John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

We had dessert before, during, and after the meal. Colin had discovered where the dessert pantry was—that famous pantry we had never been able to find as kids. It was locked, but Victor ran his hand over the jamb, and the lock clicked open of its own accord.

They had gathered all sorts of treats, meatballs, and cheeses, and little snacks in folds of sugar-fried bread. There was tray after silver tray of it, all gathered for some after-the-meeting reception, which, because Venus had shut down the meeting, the Visitors and Governors never got to. There were éclairs and pastries and a cake of seven layers. The things I remember best were these cupcakes made of chocolate foam, topped with froth of a different kind of chocolate, where the cups were not paper, but yet a third kind of chocolate, hard and crunchy, yet melting like a snowflake on the tongue. I had never seen anything like it before. Edible dishes! Like something out of a Roald Dahl book!

And there was a bottle of champagne.

Things became quite merry after that. Part of the reason why the boys were merry, I am sure, was seeing Vanity and me in our absurd impromptu maid outfits, waiting on them. Part of the reason was that we were lightheaded from sipping champagne.

But we were drunk on information. I had unearthed a treasure trove of secrets, secrets which had been kept from us our whole lives.

And I was merry because I was the center of attention during the first half of the meal. I talked and talked and not even Colin interrupted me. Quentin had found Cook’s account books and was writing notes on what I was saying on the back of pink receipt slips.

What a funny feeling. No one had ever thought what I had to say was important enough to write down before.

Then came questions.

Colin asked: “Her name is Nausicaa or Nausea or something. Your dream called you Phaethusa. Did you find out my name? You didn’t, did you?” And he threw an olive at me, using his fork as a catapult.

Quentin asked: “Those creatures were Hecatonchire, weren’t they? The hundred-handed giants from Greek myth. They looked like humans, I am supposing, because something in the human world makes them. But they said the table gave them the ability to use their powers nonetheless. Notice this is the same table mentioned in Amelia’s dream.”

Victor asked: “Why did you fail to mention that the staff here thinks we will get sick and die if we get too far from the boundaries of the estate? That might be a good thing to test before we make our escape.”

Vanity asked: “Why did you keep slapping Quentin? It’s not like he wanted to kiss you!”

Colin asked: “Why was Mavors or Mars or whatever his name is carrying both a spear and a pistol? What the hell is the point of that? Are they magic items? Are there different laws of nature in different worlds?”

Quentin asked: “You said that when you were in the Fourth Dimension, you saw behind you both a wheel surrounded by a lesser wheel, and two cone-shaped things. What were those things—?”

Victor said, “I don’t understand this whole idea that they are mythical gods and goddesses. I mean, how is it supposed to happen? Homer sits down to write the Iliad , and some real god becomes immediately aware of it, and sends telepathic particles into the poet’s brain to make him write down what the facts are? If so, why didn’t these gods just publish newspapers? Of course, I am making the assumption that there was a man named Homer, and he did write a book called the Iliad . They might have made up that whole poem, just before they opened the school, just to teach us. Greek could be a made-up language, which they forced us to study just to annoy us.”

Vanity said, “Who eventually fell in love? At the ball?”

Colin: “And what the hell was Boggin actually trying to accomplish?”

Quentin: “The man whose head was off was Orpheus. Was there anyone else at the table who talked as if they were in his group? The Unseen One he is representing is Hades, the god of the Underworld. The Psychopomp is the guide and guardian of souls to the Land of the Dead. Hermes is supposed to be in that position.”

Victor: “Are we members of the same race? Were we adults before they made us into the shape of children? You know we must all be shape-changers, don’t you? Why else would they measure us every night?”

There was one question in that mess I could answer: “It must have been the Hecatonchire. The cone-shaped things I saw behind me. I was looking through the wall at that point, and looking at the people around the table.

“You said it yourself, Colin, that they are giants in their own world. Why a cone? Imagine you saw a boy growing up into a man, but that you could see through time as a dimension. His three-dimensional cross sections would continually increase in the direction of future, continually decrease in the direction of past. A cone. Except in this case, I do not think the directions are past-future. I am calling them ‘red’ and ‘blue’ as one seems to Doppler shift light to higher energy states, and one to lower.”

Vanity asked, “What did you look like?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “In the fourth dimension. I keep trying to picture it, but all I can picture is that you would see yourself as a flat person. Her skin is a line rather than a surface. Her internal organs are flat, like an ameba’s. She only has one eye. Uck. Yuck. Just trying to picture it is gross.”

“No, you’re wrong,” said Colin, pulling up one of his eyelids. “It would only be half an eye .”

“Ugh! Ugh!” said Vanity, entirely discomforted.

Quentin said, “It is a bit unnerving. If you, Amelia, are like Vanity’s flat person in a plane, let’s say something like this floor, then by rotating in the third dimension—a dimension of which creatures living in the floor would have no conception—they would see you turn into a line. So what would happen in three dimensions? Would you become flat, like a picture?”

“No,” I said. “You’d see a cross-section. The man from flat-land, if tilted, would have only two points of his skin surface intersecting the world-plane. By analogy, three-D folk would see a tilted four-D person as a hoop of flesh surrounding a flat section of blood and internal…”

“Oh, please!” said Vanity. “Pul-ease, can’t we talk about something else while we are eating!”

I said to her, “But I don’t think I’m flat. I mean, I don’t think I do not have other three-dimensional surfaces embracing my volume. My hypervolume. What I saw of myself, I seemed to have streamlined-looking wings or fans reaching off in other directions. And branches, or lines of energy—bright things, made of sound, or thought, or music. Or something. I think what we call matter and energy are merely two different rotations of the same hyperparticle. I had other senses, too.”

Colin said, “So you looked like a squid with wings, and you actually have a cluster of eyeballs and dripping ears on the end of stalks hidden in n-space where we cannot see them. I will still think you are lovely, Amelia.”

Victor said, “You could poke your finger into someone’s brain without touching his skull.”

Vanity said, “Ugh! You people are as gross as toads! Can’t we change the topic?!”

Colin said, “Yeah, but we are only toads that have been run over by a car, and flattened. Amelia is a real fat 4-D toad. We can’t see what she really looks like because we flat folk only have… half an eye! ”

“Ugh! Uck! Make him stop!”

Quentin said, “One last question, then we can ask more about the pagan gods. Amelia, what was the sense of weight you said you saw coming from the safe?”