John Wright - Titans of Chaos

But he was blind in one eye on that side, and folded his body back into a three-dimensional solid (all his little forms like nested Russian dolls, one within the other) during the moment when he chanted his death-curse at Colin. (Unable to do two paradigms at once? Perhaps.) So he did not see me. During that moment.

During the next moment, he was talking to Vanity, and she was flashing her eyes and heaving her bosom at him.

I don't meant that the way it sounds, but, gosh, if I had been a superpowered mad god, recently escaped from Hell, here to destroy the universe, I would have paused to chat up Vanity, too. I mean, she has that way about her, bright and fiery good looks that draw men like moths to candle flame. And she had undone the three buttons of her blouse again.

And she did what any girl has to do to keep a guy talking: She asked him questions about himself, gave him a chance to brag.

And even a swift god cannot do three things at once.

So, during that moment, I reached into Quentin's body and tried to move the poisonous gas in his lungs into the fourth dimension, while leaving his lungs in three. It did not really work. My upper tendrils and wings and such can manipulate from rather fine energies, but I was not used to dealing with a cloud of discrete particles.

Then I brushed up against a monad that did not belong to Quentin. The gas cloud had a single driving purpose behind it, one set of molecular instructions that had been repeated by a time-stutter technique onto all the separate cells of Quentin's lungs. The poisonous gas was carbon monoxide, created directly out of the carbon dioxide waste of his exhalations, with an unhealthy seasoning of ozone thrown in for good measure.

I tried to orient my manipulators so as to consider all the monads of the traitor-monoxide as one monad, and negate its purpose. But I did not know what I was doing. Victor's paradigm was one that had been used here, the matter-control of the cyclopes. Had I more time, I could have figured it out.

So I managed to scoop some of the monoxide out of the lungs merely by tilting Quentin in the fourth dimension and bending gravity to make it pour out. When I folded Quentin back into the three-dimensional space, I left a bubble in the lung area, so that the "distance" between any point inside his lungs and the actual walls in his lungs was greatly increased. Any given particle of the swallowed gas cloud now had farther to go to reach the lung wall; the effect was to decrease the density of the monoxide.

It decreased the distance to the oxygen, too. Quentin still could not breathe.

This will sound gross. I put my four-dimensional face inside his three-dimensional lungs and breathed out. I was giving him mouth-to-mouth. Sort of. The wall tissue of the lungs was around me to each side, as if I had put my head in a wet bag, and they were red and blistered from the chemical reactions Trismegistus had created here. Part of the damage had been to turn the cell matter in the lungs into poison.

I unfolded my lungs into the fourth dimension, so that the volume they contained was much greater than any three-dimensional lung. Out I blew, a little Headmaster Boggin of my very own.

It did not seem gross to me, when I saw the utility light up through Quentin's damaged lung.

I reached out with my hand and massaged his heart to make it start again. I felt the unbeating heart jump to life. No, it was not gross at all.

When his heart moved, I saw, outside, that the walking stick Quentin had been carrying now jumped up from where it lay on the deck and struck Quentin.

The internal nature of the stuff Quentin was made of had been disenchanted, turned unmagical, and neutralized, when the azure beam from the eye of Trismegistus swept over him. But his wand had not been in his hand at that moment The wand was still magical. It was still wreathed around and knotted with lines and webs of spells, set there carefully by Quentin.

The wand struck Quentin's motionless body.

Then it all turned into clay. Quentin's spirit, a shape of dark fire, winged with night and crowned with black stars, fell out from the bottom of his flesh and slid through the deck. It closed upon the black cat-shadow clawing Vanity.

The wand, flying off on a mission of its own, smote Phobetor, who turned immediately back into Colin, a nice, human-looking boy.

A boy without a demon-heart to quench. I saw the web of magic slide away, clawing and strangling, but slipping. Colin swayed unsteadily to his feet, screamed a weak sort of yell, and flopped somewhat unconvincingly at Trismegistus.

Trismegistus, meanwhile, saw Quentin's body turn to fine porcelain, and the beam darted from his metal eye, sweeping down. Both Quentin and the catlike shadow-thing were struck, but the beam must have hit a more vital part of the shadow-cat; it yowled and vanished, whereas Quentin merely staggered.

Trismegistus shrank to half his size and lifted his revolver into the fourth dimension, and shot me.

I rotated my girl-body into place to parry and ducked behind it. The bullet bounced off the skintight Amazonian bodysuit I wore. Tee hee.

A probe (made of some sort of music energy) unfolded from a time distortion in the fourth dimension, and fired a bullet of another kind. This one was an Amazonian space-flattener bullet.

I unfolded out from behind my 3-D cross-section, trying to maximize my volume, so that I would have the largest mass possible to absorb and disperse the damage. Three, four, and five dimensional I became, and, since the restraining weight of the neutronium medium seemed weaker and more flexible here, where the chaos was bubbling to every side, I pushed an inch or two into the sixth.

Odd. What were those tetrahedrons doing here? Each face of the tetrahedrons was made of a five-dimensional plane of time-stuff. Beyond, I saw gravity-lights, refracting the time-shining into four rainbows, which formed, in turn, into many-branching shapes like towers of coral, each angle of which held an interlocking group of hypercube-crystalsfor an edge, reaching long arms into whirlpools of neutrino-heavy ideograms made of paper-thin five-dimensional thought-energy.

Shock, pain. The shell passed over and into the space I occupied, bypassing the three-dimensional armor, smashing me flat again.

Instead of jumping away from Trismegistus, I jumped at him. The shell went off when I was only two meters from him, and a hot poker of pain went through my shoulder, down my lungs, hip, tail, and out the other side of me.

The music cut into my wings and tail. I smelled my own blood burning, and I fell, three-dimensional again, to the deck. I did not feel the pain just yet. But I could not feel my right arm either.

Trismegistus had to pull all his mass back into the shape he wore, the small shape, because the music burning me was going off so close to him. Colin grappled him for a moment, biting into his neck veins with an unenthusiastic sort of chomp.

During that moment, Victor, our human-size Victor, dressed in a skintight cloth of metal foil, popped out of a coffin-shaped slot or hangar in the tail of the dead dragon body. He was faceless and eyeless, his visage merely a blank mask of bony substance. He reached back inside with a ray of magnetism and manipulated some control. The guns lining the back and sides of the dragon swiveled to cover Trismegistus, and opened fire.