John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

He stood, raised his wand, touched the tip to his chest, and spoke: "Nine nights I hung upon the wind-torn tree, my own spear through my own heart, myself a sacrifice to myself, high on the tree whose roots none know! None came to aid me, none gave me drink. I saw the runes below me. Crying out, I seized on them."

He pointed to one of the marks he'd made on the ground with his wand. "Three great runes burn in my hand. A fourth and greater one I know. If a man fastens chains and gyves to my limbs, I sing the song to set me free; locks spring apart, fetters jump open, my hands and feet know liberty."

He raised the wand and tapped the door.

The door trembled in the frame.

Vanity said, "Did it work? The door was listening to him."

I said, "No. I can still see the spiderweb across it."

Colin said, "Maybe Vanity can just wish a secret passage into being, and we can go into the room that way."

Quentin said over his shoulder, "That's not the problem. The door is not really locked; it is just going to let off an alarm or a curse if we open it unlawfully. The windows and floorboards are the same way. The act of going into the room is what is prohibited. If this had been a locked door, something keeping us prisoner, that last rune would have worked. Well. Maybe I can make the magic think magic is wicked.

Let me try something else…"

Again he tapped a chalk letter with his wand-tip. "Nine great runes burn in my hand. A tenth and greater one I know. When witch-hags ride the wild wind at night, such spell I know as to daze and confound them, that they will not find their own doorposts again, or return to don their day-shapes."

When he raised the wand to touch the door this time, the stick in his hand jumped backwards in his grip, striking Quentin a nasty knock across the elbow—he had put his arm up to guard his face—and went spinning end over end down the corridor. It clattered loudly to the carpet.

"Ow, ow, ow," muttered Quentin, holding his arm.

"Is it broken?" asked Colin.

"If it were broken, I would be crying like a girl, not saying, 'Ow, ow, ow.'"

"Well," said Colin. "Let me go fetch your wand. At least it will give me something to do."

"Don't bother. Apsu! To me!" And the invisible stagehand snatched up the stick and tossed it back to him.

"Great trick," said Colin, looking more downcast than ever.

Quentin said to the door, " Mellon !"

A noise came from the door, a creak of wood.

Vanity said, "What's that noise?"

Quentin said, "It is laughing at me. Apparently, I am not exactly a friend."

I asked, "What it? What is laughing?"

He said, "An undead dryad. They chopped her up and planed her into boards. I cannot break the spell, because I don't have any influences to back me up. I am a trespasser. The moral order of the universe is not on my side."

Colin said, "Tell the door that it's our stuff in there. Stolen property. Belongs to us."

"In effect, I just tried that. Whoever put up the door was not the one who stole the goods. If they are stolen."

I said, "They might have been surrendered in a war. Or they might simply belong to Boggin."

Victor said, "We are forgetting the principle of what you call the table of oppositions. Magicians don't stop spells, you said. They stop psionic effects. Materialism stops magic."

His forehead opened. His metal eye rotated into view. Azure sparks, and then a beam, lanced from his eye and played back and forth across the door.

Quentin backed away nervously.

Victor, said, 'There is a magnetic anomaly. But there cannot be any mind, or intention, or purpose watching this door, since only complex living mechanisms have minds, and there is insufficient complexity here for that. I see nothing but wood, and wood is carbon atoms strung together. I do not see anything that could cause the magnetic anomaly. Whatever has no cause cannot exist."

Victor put his hand out and pushed the door open.

2.

I stepped in. I said, "Quentin, do you have the disc?"

Quentin pulled out the CD.

I said, "Victor, please tell me the disc player you got from that Lilac woman is still in working order after your duel with Dr. Fell?"

Victor gave me an odd look. "Her name is Lily. I haven't checked the player. I don't know if it works.

Give me the disc, Quentin."

Colin said, "What is supposed to happen?"

I said, "The last time I was here, Miss Daw played music. One of the objects in the safe reacted to the music, and sent out an energy. Call it light. That light allowed me to see in a direction I normally cannot see, and to reach a part of my body… God, you guys don't remember any of that, do you?"

Victor said, "I remember." To the others, he said, "She thinks she is four-dimensional. That is the model she uses to explain her supernatural effects, like psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and shape-change."

I wasn't going to argue the point. I said, "Play the music."

One of Mozart's violin concertos floated from the tiny speakers on the little square machine. I saw space shiver and flatten.

Like a crystal goblet vibrating in sympathy to a perfect note, the sphere in the safe rang. It gave off the substance of hyperspace, a material thicker than reality, which, at once, was light, music, thought, interval, time, probability, certainty___

I could see the squat safe, drawn like a thick line around the other flat objects it encircled. Extending above and below it in the "red" and "blue" directions, I saw the hemispheres of the hypersphere.

Victor handed me the disc player, and I kept my hand on the button. When I stopped it, the hypersphere continued to ring and echo for a moment, and, during that moment, I could act.

I put my hand "over" the line and into the safe. I could touch the surface—one of the many surfaces of its hypersurface—of the sphere with my fingers, but I could not budge it from its location.

I pulled my hand back down into three-space.

I pushed the play button again; space flattened; the flatness set the sphere to ringing; I pushed pause and reached again. I tried to pick up the other objects in the safe: a book, a photo, a vial of fluid, a necklace.

Nothing moved. It was as if they were frozen in ice.

Vanity said, "Gosh, that looked weird."

I glanced at her. "What did you see?"

She said, "Your hand got small. Not like it was shrinking, but like it was receding down a tunnel. You know."

"Parallax," Victor said.

"Yeah. Parallax. But the wall of that metal cabinet thing. Still looked like it was closer, even though the hand, your hand, in front of it, looked farther away. Um. And it turned red."

"Doppler shift," said Victor.

Quentin said, "Your hand turned ghostly. I saw a red light, too. But it wasn't exactly what Vanity just described."

Victor said, "Chaos. Our brains are each programmed to interpret it according to a mutually exclusive metaphor."

Colin said, "No. I saw. Her hand woke up. This dream, this false world we are all in, it gave way. Look, you are all logical people. If the safe was real, could she put her hand through it, into it, without leaving a hole? No. The safe is an illusion. It is only there because we think it is there."

Victor said, "I cannot seem to penetrate the safe wall with my magnetics. I cannot manipulate the lock."

He turned. "If your theory is correct, Colin, you could open the safe just by willing it to open."

Quentin muttered, "It is not a theory. Not disprovable. Article of faith."

Colin frowned, looked determined, strode forward with a quick and steady step, plunged his hand down as if to brush the substance of the safe aside like mist…

Cracked his knuckles loudly on the steel sides of the safe, and sprang back, yelping and waving his hurt hand in the air.