John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

My hand was normal weight again.

Have you ever wondered whether you were insane? It is not a pleasant notion.

Standing there in the dark, I made a resolution to myself, that I was not. No matter what I saw or thought I saw, there was a rational explanation for it.

I may never know the explanation, but I could know that it existed without knowing its content. Algebra can manipulate numbers without knowing their values; I could do the same for my knowledge.

So I vowed to myself I was not insane. And, despite my agnosticism, I prayed to the Archangel Gabriel to tell his boss, whoever He might be, to make my vow not one vowed in vain.

If I were not insane, what was the next logical step to take?

I put my hand on the case. The sphere inside was still humming or ringing as the music flattened the space it attempted to occupy. I got into a sprinter’s stance and faced the Eastern window. And then I waited for the next break in the music.

Miss Daw would have to take a breather at some point, or the headless man would be called on to play a solo…

The foxtrot ended. The applause was more than the few people in the ballroom could account for. Maybe the men in the blue business suits were clapping with all their clouds of hands.

This time, I could clearly see the sphere, extending “above” and “below” the hyperplane of three-dimensional space in smooth hemispheres. It was still ringing with the echo of the shock the music had delivered to it; the sound was somehow something like light, and it allowed me to see the direction I had not been able to see before.

The shock waves the hypersphere gave off were only “sound” along one surface (hypersurface?) of the concentrically expanding ripples of pressure. There were other surfaces, five more of them, all at right angles to each other, producing other types of vibration aside from the pressure waves created by the music: the first axis gave off energy of a type that made the internal nature of objects clear to the reason, the way light makes the surface of objects clear to the eye; the second shed an energy that made clear to the will what objects were useful or useless; the third showed the conscience what moral obligations one was under; the fourth showed the understanding the degree of causality or indeterminateness an object enjoyed, as if measuring the number of future paths or probabilities each event shed. And there was one other form of energy or beingness I could not account for, shining from the fifth and final axis. But something (could it have been that final energy form?) made all of what I was seeing so clear and familiar to me, it was as if information and understanding was being poured into my memory, as if it had always been there.

Somehow, in the fourth dimension, concepts that to humans were merely abstractions, dim shadows human reason could only guess at, were vivid and solid.

By the shine of that light, by the echo of that ringing, I could see how to move past and beyond the window without moving through it. I could see how the surface of time-space was curving toward me, based on the gravity distortions from the Earth’s mass. All I needed to do was do to myself what I had done to the heavy door earlier this evening. Now that I could actually “see” the fan of world-paths spread out in shining lines from me and detect, with another new sense impression, the ponderous curve of space-time where the Earth’s mass was distorting it, it was child’s play to divert the forces so that I would fall more slowly, with less kinetic energy. A thirty-foot drop was nothing. I could practically step there…

I jumped. The world turned blue, and seemed to swell and fade in my vision. The walls and the window and the ground outside turned into gigantic things, huge, like walls of mist and cloud.

Something… a trio of somethings… was behind me. First seemed like a wheel: beautiful, pale, intricate, surrounded by many lesser wheels, with eyes and darts of fire radiating from each spoke, circle within epicycle, delicate and baroque. The second and the third were both roughly cone shaped, clusters of ugly knots and, along the outer surfaces of the knots, clusters and hands and fingers reached out in each direction.

I had miscalculated. The distances from the cabinet to the window to the ground were not the same in four dimensions as they had been in three.

And the light from the sphere fell off much more sharply than I expected. The hyperlight was dim a meter from the cabinet; it was sixteen times more dim at two meters; eighty-one times more dim at three. It was practically pitch black when I passed “over” the space occupied by the window, and I could no longer “see” the direction I was supposed to go.

The space-time occupied by Earth was like a plane spread before me, less than an inch “below” me. But when the sphere light was gone, I lost sight of it.

The universe was an inch or two away. I could not see it.

Nothing I can say can convey the horror. If I had been an astronaut on a space walk with a severed umbilical hose, countless light-years outside the galaxy, outside the local cluster of galaxies, I still would have been closer to home than I was at that moment. Because I still would have been in the same dimension.

The thing behind me, the pale wheel surrounded by lesser wheels, dipped one curving diameter into the plane I could not see, and rotated it. The wheels were made of what, in three dimensions, were sounds to be heard sequentially, linearly, in time.

We call it a song. But it is not. In this place, each composition was one simultaneous thing, eternal and unchanging, every part and every note existing in geometric relation to one perfect and harmonious whole.

I called the tiny crystalline echo ringing from the sphere in the cabinet a shock wave. It was not. It was a small sound, really.

This was not small. This was gigantic. This was larger than worlds.

With a force like a hundred earthquakes, like a storm front of unguessed power, an explosion filled hyperspace, blinding me, numbing my whole body. It was like being mashed in a trash compactor.

And then…

I struck the snow with considerable force. My body was shaking with the shock of ice-cold that ran through me.

There was a haze of red and blue particles around me for a moment. I tried to get to my hands and knees, and was poleaxed by a blinding pain.

I vomited. Snow, a slurry of snowflakes, gushed from my mouth. How had snow gotten in my stomach?

I had the horrible, horrible image of a two-dimensional person being forced into the same flat plane as a two-dimensional patch of snow. His skin would just be a line; all his internal organs would be occupying the same place as the snow. Was snow in my veins, in my abdomen, my lungs? Inside my eyes and skull? In every cell?

Another moment of pain: my whole skin turned red. For a moment, I gave off a shaking shock wave similar to what the hypersphere had done; but something was carried with it. A cascade of shimmering red sparks of not-light flung snow in every direction around me, several pounds of it.

Then, it was over.

I blinked and looked around. There was an imprint around me in the snow. It looked more like an elongated snow angel than anything I can name. Whatever body had made this was long and streamlined, with wings and lines radiating from it. There were no footprints leading up to the imprint.

I was outside the Great Hall, about twenty yards from the front doors. The windows behind me were lit. I could see the rest of the campus, quiet in the moonlight.

Dimly, I could hear the faint, beautiful strains of Miss Daw’s violin, playing a waltz by Strauss.