John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I decided to make for the Eastern corridor. Anything else required walking or crawling around 180 degrees of the balcony, in plain view (now that the chandelier light shone full upon it) of anyone below who happened to look up.

So down the corridor I went, softly, still half-benumbed by the music. There were tall doors to my left and right, offices of the School Administration, I supposed, or perhaps the living quarters of the Talbot family, should they ever return to their estate.

I took the stairs two at a time, for now the music had segued into a foxtrot or jig of some sort, and many feet were galloping on the floor, and I could not keep still, hearing it.

I was at the second landing, where the stairs switchbacked, before I heard, over the noise which was masking my descent, the sound of several feet ascending the stair I was about to step around the corner onto.

I was on the second floor. It was quicker to open the door and slip through it than it was to run back up the stairs.

I slipped into the darkened room, pushed the door shut (quickly but softly), and stood with my hand on the door, listening, trying to control my breathing.

From the voice I knew it was Pherespondus the Satyr, and the red-furred fox.

“…I am only saying, Vulpino, that Nemestrinus of Arcadian Wood has a natural harmony of interests with Anacreon.”

“Some call the Lord Vintner a traitor god.”

“Certainly, a traitor. And yet I wonder what strong reason impelled him to that treachery? He was the first to traffick with the Fallen Uranians. What could they have told him? They are as old as Cosmos, and know the secrets of its construction.”

“You think the young Uranians will offer victory to whichever side ends up in control of them. Why? Are you saying Morpheus in Cimmeria… or Helios from Myriagon… will assist our…?” Mutter mutter. I could not hear the end of the question. The fox had a soft voice.

“Boreas is ambitious… sell out to whomever…” Murmur murmur. The voices trailed off.

With the door shut, and the music muffled, my head felt slightly clearer. With my eyes closed, I thought I could tell what the music was doing: it seemed to be flattening or normalizing time-space in the local area. By some intuition, I now knew what part of myself was suffering pins-and-needles like a limb with its circulation impaired. This part of me did not have a name, but it was the part I used to deflect normal straight-line gravity paths and lift massive objects that boys stronger than me could not lift.

Now I was more afraid of the music than I was of being seen, and I did not want to open the door.

I turned my head. There was a little moonlight leaking in through the windows here, made bright by reflections from the snow below. This was a corner room, and there were windows looking East and South. There was a desk, a bookshelf, and a squat metal cabinet to one side. There was no other door out.

I went over to the South window. I had been thinking that the second floor might be low enough to jump down from, if I hung from my hands before dropping. One look out the window banished that notion. The first floor of the building was double normal height. But I could see the corner of the portico leading to the main doors. A sloping roof, wide pillars… too wide to shimmy down? Maybe not.

But there were wires running from the window frame to the panes. An alarm system. Victor, who knew all about such things, was not here. For once in my life, I actually felt like the helpless female Quentin had been pretending I was. I didn’t know what to do when I saw those wires, except wish wistfully that Victor were here.

Maybe the other window was unalarmed?

I walked around the desk to step to the East window when the walking stick… moved… in my hand.

I froze. Something had twisted the jackal-headed cane in my grip, so now the muzzle was pointed toward the cabinet.

Magic? Maybe.

I stepped over to the cabinet. They were a heavy steel construction, not at all in keeping with the rather tasteful wooden décor of the room. The doors did not open. They did not even budge when I tugged on them. There were two locks and a keypad, and the locks were on opposite sides of the main panel, making it almost impossible for one person to turn both locks at once. The whole affair was bolted to the floor in eight places. It looked like the kind of safe in which you put documents you want to be left intact after a Russian missile attack. The safe looked so massive… too massive…

There was a noise coming from inside, which I could dimly hear, or feel, when my hand was on the cabinet. It sounded like the chiming whine of a wineglass, which rings because a violin note of the proper harmonic resonance is played too nearby.

Something inside the cabinet was reacting to the music in the hall.

The numb part of me stirred and trembled, when I put my right hand on the top of the case, and heard that ringing crystal chime. If the music had not been dimly echoing into the room from beyond, I might have been able to sense what that inner part of me was trying to tell me.

And then, the violin music wound into a sultry crescendo. Silence fell. I heard a scattering of applause. Calls: “Bravo!” And a pause. The musicians had finished their first song of the evening.

Silence.

I wiped my palm on my pants leg and put it back atop the cabinet. Something… massive… was inside the cabinet…

…something whose mass was greater than its volume and density could account for…

I could see it in my mind’s eye, almost as if I were looking past the walls of the case. Past, not through. If a three-dimensional man saw a safe built by Mr. A Square of Flatland, it would look like a rectangle to him. No matter how thick the lines in the plane were drawn, nothing could prevent the three-dimensional man from merely looking… over … the boundary…

But this was not… over… I was looking… another direction…

I saw it. There were other objects in the case. They were flat, merely three-dimensional: a book, a phial of liquid, a playing card, a necklace.

The final object was a sphere, a globe of gold-white crystal. It was round in all directions, all dimensions.

A normal sphere had a volume described by four-thirds of the cube of its radius times pi. The surface area was the same as a sphere—I could see that—but the volume… the hypervolume… was half its radius to the fourth power, multiplied by a square of pi.

I began to reach out my hand in the direction that I had never been able to see before. I cannot tell you what direction it was.

My hand grew glittery with light, turned reddish, and seemed to shrink…

With a triumphant glissando of notes, the music started up again. The dream, or delusion, or whatever it was, ended. I suddenly could not imagine what I was doing, could not picture in my mind the direction I could not see. I could not visualize or understand how a sphere could be anything but a sphere. And I could not imagine seeing through solid walls…

The walls of the cabinet snapped shut on my hand. I felt a pressure on my wrist, but my eyes would not focus. It looked like the stump of my hand ended in a red haze, flat against the surface of the cabinet.

I squinted, trying to correct my vision. What was I seeing? I could feel the curved surface of the sphere… full, not flat… just beyond my fingertips, my hand… Almost touching…

I yanked my hand back with hysterical fury, afraid that it had been severed.

No; there it was, not a stump. My beautiful hand.

Little reddish dots and little blue dots floated toward and away from my hand for a moment, and my hand felt far heavier than it had been. But then the dots were gone, or they had never been there… or… they had moved off in two different directions. Directions I could no longer point to, or imagine, even though, just a moment ago, I had been able to.