He looked at Quentin. "Can you see me, Quentin?"
Quentin had his face turned toward Colin's chair, but his eyes were unfocused, like a blind man's. "Not at the moment. I cannot see the beer bottle either. It was there a moment ago, but I do not remember seeing it fade out or wink out, or anything. I must have blinked just when you picked it up."
I said, "How many people do you think you could lift, Colin? I mean, if you can pick up a beer bottle, you can pick up Vanity. Maybe the whole group could vanish, if need be."
He said, "In my elephant form, or as a human?"
"Do you have an elephant form? When did you get an elephant form?"
Colin twisted the ring. A sort of pressure in my sinuses and eyes relaxed and faded. It was a small thing, and I was not aware of it until it went away, but something, some hypnotic compulsion, had been trying to get me to look away, or blink.
Colin said to Quentin, "Okay, great and powerful Oz, how do I get an elephant spirit to come and flow through my crystal window?"
"The true name of the father of elephants is Tantor."
"Great! What good does that do me? I am not a necromancer. I cannot summon up spirits by calling on their names."
Quentin said mildly, "Are you sure?"
"Okay!" Colin put the beer bottle aside and stood up, making a dramatic gesture with his hands,
"Sim-sala-bim! Size of… an eleph—"
" No!" Quentin and I shouted together. I jumped up and grabbed Colin's arm. "If you turn into an elephant in the cabin, you'll crush the deck up and smash everything! Are you crazy?"
Colin sat down again. "Doing a Quentin-type spell would not work for me, anyway. I do not believe in that stuff, so it wouldn't work."
Quentin said, "Actually, what I do works whether I believe in it or not."
Colin picked up the beer bottle and gestured with it: "Aha! You believe that, don't you? So it's true for you."
Quentin turned to me. "Amelia, help me out…"
I said, "Don't look at me! I believe every statement has truth-value only in relation to its frame of reference. An Englishman and a Chinaman pointing 'up' both point away from the center of the Earth, but if you extend the lines from their fingers indefinitely, they get farther and farther apart…"
"No, that wasn't the help I was asking for. Look at the ring of Gyges. What does the ring look like to you? I am curious as to how you see it."
I opened my higher senses and looked.
2.
The ring was the center of a webwork of morality strands, which extended throughout the entire nearby area of time-space. Major arms of the strands extended to some place I could not see with merely four-dimensional senses.
I "lifted" my hand out of Earth's continuum and plucked my hypersphere from where it rested in my wings, and I rotated it from circle to sphere, and then to four-sphere, and then to a five-sphere.
It grew immensely heavy in my hand as "hemispheres" of crystalline energy popped up into existence
"below" and "above" the (now flat-seeming) plane of hyperspace. It began issuing concentric pressure waves into the solid neutronium medium of five-space.
The range of echo response in five-space was very short, so I had to touch the ring with my other hand to be able to "sense" it. The sense was more like hearing than sight. Sort of.
Even though my hand was five-dimensional, and Colin's was only three-dimensional, he closed his fingers around my hand when I touched his ring. The fingers felt normal to me, not flat They were round, warm, strong. I could feel my sense perceptions beginning to slip, as if I were about to collapse back into three-space, but I used an energy-balancing technique to let the ring affect my lower vision centers. If I did not "look" at the impossible hand-clasp Colin had me in, the uncertainty wave would not collapse, and he would not collapse me out of my shape back into 3-D girldom.
Instead, I looked at the ring.
I could no longer see the morality webs—they were too thin and insubstantial to be seen, since they were merely made of flimsy four-dimensional material—but I could sense the extensional, relational, and existential measurements of the ring of Gyges.
Hie ring's extension degree was congruent with the light-cone it gave off, and it reached to all observers.
The relation degree was a moral one. Apparently the ring imposed an obligation onto any onlookers not to look at the wearer. Anyone who violated that prohibition was penalized by being forced to obey the imperative to look away; but, logically, also had to "look away" from the fact that he was being forced to look away. By definition, a person is always unaware of what he is unaware of The existence degree was metaphorical rather than literal. Although I could no longer see them, I now knew where those longer arms of the morality strands were leading. They were going into the place behind the walls of the tunnels Vanity created. They were going into the dream continuum. But whether they were reaching in the dreamlands surrounding Earth, or the dreamlands of some unknown sphere or region of matter-energy outside the star-filled universe of Earth, that I could not say.
I tried to explain this as best I could to the boys. My explanation seemed to confuse more than it illuminated. I said, "The ring may have a weak spot. Innocent eyes will not be deceived by it. A person who bears you no ill will, or a child perhaps. Someone without sin. Eye unclouded by hate."
"Oh, great!" said Colin. "Now I know what my friends think of me."
I folded up my sphere and pulled my hand back "down" into three dimensions.
3.
Colin held my hand for a moment longer than he should have. I tried to yank it "up" into the red or
"down" into the blue continuum. That would have worked on anyone else in the universe, but his fingers still seemed real and solid, no matter what.
I looked at him, "Let go of my hand, and I'll tell you the answer."
He said, "Tell me the answer, and I'll let go."
I said, "Music."
Both the boys looked at each other, saw their mutual confusion, and looked at me. Colin said, "Great.
Now tell me the question."
"How do you get Tantor to come? How do you attract spirits, since you are not a warlock, and cannot call them by ritual? Music."
"You mean, I play 'Elephant Walk' for elephants, and 'Flight of the Bumblebee' to turn into a bug, and maybe theme from 'Batman' to change into a bat…"
"I'm serious. Quentin, tell him to let go of my hand."
Quentin said, "Be nice, Colin, or I will have the girls do another striptease for you."
Colin said, "What is the downside of that, again, exactly?"
"They will have to do it to return you to human form," Quentin said darkly. "Remember, don't make promises you don't intend to keep. It makes you vulnerable to certain operations."
Quentin's stick flew from across the room and into Quentin's grasp.
Quentin reached the quivering wand toward Colin's hand, and the look on Quentin's face was so grim and so un-pitying, that even I said, "Quentin! Wait a minute! We can't just use our powers on each other—! Quentin! Stop! Stop!"
Quentin did not stop. The wand drew closer.
I shouted, "Victor, do something!"
Victor, across the room, did not look up. "Check your premises."
Quentin touched Colin on the knuckle with the wand. Quentin's lips did not move, but we heard a voice, a thin version of Quentin's voice, begin to mutter and chant: " Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres!
Arma virumque cano! Res ipsa loquitur.…"
Colin's nerve broke. He dropped my hand and jumped back as far as his chair would allow. "Keep off!
Keep off! Damn! He's gone mad with power!"
Quentin smiled and put his stick aside. "Yeah. Be careful, or I'll tell you the name of the Father of Salmons."