I spent more than an hour trying to catch up Colin on some of the things he'd missed while he was a bird, including hordes upon hordes of information I had already told the others while we all were waiting in the motorboat.
He seemed disinterested after a while, and I let the conversation lag. Eventually things trailed into silence, and we sat watching Vanity. In, out. In, out. I assume the guys got more fun out of seeing her chest rise and fall than I did.
4.
Quentin looked up from his grimoire (where, I assume, he was only looking at the pictures) and he said to Victor, "I notice that three of the paradigms, Vanity's, Colin's, and Amelia's, do not seem intellectual in nature."
I stirred from my lethargy and said, " It is so intellectual in nature! What I do? It's geometry."
Quentin said to me, "How did you give the molecular engine living in my bloodstream free will?"
I blinked. "Um. I turned the moral energy strands back on themselves to form an infinitely recursive fractal loop. Once the awareness was self-reflexive, it was self-aware. See? That was a very intellectual-in-nature thing to do."
Quentin said, "And how did you know to do that? How were you able to 'turn' this moral energy?
Manipulate it?"
I said, "That's not really a fair question. An eyeball cannot see itself. No mind, by definition, can be aware of the subconscious foundation of its own thought; nor can any mind exist without such a foundation.
How can I de-scribe a process when I am part of that process, and the act of making up a description changes the process? I have limbs and organs and energy-manipulation systems in the fourth dimension.
They do things. I am not a biologist; I cannot tell you the mechanism."
Victor said, "I am a biologist. It takes a child months or years to learn to develop nerve paths to control a limb or organ. If you discovered a new hand grafted to you tomorrow, it would take you months or years to learn how to use it, because you would have to develop the nerve structures and reflexes one at a time, like a child."
I said, "So what are you saying?"
Victor said, "Those nerve paths must have been impressed upon you without your knowledge."
Quentin said, "Or you have always had them, you and every member of your race. Or maybe I should say, everyone who follows your metaphor of the universe." To Victor, he said, "Amelia is basically agnostic; she has theories about the limitations of human knowledge, she believes in the uncertainty principle. All knowledge is relative to a frame of reference. For her, 'Chaos' is that which by definition is unknown and unknowable. The fourth dimension is her metaphor for it."
I said, "It's not a metaphor. I've seen the fourth dimension."
Quentin spread his hands. "And I have seen aetheric spirits dancing in palest raiment by the light of the moon around a mushroom ring, and I've heard the harps the Four Living Beings play who ward the dancers sacred to Endymion. Where those light feet had passed, I drew up a residuum through a wand of willow-wood, into an alembic, and sealed those vapors there by virtue of the key of Solomon. Explain my experience."
I said, "I can't. What cannot be explained is a given, like a premise."
Victor said to Quentin, "Undeveloped sections of your nervous system were reacting to energies around you, and presenting childlike images to your cortex in response. A sufficiently detailed examination of the motions of the atoms in your brain would reveal what causes these images to arise."
Colin said, "Examinate, exschmaminate. You saw what you wanted to see, Big Q. It was magic."
Quentin raised his finger. "And that is my point! Amelia, Vanity, and Colin operate without conscious thought.."
I sat on the divan, murmuring, "I could have told you that about Colin years ago…"
"But what you and I do, Victor, requires specific knowledge and liberal arts. Natural sciences, knowledge of the correspondences between herb and constellation, phases of the moon, and their angelic governors and principles. And these molecules and atoms and void and what-not you believe in. Specific knowledge."
Victor said, "Is this comment leading to something?"
"Note the symmetry in the table of oppositions. The Phaeacians tie together you and Colin: one intellectual with one nonintellectual paradigm. The Olympians, likewise, with me and Amelia. But the Phaeacians, or at least Vanity, operates without conscious knowledge. She does not know how she creates secret passages. She does not even believe it is she herself doing it!"
"So?"
"So, assuming the symmetry is maintained throughout the whole table, the Olympians must operate by a specific science or body of law. Once we know the law, the specifics, we can stop them. A technology can be foundered on the rocks of detail, in a way that emanations from a nonintellectual force cannot be."
Colin stretched his arms and yawned. "I prefer the terms esprit de finesse and esprit de geometrie. I'll just wish our foes into oblivion! I really, really want that. By the way, has a busty cat burglar in skintight black with a whip shown up yet, or Seven Year Itch girl? Amelia and Vanity in their underwear don't count."
Quentin said, "According to the book, your power doesn't work that way."
Colin straightened up. "Since when? Amelia said…"
Quentin came across the salon from where he had been sitting and settled in the chair opposite me, saying, "Ah! Listening to Amelia in this one case was a mistake."
"Hey!" I said, feeling a little put out.
"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Amelia!" Quentin said. "But what is going on is— Ah, wait, I will show you. Colin! Ready for a question?"
Colin shrugged, looking curious. "Ask away."
"Do you understand what it is I do? My 'magic,' as you call it?"
"Sure. You wish for things to happen, and they do. You go through a lot of rigmarole with wands and chalk and candles and junk because it impresses the ladies. Or maybe you need it as a crutch."
"What could I do to do it better?"
"That's obvious, Big Q. If I were you, I'd throw all that mumbo-jumbo away and just do it by concentrating. I mean, it is obvious you already have the power, but you are wasting energy by putting power—putting belief— into things like wands."
Quentin grinned and turned toward me. "Did Colin give me good advice?"
I said, "I don't think he knows what it is you do. Not that I do, either…"
"He gave me the worst advice imaginable. Do you know what they call a practitioner of the Art without his wand?"
"What?"
"Unemployed." Quentin turned and hooked one arm back over the chair. "Just out of curiosity, Victor, what would your advice be?"
Victor said, "To do what?"
"Be better at what I do?"
"Define'better.'"
"Oh, come now. More able. You know what 'better' means."
Victor said, "You are the victim of a complex cryptog-nostic trick. A set of nerve paths has been instilled in you, each one of which creates a distinct reaction in your environment when they are triggered. Each nerve path runs through your hypothalamus and reticular formations, and affects and is affected by reaction-complexes from symbols embedded there. Your specific pseudo-science relates to discovering which symbols create which reactions. So, first advice: learn all the symbols and their correlated reactions."
Quentin said, "That is basically what's in the Oneiro-critia. What else?"
Victor said, "The things you call 'spirits' are electromagnetic entities of specific voltage, wavelength, and properties, who have been programmed to react to certain commands given in certain ways, gestures and so on. They are made of matter just as everything else is.
"Also, the molecular combinations which make up this world—Mulciber's world—have been impregnated with command and control codes to react to signals passed through the electromagnetic entities.