John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

Colin guffawed. “Sort of like picking out a new hat…? I do not like stars and planets; they are so very out of fashion this season! I want the lights in the sky to be little lamps carried by elves! All in favor say ‘aye’! Come on.”

Vanity looked outraged. “But you are the one who just said life is an illusion!”

“Yeah, but I said life actually, really, is an illusion, and that’s a fact. I have proof! Would Victor be able to wish a lock on a door open, if all this were real?”

Quentin said, “I hate to gang up with Colin against you, Vanity, but you are being a bit of a solipsist. Let me take an example. Suppose you climb a hill or go into a valley no one has ever seen before. The moment your eyes light on it, do trees appear?”

She shrugged, saying, “Who knows? Why assume trees you never saw before were there before you saw them? You can make any assumption you want. That’s what assumptions are. You fill them into the blank spots in your knowledge.”

Quentin smiled, saying, “Who or what decides how many leaves each branch of each tree has, or how many veins on each leaf?”

Vanity waved her hands at him. “Now you are being silly. Nobody sees every leaf in the forest at once.”

Quentin said, “Do you pick a number in your head before you look?”

Victor said, “The forests children see would have fewer leaves than the ones seen by, for example, professional astronomers, who can think in scientific notation. Hottentots could not see more than ‘three’ because they don’t have a word for any number higher than that.”

Vanity said, “You are both being ridiculous! We see dreams, don’t we? But we do not sit down with typewriters and write out a script before we fall asleep. We just see them. They must come from somewhere. For all we know, the number of leaves on a tree could just be the same way. It comes from somewhere. Maybe from the same place as dreams. I mean, nothing comes from nowhere for no reason, right?”

Victor said, “I move we shelve the discussion of the nature of reality until after we decide what to do with what we’ve learned. Right now, they don’t know we know. With Dr. Fell blanking out Quentin’s memory, they think they’ve covered their tracks. There are at least two factions, maybe five. Mavors, Mulciber, Trismegistus we know; they spoke about Pelagaeus and the Unseen One at the meeting. The Satyr was representing the Vine God…”

“Dionysus,” said Quentin, “And Pelagaeus is Poseidon.”

“…who may be in the same camp with Hermes, according to what Amelia overheard. Now then, they all think we can give victory to whatever side we help, and they are afraid to kill us because the threat to our lives as hostages is all that is holding back Chaos. For the moment, Cyprian has to talk to Mulciber to get his agreement to the plan to have us moved to the Unseen One’s control. Or, they might instead just decide to take Vanity and give her to the Atlantians. Does that sum up the facts?”

Colin said, “Suppose Hermes is on the level. He got in trouble—you said—for making a deal with our folks, the Urine People.”

“Uranians,” said Quentin. “Sons of Uranus. Titans.”

“Whatever. How do we contact him, if he’s the one we decide to go for?” said Colin.

I said, “He must have thought it obvious, so he didn’t say.”

Victor said, “Taffy ap Cymru. Also a shape-changer, by the way. Works for him. Hermes knows you know that. He gave us Taffy. As a gift. Don’t any of you see it? If Taffy doesn’t do what we ask, we turn him over to Boggin.”

Quentin said, “Boggin would have power over him. That is how one acquires authority over the soul of another. Get a man to break his word to you. Or break a law.”

Colin muttered, “Have them put their boots on the table.”

Quentin said, “Immorality is weakness. Virtue is strength. You can’t hex an honest man. That’s what Boggin wanted, Amelia. Permission to hex you.” Quentin looked around the circle. “Did anyone else promise him anything, when he talked to you?”

Victor said, “I asked him to define his terms. I said that if I were a child, he could not make a contract with me in the eyes of the law, and that if I were not a child, he could not keep me imprisoned here. I asked him which it was.”

Colin said, “I pretended that I had forgotten how to talk, except to say ‘Go on.’ Whenever he asked me a direct question, I said ‘Go on.’ I timed it, to see how long he could go on with me not saying anything. Forty minutes, ten seconds.”

Vanity said, “He didn’t talk to me.”

I said, “The people at the meeting seemed to imply that the Phaeacians can somehow open or shut the boundaries between reality.”

Colin said, “Meaning what?”

“When the boundaries are open, our various powers work. When they are shut, we’re just kids.”

Colin said, “How did you come by that notion, Bright Eyes?”

“Several things they said. Also, just seeing a sphere from my homeland enabled me to travel through other dimensions and walk through walls. I wonder if the other objects in that safe are similar reminders. Keys. To turn us on. They always meant to use us, right? The only question holding them back is not whether to use us, but who gets to use us, right? If reminders of our homes can do that to us, what happens when we find the boundaries between this dimension and our various homes? There are four boundaries to the estate, and four of us. Four Uranians, I mean. Vanity, or Nausicaa, rather, is from Phaeacia.”

“Very interesting,” said Colin. “But could you give me some milk?”

“The carton’s right by you.”

“No, no,” he said, putting his glass right under my breasts, “I meant, could you give me some…”

Vanity gave a little shriek and leapt to her feet.

Colin said, “What? What? It wasn’t that funny!”

“I’m Nausicaa! I’m that Nausicaa. The girl from Phaeacia who discovers Odysseus washed up half-dead on the shore! Don’t you see…?”

We looked at each other.

“I actually did those things. I had a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and maybe even a dog and a palace and everything. I had favorite foods. I had people I had fights with. A faith. Things I thought. Things I wanted to do. Maybe artistic talents or a lover or… They’ve taken it all away. All I remember is this place. They’ve killed me.”

And she started crying in earnest. Quentin went to put his arms around her, and said, “Shush, shush…”

Victor stood up. “I move we put memory restoration at the top of the agenda. We all add to our running-away caches, and we all steal money when we can, except you, Quentin. I don’t think we need to flee just yet; they don’t know we’re on to them, and I also want a crack at that safe Amelia saw. As for the memory thing, let’s try the thing in Amelia’s dream. Let’s do that right now.”

“But we need the table,” I said. “The great green table in the Great Hall.”

Victor smiled. “There is also a table made of a similar green marble in the waiting room in front of Boggin’s office. Is it the same? Let’s go upstairs and find out.”

Victor and Colin stayed behind in the kitchen to loot it systematically. Victor wanted a certain amount of imperishable foods, lightweight canned goods, and other things like knives, all packed away and hidden before the escape attempt. The outside weather was cold, so even perishable food would keep for a while, hidden in the woods or the Barrows.

When Vanity and I were finally released from doting duty, she had to cut me out of my apron strings with a paring knife. I looked in wonder at the knot Colin had made. It seemed to have no beginning and no end, and have no place for slack to form: a topological impossibility. Perhaps he had done magic to it, “put energy into it,” as he would say. I stuck it in my skirt pocket for later study.