John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

“Do you believe in souls? Do you think everything has a soul?”

“Only a creature with a soul could frame such a question.”

I said, “Do you think I have a soul?”

“Of course, dear child, and it is a bright one, despite your anger and confusion.”

“If I have a soul, I cannot be a monster. Boreas cannot be afraid of me.”

“I do not actually think he is afraid of you, child.”

“Then why did he order you not to talk to me? This conversation is the first one I’ve had in seven days. If you don’t count the little scene with Grendel. I am so bored. Bored and tired and scared. Tired of being scared. Bored of being scared. Scared of being bored. I will do whatever you say. I will do what Boreas wants me to do. Just don’t put me back in that cell!”

“We have little choice in the matter. Even Boreas has little choice.”

“At least give me something to read or something to do. What about my lessons? I had a test this week that I missed because I was in jail. One of your tests: the Hawking formulations on Black Hole Theory.”

“Naturally, I did not hold the test this week, Miss Windrose.”

“Give me the materials so I can study! How often do you have a student begging you for work?”

It seemed she was not listening. She said absentmindedly: “It would be a waste of time, child. No matter what you learned, you would have to learn it again when you come out.”

“At least come talk to me during the day. You must be bored, too, if there are no classes being held this week!”

She shook her head. Apparently she was not bored.

I said in an angry voice: “Answer me! Boreas cannot be afraid of me talking to you.”

“No, child. He is afraid I might take heart from your example.”

“Take heart?”

She turned and looked at me. Her eyes had been staring into the Fourth Dimension, and were still surrounded with a faint cloud of distance-negating energy, which, in the sunlight, made her eyes seem all silvery.

Solemn and sad, she said in the soft music of her voice: “I am a slave. These people are my captors, too. I am not from here.”

“Where are you from?”

“From home.”

“What home?”

“Home. Your home. My home. Our home. Myriagon.”

She said, “Like you, I was once collared and penned up. Upon my parole, I am allowed certain privileges, to walk abroad in the sunlight, to take upon myself a fair-seeming shape, to drink wine and eat savory food. And to play my music. That is the kindest thing I am allowed, and also the most cruel.”

Her perfect, ivory-pale face was calm; but old, old sorrow haunted her eyes.

“Sometimes, I look for it, you know. I look to see some shadow of Myriagon in the far distance, a shadow or reflection of her musical cross-section in the fifth or seventh dimension. Or something comes to me like a scent of apple blossoms, or the tremor of an energy path or thought-reflection issuing from the time-trees in those gardens.

“Once I saw what I thought was a golden dot, and senses I never had before and have never had since, opened up in me. I saw it only for a moment, but I was able to superimpose multiple shadow-pictures in my memory until an image built up.

“That dot was a globe of finite surface area but infinite volume, with towers and formulations extending in each direction. Each tower and each window opened up into a new direction, a new domain, and I could see gravity and time-flow folded like origami, engineered as part of that great structure.

“Time, space, and gravity were not there (as they are here) simply imposed from above. The gravity was manmade there, its moment and constants and characteristics. The time, and the space, and all were designed to serve the pleasure and convenience of those who dwelled in those towers, or in the private vest-pocket dimensions hanging like silver bubbles on the beyond-sides of those windows.

“The city with its towers and its gardens and its private time-space continua, occupied more than four dimensions, more than five or ten or a hundred. There were a thousand surfaces, a thousand volumes and hypervolumes, a thousand dimensions, or ten thousand.

“And there was reflected light shining from it, not merely the flat, thin light of this three-dimensional place we are in, but a solid, full, massive light, filling up volumes and hypervolumes of increasingly higher dimensions. Myriagon was orbiting something, something which shed that light, some singularity of ever higher and ever smaller dimension I could not see.”

Miss Daw was silent for a time, and then said softly, “In a way, that one moment of seeing my home was and is more solid in my memory, more meaningful, more real, than all my other life besides.”

I asked, “Are there more than four dimensions?”

“Many more, but they do not exist here, in the created world. When Saturn rebelled against Uranus and created the world of time, of entropy and decay, he knew he would be attacked both by those he had trapped within the orbit of his creation, and by rescuers from outside—other sons of Uranus.”

“In other words, us,” I said. “The Uranians.”

“To limit the Prelapsarians—your people—he made this world to collapse the higher dimensions into infinitesimal volumes. He needed only a fourth dimension, in order to erect a superstructure of time, space, order, and to establish universal laws of nature.”

“What is it like out there? In Myriagon?”

“I know only the old tales and stories repeated by my sister, Parthenope, and she had them from our grandfather.

“There is a singularity, called the Unknown, which retains the condition of time-space as it was before the lapse of reality into the Big Bang. Myriagon orbits this singularity. From the depths of its event horizon there arise, from time to time, lapses or folds in the substance of reality, which can be collapsed to form various areas and conditions of time, space, matter, and dimension. Most of these vest-pocket universes are small, no more than ten light-years across or ten years old, and containing trivial mass-energy.

“Larger universes can be created, she told me, if a diver is willing to go closer and ever closer into the event horizon. There are methods to create a disturbance within the deeper layers, which will cause the ejection of larger areas of time-space, more mass-energy ylem.

“No matter how swiftly or slowly your personal time is running, however, the deeper you go, the longer your journey seems to take from the point of view of outside observers.

“Saturn is a creature from the very earliest times of Myriagon, back when it was called Polygon, and only occupied two or three dimensions. He fell far more deeply toward the event horizon than any other of the Early Ones. Millions, billions, countless ages of time went by; albeit, to Saturn, it was but a single journey of a single day.

“When he emerged he controlled an area of time-space so great, and containing a mass-energy so large, that it created its own event horizon embracing the other universes. All the tiny realms of all the innocent people of Myriagon were unfolded and collapsed into his. This collapse of all life into his macro-cosmic universe created time and entropy. Countless people died. Cosmos was created—the established world.

“Parthenope told me that no one knew why he did it. Whatever events had prompted him, whatever insults he was seeking to avenge, or ills he was trying to cure, had been forgotten in the billions of years since his departure. Only those few spirits ranging far afield, beyond all the established structures and private universes of the Prelapsarians, were spared. They returned to the wreckage of their great home, and slowly, despite that they were so few, rebuilt Myriagon.