Titans of Chaos

The echoes of the fading light failed, and it was suddenly as dark here as it had ever been inhyperspace above England. Remember England, where I had gotten lost less than an inch or twoaway from the plane of Earth? Here, I was at least fifty yards away, and had been blown fartherstill, and tumbled. I did not know at what angle my present three-body might be relative to Earth'sspace-time.

So I floundered for another long minute or so in the gloom and gluey thickness of hyperspace.

Then I gathered my wits, glad no one was around to see me panicking.

I looked for morality strands. There were two pairs, of different internal natures. One set wasglittering with how useful it was to Lamia. I selected the other set and chased it.

I saw disconnected clouds of bluish light, like nebulae in a sky without stars. When I passedthrough one such cloud, I saw an image of Earth's home dimension, with the expanding blister ofthe dreamworld still touching it and intersecting. Was this a current image, and the cloud amedium to carry the image to me? Or perhaps I was passing through patches of slowly travelinglight that were tumbling like shards of a broken mirror through the vast gloom of hyperspace,debris from the explosion.

Whatever they were, when I passed through the first cloud, I saw it light up with usefulness tosomeone or something.

There was a glint of shimmering music-energy ahead of me. I saw two of them advancing towardme through the gloom, wheel within wheel and circle within circle, with eyes of fire on the rim ofevery wheel. They were made of a substance higher and finer than matter, and extended intoupper and lower dimensions. The wheels orbiting them, if they passed through the "plane" ofthree-space, would be per-ceived not as a single perfect whole, but as a succession ofmathematically distinct notes and tones, distributed across time from beginning to end. Music, inother words. These were creatures of living song, with strands of destiny-force extendingfutureward and past-ward from their blazing, beautiful eyes.

Sirens. These were the race of Miss Daw. The sirens were coming for me, glittering and shining,wheels within wheels of slow, grand, solemn force, awful as the motions of the starry spheres---

Without a word, they attacked.

Sirens