John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

Colin said, "This is our first night of freedom. Let's get some champagne!"

"There's the phone," Quentin said, reaching up to pluck the three hovering bottle caps, one after another, from the air. "You just call, a guy named Miguel brings it. Oh, and you hide in the closet, because you're not supposed to be in here. We did not buy a ticket for you."

Colin said, "Oh, come on. Hide in the closet?"

"Aha!" I said. "You will be the master of hiding! I have a present for you, Colin! Victor? Where did Vanity put it? The ring?"

Victor plucked the ring out of Vanity's pocket and tossed it across the room to me.

I held it out to Colin. "This is for you," I said.

'This is all so sudden," he said, sniffing. "I—I don't know what to say. Of course I will many you, but you will have to give up other women…"

"No, you moron!"

"Shouldn't you be kneeling?"

I proffered the ring to Quentin. "You give it to him."

Quentin waved it away. "And run the risk of another round of English schoolboy jokes? Not me. No.

No, thank you."

I said in anger to Colin, "It's a magic ring!"

"Of course. I expected that. What's it do?"

"Turns you invisible!"

"I expected that. Of course. Does it inevitably corrupt the ring-bearer?"

Quentin said, "It's from Plato. It's a symbol of absolute power corrupting absolutely."

"And I am getting this fine, fine gift of corruption, why, again, exactly?"

Quentin said, "Dwarfs make less noise when they fall than giants. You know, less distance to the muck.

So when the word 'corruption' popped up in conversation, the name 'Colin' sprang up on our lips almost of its own accord!"

I said, "It will protect you from Miss Daw's magic. No more being flung off cliffs. You'll be the strongest person in our group. It won't really corrupt you."

"I'll be the strongest person in the group… ?"

"Yes," I said.

"And it won't corrupt me… ?"

"One never knows."

"Will I be able to command the Nibelungs with it?"

"Do you want it, or not?"

"You are sure about the 'no corruption' thing, right?"

"Do you want me to stuff this up your nose?"

"No. Give it here! It already seems very precious to me, yessss… Precioussss… Is anyone hungry for fisssssh or is it jusssst me?"

"Will you stop fooling around?"

"Ach! They hates us, my precious! Nasty elfish blondes!"

1.

Colin slipped the ring on his finger. "Well? Am I invisible yet? I want to know when I can start taking off my clothes."

Quentin said, "The clothes turn invisible, too."

"Yeah, but I get to walk around in the buff, with no one staring. I can pick my nose, scratch my bum, you know…"

"Um, well. In cold weather, you can put on clothes, and your socks will no longer need to match,"

Quentin said.

"What about things I pick up? What if I just lean against something, and pretend I am picking it up? If I turn a laser beam invisible, can I make it harmless? What about radio waves? Am I also stealthed to radar? Can I blind an enemy by making his retinas invisible?"

I looked impressed. Actually, I thought they were good questions. Smarter than I expected Colin to ask.

Maybe he had been hanging out with Victor more than I noticed.

Quentin said, "I would guess it relates to objects directly related to identifying you, such as clothing or footprints. When you turn the collet of the ring toward your hand, you see, that acts as a symbol of the hiding of your seal, or, in other words, your public or outer self."

"Ah! I see! It is all clear!… Except…"

"Except…"

"What the heck is a collet?"

"That thing there."

"Aha! On—! Off—! On—! Off—!" Colin twisted the ring on his finger, round and round. He vanished and reappeared, vanished and reappeared.

I noticed that something other than being permeable to photons must be creating the effect. Not only did his clothing vanish, but the seat cushion where he sat was not depressed, or did not look depressed, when he was unseen.

Colin flickered and reappeared. "I am trying to get it exactly halfway between turned in and turned out, to see if I can make only my left disappear. Here! Watch this." He vanished. "Tell me when you see the beer turn into urine. Ready?"

When he picked up the beer bottle, I was expecting to see a floating beer bottle, like in every version of the movie The Invisible Man I had ever seen. Instead, I saw the bottle, I knew it could not float by itself, saw the fingers, and traced the line of his arm back up to his face. His features were dark and clouded with shadows, as if light were avoiding him.

I stuck out my tongue and waved at him. "There is a limit on what you can do," I said. "If you attract attention, people can see through the illusion you're casting."

He looked at Quentin. "Can you see me, Quentin?"

Quentin had his face turned toward Colin's chair, but his eyes were unfocused, like a blind man's. "Not at the moment. I cannot see the beer bottle either. It was there a moment ago, but I do not remember seeing it fade out or wink out, or anything. I must have blinked just when you picked it up."

I said, "How many people do you think you could lift, Colin? I mean, if you can pick up a beer bottle, you can pick up Vanity. Maybe the whole group could vanish, if need be."

He said, "In my elephant form, or as a human?"

"Do you have an elephant form? When did you get an elephant form?"

Colin twisted the ring. A sort of pressure in my sinuses and eyes relaxed and faded. It was a small thing, and I was not aware of it until it went away, but something, some hypnotic compulsion, had been trying to get me to look away, or blink.

Colin said to Quentin, "Okay, great and powerful Oz, how do I get an elephant spirit to come and flow through my crystal window?"

"The true name of the father of elephants is Tantor."

"Great! What good does that do me? I am not a necromancer. I cannot summon up spirits by calling on their names."

Quentin said mildly, "Are you sure?"

"Okay!" Colin put the beer bottle aside and stood up, making a dramatic gesture with his hands,

"Sim-sala-bim! Size of … an eleph —"

" No !" Quentin and I shouted together. I jumped up and grabbed Colin's arm. "If you turn into an elephant in the cabin, you'll crush the deck up and smash everything! Are you crazy?"

Colin sat down again. "Doing a Quentin-type spell would not work for me, anyway. I do not believe in that stuff, so it wouldn't work."

Quentin said, "Actually, what I do works whether I believe in it or not."

Colin picked up the beer bottle and gestured with it: "Aha! You believe that, don't you? So it's true for you."

Quentin turned to me. "Amelia, help me out…"

I said, "Don't look at me! I believe every statement has truth-value only in relation to its frame of reference. An Englishman and a Chinaman pointing 'up' both point away from the center of the Earth, but if you extend the lines from their fingers indefinitely, they get farther and farther apart…"

"No, that wasn't the help I was asking for. Look at the ring of Gyges. What does the ring look like to you? I am curious as to how you see it."

I opened my higher senses and looked.

2.

The ring was the center of a webwork of morality strands, which extended throughout the entire nearby area of time-space. Major arms of the strands extended to some place I could not see with merely four-dimensional senses.

I "lifted" my hand out of Earth's continuum and plucked my hypersphere from where it rested in my wings, and I rotated it from circle to sphere, and then to four-sphere, and then to a five-sphere.

It grew immensely heavy in my hand as "hemispheres" of crystalline energy popped up into existence