John Wright - Titans of Chaos

It was ours.

Oh, the nights! Campfire tales! Marshmallow toasts! Sort of. We toasted chunks of papaya instead, since our marsh-mallows floated away.

The times when I did not mind having chopped so much wood were when we made blazing bonfires in our nicely stone-paved fire pit. Crawling red and black logs of palm-wood would send up a blaze, crackling with sap, and sparks would fly up like jeweled insects toward the whispering canopy. Between these leafy Venetian blinds, stars winked.

We would report on daily progress, those who made any, or talk about our dreams and our fears, or crack jokes, or make fun of each other.

Victor's reports were usually terse: He spent his afternoons underwater offshore, trying to build or, rather, grow a particle accelerator out of a coral bed into which he'd designed cells like those in an electric eel. He would be speaking one moment about peroxisomes and sphingolipids, alleles and demes, and the next about RF cavity resonators, Cockcroft-Walton generators or voltage multipliers, or plasma wakefield acceleration.

Quentin's reports were even more incomprehensible: He had covered the concrete floor of the abandoned cabin with chalk and paint, and each night he interviewed a different creature, and at report times, he could produce lists of the various felonies and enormities they could commit, "at the behest of the operator," or the liberal arts they could teach. He ended every report with a plea to Vanity to go back to civilization for a day, so he could reference books on goet-ics, or silver and tin to forge talismans, materials to build a proper anthanor.

It was like living on an island with Nikola Tesla and Johann Faust.

Vanity, being the captain of the group, did not give reports, but she had found a geologically impossible series of caves to the south of the island, erected different laws of nature in each, and was trying to tinker slowly with them. She ordered us to avoid the spot. The caves grew prone to odd noises and earth tremors, but Vanity did not quit. Being buried alive simply held no terror for her. "What are the odds the rock will be solid, and not have a hidden door?" she asked dismissively.

Colin refused to give reports. He would talk smugly about how his paradigm "... had no research, no astrology, no physics, no demonology. Focus my emotions, they come to a point, and everything I'm trying to do just clicks into place. I'm a point-and-click interface! User-friendly!"

"Music!" Vanity would say. "You should be practicing music! It's the key to your powers!"

"Gah! Music is my worst class."

"How can you tell," I chimed in sweetly, "among so many contenders for the honor, Colin?"

"I still haven't done my Mozart paper for Miss... Jesus nailed up a tree! I'm never going to have to do that paper. Not ever. No symphony in E-flat. No Baroque period, no Classical, no Romantic. I don't have any worst class anymore. Or a best class! I don't have any class at all!"

So he stood, with his eyes illuminated by the beatific vision of Life without School. His eyes were blind with happiness, and his mouth hung open in a smile.

I opened my mouth to make the obvious joke, but closed it again. He was just too happy.

On the third night, Vanity told me to take up my old office of Keeper of the Tales, and lead the group in the Telling once more: those dim fragments of memory we recalled from before our capture. The night became solemn. We each stood up before the fire and took our turns speaking.

It was strange, strange to hear those old words spoken, now, by young men and women, which had once been spoken only by children. Vanity's gold and silver dogs; Victor in space, making a worm out of falling rain; Quentin seeing a giant in the ice; Colin, urged on by his brothers, stealing a wolf pelt from the roofpole of his father's lodge, which held up the North Star. And me, remembering a pool like a globe larger than universes, in which the stars and worlds swam; and one small world was dark, a tiny world where time, death, and entropy were sovereign.

We spoke the words; we vowed not to forget. We promised each other we would escape and find our families again, our folk who loved us.

Colin said, "And we have not done it yet. We are still in prison. This world is not of our making."

Victor said, "I am not sure it is of their making, either. The Olympians seized control from an older being: Saturn, Father Time. He made this place. And what he seized to remake is a fragment of a larger, Uranian universe, a large volume, more disorganized."

"Disorganized, or free?" I asked.

Quentin said softly, "I think I understand my story now."

We all turned to look at him. He sat with his back to the fire, so that his face was a mass of shadow, and red light beat against his shoulders and back. "Certain things were explained to me by mighty spirits, Principalities, Dominions, and Potentates from places lower than Heaven. The chamber I remember in my father's house, the one filled with statues and chessmen, was my father's wardrobe. What looked like chessmen to me were figurines of human beings, who are naturally much smaller than my people. Those are bodies the Fallen can wear.

"The harp in his lap was the kantele, made of the bones of the leviathan and strung with the hair of fallen angels, who in grief and pride sheared their locks, as the ambrosial fragrance lingering there caused them the pain of memory.

"My father is Vainamoinen, who was an old man before he was born, spending seven hundred and thirty years in his mother's womb. The Greeks called him Proteus, the First, the Old Man of the Sea. The blind old women I remember are my three mothers, the Graeae, the Gray Sisters, white-haired hags from birth. They had but one eye and one tooth between them, which they had to pass back and forth: Only one at a time could see, or could chew."

He paused and wiped his eyes, perhaps in weariness, perhaps to brush away a tear. "I was supposed to help them. My mothers, I mean. To lead one around by the hand, when it wasn't her turn to use the eye; to moisten bread in wine for another to gnaw, when it wasn't her turn to use the tooth. My mothers were not godlike beings, not Titans, but cripples. Handicapped, I mean."

Victor said, "Did they also share one, um... I mean, how were you born from three women?

Physically, how was it done?"

Quentin scowled. "I assume I was born in sections and joined. Plato speaks of the three parts of the soul: the reason, the passions, the appetites. Certainly I feel always as if my conscience, my body, and my spirit are at odds, born of different mothers, as if I am pulled on a rack between opposites. I thought every man felt this way, like a fallen creature who dimly remembers he should be better."

Victor said, "I don't feel the way Quentin describes. One conforms one's actions to logic. There are no other alternatives."

Colin belched loudly, and said, "I don't feel that way, either. Should be better? If anything, I feel like I should be worse. You know, a drunk or something. A guy who gets in fights. To live up to my Irish heritage."