John Wright - Titans of Chaos

'To any who challenge my sovereignty, I will answer with a weapon, thus." And he threw the lance into the rust-colored soil at his feet, splitting a rock in half with a noise like a gunshot. The lance stuck fast and stood quivering.

This time, I saw how Boggin made himself and Mavors disappear. They had not been in the crater any more than the Mars lander had been. It was a Phaeacian technique. It looked to me like a tube of force running from this spot, up out of the continuum, through the dreamlands, and back into the continuum at another spot, their real location. The three-dimensional energies, such as light waves, as well as fourth-dimensional media, by which I perceived such things as internal natures, utilities, monads, and moral obligations, were all swept from one spot to another through the Phaeacian shortcut. Presumably, they could be manipulated, dreamed into new shapes, while they passed through the dreamlands, before being deposited here, in a spot where the laws of nature had been changed to allow for this type of illusion. The photons were not emerging from trapdoors, but from subatomic areas of uncertainty in the base vacuum of space itself.

Magnetic waves had been present, too. Something from Victor's paradigm had allowed these three-dimensional light images to manipulate my flagpole and Mavors' spear in coordination with the actions of their hands. I had not seen how the wind and air had been manipulated, but it was not hard to guess that Boreas might have fine control over such things, fine enough to make the sound waves of a spoken voice. Since I could detect no clue, perhaps Colin's paradigm was involved? Hard to say.

And also, somehow, the Phaeacian ability to detect attention must have been tied into an ability to deflect attention: The clues that would have warned me that the lander was not below as we flew down toward it had been hypnotically thrust aside in my brain.

The moment I woke up Victor, I knew why they had to knock him out. He called it cryptognosis.

He said he had detected the interference in my perception system the moment we crossed the boundary into the special laws of nature obtaining in the crater basin. He had been silenced before he could speak. He was immune to illusions woven by magic.

I attuned my senses to a distant spot, during that moment while I had the chance. The place where Boggin and Mavors had truly been standing was atop Mons Olympos, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

And it was not a barren waste: Mavors had a camp there. A camp? A city. I saw endless arsenals and munitions factories half-buried beneath the rock and crag of the mountain, manned by shark-toothed snake-skinned Laestrygonians. Poking up through the bedrock and casting long shadows across the landscape of snow and rust loomed launching towers, magnetic rails, and missile emplacements large enough to shoot down the tiny moons, cyclopean, huge and dark, beneath the dusty pink sky. The Laestrygonians manning these skyscraper-size guns wore no pressure suits on the surface: Perhaps they were the original inhabitants of Mars.

Out from this fortress-city ran corridors into the fourth dimension, shortcuts through space exactly the type Vanity had been unable to make.

I could see the distant points to where these corridors led: I saw strange cathedrals made of glass beneath black skies that rained sulfuric acid; I saw a soaring fortress, slim as an upraised sword, towering over a cratered gray land where stars burned to either side of a pitiless sun. At the end of one corridor made of darkened air, I saw a space station made of carven wood, its hull overgrown with metal trees and leaves of purest silver, hanging above cold, swirled methane-snowstorms of a gas giant surrounded by broken and scattered rings.

Venus, Luna, Neptune. Of course, I knew these places at a glance. Had I not seen a hundred artists' renditions, had I not pored over Voyager photographs, hadn't I dreamt of nothing else my whole life? These were the unclaimed worlds into whose alien soils I had meant one day to plant the Union Jack.

Someone had beaten me to it. All these planets were explored.

I saw ships plying these space routes. I saw the gilled men of Atlantis, brothers to Mestor, in shining black scale-mail, wearing neither helmets nor gauntlets, hanging weightlessly by tethers from long cylindrical vehicles of open grillework, vessels poised in the airless, interplanetary void.

Atlanteans were amphibious, not just to water, but to outer space as well. A pang of envy went through me. No need to carry heavy life support if you were a race born for space.

Some of the vessels were heavily armed, and crewed by Laestrygonians. These had the circle-and-arrow emblem of Mars painted on their hulls. The Atlantean ships were bronze or cerulean blue, and bore the emblem of the trident.

The trip back across the cold red landscape of Mars at dusk was bleak and melancholy.

The ship was trapped in the ice, and Victor circled it slowly, bathing the waters in infrared and microwave radiation until she floated on a very small, steaming lake of dirty red water.

I turned and looked over the globe of the Fourth World from Sol, a blasted desert that had known life a million years ago, perhaps-or never. It had been so easy for us to get here. An impromptu expedition, a bit of skylarking.

I was thinking of those poor humans, trapped on their world. Not unless they expended their utmost, cleverly used the technology at their command, could they match what we had accomplished in a fortnight, and then only with months and years of genius devoted and treasure expended, and with the toil, and sweat, and courage of multitudes.

They had the ability now. Why hadn't they come? Why hadn't someone planted a flag to defy the grim black banner of Ares?

Were they content to remain trapped? I would not believe that of anyone.

Not until we were back aboard the Argent Nautilus, and I had Vanity check me for bugging devices and Quentin for divination spells, did I tell them what had happened.

"They were too scared to meet me face-to-face. It was an elaborate illusion, and Boggin messed it up for me, showed me how it was being done."

Colin said, "I hope he is not on our side. That would make me barf."

I said, "He is not on our side. But he is not on Mavors' side either. Mavors cast a spell, a decree, a fate on me. Imposed a moral obligation. On all of us. Boggin had a note in his pocket, telling me where to go to have it nullified."

"Where are we going, Leader?" asked Quentin.

I smiled at Vanity. "Hollywood!"

Her face lit up.

Love's Proper Hue

The reentry heat killed Victor's green metal clams, and his mood was grim as he spent an hour stripping them from the hull, because he felt responsible for life he had created. Vanity was pleased because her ship was silver-white again, and the painted eyes uncovered. I was pleased because the clams, alive or dead, had been able to act like ablative tiles and had prevented our wooden ship from going up like kindling.