Titans of Chaos

And his geometry was bent the opposite way from mine. His space was Riemannian, where minewas Lobachevskian. Everything in four-space was farther away for me than it would have beenthrough flat three-space; for him, everything was closer.

A ball of shortcuts through space-time was folded around him like an origami rose, confusing andcomplex to behold.

The spiderweb of moral strands I had seen around Mrs. Wren was nothing compared to the vastwebwork I saw now circling the god of magicians, nets upon nets and fields upon fields, streamingaway from him in each direction. There were ripples and glances of activity of some sort, furiousand restless, pulsing through these webs. Like the eye of a storm, the fulcrum of all these webswas wound around the wand in his hand, so that no moral obligation went straight to norreturned correctly from the web he wove.

He had bent the fourth dimension positively to increase his speed. When he struck Victor's skull,the bend had popped open, and the laws of nature inside had spilled out like burning oil directlyinto Victor's interior spaces, his heavy armor pointless, useless, a medieval wall unable to keepout a satellite-based missile attack.

Inside Victor's gigantic snake-body, I saw the energy echo of the damage the fourth-dimensionalmurder weapon had done, and was still doing.

The twisted laws of nature had imposed a twisted moral obligation on the inanimate matter insideVictor's body. Trismegistus had warped the monads inside Victor's huge body, woke them intoself-awareness, bribed them to do his bidding, and turned to deal with Quentin.

Matter, in Victor's paradigm, lacked purpose. Atoms simply were what they were, without plan,final cause, reason, or preference. However, from the point of view of the higher dimensions, evenapparently random events had final causes, evolutionary pressures directing them toward certainend-states and away from others. Trismegistus had imposed a final cause on the matter in Victor'sbody; it was now meant to kill him.

Like a game with a bribed umpire, the statistically random microevents, Brownian motions inVictor's bloodstream, nervous system, and chemical system, began to tend toward a fixedoutcome. The workings of his body began to manifest a series of "accidents" and malfunctions ona molecular and cellular level.