John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

Vanity said sweetly, "Illusion hurt you?"

Colin gave her a dark look. "Bugger you. Nightmares scare people, okay? They are still not real. No one dies on roller-coasters, but everyone screams on them." He wiggled his fingers gingerly. He muttered to himself, "If Cat-woman had been in that safe, damn safe would have melted…"

I said to the group, "I can touch the sphere, but for some reason, I cannot move it. Any theories?"

Colin sat down on the desk, still nursing his hand. He said, "You know more than any of us do about what's happening here."

I said, "Wait a minute. While we are waiting, let's catch up on what we intended to do."

I looked at Victor, reached into his monad, and realigned it, so that it illuminated all the darkened sections of his nervous system.

Vanity shrieked.

"What?" I said.

"You just stuck your hand through his head!"

Colin said grumpily, "It only appeared that way!"

Victor said, "I do not know what you did, but it seems to have accelerated some of what your molecule creature was doing. Quentin? May I experiment on you?"

Quentin said, "There is something I need to do first. I don't know what you are going to do to me, but I don't want to get my memory back until I do this."

He stepped forward and, with infinite tenderness and simple strength, took Vanity by the shoulders and dipped her back.

She said in horror, "Let go of me, or I'll scream!"

He said, "Then scream."

But he kissed her, and so she didn't. She made sort of surprised noises in her throat, and waved her arms almost comically in the air, but then the throat-noises became warm and soft, and the arms twined around Quentin's neck.

Colin said, "Me next."

Victor said, "I cannot help you. You need Quentin to cast a spell to get your memory back to you."

"No, I meant I get Vanity next. Pucker up, hot stuff!"

Quentin straightened up, pushed Vanity slightly behind him with a gentle motion of his arm, as if to keep her away from Colin.

Victor opened his third eye. With my higher sense, I saw the life-force of the puppy-like helpful nanite creature stream as a series of charged particles out from Vic-tor and embed themselves/itself into Quentin's bloodstream. Knots of moral energy that had been twisted around his heart and head went lax and slipped away.

Quentin rolled his eyes. "Oh, I am an idiot." He touched his wand to Colin's head.

Colin said, "Hold on! There is something I have to do before I get my memory back!"

And he got up off the table and came toward me with an evil gleam in his eyes.

I danced back. "Get away from me! I am not kissing some guy who just vomited! I don't even like you!"

Victor stepped between Colin and me, saying, "Colin, leave your sister alone."

That was like a bucket of cold water on me. Sister. If I was Colin's sister, then, according to Victor logic, I was Victor's sister, too.

Colin must have seen the sick look on my face, because the sort of fun-and-games grin he was wearing slipped.

He turned to Quentin. "Go ahead, Great and Powerful Oz. Zap me."

Quentin said, "I did everything right, but I did not finish the demonstration. There were other people besides Mrs. Wren who did things to you."

He tapped Colin on either shoulder, as if he were knighting him, touched him lightly with the wand on the forehead, and turned toward one of the walls (the west wall), saying in a loud voice, "Guardians of the Watch-towers of the West, it was only by Erichtho's evil that other forces and spells, potions and evils came to afflict Phobetor! You have washed him clean! He is unstained and whole! Morpheus, father of dreams, return the memories and thoughts that were lost to your son! I call upon Mnemosyne to make whole the spell! So Mote It Be!"

Colin said, "Oh my God !"

"What? What?" said Quentin.

"I tried to chop up Mrs. Wren with an axe! And she kicked my ass!"

Vanity rolled her eyes and made that little ugh ! gesture she sometimes makes when Colin is around. She tucked her hand into Quentin's elbow.

Quentin said, "What about Vanity?"

Colin said to me, "Yeah. Vanity next."

Vanity looked at me hopefully. "Yes? What about me? Is it my turn?"

I felt a sickening, sinking sensation in my stomach.

"Maybe something in the safe will help," I said. "If we could get it open."

3.

We talked over several options for how to get the safe open.

Victor assumed the hypersphere was fixed in place by Mr. Glum's power, psionics, and that Quentin could release it, if he could cast a spell into the safe, which he could not. Victor said the safe was made of a durable nonmagnetic alloy, which would not let "magnetic anomalies," i.e., magic, through the surface. Maybe if I had Quentin's wand in my hand, and touched it to the ball?

I tried that. Quentin and I practiced once or twice without reaching into the safe, just to get the timing right. Only the moment or two after I turned off the music, but while the sphere was still ringing, did I have a chance to act.

I knelt before the safe, one hand on the disc player, one hand on his staff tip. He was holding the other end of the staff, standing behind me.

I clicked the button. Mozart floated into the room. The sphere rang sharply, as if the notes were hammers striking it. Click. Music stopped. The ringing started to fade…

Quentin looked nervous as one end of his wand turned ghostly, reddened, and vanished into the solid surface of the safe wall. I touched the staff to one of the surfaces of the many spherical volumes of which the curved hyper-surface was composed.

I said, "Quickly." Each echo was quieter than the one before.

He said quickly, "The Eloi Adonai gave to Adam dominion over all beasts of the field and birds of the air, the bugs that swarm and the fish that swim. In token of this, King Adam granted names to all living things.

Force which binds: I am a son of Adam. You are a living thing of Earth. I name you, I dub, I christen you…"

I said, "Faster." The echoing in hyperspace was fading, fading. The hyperlight dimmed, like a candle flickering out. It was getting hard for me to "see" in that direction. Hyperspace is so very dark.

"… You are Er, the alone one, who grips these talismans. I call you by your true name! Release the talismans! And you shall no longer be alone…"

Too long. The last glint of hyperlight went dark; I lost the direction. With a spray of red sparks and the thrust of pressure, both my hand and Quentin's staff were forced out of the safe.

Quentin staggered back, looking at his staff, and at my hand. "Are you all right?"

He was talking to me, but the safe answered, with a hideous, unearthly moan, "It hurts! It is so heavy !"

Quentin waved his staff, and said several impressive things, but the voice did not speak again.

After a moment or two, Vanity told him to stop. "It is not listening anymore."

Victor said, "There was a magnetic flux near the point where the wand came out from the surface of the safe, but then it was smothered."

Vanity said, "I think it… died."

Quentin had been trying to mold the psychic energy into a living being, like drawing a face in clay. He had gotten the idea from what I had done to Dr. Fell's molecular engine, which I had given free will. His thought was that he could cast a spell on a being that had a moral nature, or at least talk to it.

Quentin looked rather pale at this point. "I wasn't expecting it to die again. I mean… I wasn't expecting that…"

Victor said, "I have an idea, though. In your paradigm, murder is bad, right? You could argue that Boggin was responsible for that entity being killed, and…"

Colin, looking at Quentin, interrupted softly, "Hey, maybe the thing is still alive, but just, you know, trapped in the safe?"