John Wright - Titans of Chaos

The green stone in Vanity's hand flickered and lost its color. The gap of fourth-dimensional nonspace between the deck and the cabin evaporated. The laws of nature between the two spots equalized.

The black shadow of Trismegistus' magic snarled and leaped down into the trapdoor at Vanity.

She fell beneath its claws, bleeding, screaming, screaming.

Trismegistus pointed his revolver at where I crouched and shot a bullet through my head.

The empty shell of my head. The girl-shaped form of flesh on the deck, at that moment, was a mannequin, an empty outer garment I had carefully left behind me when I moved. It was hollow.

The gunshot broke it open like a clay pot.

I had not been twiddling my thumbs while Vanity chatted and bought me time. The initial stroke that paralyzed Victor and sent an azure-burning Quentin, smothering, to his face, all happened before I would move or blink.

But at the same moment when Colin was leaping, with his inspired and impossibly quick movements, onto the god (whose movements turned out to be even more impossible and even more quick), I had slid most of my mass into the fourth dimension and "past" the deck into Victor's body.

My higher senses showed more details about the Swift God. Like a Hecatonchire, he was a fourth-dimensional being. But, where they were thick and blocky, expanding cones in the fourth dimension, he was slim and streamlined, occupying successively smaller and smaller cross-sections. They might be able to turn into giants, but he could turn into a pixie, or a dust mote.

And his geometry was bent the opposite way from mine. His space was Riemannian, where mine was Lobachevskian. Everything in four-space was farther away for me than it would have been through flat three-space; for him, everything was closer.

A ball of shortcuts through space-time was folded around him like an origami rose, confusing and complex to behold.

The spiderweb of moral strands I had seen around Mrs. Wren was nothing compared to the vast webwork I saw now circling the god of magicians, nets upon nets and fields upon fields, streaming away from him in each direction. There were ripples and glances of activity of some sort, furious and restless, pulsing through these webs. Like the eye of a storm, the fulcrum of all these webs was wound around the wand in his hand, so that no moral obligation went straight to nor returned correctly from the web he wove.

He had bent the fourth dimension positively to increase his speed. When he struck Victor's skull, the bend had popped open, and the laws of nature inside had spilled out like burning oil directly into Victor's interior spaces, his heavy armor pointless, useless, a medieval wall unable to keep out a satellite-based missile attack.

Inside Victor's gigantic snake-body, I saw the energy echo of the damage the fourth-dimensional murder weapon had done, and was still doing.

The twisted laws of nature had imposed a twisted moral obligation on the inanimate matter inside Victor's body. Trismegistus had warped the monads inside Victor's huge body, woke them into self-awareness, bribed them to do his bidding, and turned to deal with Quentin.

Matter, in Victor's paradigm, lacked purpose. Atoms simply were what they were, without plan, final cause, reason, or preference. However, from the point of view of the higher dimensions, even apparently random events had final causes, evolutionary pressures directing them toward certain end-states and away from others. Trismegistus had imposed a final cause on the matter in Victor's body; it was now meant to kill him.

Like a game with a bribed umpire, the statistically random microevents, Brownian motions in Victor's bloodstream, nervous system, and chemical system, began to tend toward a fixed outcome. The workings of his body began to manifest a series of "accidents" and malfunctions on a molecular and cellular level.

Little blood clots had formed, blocking capillaries and veins; nerve cells had lost charge or misfired, causing a cascade of neural failures, a seizure; cells hemorrhaged; the statistically random movements of oxygen in the lining of his lungs were no longer even, and the pressures no longer permeated smoothly. Victor's self-repair reactions merely brought more random chance into play, and therefore gave the deliberate accidents a wider scope of action. He had heart, nerve, and lung collapse within the first second; brain misfirings were rapidly erasing all his brain information.

His higher centers of consciousness had been the first things to go; Victor's complex control over his own body, his elaborate defense strategies for dealing with material attacks, had all been bypassed.

His brain had simply stopped. In Victor's paradigm, the mind was merely mechanical brain actions; stop the brain actions, stop the mind. And it is all over.

Except that not everything inside Victor's body was obeying Victor's paradigm.

My little friendly blood-creature, and its gallons of progeny, was not neutral and purposeless matter. Their molecular games had bribed umpires of their own. Its repair-purpose was at odds with the death-purpose Trismegistus had imposed.

Furthermore, my blood-creatures were under an instruction to react and adapt intelligently, to create new strategies, and to perpetuate themselves. On the other hand, the purpose Trismegistus had implanted had been final and straightforward; he had not thought to ask the matter he contaminated to keep trying to kill Victor after Victor was dead. Nor had he thought to order his matter to cooperate with other matter to find any mutually satisfactory solutions.

I saw the solution that had been evolved, an intelligent design springing from the unintelligent motions of purpose-driven matter. I saw a glitter and flash of exchanging utilities, rapid strands of moral obligation running back and forth. A deal had already been struck.

A way was evolved to satisfy both the repair purpose and the death purpose; all the matter that cooperated toward the mutual purpose was helped; matter bits that refused to negotiate or to cooperate spent their energies fighting each other, and were ignored by the majority mass of the body.

I helped the negotiations by nullifying as many as I could reach of the controlling monads of the poisonous death-wish inside those bits of matter cooperating for the destruction of Victor. It took me only a split second, while Trismegistus was striking down Colin.

I saw I was not going to be able to save the huge and armored Telchine battle-body. Part of the compromise was that the death-seeking matter would be allowed to kill that giant body. Too bad.

It was magnificent inside, a cathedral on a molecular level, intricate and deadly as one of Her Majesty's Dreadnoughts.

If Trismegistus turned his head, or opened his upper-dimensional senses to look, he would have seen Victor escaping with his life. The shining usefulness, the reciprocal agreements between the warring groups of molecules, would have been as clear to him as it was to me.

And he would have seen me, too.