Titans of Chaos

One bullet was silver, and wrapped with webs of moral energy. One was charged with amonad-rotating vortex. Fascinating. One contained a charge of the matter-utility-negatingenergy-this is the one I had felt. The final one was the 3-D cross-section of twenty-one strands of4-D dimension-compressing musical wave fronts. This was the one the ladies had chambered.

The power supply came from something that looked like a miniature cyclopes eye embedded in thestock. Buttons along the barrel controlled a microcomputer that fed commands to this hidden eye.

There were packages of material set in the stock, and the beams from the eye could be focused topass through one or more of them, altering their contents; and there was a chambering section toload the altered contents into a magazine of empty shells, which could then be chambered byworking a lever above the trigger. Thus, in addition to the four main types of shells, theseweapons could fire any number of possible nanite-packages to produce a very wide range ofeffects, limited only by the skill of the weapon programmer.

When I twisted the controlling monad of the power supply, and then granted the mechanisms freewill, the guns did not know what to do. Of course, since the silly things had been (until this verymoment) only made of groups of mindless atoms organized without final causes or moralpurposes, once free, they had no unity to hold them together. One barrel blew bubbles; the othersmacked its lips and started warbling Bing Crosby tunes. The bullets trickled out of the no-longerbarrels and dropped limply to the grass.

So glad Vanity suggested that idea.

Negating the controlling monad of these robotlike women robbed them of purpose and madethem, also, drop limply to the grass.

The horses were also artificial constructs, made with a very advanced form of biotechnology,perhaps constructed one molecule at a time. Instead of protein, their bodies were made ofsomething more like fiberglass, layered with Kevlar. The bones were some sort of flexible livingceramic.

The steeds were smart, fast, tireless, and strong. And brave. And well-trained. (Or should I say

"well-programmed"?) Just the kind of steed every girl dreams about.

The horses, like the women, were also "flat" in the fourth-dimensional direction, not unlikeVictor, or Dr. Fell.

I should mention that I moved my cross-section one-hundredth of an inch redward into thematerial plane.