Titans of Chaos

The thin white plumes of the clouds were below me now, a dazzle of white that seemed to rest onthe indigo bosom of the ocean. The air had a width to it, a whiteness, I had not seen before. Therewas nothing around; the nearest island to us was still behind the visible horizon, even at thisheight.

I did not head straight up, as that was not the easiest way to gain altitude. I picked a spot abovethe horizon, bent the energies of gravity and timespace around me, and soared.

As I rose through ever-higher strata of atmosphere, I had to keep adjusting the contours in myfourth-dimensional body. This was a delicate balance of several factors.

For thrust, I was swimming in the heavier medium of four-space, being carried along bysupermassive particles in that parallel continuum. The flows of heavier-than-matter substance inthe fourth dimension were not even. From time to time I sensed (shining with utility) favorablecurrents in the thick medium, things like updrafts. I could sail up these not-quite-thermals with myblue-shining wing surfaces no three-dimensional wing could reach, and ride the current upward.

When I reached the top of the not-thermal, I had to start pumping wings again. To get the bestspeed, I had to flatten and fold as much of my many-dimensional body as I could into the "plane"

of the Earth's continuum, but I had to keep enough wing in four-space to grip the medium. Thisincreased my drag.

For lift, I was not shooting rockets out of my boots or anything like that. I attempted the thing Ihad seen my sister Lampetia do in the dream: forming a lapse in space.

The resistance of the earthly gravity made folding space impossible at first. Then I discovered if Iattempted a lapse on a submicroscopic level, where the position of particles of known mass wasuncertain in any case, even the nearby mass of the Earth did not bother to hinder the effect.

You cannot really call it "falling up." It was a series of perspective adjustments taking place morerapidly than the acceleration due to gravity: My frame of reference was moving upward morequickly than I was falling downward within my frame of reference.

Imagine the space like a bit of paper. I fall down nine meters per second: I fold ten meters of thepaper and introduce an uncertainty as to my location, and move up one inch across the fold. Isnap the paper open, and find myself ten meters up: net gain of a meter.