"Hey! I've got this ring! I am supposed to be immune to magic powers now!"
"Yes, Colin, but I have said before I do not do magic. I only seem to. It's a trick done with mirrors. Your ring cannot stop me from pulling a rabbit out of my hat."
"You… tricked me!"
"Ah, grasshopper! You have learned everything there is to know about magic! Now you shall be the master! Go, and rule the world in my name!"
"Don't single me out for your magic curses. I am not the only one! Amelia made some sort of promise to me, she's not saying. What about that promise?"
"I can tell her the name of the Father of Salmons, too. It's Gwion. Now listen to what she has to say."
" 'Music'… ?" Colin looked at me.
"The Lamia said it. Remember, Quentin?"
Quentin said, "I would say, there are some things you just don't forget, but I think I forgot that scene twice." He shivered and looked unhappy. "I remember."
"In the story you told us? The Lamia was complaining that right under everyone's noses, Boggin had been teaching us the paradigms we needed to control our powers. They taught me Einstein, and Newton to Victor, Aristotle to you, and to Colin…"
Quentin muttered, "'He taught music to the wild prince of Night and Dreams…'"
Colin said, "That doesn't make sense. Not only do I hate music, but Miss Daw is the music teacher, and she's the one who uses Amelia's paradigm. Daw is a four-dimensional squid with wings, right?"
"Actually, she looks like wheels within wheels with eyes on every rim," I said. "But, you are wrong about one thing. She used her music to stop me. That's not part of my paradigm. That's against my paradigm."
I turned to Quentin. "Could she be something, I don't know, sort of halfway between my position and Colin's?"
Colin said, "Glum did not use music."
Quentin said, "But he did use a bearskin to turn into a bear. That was his beast-shape-cloak, his bear-sark. He was doing a shamanistic thing. It also sounds like he had a fetish."
I rolled my eyes. "I'll say!"
"No, I mean a real fetish."
"It was a real fetish," I said.
Quentin gave up on me and turned to Colin. "It sounds like Grendel used some shaman props to work his art That would put Grendel halfway between you and me, sharing some of the properties of both."
Colin said, "Who else fits where? And why does everything have to be so complicated?"
I said, "If things were simple, everything would have been solved long ago."
Quentin said, "At a guess… ? And this is just a blind guess, I'd say the Hecatonchire are a cross between Victor's people and Amelia's. And who knows? I can't think of anything that could possibly fit between me and Victor. He and I have nothing in common, really. No overlap."
I said, "Maybe the Cyclopes. I've been assuming Dr. Fell is just like Victor, but maybe he actually does semi-magical stuff like potions and alchemy as well as molecular engineering. Some of the enemy called his stuff 'potions.' We don't have any evidence either way."
I leaned back in the divan, wondering if, all this time, Vanity had gotten the best catch out of the three.
Victor was unapproachable; Colin was crude. But Quentin…
I said, "When did you become the Answer Man, Quentin? Why do you know all these things all of a sudden?"
He picked up his gold-and-silver grimoire, and pointed to it. 'Warn et Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est.
Colin's Dad told me. He wrote this book. You know, this might have been the talisman meant for Colin, except… Happy birthday, Colin! More powers for you."
He took out the little brown envelope, on which was written in Boggin's crisp, wide-looped penmanship, Remember Next Time Not to Look,
"My talisman! You and Victor got instruction books on how to use your powers. I guess my instruction booklet can be written on the three-by-five card." Colin opened the envelope and took out something about the size of a playing card. The back was embossed with a design of a poppy blossom. "Oh, great,"
said Colin, looking terrifically unimpressed. "What's it supposed to mean?"
"I don't know what it means," said Quentin. "I don't know what is on the face of the card."
"What do you mean? Look" Colin held the card toward him facefirst.
Quentin flinched and put up a hand to block his vision. "No, no, no! Don't show me. We all played around with looking at that card. Thanks, but no thanks."
I said, "Why? Does something terrible happen when you look at the card?"
"Amelia, can you hear me now?" asked Colin.
I said, "Of course, why shouldn't I be able to hear you?"
Colin looked at Quentin and whistled. "Wow."
Quentin said, "Same thing happens to me and to Vanity. Victor is unaffected. That doesn't make any sense on our table of oppositions, because I should be able to trump your powers."
I said, "What's going on? Is there something on that card I can't look at?"
Colin said, "You want to see it again?"
"What do you mean 'again'?"
"Here, look."
"I am looking. Hold up the card." I turned my head. Quentin was now sitting on the divan beside me, and Colin was in the chair Quentin had been in.
"Good trick," I said to Quentin.
"Here is a better one," said Quentin, handing me a piece of paper.
On the piece of paper were words in a flowing, delicate handwriting: Picture shows a man standing in black robes, stars in robe, cup of sparks in hand. Crowned w/
crescent moon. Cup tilted, sparks fall into pool at feet. V. pretty woman kneels by pool. Crowned w/poppies. Crying. Tears fall in pool. Basket in pool. Baby in basket.
Behind them dark forest, tall tower of wh spiral. Unicorn horn?
Heraldic emblem top of card. Winged horse w/ head dragon, rampant, propre.
It was my handwriting.
I looked up. "What does it mean?"
Victor from the across the room said, "The card is an artifact from Quentin's paradigm, not from Colin's.
It interferes with the time-binding function of the cortex."
I said, "I assume I was not asleep… I wrote this?"
Quentin said, "The thing that happens when one wakes in the morning, to make one forget one's dreams, is in that card. It does not affect Colin, because he is entirely made of dream stuff. It does not affect Victor, because, well, not to sound mean about it, Victor is a robot. No offense meant, Victor."
Victor replied, "None taken, puny flesh-slug."
I said, "He's not really a robot."
Quentin said, "But I don't think he has any part of his being made of dream stuff. I mean, that sums up all the differences and similarities between our four paradigms, doesn't it? Colin is all spirit, and Victor is all matter. I am both, an immortal spirit trapped for a time in a mortal body made of clay. You… Gee, Amelia, I do not know about you. Both? Neither?"
I said, "It's actually pretty simple. I have a controlling monad which is the final-to-mechanical causality nexus for governing other lesser nexuses, each of which has its own meaning axis and the non-meaning axis. What you call matter is an extension of non-meaningful relationships. They are objective and devoid of self-awareness or purposeful behavior. The other axis informs meaningfillness. Meaningful things are subjective. The meaning axis forms the context, the frame of reference, in which the non-meaning axis operates. Perception presupposes a perceiver and a perceived. The final cause of our perceptions, the reason why we have them, is to render matter meaningful; the mechanical causes of perception are the sense-impressions which arise from matter."
Quentin turned to Colin. "Can you translate Amelia glossolalia into the Common Speech of Westron?"
"She thinks matter and spirit are two parts of one underlying flung, I think," Colin said.
"No," I said. "I think questions like that are, by their nature, unanswerable and ultimately unaskable. Life requires us to adopt dualism, at least in our actions. We move thoughts by thinking, we move matter with other bits of matter. Matter is what we call those filings we cannot control with our thought alone. If everything was matter, everything would be inanimate, and there would be no deliberate action. If everything were thought, everything would be omnipotent, perfectly tranquil, and at rest, for there would be no need for action.