John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

In the dream, the water, which had been black and rolling, webbed with white foam and spray, suddenly grew clear as crystal. A figure that was so large as to make our ship seem the size of a lifeboat was gliding beneath the waves, parallel to our course. The figure had his hands back along his sides and his head down; he did not kick his feet. Instead, the water streamed past him, like wind streaming past a man falling effortlessly through the air.

“ Tell him to quell the storm,” said the voice of the doctor in my ear.

The figure turned its head and regarded us both. Its eyes were lamps, eerie with a greenish light, and it had a third eye, made of metal, embedded in its forehead.

Instead of being terrified that I was going to be pitched overboard or stabbed, I was overcome with a painful embarrassment to realize that the gigantic figure was utterly nude and that, as he kept turning, I would soon see a penis larger than the member of an elephant, rippling through the water like a periscope. What made it more embarrassing was that the figure had Victor’s features.

The third eye, the metal one, seemed to be the only one with a soul in it. In the senseless way things are known in dreams, I knew that the mere fact that it could see me with this eye meant he could speak to me, despite all the water between us, and the noise and wrack of the storm. “ I am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preconsciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you…”

“ Tell him to make the clouds move.”

“What?”

“I said, I hope the clouds move. We need to get a clear reading when the moon reaches zenith.”

I was awake again, with Victor, on the cold hillside. A knotted texture of charcoal-black and gleaming silver hung like a ship out of fairyland high above us. The cloud covered the moon, and limned the edges with swirls of argent.

Victor was still standing.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Two hours, fourteen minutes.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Then I said, “Why are you doing this? We could get caught. It’s not as if Michelson and Morley hadn’t done this experiment one hundred years ago.”

He said, “One hundred eight. They’ve been saying untrue things to us. The teachers. The readings we got from the interferometer in lab class had been meddled with. When I did the experiment under controlled conditions, I got results consistent with the theory that light is conveyed via luminiferous aether.”

I sat up. “Are you saying there’s no Einsteinian relativity? But there have been other experiments. The procession of the axis of Mercury. Cesium clocks in a fast-flying airplane. Light was seen to bend around the sun during an eclipse.”

“We have only hearsay for that.”

I was astonished. The sheer magnitude of his skepticism was beyond words. It was like an elephant I had seen once during a rare field trip to Swansea Zoo. As soon as you think you understand how big it is, you look again, and it is bigger.

He said, “Picture this. According to relativity, objects compress in the direction of motion, right? And yet it also says that the same objects and events appear from each other’s ‘frames of reference’ to be symmetrical, right?”

“Right.”

“Take a cup with a tight-fitting lid. The cup and lid fit together, correct? Now move the lid and cup away at right angles, the lid horizontally, the cup vertically. Got the picture?”

“Got it.”

“What happened when you bring the lid and cup back together at near light speed?”

“Um… I am sure you are about to tell me…”

“From the point of view of the lid, the cup is compressed in its direction of motion, horizontally. The cup is shorter, but still a cylinder. The lid, to itself, suffers no distortion, of course. When the two meet, the lid will fit on the cup. But from the point of view of the cup, the lid is foreshortened in its direction of motion, vertically. Which means the lid is now an oval. The cup still appears round to itself. When the two meet, the lid cannot fit on the cup. The same event has two different results from two different points of view.”

I looked at him sidelong, wondering if he were kidding. For the first time, I wondered whether other people have more trouble visually picturing things in their imagination than I did. I mean, it is not as if I could look into their heads to see.

I opened my mouth to say that both observers would see the motion vector as a diagonal, but then I closed it again. I did not like arguing with Victor.

“What in particular happened?” I said.

For a moment I thought he was going to ask me what I meant, but then he said, “You know Mrs. Lilac from the village, whom Mrs. Wren uses to carry burdens and packages when she has done too much shopping?”

“Sort of the way you do me,” I said archly. I had carried the equipment up the slope from the hedges behind the lab shed.

“I don’t see the analogy.”

“Go on with your story.”

“Mrs. Lilac passed me in the hall. She said her daughter Lily was going to graduate from upper school soon and, seeing as how I had helped Lily learn her letters when she was in grammar school, would I care to attend the graduation ceremony? You know who Lily is, don’t you?”

“Yes. I know who she is,” I said shortly.

I was thinking that Victor had been to see Lily Lilac on every occasion that the Headmaster would allow. She was fair haired and fine boned, with a breezy, insincere manner I found exasperating.

Her father owned the fish cannery, and was counted as being one of the more influential people, among the working class, in town. Lily owned her own outboard motor, and she went boating on every possible occasion.

From time to time I had seen Victor watching Lily Lilac from the sea cliff. He would stand among the rocks with a telescope, and watch her fly by, her boat bouncing along the waters of the bay, her blond hair bouncing in the wind. She was always with a different boy each time. She seemed to be able to do what she liked, and go where she liked, when she liked. I do not recall hating any other living being so fiercely.

“I know her,” I said with a sniff. “So you’ve been invited to a graduation. I doubt Headmaster will allow you off the grounds.” I remember I was being fiercely loyal to Headmaster Boggin in those days, and thought he could do no wrong.

Victor favored me with another one of his withering glances.

“What?” I said. “What?”

“Logic. How young do you think a person has to be to not know her letters and numbers? And I must have been old enough to know mine. Let’s assume I was unduly precocious, and she was unduly slow.”

“Yes, let’s do,” I said, perhaps with a note of venom in my voice.

“I could have been what, three? Have you ever heard a child know his letters at two? How late could she live and not know her letters? Let’s say five. She would be nineteen when she graduated. If she skipped a grade, eighteen. That makes me how old now?”

“Fifteen.”

“But suppose the numbers were reversed. What if I had been around five when I taught a two- or three-year-old? How old does that make me?”

I said, “If you were twenty-and-one, you’d be an adult. They would have let you out of here. They’d have let you out three years ago.”

“Would they have?”

“Why would they keep you?”

“Perhaps they get money from the trust for my upkeep. Who knows?”

“But how could they tell such a lie, and not get caught?”

“Who is to catch them? The townspeople are afraid of the Headmaster.”

The idea that anyone could be “afraid” of the kindly old headmaster, with his gentle smile and mild humor, was beyond belief. Had it been anyone other than Victor, I would have laughed aloud.