John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

He was wearing a white loose shirt with puffed sleeves gathered at the wrist, and cream-colored whipcord riding breeches that showed off the muscles in his legs. He looked like something between a flower child and a king's musketeer. I was surprised Vanity had not also bought him a hat with a plume.

Colin looked up when I entered, tried to wolf-whistle but could not, and tried to applaud, but could not, his mouth blocked by the rebreather, his hands by the menu.

Quentin was picking up some of the litter off our carpet from the impromptu picnic, and was staring in puzzlement at a clearly labeled box of spoons.

Vanity was sitting in a chair with her eyes half-closed; Victor had one hand on her wrist and was looking at his new watch, like a doctor taking her pulse.

Colin spat out his rebreather. It hissed at him. He said, "Don't you clean up pretty, Amelia? Nice dress."

Quentin glanced up from his spoon-frowning activity. "Yes. Very attractive, Amelia."

I said thank you and turned around with my arms out, giving them a little catwalk spin.

Colin said, "The other one was nice, too. The breast-exposer dress, I mean. Very Minoan."

I made that noise one tends to make in one's throat when Colin talks, a sort of half-gargle, half-sigh, as if one is preparing to spit out a bad taste. "Well! Enough about me! Let's see to item number two on our agenda. Vanity's memory. What do we do?" I said.

Colin emitted a short, high laugh, and put his re-breather back in, bending his head over the entertainment listings.

I gave Colin a sharp look. "What? What?"

Quentin answered. "It's done. We're done. Victor and Colin performed the operation while you were getting dressed. It didn't take long."

Victor looked up at me. "Colin impressed his view of Vanity onto her while I sent a cryptognostic probe into her long-term memory areas. The enemy could not seem to actually destroy the memories, but they misfiled them."

Colin spat the rebreather out again. "He's telling it wrong. Miss Daw increased the amount of time surrounding each memory, so it happened a million years ago, instead of last week. No wonder Freckle Fox couldn't remember anything! And Mrs. Wren cast an enchantment on her, so it seemed like a dream, and faded."

I was still blinking. "So… you already did it? It's over?"

Quentin said, "Our part is over. Vanity is on a spirit quest. She may be gone all night."

Missing something because I had been kidnapped, that was one thing. Missing something because I had paused to get dressed, that seemed downright rude, somehow.

I said, "Well? Are you going to tell me what happened? What did you do to her?"

Victor said, "There was almost nothing to do. Quentin's book, the chapter on the Ancient Art of Memory, described a method of approach. Vanity was subconsciously hypnotized into believing in

'magic,' and so she was the one actually suppressing her own memories, due to her faith in, Mrs. Wren's so-called spell. Once nerve paths were opened between her cortex and the hypnagogic areas of her brain, she became aware of the deception."

Colin said, "I will translate from Victor-babble into the common tongue of Westron. Miss Daw thrust a million years of time-energy into Vanity's brain. Once Vanity realized that time is an illusion, the million years went away. There was also some sort of spell, too, but Victor neutralized it with his magical anti-magic ray that magically pops out of his head and magically shoots out magic beams of blue magic."

Quentin said, "There is no such thing as magic. Victor does not believe in magic."

Colin said, "Victor does not believe in magic because that mind-set is one of the ingredients in the magic spell he uses to throw magic blue beams from his magic third eye. It's just an ingredient, like having eye of newt or toe of frog."

"It's not magic," insisted Quentin.

"Guess I was fooled by the big blue extra eyeball! Extra eyeball! Or didn't you notice he has an extra eyeball? Count them. I get at least to three before I get confused. Isn't that one more than you or me, and two more than Popeye the sailor? Check my math here."

Victor spoke without looking up from his watch: "Your dispute is terminological. Check your definitions."

3.

We all sat or stood, watching Vanity breathing. She breathed deeply and slowly. It did not look to me as if she were asleep.

I spent more than an hour trying to catch up Colin on some of the things he'd missed while he was a bird, including hordes upon hordes of information I had already told the others while we all were waiting in the motorboat.

He seemed disinterested after a while, and I let the conversation lag. Eventually things trailed into silence, and we sat watching Vanity. In, out. In, out. I assume the guys got more fun out of seeing her chest rise and fall than I did.

4.

Quentin looked up from his grimoire (where, I assume, he was only looking at the pictures) and he said to Victor, "I notice that three of the paradigms, Vanity's, Colin's, and Amelia's, do not seem intellectual in nature."

I stirred from my lethargy and said, " It is so intellectual in nature! What I do? It's geometry."

Quentin said to me, "How did you give the molecular engine living in my bloodstream free will?"

I blinked. "Um. I turned the moral energy strands back on themselves to form an infinitely recursive fractal loop. Once the awareness was self-reflexive, it was self-aware. See? That was a very intellectual-in-nature thing to do."

Quentin said, "And how did you know to do that? How were you able to 'turn' this moral energy?

Manipulate it?"

I said, "That's not really a fair question. An eyeball cannot see itself. No mind, by definition, can be aware of the subconscious foundation of its own thought; nor can any mind exist without such a foundation.

How can I de-scribe a process when I am part of that process, and the act of making up a description changes the process? I have limbs and organs and energy-manipulation systems in the fourth dimension.

They do things. I am not a biologist; I cannot tell you the mechanism."

Victor said, "I am a biologist. It takes a child months or years to learn to develop nerve paths to control a limb or organ. If you discovered a new hand grafted to you tomorrow, it would take you months or years to learn how to use it, because you would have to develop the nerve structures and reflexes one at a time, like a child."

I said, "So what are you saying?"

Victor said, "Those nerve paths must have been impressed upon you without your knowledge."

Quentin said, "Or you have always had them, you and every member of your race. Or maybe I should say, everyone who follows your metaphor of the universe." To Victor, he said, "Amelia is basically agnostic; she has theories about the limitations of human knowledge, she believes in the uncertainty principle. All knowledge is relative to a frame of reference. For her, 'Chaos' is that which by definition is unknown and unknowable. The fourth dimension is her metaphor for it."

I said, "It's not a metaphor. I've seen the fourth dimension."

Quentin spread his hands. "And I have seen aetheric spirits dancing in palest raiment by the light of the moon around a mushroom ring, and I've heard the harps the Four Living Beings play who ward the dancers sacred to Endymion. Where those light feet had passed, I drew up a residuum through a wand of willow-wood, into an alembic, and sealed those vapors there by virtue of the key of Solomon. Explain my experience."

I said, "I can't. What cannot be explained is a given, like a premise."

Victor said to Quentin, "Undeveloped sections of your nervous system were reacting to energies around you, and presenting childlike images to your cortex in response. A sufficiently detailed examination of the motions of the atoms in your brain would reveal what causes these images to arise."