, "put a stout pint o' bitter in me good right hand, and a stout stick in me left, and put an orange Ulsterman before me, stout or not, and by Saint Patty, you'll see what a good son of Eire I am, and how many heads I can break, drunk or sober."

Vanity said, "None of you are Irish or Welsh or English or anything. Even I am not British. I'm Greek or Albanian or something. From Corcyra. You are not human beings."

Quentin said with quiet emphasis, "We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts."

Vanity changed the subject. "I am curious why we have not been able to get our real, original memories back. I used to be a princess: I saved Odysseus, according to Homer. I'm like the only woman in the whole dumb poem who is nice to anyone! I'm..." Her face grew blank.

"What is it?" asked Quentin, worried.

"... I'm responsible. In The Odyssey, at the end, the island of Corcyra: It's blockaded. A stone mountain fills the harbor, and the ships are cut off from reaching the human world ever again.

Neptune, the sea-god, punishes the Phaeacians for having helped Odysseus. But they didn't help him. I did. According to the poem, I mean. I destroyed the Phaeacians. Is that-is that why they sent me away? Is that why my mother and father sent me off to be a hostage, to be put in prison?

And such a cruel prison! Aristotle said I married and had a baby. My own baby! If a woman has a baby, she can't really forget him, right?"

Vanity's voice (it was hard to make out expressions in the firelight) held such a note of pain that a moment of silence passed.

She broke the silence: "Quentin, can you get your Mafia friends, your imps or whatever they are, to find out more about us? How do we get our original selves back? Colin, or anyone else, if you have an idea, an experiment you can try, a messenger from another world you can contact, your Fearless Leader authorizes the attempt."

Quentin said, "I am curious myself. Was I sent into this world as a penance? What did I do to deserve it?" He shook his head.

I spent more than one afternoon looking into Victor's nervous system, trying to find and stimulate monads, or set the meaningless ripples of atoms in motion that would stimulate his buried memories.

Quentin worked his astronomical calculations and walked in dreams with fantastic beings who appeared in the forms of raven-headed men, or mighty kings mounted on dromedaries and holding vipers.

Colin patiently wove himself a hammock and spent his afternoons in it, going on a dream-quest, or so he said, to find the lost dreams of our former lives.

Each night before the campfire, we shared what results we could.

Colin, one night, said he had remembered some things, including something of Quentin's and Vanity's.

"I talked to my brother Phantasmos tonight. He said that this world I'm trapped in is a dream, just a bigger and nastier one than most, because it is the one dream that says no other dreams are real. That is why men forget dreams on waking here-to preserve the illusion. Saturn was originally one of us, a Dream-Lord of Cimmeria, the world without sunlight, but he found a way to deceive the night sky, and separate Uranus and Gaea. The stars used to walk freely on Earth, back when Earth and Heaven were merely two equal dreams, and there was no solid matter to hinder mankind, or to make them greedy for material things.

"The divorce of Heaven and Earth changed all that. The only way for the stars to reach Earth now was a one-way dive: a falling star. They cannot get back up again. This is the cool part: I know what part of Quentin's tale means. Listen up, Big Q. Those silver mountains where the stars fall down, that is a real place, a landing zone, sort of, for bearded comets and spirits from the astral heavens to touch down and enter the material world. Some fell through pride or because they lusted after the daughters of mankind, but others came down willingly, even though they can't go back. That big giant in your dream is Ouranos, the eldest primal god: the father of Cosmos and Chaos both. The little dwarves chipping him out of the ice, Phantasmos said were Hours and Days, wearing away at the chains Father Time put on Eternity. Time itself will end when Eternity breaks free and rises up as lord of all this world again.

"And, Vanity, my brother knew you, too. Those dogs of silver and gold at your house are real, and so are the walking tripods that cook food of their own accord. These are robots or golems, living metal creatures made by Hephaestus, who-guess what?-is that same big ugly guy Amelia met who tried to hire her. Lord Talbot, who owns the estate where we were raised. My brother knows your people because the Phaeacians helped the Sons of Morpheus, the Lords of the Dark.

" 'Your people are smugglers,' my brother said. I am hoping he means, you know, good smugglers, lovable rogues like the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, or Han Solo or something, not just drug-runners."

Vanity asked Colin, "What did they smuggle? My people, I mean?"

Colin poked the fire with a stick, throwing up a spray of sparks, and in the sudden light I saw his eyes dancing. "I don't know what they smuggled in from other worlds, but from my home, from dreamland, they smuggled dreams. That's what my brother told me. I don't know what it means.

He said a time had come, in ancient days, when all the dreams of man had died, and men bowed and sacrificed to unworthy gods, lecherous and cruel. Odysseus spied on the paths through the realm of shadows and found the empty kingdom of Lord Dis was not the final place to which men's souls fled-there was an Elysium beyond- and so the Phaeacians help him smuggle the truth back to mankind. The myth of Er, the tales of Zoroaster, legends hinting that this material world is but a dismal dream from which we wake to brightest sunlight-Socrates knew the truth of it, which is why he scoffs at Homer."

Vanity, for some reason not clear to me, looked guiltily at Quentin, and then asked Colin, "Did he say anything else? About Odysseus, I mean. Did your brother Phantasmos say anything else about Odysseus?"

"In my land, in Cimmeria, he is regarded as a great hero. He was much further traveled than he let on. He sailed to the foot of Mount Purgatory in the South Pole, which is this mountain so tall that tresses of the trees of the Earthly Paradise atop it scrape the bottom of the turning dome of Heaven, and starlight is tangled in their leaves and twigs. Odysseus sailed beyond the sunset, and he would not let the gods tell him no. So, buck up, Red." And then he turned to me, and said,

"Your kind of guy, too, Amelia. You know, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

And he threw out his chest, and said,

... Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

We all clapped for him, and I clapped loudest of all. (Gee. Sometimes I could almost like Colin, you know? If he weren't such a jackass.)

One night it was Victor's turn.

Victor said, "I remember the name of my teacher: It was Ormenus.

"I remember walking on an island barren of all life. All around me were yellow clouds: poison gas or molecular dissembler engines, Styx-water mixed with sulfur. It was war: The Olympians were driving us out of our homes, and we were leaving nothing alive behind.

"Almost nothing. There were only two, an old woman and a young, of our race we left. Maleco and Dexithea were their names. The Olympians favored them, as they were the first to erect statues to the gods. We walked away across the dead soil, without any word of farewell, regret, or blame. They stood and watched us depart as we walked into the sea.

"My people are stoic and dispassionate; they act without anger but kill without mercy. They do not regard life as a sacred thing, since it is merely a complex mechanism made of atoms in motion. But we do have duties, and one of the duties, the one my teacher placed within my long-term memory, was that the strong protect the weak. Otherwise, we would be destroyed by creatures stronger than we, our creators. Any living machinery we create, we also must encode this same thought-mechanism into them, so that the thought is passed though the generations like a virus.

"Another thought-chain Amelia found and stimulated in me is this: I remember a necklace I helped forge for someone named Harmonia. It was shaped like an amphisbaena, a two-headed snake, and the two mouths clasped ornaments of jasper and moonstone. Each gem, each molecule, even each atom, contained parts of the code of prior ages of the Earth, earlier evolutionary stages of the cosmos, reflected in miniature.

"Built into the scales and patterns of the necklace were energy-bundles related to earlier strata of evolution, including the primal atom-shapes adapted to the conditions of the early universe. The necklace was a history: but a cyclic history, for one head eats and consumes the other, without ending and without beginning.

"The cosmos undergoes periodic universal conflagrations, a concentration of matter that compresses, builds up heat, and destroys sun, moon, stars, void, earth, ocean- everything. This is the meaning of the jasper stone, which is ruddy. After the conflagration consumes all, the universe is empty again. This is the meaning of the moonstone, which is clear.

"The ashes consist of atoms falling in straight lines through the void. Some atoms contain a swerve or variation which causes them to collide. The collisions, happening with increasing frequency as immense time passes, sort the atoms (who are attracted and repelled from each other in different ways) into their various elements and molecules. Certain molecules are more complex, and form self-replicating chains of elements, and they make more like themselves out of the falling atoms. Complex enough self-replicating mechanisms seem to be self-aware, because the actions of internal mechanism, their nervous systems, retain shapes or impressions of previous events. I can show you the math if anyone is interested.

"As befits a mechanical cosmos, the early creatures were mechanisms of survival, like insects, without emotion. Those that had maladaptive survival behaviors did not survive and did not pass on the molecular programming of their behaviors to their next generation.

"I remember being taught that Saturn was one of us. But the swerve, the unexpected motion of certain of his brain atoms, broke his programming. He is a mutant. He used his cryptognosis to find a new method of controlling created life-mechanisms. He gave them illusions, passions, and emotions. He divorced their internal reality from strict empirical reality. They were no longer insects or living robots, but birds, mammals, man. Our form of life was superceded. There was war. We were driven into the void. Saturn invented false thoughts, lies, false hopes. This gave his creatures some extra incentives to survive that we did not possess."

Victor stood in the darkness, frowning at the fire. "Maybe he invented love. You can see why I am not so certain that our people are the good guys.

"We must have independent confirmation before we proceed. To be independent, we must be free of interference. To be free, we must gain strength. This time on the island is nothing but a brief respite between battles. A breather."

And I said, "A holiday."

He smiled at me, one of his rare smiles. "A holiday, if you like."

"Have a papaya chunk. I burned it just for you."

He came, and lay down beside me, where I was sitting cross-legged by the fire, and he put his head in my lap and ate the "marshmallow" out of my hands. "Ah, such a good cook you are, Amelia. You'll make someone a fine wife someday."

I cannot tell you how many times I replayed that scene in my mind, wondering if he meant what I think he meant.

If we fell into enemy hands again, they would take that memory from me, the firelight, Victor, his golden hair on my bare leg, his green eyes filled, for once, with warmth and humor. A man of duty, and a man of honor: a man without fear.

One night not long after that, while I was asleep, I saw Colin walking toward me in the moonlight.

He was dressed in black, and he wore a coronet, and his face was the face of a many-antlered stag and not that of a man. In that odd way that dreams have, it did not seem abnormal.

He drew a colored light out from his pouch. "My father gave me presents. Look what I found for you, Amelia. It was yours once, and I found it. A lost dream."

I never quite saw the thing in his hand. Perhaps it was like a wafer, and I ate it; or perhaps it was like a syrup, and I drank it; but most likely it was like a goblet of perfumed vapor, and I dipped my head to the rim of the cup and breathed the dream into me.

I saw Myriagon.

It was my home. I saw the thousand-sided towers reaching through the myriad dimensions, golden with the layers of time-energy, windows shining with reflected thought-progressions like many-faceted crystals. I saw the highways made of nine directions of contemplation and four modes of existence, reaching down-up past folds in space to the Uttermost Singularity, that mysterious source of all-ness, brighter than a sun, whose infinitely recurving rays shone from the gravity-spires and polished mind-forms and hypersphere domes of Myriagon, glittering on memory-images, or glancing trails of fire across the ten thousand layered sides of many-dimensional oceans held in tiny grails and falling teardrops.

The symphony fountains bubbled with fractal spaces and fractional dimensions, and strolling figures would pause, gemlike subuniverses in their hands, and draw the living waters into their vest-pocket dimensions, where each person kept spare bodies folded, useful laws of nature like colored webs of string. I saw grandees leaning on staffs made out of micro-time, to allow them to walk sideways across probabilities, and poets fingering instruments made of macro-time, to allow them to play the years, and send months and seasons like flowers over the heads of smiling demoiselles.

Between the towers were gardens made of folded origami shapes of virtue, crystallized forms of the morality energy, resplendent, wondrous, but much more glorious than the simple strands and webs of reciprocity I saw here.

I knew that the virtue gardens of my father were grander and wilder than those known elsewhere, for he had located that tiny spot of darkness Saturn made, and he saw the sorrowing of souls trapped in there, and he had vowed a great vow of compassion.

But none who walks into one of those virtue gardens returns unchanged, nor can the changes be known beforehand. The moral obligations affect and are affected by the observer.

In the dream, I emerged from my father's virtue garden, stern and frightened, and took a single step to activate a soul-path that hung to one side of me. The specialized cluster of hyperspatial bubbles wherein both my private chambers, and my childhood memories, dwelt were linked by this soul-path to a distant spot where a time-mirror hung. Its glass showed me images, not merely of linear future and past, but planes of probability, volumes of potential, hypervolumes of rationality. One image in the mirror of time shifted from being an alternative version of me to become my sister, the sweet Lampetia.

In the hands of Lampetia the Bright was a silver shepherd's crook, made of solidified time-energy taken from a logic tree. Her hair was disheveled, and her face was weary with tears shed for me.

Behind her was a field of thought, and behind the field, the outer spacer and earlier time-segments of Myriagon: In this darkness, the simpler and older creatures of Myriagon rose up, roaring and lamenting.

Lampetia said, "Despite our father's pleas, O Phaethusa, do not look into the dark world; do not go into the tiny cosmos of crooked Saturn."

"I must," I said, or seemed to say in the dream. "The awkward primordial beings whom we displaced as rulers here, the original inhabitants, recall Saturn's great crime, and know how many living beings he trapped within the linear collapse of entropy, when cosmos was created. Shall all their suffering be in vain?"

"Why you, beloved Phaethusa? Why not me? The theft of those spirits, loyal to the Bright One, which Saturn in mirth calls the cattle of the sun, was as much my fault as yours, for we both crept into the Garden of Virtue and saw the moral obligations leading from our perfections into the lapsed worlds of Saturn."

I said, "I am more suited to go. There in the distance is the ocean of moral obligations. Here are the positive and negative values of each monad-atom. You may check my calculations."

She said, "Sister, a world where time flows in one direction only is a world where sins cannot be undone before their commission, and effect cannot precede cause! It is a world of terror, where sorrow is absolute, and death comes to all. How can you hope to return to us?"

I said, "Even now, another version of me meets with Father in the shining hall of all-knowing, where the energy of omniscience has been compressed into the mirrored substances on which his twenty-dimensional throne-world sits. That version was, is, and always shall be recently returned from the horrid capture I must suffer, if those who suffer more than I are to be saved. From that point of view, all this has been accomplished; all the horror is a distant memory."

"From that point of view!" she exclaimed. "Have you forgotten that, from that point of view, you will be trapped, and all this glory be forgotten: From that frame of reference, years and centuries must pass, and you must crawl, one second per second from past to future. You cannot imagine what the dark world is like: No! You cannot limit your imagination enough to imagine the limits."

I reached out with my own crosier, which was of gold, and took a box of folded eternity from a shelf in my chambers to bring it into this scene, where it retroactively had always been. From within the box, I drew out a garment of time, ten thousand years woven into a shining dress, delicate as dew, bright as the rosy dawn.

"Here!" I said. "Ten subjective millennia I will interpose between 'now' and the point at which I must depart. Join me in my frame of reference, and to us it will seem a century of centuries before my captivity begins. Do not weep. How can any sorrow be here, in a world where infinity, morality, eternity, are known and understood, and the light of the Primal Singularity illumes the segmented spaces of Myriagon, and the Hours wait on the King our father as his handmaidens?"

She said, "One of those Hours is already selected as your escort whose soft hands will lead you down the funnel of moral-energy and across the event horizon of the Inner Dimensions. Saturn himself will have been overthrown by the time you pass within the plenum of the enemy!"

I saw her take thoughts from her inner nature, and I saw the way she manipulated space to create a fold, or lapse. She did it right in front of me. It was the basic geometry of how to use the fourth dimension to lapse the third.

In large enough volumes, such a thing could create a universe. She was doing on a small scale what Saturn had done on a vast, unparalleled scale. His universe was merely a lapse, a space-warp, a singularity surrounded by an event horizon. My father, all of us, we were the people who were older and above that singularity: the prelapsarians.

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

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

"What is it?"

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

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

Accomplish that."

I woke with tears in my eyes.

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

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

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

Work and Days

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

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

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

And so I dove.

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted Mars.

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

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

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

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

"What is it?" I finally asked him.

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

Get behind that lead shielding."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We can deform reality, can't we?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Leader?"

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

Something clear. Something plain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But my speed increased, and the friction dropped. I also noticed that the thickness of hyperspace fell off much more quickly than the air pressure dropped. The difference between an inverse-square and an inverse-cube law, I suppose.

Higher and higher. Vast, so vast, this wide world: at fifty-five thousand meters, eight hundred kilometers of ocean were in one glance beneath my feet. It might have been a floor of rippled bluish marble, only inches from my pointed toes. Below, the sea was dark purple, its color made bluish by the intervening masses of air. The horizon was curved, and seemed to have a glowing blue swath of light following its bow. And above! Above the sky was black, the freedom of unobstructed outer space. I could see the dim, un-twinkling lights of brighter stars, the colored points of planets.

Here, only my earthly eyes were useful. I could not pick up the internal natures of the distant worlds and suns, and their utility to me was nothing, so far out of reach; I could sense no controlling principles, no degrees of variation or freedom, no bonds of moral obligations.

Whatever dwelt among the stars had nothing to do with earthly concerns. I wonder if you will understand me if I said, staring at the indifference of the cold heavens, that I never felt less religious than in that moment, but staring at their majesty, the grandeur, I never felt more. Cruel Saturn's created world was worthy of awe.

Lapsing space was easier this far from the Earth. The friction of hyperspace had dropped nearly to nothing, so that I could put more of my fourth-dimensional limbs into the act, grab wider sections of the fabric of space, and bend them more pliantly.

The air was too thin, and I was ready to attempt speeds more immense than an atmosphere would permit. I was about to assume a shape something more like a dolphin made of light: It was a cross-section of mine I suspected might be spaceworthy. Vacuum and hard radiation form an environment more welcoming than hyperspace, and my body could adapt.

A bright light below my feet and to the left pulled at my attention. I rotated back to my earthly form, which has the best eyesight, and pulled in my extra energy-fans, so that I was little more than a girl in a brown jacket and goggles, in free fall, weightless. My scarf fluttered overhead.

I was seeing a glitter of the moral strands that tied me to some object below. In a moment, it became visible: a streamlined shape of golden metal, its blunt head reddish with friction, an aura of heat around it. With my upper senses, I could tell it was propelling itself upward by manipulating magnetic energy, powered by some sort of controlled hydrogen-fusion reaction taking place in the chest cavity. There was a trail of expelled metallic motes behind it: Where cosmic rays or other high-speed particles had disturbed the body on a cellular level, it had ejected the damaged tissue.

And I saw its inner nature: powerful, masculine, rational, slightly worried, slightly impatient.

Victor Triumph.

We matched velocities, and the golden humanoid shape directed a beam of radio-energy in my direction. Like all forms of communication, I can read the internal nature and intention of the message, even if I cannot pick up the radio blips in which it is coded.

"Amelia, this was gross negligence on your part. Your contrail is leaking exotic particles that don't exist in nature, some of them radioactive and highly visible. You may have given away our position. Come back down to Earth. We are going to have to sneak back to the island by a circuitous route. Vanity is going to have to arrange some sort of punishment."

I would have been more in a mood to be chastised by Leader Vanity if I hadn't reported to her just as she was posing nude for little Quentin. Quentin had dug up some white mud that, with Victor's help (and of course I noticed that no one can get anything done without Victor's help, the man who should really have been in charge this whole time) had been transmogrified via molecular engines into a serviceable fine clay. Quentin had no kiln other than a corner of concrete with some parts of a stone wall still standing, but he had Victor to come by and superheat his clay figurines into porcelain.

So there she was, kneeling with her hands up in her hair, elbows up and back arched, not exactly the pose of the Venus de Milo, and here was Quentin, wearing little more than shorts and a smock, all covered with clay, scraping with a sharpened wooden spoon at the five-foot-tall mass of white clay he had heaped up before him. To one side was a bucket of water in which a rolled-up shirt was soaking, an impromptu sponge.

There were other figurines sitting in the shade of a tarp along a section of broken wall, about a dozen, and all were small: a seagull, a mouse, a fish, a snake, all perfectly realistic and glazed white. The face and shoulders only just now emerging from the clay mass did look remarkably like Vanity. Professional-level work. It was a skill I never would have suspected in Quentin.

She saw me, and must have seen the dubious look on my face, for she stood and, with more dignity than I have seen her use before, excused Quentin. That's right; she told him to go and he just nodded his head, like a little bow, and went away without a word.

Now she wrapped herself in a white towel, and with her pinkish-red complexion, under the tropic daylight, even in the striped shade of the palms, she looked flushed and hot and too freckled. I suppose the equatorial clime did not agree with her. Certainly her look was disagreeable.

"Well, Miss Windrose?" she said, just as if she were a headmistress or something, not a girl younger and shorter than me wrapped in a towel.

"I was just doing as ordered, Leader."

"Breaking orders, you mean! Do you want to get us captured? Do you want to get us killed? No one goes off alone. That's the rule. All of you chaoticists have a weakness, a power you cannot stop. Suppose Echidn- I mean, suppose the fishmonger had just glanced up at you, just a glance, while you were flying off at Mach twenty-four! You would have just fallen to Earth and died! You weren't even wearing a parachute! Then your family, your kingdom, your creatures, whatever the heck they are, the fourth-dimensional people, attack the universe and destroy everything! Is that what you want?"

"Leader, don't be silly," I said sharply. "We don't even have a parachute. Besides, at that speed, the reentry heat would have killed me much quicker... Say, did I actually achieve Mach twenty-four?" That was below escape velocity, but it was above orbital velocity, at least for some altitudes.

"Victor measured it and yes it was fast and don't change the subject. What's your excuse?"

"Do I need an excuse, Vanity?" I said back. Well, maybe I raised my voice a little. It was hot here, and I wasn't wearing a nice cool towel, but a heavy leather jacket, jodhpurs, gloves, scarf, and leather cap. "Do I need an excuse? You've been pushing me to try out my powers, to experiment, and now you're barking mad because I did what you said! You're snapping at me because I might have attracted spies, but did you say anything to Victor when he blew a hole in an undersea mountain with a death ray? You give one order and then directly contradict it, and you make these stupid work schedules, except Quentin never seems to have work to do: When is the last time he chopped down a tree?"

"Mr. Nemo," she said in a voice so icy that it hardly sounded like Vanity, "has successfully discovered how to emerge from his body and assume an insubstantial form. This could prove to be quite useful to our little company. Last night, he entered the body of the fish he made from clay, and animated it, and he swam quite naturally and freely in the sea. He has discovered the secret of how his people, the Fallen, make new shapes for themselves. In the meanwhile, you have discovered how to moon around after Victor and take leisurely swims in your bathing suit."

"At least I wear a bathing suit," I said with a snort. Okay, maybe I rolled my eyes a bit.

"That comment was quite a bit out of line, Miss Windrose, and you will apologize for it immediately." I swear she sounded just like Boggin when she said that. No emotion at all. Not

"you shall apologize," like a demand, but "you will," like a predicted certainty.

No, not like Boggin. Like Nausicaa, a princess from a Bronze Age Greek culture of supernatural beings.

If I had been leader, and she'd caught me nude, I would have tried to make a joke out of it. I would have handled it better. I would have...

But I was not leader. Right or wrong, I had to support the group. So I apologized. "Sorry, Leader.

Please forgive me, Leader."

"Apology accepted," she said curtly. "Let us say no more about it."

"How did you get to be leader, anyhow?" I burst out. That kind of surprised me. If you had asked, I would not have said I felt any resentment. But no eyeball can see its own interior; no mind can know its own buried thoughts.