Titans of Chaos

Harmoniously the sirens sang out loudly, one voice clear and high, the other dulcet and soft andlow. I saw it as a wave of advancing energy, and concussion of force rippling through the mediumof hyperspace, flattening everything in its path into three dimensions, then two, then one, thenzero. It was a force of utter annihilation.

The force expanded in spheres and hyperspheres, filling the area. It was broad and wide and high,and also filled the spaces to the blue and red directions of me.

There was no direction to turn. Except...

I was still carrying the talisman of Chaos. With a wingtip, I opened my hypersphere and folded itinto its fifth-dimensional form. My sphere lit up with a potent energy-echo, sending a shock waveinto each direction, including two new directions at right angles to all others, showing me thedark, grainy beingness of the fifth dimension. You will never be without light again...

I could see that new, strange direction: I moved there.

The substance of five-space was so thick as to make the cores of neutron stars seem like vacuumby contrast. I could press, or seep, my now five-dimensional body into the gray solid wall and pushit out of shape: a quarter inch, maybe, maybe an eighth of an inch in the direction I now called

"strangeward."

But a three-dimensional cube one eighth of an inch above a flat plane where an angry squaresends out a flat knife of all-destructive energy is safe. The knife misses. The target is in anotherdimension, infinitely out of reach.

And this was all-destructive energy. This was not something meant to stun or trap me. I couldhear the interior reality of the four-dimensional expanding hypersphere of deadly music as itpassed by an eighth of an inch "beneath" me. ("Beneath" a better word than "antistrangeward")My five-dimensional senses opened up. Once more, I had adapted to this new, intenselypressurized, endlessly black dimension. Once more, I could hear three new conditions orsensations: being, relation, and extension.

The neutronium medium of five-space rang like a dull bell. I heard messages made of relational

"sets" or "frames" being passed back and forth through this area of over-reality:Your wife, Parthenope, speaks: Lord Husband, I detect the interior nature of the shadow of thetarget, Phaethusa. She is nearby, at right angles to our present theme.