John Wright - Titans of Chaos

I said, "That is such a stereotype!"

He shrugged. "I'm allowed, that I am. They're my people, after all. Faith and begorra!"

"But you're not really Irish. You've never set foot in Ireland."

"Lassie," he said expansively, "put a stout pint o' bitter in me good right hand, and a stout stick in me left, and put an orange Ulsterman before me, stout or not, and by Saint Patty, you'll see what a good son of Eire I am, and how many heads I can break, drunk or sober."

Vanity said, "None of you are Irish or Welsh or English or anything. Even I am not British. I'm Greek or Albanian or something. From Corcyra. You are not human beings."

Quentin said with quiet emphasis, "We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts."

Vanity changed the subject. "I am curious why we have not been able to get our real, original memories back. I used to be a princess: I saved Odysseus, according to Homer. I'm like the only woman in the whole dumb poem who is nice to anyone! I'm..." Her face grew blank.

"What is it?" asked Quentin, worried.

"... I'm responsible. In The Odyssey, at the end, the island of Corcyra: It's blockaded. A stone mountain fills the harbor, and the ships are cut off from reaching the human world ever again.

Neptune, the sea-god, punishes the Phaeacians for having helped Odysseus. But they didn't help him. I did. According to the poem, I mean. I destroyed the Phaeacians. Is that-is that why they sent me away? Is that why my mother and father sent me off to be a hostage, to be put in prison?

And such a cruel prison! Aristotle said I married and had a baby. My own baby! If a woman has a baby, she can't really forget him, right?"

Vanity's voice (it was hard to make out expressions in the firelight) held such a note of pain that a moment of silence passed.

She broke the silence: "Quentin, can you get your Mafia friends, your imps or whatever they are, to find out more about us? How do we get our original selves back? Colin, or anyone else, if you have an idea, an experiment you can try, a messenger from another world you can contact, your Fearless Leader authorizes the attempt."

Quentin said, "I am curious myself. Was I sent into this world as a penance? What did I do to deserve it?" He shook his head.

I spent more than one afternoon looking into Victor's nervous system, trying to find and stimulate monads, or set the meaningless ripples of atoms in motion that would stimulate his buried memories.

Quentin worked his astronomical calculations and walked in dreams with fantastic beings who appeared in the forms of raven-headed men, or mighty kings mounted on dromedaries and holding vipers.

Colin patiently wove himself a hammock and spent his afternoons in it, going on a dream-quest, or so he said, to find the lost dreams of our former lives.

Each night before the campfire, we shared what results we could.

Colin, one night, said he had remembered some things, including something of Quentin's and Vanity's.

"I talked to my brother Phantasmos tonight. He said that this world I'm trapped in is a dream, just a bigger and nastier one than most, because it is the one dream that says no other dreams are real. That is why men forget dreams on waking here-to preserve the illusion. Saturn was originally one of us, a Dream-Lord of Cimmeria, the world without sunlight, but he found a way to deceive the night sky, and separate Uranus and Gaea. The stars used to walk freely on Earth, back when Earth and Heaven were merely two equal dreams, and there was no solid matter to hinder mankind, or to make them greedy for material things.

"The divorce of Heaven and Earth changed all that. The only way for the stars to reach Earth now was a one-way dive: a falling star. They cannot get back up again. This is the cool part: I know what part of Quentin's tale means. Listen up, Big Q. Those silver mountains where the stars fall down, that is a real place, a landing zone, sort of, for bearded comets and spirits from the astral heavens to touch down and enter the material world. Some fell through pride or because they lusted after the daughters of mankind, but others came down willingly, even though they can't go back. That big giant in your dream is Ouranos, the eldest primal god: the father of Cosmos and Chaos both. The little dwarves chipping him out of the ice, Phantasmos said were Hours and Days, wearing away at the chains Father Time put on Eternity. Time itself will end when Eternity breaks free and rises up as lord of all this world again.

"And, Vanity, my brother knew you, too. Those dogs of silver and gold at your house are real, and so are the walking tripods that cook food of their own accord. These are robots or golems, living metal creatures made by Hephaestus, who-guess what?-is that same big ugly guy Amelia met who tried to hire her. Lord Talbot, who owns the estate where we were raised. My brother knows your people because the Phaeacians helped the Sons of Morpheus, the Lords of the Dark.

" 'Your people are smugglers,' my brother said. I am hoping he means, you know, good smugglers, lovable rogues like the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, or Han Solo or something, not just drug-runners."

Vanity asked Colin, "What did they smuggle? My people, I mean?"

Colin poked the fire with a stick, throwing up a spray of sparks, and in the sudden light I saw his eyes dancing. "I don't know what they smuggled in from other worlds, but from my home, from dreamland, they smuggled dreams. That's what my brother told me. I don't know what it means.

He said a time had come, in ancient days, when all the dreams of man had died, and men bowed and sacrificed to unworthy gods, lecherous and cruel. Odysseus spied on the paths through the realm of shadows and found the empty kingdom of Lord Dis was not the final place to which men's souls fled-there was an Elysium beyond- and so the Phaeacians help him smuggle the truth back to mankind. The myth of Er, the tales of Zoroaster, legends hinting that this material world is but a dismal dream from which we wake to brightest sunlight-Socrates knew the truth of it, which is why he scoffs at Homer."

Vanity, for some reason not clear to me, looked guiltily at Quentin, and then asked Colin, "Did he say anything else? About Odysseus, I mean. Did your brother Phantasmos say anything else about Odysseus?"

"In my land, in Cimmeria, he is regarded as a great hero. He was much further traveled than he let on. He sailed to the foot of Mount Purgatory in the South Pole, which is this mountain so tall that tresses of the trees of the Earthly Paradise atop it scrape the bottom of the turning dome of Heaven, and starlight is tangled in their leaves and twigs. Odysseus sailed beyond the sunset, and he would not let the gods tell him no. So, buck up, Red." And then he turned to me, and said,

"Your kind of guy, too, Amelia. You know, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

And he threw out his chest, and said,