John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

He said, “Glum is somewhere that way. I can see his emission trail. Can you make it past him?”

I twisted my hips into the fourth dimension to bring another aspect of my legs into this continuum. Centaurish, I now looked like a sleek silver doe from the waist down. I shifted the aspect of my back, so that my wings, made of white light and surrounded by little echoes of music, dipped into this dimensional plane, also. A cluster of misty fireflies and silver bubbles appeared in the air around my head, like a halo, when I “opened” my higher sense-impressions. I could feel my flesh growing denser and hard, hard enough to stop a bullet, as more mass was pulled into this cross-section. This increase in mass-energy made a bluish light shimmer from my flesh.

I reared up on my hind hooves and lashed my unicorn tail. “He’ll have to be pretty quick to stop me!” I said in a voice like a silver bell.

I spread the possible paths down to the beach in front of me like a fan, selected the briefest one, and charged down the slope, with little sparks of energy from higher dimensions flickering and shining around my deer hooves.

With my manifold senses, posted many fathoms in each direction on the shifting foam of curved space, I could now see, not merely in 360 degrees, but globally, overhead, underfoot, in all directions. Surfaces did not impede my sight.

Other senses came into play. I could sense the internal nature and utility of objects; I could see the flow and ripple of time and probability; sense nervous system energies and distortions; I could see moral order (and disorder) like webs (and snarls) interconnecting all the free-willed beings in the area.

Strands went up to two places above the clouds. From the interrelationship of moral duties between the two points, I knew they were brothers. One I did not recognize; the other had an internal nature that was jolly, cold-hearted, kindly, sinister, and calculating. Boggin. The other point must be his brother, Corus, the blue-winged man.

Elsewhere, I could see another strand of moral order reaching to a point beneath the sea, and saw the world-paths caused by the rapid approach of the Atlantean, Mestor.

I focused a distance-negating sense on him, and saw. He had his arms back in a swan dive, legs pointed, and was simply being propelled forward through the deep, his black hair streaming.

The propulsion was a space-effect. The scales on the armor amplified it. I could sense the aura of a similar effect around the white ship, and also deep in the cells of Vanity’s body. The Phaeacian power?

Mestor reached out into time and… did… something.

In the time-images I saw around Vanity, I saw first one, then nine, then eighty-one, and then all of the images changed, as one probability suddenly shifted to a certainty.

One image, a certain one, remained: Mestor, all shimmering with sea spray, was about to rise up out of the waves, his blue-and-green-and-white scale jacket ringing, and grab Vanity. One hand would go over her mouth and nose, another around her waist, and he would fall back into the ice-cold ocean, dragging her along. He would wrap his cloak of mermaid hair around her, so that the cold would not kill her, and he would pinch her nose and breathe bubbles into her mouth, while she struggled in panic…

I charged down the slope toward Vanity, gathering my legs beneath me to carry me “past” the volume of space occupied by Mr. Glum. He had seen me now, and he stood up on his legs and spread his arms, as if ready to catch me.

It looked so foolish. As if a flat cartoon man in a two-dimensional world were trying to reach out of his cell to stop a bird from flying past.

I laughed and leaped, spreading my wings, shedding silver notes of light and motes of music from them. The world turned red, flattened, and receded.

In hyperspace, the world is merely a flattened disk, surrounded on either side (red and blue) with energy-structures that inform its laws of nature and the shape of surrounding space-time.

There is no visible sun here. Gravity works in an inverse-cube rather than inverse-square law, and radiant energy likewise. There is no way to form stable orbits, stable atomic arrangements, or to see the reddened, reddened light from even a nearby star.

But there was something here, a thick more-than-matter that filled the ambient hypervolume.

The medium absorbed and flattened the ripples in time and space issuing from our continuum, like a heavy blanket. The gravity well of the Earth also forced the time-space into a curve. Unfortunately, the curve was negative; “away” from me in all directions. Rather than being the shortcut I had hoped, I encountered more time-intervals per second than in three-space. The moments here were longer.

Distances were, in effect, greater between two points here than in three-space. It would take me, not just one, but several seconds to pass “over” Mr. Glum’s position.

I had the time to spare a glance at the cluster of energy-lines I had oriented to watch Quentin and Colin.

I space-folded a light-receptor away from the scene faster than the speed of light, so that I could see what had happened. Slightly to my past (during the same moment when I had first seen Miss Daw, and exchanged a brief word with Victor) Quentin raised his walking stick as if to ward off a blow, and said loudly back to her, “Wise One! You misquote the scripture! The Commandment is to honor the mother, not the nurse! What is the penalty for twisting the words of God? Does that not take His name in vain…?”

Before he could finish, she said back, “Your mouth is stuffed with stolen food. Thief! I steal your voice!”

Quentin choked.

Colin started running at Mrs. Wren, brandishing the axe. My sense impressions around him went black as he negated reality itself in some way, and leapt up the rock she stood upon, in a leap no legs could make. He was carried by nothing but his desire.

Mrs. Wren ignored him as he closed in on her, and instead pointed her twiggy broom at Quentin. “You turn my teachings against me; my birthday gifts to wound me; Ingrate! Reprobate! The Spirits of the Great Mother recoil at your crimes! Your staff is broken!”

Quentin’s walking stick shattered in his hand. He fell to his knees and clutched his head.

Even Colin could not bring himself to chop down an old woman. Colin struck her with the flat of his hand, knocking her crooked body backward onto the stone, and stood over her, flourishing the axe.

“Cut it out, old witch! Stop it! Stop it or I’ll kill you! I swear I will!”

She smiled up at him. “ ‘There I met a brash young man, who wouldn’t say his prayers; I took him by the left leg, and threw him down the stairs.’ Have you not said your prayers, little dragonet? Say them now.”

He struck with the axe.

It missed her.

Colin chopped himself in the leg. Red arterial blood sprayed out. I heard the distinct noise of a bone cracking.

Anyone else watching would have seen Colin stumble back, drop the axe, and fall…

But I saw the strands and lines of moral order snarl into a twisted fist, reach down, and slap the axe from his hand, and then lash back to pick him up bodily and throw him headlong from the top of the cliff.

Over the brink he went, screaming…

With another group of lines, I was watching Victor. He closed in on Miss Daw, running down the slope, his legs like pistons, his eyes watchful, his face without expression. Since her power was the one that stopped mine, it was logical to assume that she could not stop him. How hard could it be for a strong young man to take a delicate violin out of the hands of a slender woman a foot shorter and one hundred pounds lighter than him?