Colene got hazy on the technical aspects beyond that. But she knew that a man named Benoit Mandelbrot had coined the term “fractal” for this type of figure, considering the process to be like a fractional dimension. A triangle was a two-dimensional figure; a fractal based on a triangle was a two-and-a-half-dimensional figure. There were implications for the ultimate nature of reality—and, it seemed, for the Virtual Mode. Because they seemed to have stepped into a fractal reality.
Benoit Mandelbrot had plotted his complex equation, and come up with a fractal figure that was a good deal more complicated than a triangle or circle. In fact it was deemed to be the most complicated object in mathematics. It had buglike shapes, and shell shapes, and seahorse-tail shapes, and separate “floating molecules” connected by “devil’s polymer,” an intricate web of invisibly fine filament. No matter how much the magnification was increased, there were always more and smaller bugs and shells and tails. Colene had been fascinated by the Mandelbrot set, but had thought it had no immediate relevance to her life. So she had watched a video tape showing the Mandelbrot set and what were called Julia sets, which she understood were two-dimensional aspects of the larger set, and let it fade from her thoughts.
Well, that had changed. Because Hobard was telling them that this was not the planet Earth, but a Mandelbrot bug. That just might make this a Julia universe. The implications were mind-blowing.
While she worked this out, Darius was coming at it in a less theoretical manner. He was not burdened by her awareness of the mathematical aspects. “So we are here,” he was saying. “On the planet Oria. And we are a satellite of this larger planet Jupiter. And you want to know whether we come from Mercury, Venus, or Mars.” He was speaking in his own language, using different names for things, but this was the way the thoughts came to her.
She focused on this confusing alignment. In this fractal universe, it seemed that Earth did not revolve around the sun, but around Jupiter, and so did the other small planets. Each planet was a Mandelbrot bug, and Jupiter was a big bug. The webwork of lines connected the four smaller bugs to the big one; apparently gravity didn’t do the job here. Okay, if that was the way it was, that was the way it was. In some realities science worked, and in others pseudoscience like faster-than-light travel worked. Where Darius came from, a kind of sympathetic magic worked, buttressed by emotional telepathy. Here on Oria—their name for Earth—magic worked. And astronomy was weird. But at least she had a handle on it, because of her experience with the Mandelbrot set.
“We come from none of these,” Darius said. He illustrated the statement by pointing to each of the other three bug-planets in turn and shaking his head no.
Colene was sent into another bypath of realization. The Mandelbrot set was portrayed two-dimensionally, but this was a three-dimensional world. Her pictures had shown small bugs of similar size to the north and south of a large one, because the south was the mirror image of the north. The north curlicues wound clockwise, the south ones counterclockwise. The Mandelbrot set was excruciatingly well organized, on its own terms. The image Hobard generated was three-dimensional. In fact it wasn’t a picture, it was a hologram. It showed four orbiting bugs: North, South, Toward, and Away. The Mandelbrot bug was always represented as pointing its snout to the west, with its babylike bottom toward the east, so those directions weren’t available for this. So Oria was north, and Mars south, with Venus and Mercury this way and that way. All of them tiny compared to Jupiter.
But of course they weren’t from any of the other planets. They were from Earth, which was the same as Oria. But not only would this be difficult to explain, it might not be wise. Their party of four had gotten trapped in an alternate reality in which a galactic emperor intended to use them to begin his conquest of other realities. Colene had worked a trick to free their anchor in that reality, and the Virtual Mode had found a new anchor here. If these despots caught on to that, not only would Nona be in trouble, the four of them might be similarly trapped here.
But Colene knew that Darius wasn’t going to lie about it, if asked directly. He had a thing about integrity. She loved him for that, but it was now a bad problem between them. As was the matter of women: he didn’t have a thing about being limited to one.
“None?” Hobard was amazed, and King Lombard was plainly skeptical,
“From a more distant planet?” King Lombard asked. Colene got the gist from Hobard’s understanding of the question; the king’s mind remained opaque to the horse.
We’re wasting time, Colene thought to Darius. We need to get settled with these folk and get by ourselves, so we configure out how to get back through the anchor. Because this was a temporary stop; they were on their way back to Darius’ reality, where they would be together, once they worked out their problems.
To her relief, Darius agreed. “It is hard to explain. We have come a long way, and we are tired. May we eat and rest?” He did this by spreading his hands in bafflement, then letting his shoulders slump, then putting a hand to his mouth as if eating. Seqiro buttressed these signals with projected meaning, so that Hobard interpreted them correctly without realizing the source of his understanding.
Hobard translated for King Lombard. The king nodded, then gestured. Red-and-blue-clad theow servants entered, gesturing to the three visitors to accompany them.
The king is in doubt about your nature, Seqiro thought to them. He wants to know whether you are of the animus.
The animus. Provos had mentioned that, but the rest of them hadn’t yet found out what it was. That was frustrating.
Then Colene had a bright notion. Seqiro—can you reach Nona and ask her about the animus?
Yes. But I will lose touch with you while orienting on her.
We can handle that for a while. See what you can get. It may be important.
She felt his presence leave, and knew he was seeking out Nona. She should be well within his range.
Meanwhile the servants were taking them to separate chambers. Some distance apart, by the look of it. She didn’t like that, and not because of ignorance: the despots were doing it so that Darius could be seduced and she could be raped. But they were not in a position to protest, and Provos had indicated that those efforts would not be successful. Provos had also smiled mysteriously, as if there were more to it than showed. Provos wasn’t worried, of course; not only was she unlikely to be a target, not being young and innocent, she had her memory of the future.
Well, Colene was not about to let any man rape her. She had been through the experience on one occasion, and thereafter become not only smarter about situations but militant. She did not want merely to foil a rape attempt; she wanted to foil it in such a way that the man regretted ever having the notion. What could she do to Knave Naylor that would have the desired effect?
She knew what she wanted to do: fix it so that he was the one who got raped. But she saw several problems with that. The man was likely to have potent (no pun) magic which she could not counter, and if she did counter it, that would only show that she had strong magic too, and women didn’t here. In fact, it could be real trouble if she was even assertive, because women weren’t supposed to be. So she couldn’t fight him; all she could do was hide and whimper like a properly docile girl. That would get her nowhere.