John Wright - Titans of Chaos

My eye fell on that guitar, and I fell in love with it. I had to have it, to get it for Colin, and it had to be a surprise.

My thought: Colin didn't hate music. He only hated good music. Classical music, Brahms and Bach and Beethoven. Music in four voices, point and counterpoint, grace notes and floating glissandos.

Ah, but rock and roll was a different matter, wasn't it? Drumming backbeat, screaming guitar, banshee-shrieks of sound, all mangled and compressed together into thundering avalanches of pure noise! It had Colin written all over it. It was perfect for him. Perfect!

So I went off alone. The clerk, or maybe he was the manager, was a bent, balding man with a sunburned scalp and white puffs for eyebrows. He unlocked the display case and took the guitar out and showed it to me. "What type of amplifier does your friend have?"

"How do you know I am not buying it for myself?"

He smiled a bit into his mustache, and nodded and looked shy, but did not answer the question.

Maybe I was holding it in a way that showed I knew nothing about guitars.

The price he asked was more than I wanted to spend. On the other hand, we were about to leave civilization forever, and the money would be of no earthly use to me hereafter.

I was not very good at haggling, higgling, or chaffering, but I admitted it was a gift for a friend, and that I did not have very much money.

He could probably see that my upbringing had burdened me with ideas of polite behavior and ladylike refinement that, I am sure, have no place among the brash businesswomen of America.

The old man cut the price, just a bit, perhaps as a reward for the fact that I at least tried to get into the dickering spirit.

I could not afford any cords or amplifiers; the thing was worthless without them, but I had a vague notion that Victor could cobble something together.

I bought the thing anyway. The final thought that weakened my resolve to hold out for a reasonable price was this: Everything we bought on the cruise ship, either Victor or Vanity had bought (since they had been holding the envelope at that time), and I was not present during the Paris shopping spree. Come to think of it, hadn't Colin picked up the tab when we ate out our last night ashore? And Quentin bought the coats and stuff from the Isle of Man? I had not spent a single pound-note of the money yet.

So the bad news was that it was expensive. The good news Was that I had just enough.

It must have happened the moment he rang up the cash register and handed me the receipt.

I was riding back up to the ground-floor level on an empty escalator, the sleek black guitar in its case in one hand, my purse in the other, into which I was still (with one or two fingers not being used) trying to stuff the folded bills of my change while, at the same time, performing the not-quite-topologically-impossible act of trying to stuff the slender purse into the rather voluminous pocket of my leather jacket... when my radio phone chirruped the opening to the

"Moonlight" sonata in electronic cricket-beeps.

Okay. Enough was enough. Granted, I was in a store, and there might have been security cameras, but, on the other hand, no one was around me at that moment. No one was looking.

I stepped "past" the surface of the escalator and found myself in a little maintenance or machinery room in an unpainted section of the store customers are not supposed to see. There was a loading dock off to my left and a bare concrete corridor off to my right.

Now I reached "down" into the flat plane of three-space with a number of limbs made of motes of light, like tendrils of music, if music were made of solid energy-forms.

One group of motes diverted the mass-relationship leading from the guitar to the center of the Earth, to make it lighter in my hand; a second group folded my stray bills and slid them "past"

the surface of my purse into its interior; and a third group superimposed the purse on the interior of my pocket. To me, it looked much like putting a paper cutout of a purse inside a pocket-shaped line drawn on a plane. Since the purse actually (now that I could see it from more than 180

degrees at once) looked too large to fit through the mouth of the pocket, I would have to use the same means to get it out again, or resort to knifing open the pocket seams.

A fourth group of motes reached "into" my pants pocket and tilted the switch-hook of my phone into the fourth dimension, so that it popped "up." The mere fact that the lid of the phone was shut no longer engaged the off button. In effect, this took the cell phone off the hook without actually opening it.

A fifth group of motes folded the tiny area of time-space around my pants pocket to hold it against my ear.

I am not sure what this might have looked like to outside three-dimensional observers. Maybe they would have seen me bend at the waist at an impossible angle to put my ear to my hip. Maybe they would have seen or heard sound waves being teleported out of my pocket through a wormhole directly into my ear.

A manipulation set up a second distance-negating space-fold between my mouth and the cell phone's cunningly made little mouthpiece.

Maybe an outside observer would have seen me twisted like a Mobius pretzel to have my mouth and ear both pressed up against the same convex surface in a way spherical heads cannot. I prefer to think they would have seen a second wormhole opening between my head and my pocket, without any gross distortions. After all, the limited three-dimensional light would have followed the space-time curve as if it were flat, right? Outside observers surely would have seen a pretty girl with little firefly glints in a complex halo around her head. Hope so, anyway.

Multidimensional continuum control is a fine superpower-there is none better-but no girl wants a paradigm she cannot use without looking icky.

Vanity's voice came over the phone speaker: "Amelia! Amelia! Oh, God, please answer!"

"I'm here."

"Something just saw you. Something powerful and terrible. Then another group of somethings joined in. There is a crowd looking at you."

I looked left and right. Bare walls. Loading dock with empty trucks. Behind me was a space filled with a diesel engine, calmly purring. I ran the few yards, down a set of metal stairs, and eased open a rear door leading to the loading bay. Outside was a short alley leading to a nighttime street, neon-lit. There were people on it, couples walking, perhaps headed to the club just down the way. No one stopping to turn and look toward the store.

I opened up eyes in the fourth dimension. There was a blaze of utility from the music section of the store overhead, but now I saw it was not useful to me or Colin; the supply of instruments was very useful to someone else.

That same light sent out a streamer of moral obligation like a spiderweb. I traced the strands.

One bundle went toward Deimos, who was sitting in a glassed-in office high above a dancing floor of many dazzling lights. He had his harpoon in his hand, facing the direction of the store, as if the intervening walls and buildings were no barrier to his dread weapon. The threads there ran from him to Archer, who was on the street between the store and the club. Deimos was acting as a sniper, a friendly one, ready to strike down anyone who threatened his brother. Had he been watching the whole exchange between me and Archer? Probably not, or Vanity would have sensed his eyesight. No-something had startled him into a warlike stance, a warning that his oath to protect his brother was about to be challenged.