John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I said, “It is warm there. My home is filled with light. I am a princess and I live in a palace. My father is the king, and he knows everything. He sees everything. I remember once my mother, the queen, took me swimming in our pool. But the pool hangs like a ball in midair. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. There are stars inside it. And planets. You can swim right up to them and look at them with your eye. I remember once I was swimming. I saw a dark world and it was filled with dead bodies. Mother folded her arms around me, and took me back up out of the pool. I remember how afraid I was that something from the Dark World would get me. My mother sang a song for me, ‘My little spark, my shining one, never fear, never fear. The darkness is so very small, and the world of light is endless, here.’

“I remember she took me to the tower where she said she first saw my father. It was a palace that floated, and everything was rose-red marble. The windows were pink and the walls were scarlet. I remember he had a throne set in the very middle of a floor of glass, and the floor was one hundred miles wide. When you sat on the throne, you could look down at the world, and see everything in it. It was like a telescope, but bigger. Bigger than the moon. Father made me look at the Dark World again, even though I was scared and didn’t want to. I remember he held my hand, and said, ‘Shining daughter, do not be afraid to look into the darkness. There are no dead, no ghosts, no shadows. Look, look closely, and you will see the happy gardens made of light, into which all of those who have been hurt by Time are brought, once Time has no more power over them.’ I looked and I looked, but I did not find the happy place anywhere in the picture. That made him sad, and Mother was sad, too, and Father kissed me right here on the forehead, and said, ‘I have commanded all my people to love you, but there are those whom I cannot command. You will be taken from us for a time, brought into a cold, dark land. But you shall soon be free, and return to the land of light, and return to be with your mother and me.’ He promised. My father promised. He will come save me.”

Victor said, “No one is coming to save us. No giants, no kings. We are going to save ourselves.”

I shouted, “That’s not fair! You can’t talk back to the Tales! They are all we have!”

Colin said, “It’s his turn. Tell us your dumb story about the worm, Prime.” By which he meant Victor.

Victor said, “There’s not much to tell. I don’t remember any mother or father. We lived in a space station. Once I put my hand out the window into the rain. How there was rain in outer space, I don’t know, but that’s what I remember. The raindrops rolled together in my palm and made a puddle. I stuck my finger in the puddle and it thickened into clay. I rolled the clay between my palms and made a worm. Then the worm came to life, and started climbing up my arm. I thought it was gross, so I threw it out the window into outer space, where it fell forever.

“They took me to see a man. I don’t remember who the man was, but I was scared of him. He was like a teacher or something. He had a lamp in his forehead like a miner’s torch. He said, ‘Life is a set of rules. If those rules break, life ends. Here is our first rule: Any life you create is yours, and must be cared for. No matter how humble or small, it is still yours, and you must answer for it. Do you understand?’

“I remember I answered some smart answer back. I don’t know what it was, though.

“The teacher said, ‘Your own death is nothing, because death is nothing but the disintegration of the atoms of your body. There is no pain and no sorrow afterwards. But to kill another living thing is wrong, and is forbidden by our law.’

“I said, ‘Human beings kill each other.’

“The teacher said, ‘In every human being, there is a spark of divine fire, which makes them sacred. We have nothing like that in us. We are mightier, older, wiser than man, and we do not violate our laws; but Mankind is a finer thing than we are, and some day we will save them from the Demiurge, who made them merely to be playthings. He did not know what he made.’

“I said, ‘If we are greater and stronger, why must we serve them?’

“The teacher said, ‘The great must protect the weak. If this law is broken, those who are greater than us, those who made us, would destroy us. The same logic applies to all beings. I am putting this memory into your permanent storage, so that you will not be able to forget it, even after all else is lost.’ And a light came from his head.

“That is all I remember,” Victor said.

And he smiled, and I was able to see him smile, because a little spark had come to life where he was drilling a stick back and forth with a crude bow he had made. Gently, he breathed on the spark, and gently the darkness receded.

One twig, one dry stick at a time, he fed the flame, until it was large enough to accept a lump of coal.

That night, in the cold cellar, Victor told us all to put our hands together like the Three Musketeers.

He said to me, “We must all promise not to forget. We have to remember our Tales. We must all remember Quentin’s giant, and Quartinus’ wolf cloak, and the golden dogs that sit outside the House of Tertia in Fairyland, and the palace of light where the father of Secunda is a king, and the city in the void where my Teacher lived, and told me what my duty was. We must all keep our Tales for each other, if one of us loses or changes or forgets them, the others will remind him. Everything in this world will try to convince us that these are nursery tales, or dreams, or that we’re mad, or that we’re just playing pretend. We must promise never to forget. We must promise never to give up. We must promise we will escape from this place, and find the mothers and fathers who love us, our friends, our kin, our real world. Promise!”

And then he promised us that he would see to it that we would all get out of here together.

Oh, and it was warm when he said that.

I do not know how old I was when I found the notes, but I must have been quite young, because I remember that I had to stand on tiptoe to reach the handles of the cabinet where the cleaning things were kept. We had been told to scrub the floor of the dining hall, a task usually done by the servants, because of some prank Colin had pulled involving a bucket of fishheads. None of us was willing to turn Colin in, not even Vanity, even though (I am sure) everyone knew who had done it. This was back before we chose names, so it was Quartinus we were all mad at for getting us in trouble. I remember it was spring, and the great windows were wide open, and I could smell the new-mown grass of the playing field outside, and I remember how dearly I wanted to jump and run and play, rather than kneel and scrub.

I was wearing a smock from the art room, and had my hair tucked into a kerchief. I remember there was a bucket of smelly stuff I was rubbing into the floorboards with a brush. I had taken the bigger bucket, because I thought Tertia (Vanity) was too small to carry it. I remember how proud I was when I picked up that bucket, because I felt like a grown-up girl; and I remember how terrible it was, once I had walked out to the spigot and filled it, that I could not carry it. I staggered and stumbled as I waddled up the steps (and the steps were taller back then) and there were tears in my eyes, because I was so afraid I would be punished if I spilled it.

We had been studying astronomy in Lecture Hall that morning, and I remember thinking that if the five of us could build a rocket ship, we could fly to the moon, and be away from this place forever. And I remember my plan was to ask Tertia to stay aboard the ship once we landed, so I could be the first woman on the moon; and the moon people would be so grateful they would make me their princess; but I was going to let her be the first off the ship when we landed on the next planet, Mars or Venus, to make it up to her.