John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Between the towers were gardens made of folded origami shapes of virtue, crystallized forms of the morality energy, resplendent, wondrous, but much more glorious than the simple strands and webs of reciprocity I saw here.

I knew that the virtue gardens of my father were grander and wilder than those known elsewhere, for he had located that tiny spot of darkness Saturn made, and he saw the sorrowing of souls trapped in there, and he had vowed a great vow of compassion.

But none who walks into one of those virtue gardens returns unchanged, nor can the changes be known beforehand. The moral obligations affect and are affected by the observer.

In the dream, I emerged from my father's virtue garden, stern and frightened, and took a single step to activate a soul-path that hung to one side of me. The specialized cluster of hyperspatial bubbles wherein both my private chambers, and my childhood memories, dwelt were linked by this soul-path to a distant spot where a time-mirror hung. Its glass showed me images, not merely of linear future and past, but planes of probability, volumes of potential, hypervolumes of rationality. One image in the mirror of time shifted from being an alternative version of me to become my sister, the sweet Lampetia.

In the hands of Lampetia the Bright was a silver shepherd's crook, made of solidified time-energy taken from a logic tree. Her hair was disheveled, and her face was weary with tears shed for me.

Behind her was a field of thought, and behind the field, the outer spacer and earlier time-segments of Myriagon: In this darkness, the simpler and older creatures of Myriagon rose up, roaring and lamenting.

Lampetia said, "Despite our father's pleas, O Phaethusa, do not look into the dark world; do not go into the tiny cosmos of crooked Saturn."

"I must," I said, or seemed to say in the dream. "The awkward primordial beings whom we displaced as rulers here, the original inhabitants, recall Saturn's great crime, and know how many living beings he trapped within the linear collapse of entropy, when cosmos was created. Shall all their suffering be in vain?"

"Why you, beloved Phaethusa? Why not me? The theft of those spirits, loyal to the Bright One, which Saturn in mirth calls the cattle of the sun, was as much my fault as yours, for we both crept into the Garden of Virtue and saw the moral obligations leading from our perfections into the lapsed worlds of Saturn."

I said, "I am more suited to go. There in the distance is the ocean of moral obligations. Here are the positive and negative values of each monad-atom. You may check my calculations."

She said, "Sister, a world where time flows in one direction only is a world where sins cannot be undone before their commission, and effect cannot precede cause! It is a world of terror, where sorrow is absolute, and death comes to all. How can you hope to return to us?"

I said, "Even now, another version of me meets with Father in the shining hall of all-knowing, where the energy of omniscience has been compressed into the mirrored substances on which his twenty-dimensional throne-world sits. That version was, is, and always shall be recently returned from the horrid capture I must suffer, if those who suffer more than I are to be saved. From that point of view, all this has been accomplished; all the horror is a distant memory."

"From that point of view!" she exclaimed. "Have you forgotten that, from that point of view, you will be trapped, and all this glory be forgotten: From that frame of reference, years and centuries must pass, and you must crawl, one second per second from past to future. You cannot imagine what the dark world is like: No! You cannot limit your imagination enough to imagine the limits."

I reached out with my own crosier, which was of gold, and took a box of folded eternity from a shelf in my chambers to bring it into this scene, where it retroactively had always been. From within the box, I drew out a garment of time, ten thousand years woven into a shining dress, delicate as dew, bright as the rosy dawn.

"Here!" I said. "Ten subjective millennia I will interpose between 'now' and the point at which I must depart. Join me in my frame of reference, and to us it will seem a century of centuries before my captivity begins. Do not weep. How can any sorrow be here, in a world where infinity, morality, eternity, are known and understood, and the light of the Primal Singularity illumes the segmented spaces of Myriagon, and the Hours wait on the King our father as his handmaidens?"

She said, "One of those Hours is already selected as your escort whose soft hands will lead you down the funnel of moral-energy and across the event horizon of the Inner Dimensions. Saturn himself will have been overthrown by the time you pass within the plenum of the enemy!"

I saw her take thoughts from her inner nature, and I saw the way she manipulated space to create a fold, or lapse. She did it right in front of me. It was the basic geometry of how to use the fourth dimension to lapse the third.

In large enough volumes, such a thing could create a universe. She was doing on a small scale what Saturn had done on a vast, unparalleled scale. His universe was merely a lapse, a space-warp, a singularity surrounded by an event horizon. My father, all of us, we were the people who were older and above that singularity: the prelapsarians.

The twist of space was shining like a jewel in her hand, and yet it was made of memory-substance, not matter.

"Take this parting gift from me," her soft voice cooed, "which I give to our ancient foes, the dark and horrent Lord of Dream. Morpheus will bring to you this dream, and emplace within your frame of reference, selecting a point in the time-stream when your consciousness might be reached."

"What is it?"

"Hope! Hope I give you! Once you are free of your captors, the greater things you are destined to accomplish will be made real. Were it not for Man, nobler souls than any the demiurge could have made (Saturn did but capture and demean them) all Myriagon would rise as one to oppose your downfall. The primal beings, more crude and more ancient than the bright children of your father, who dwelt in this place before us, hang thick as clouds about the tiny, dim spot of the material world, ready to close with it and crack it open like a seed, should any word of you come forth: Phlegon our bold cousin will prepare the Thousand-Dimensional Object!

"Remember that from our point of view, those of us who love you, you have already escaped and been welcomed with rejoicing arms back to us: Happiness and freedom are inevitable. Any world path you select will lead you back to us; your task is merely to find the shortest. Let this thought buoy you while you labor in that world where despair is absolute: Your first duty is escape.

Accomplish that."

I woke with tears in my eyes.

I rolled over and shook Vanity awake. "I volunteered! I volunteered for this!"

Her hair was mussed with sleep, and her eyes half-closed. "Mm? Why are you crying, Amelia?"

"Because I'm an idiot!" I sobbed, "I volunteered! I could have stayed home!"