I tried a new technique: finding the monads or controlling principles of the incoming air molecules. I granted them free will and asked them nicely not to buffet me. Oh, and while they were at it, could they form a cloud of breathable atmosphere at a temperature and pressure comfortable for me around my face? Thanks, and you are all darlings, little molecules.
This was a luxury, I admit. I had a dolphin-shaped fourth-dimensional body I could use in hyperspace that did not need to breathe. I could have used it, I suppose. But what girl does not like the feel of wind in her face? And my human face needed oxygen, so I asked the air molecules, and they did not seem to mind providing for me.
Of course, little things with free will could choose whether to be grateful, and some did not. But the statistical majority of them did as I suggested and did as their neighbors were doing, and there seemed to be a general drop of the amount of free will as peer pressure brought the halo of breathable air into conformity. My own little pressure suit without the suit But it is the nonconformists who pull the stunts.
The air around my head flared up with strange light, and I saw I was leaving a contrail of multicolored smoke and swirls of glitter behind me. Some of the air molecules, granted their freedom, were deciding to turn into light or diamonds or notes of music or Cherenkov radiation. I had a tail like the aurora borealis shining behind.
But my speed increased, and the friction dropped. I also noticed that the thickness of hyperspace fell off much more quickly than the air pressure dropped. The difference between an inverse-square and an inverse-cube law, I suppose.
Higher and higher. Vast, so vast, this wide world: at fifty-five thousand meters, eight hundred kilometers of ocean were in one glance beneath my feet. It might have been a floor of rippled bluish marble, only inches from my pointed toes. Below, the sea was dark purple, its color made bluish by the intervening masses of air. The horizon was curved, and seemed to have a glowing blue swath of light following its bow. And above! Above the sky was black, the freedom of unobstructed outer space. I could see the dim, un-twinkling lights of brighter stars, the colored points of planets.
Here, only my earthly eyes were useful. I could not pick up the internal natures of the distant worlds and suns, and their utility to me was nothing, so far out of reach; I could sense no controlling principles, no degrees of variation or freedom, no bonds of moral obligations.
Whatever dwelt among the stars had nothing to do with earthly concerns. I wonder if you will understand me if I said, staring at the indifference of the cold heavens, that I never felt less religious than in that moment, but staring at their majesty, the grandeur, I never felt more. Cruel Saturn's created world was worthy of awe.
Lapsing space was easier this far from the Earth. The friction of hyperspace had dropped nearly to nothing, so that I could put more of my fourth-dimensional limbs into the act, grab wider sections of the fabric of space, and bend them more pliantly.
The air was too thin, and I was ready to attempt speeds more immense than an atmosphere would permit. I was about to assume a shape something more like a dolphin made of light: It was a cross-section of mine I suspected might be spaceworthy. Vacuum and hard radiation form an environment more welcoming than hyperspace, and my body could adapt.
A bright light below my feet and to the left pulled at my attention. I rotated back to my earthly form, which has the best eyesight, and pulled in my extra energy-fans, so that I was little more than a girl in a brown jacket and goggles, in free fall, weightless. My scarf fluttered overhead.
I was seeing a glitter of the moral strands that tied me to some object below. In a moment, it became visible: a streamlined shape of golden metal, its blunt head reddish with friction, an aura of heat around it. With my upper senses, I could tell it was propelling itself upward by manipulating magnetic energy, powered by some sort of controlled hydrogen-fusion reaction taking place in the chest cavity. There was a trail of expelled metallic motes behind it: Where cosmic rays or other high-speed particles had disturbed the body on a cellular level, it had ejected the damaged tissue.
And I saw its inner nature: powerful, masculine, rational, slightly worried, slightly impatient.
Victor Triumph.
We matched velocities, and the golden humanoid shape directed a beam of radio-energy in my direction. Like all forms of communication, I can read the internal nature and intention of the message, even if I cannot pick up the radio blips in which it is coded.
"Amelia, this was gross negligence on your part. Your contrail is leaking exotic particles that don't exist in nature, some of them radioactive and highly visible. You may have given away our position. Come back down to Earth. We are going to have to sneak back to the island by a circuitous route. Vanity is going to have to arrange some sort of punishment."
I would have been more in a mood to be chastised by Leader Vanity if I hadn't reported to her just as she was posing nude for little Quentin. Quentin had dug up some white mud that, with Victor's help (and of course I noticed that no one can get anything done without Victor's help, the man who should really have been in charge this whole time) had been transmogrified via molecular engines into a serviceable fine clay. Quentin had no kiln other than a corner of concrete with some parts of a stone wall still standing, but he had Victor to come by and superheat his clay figurines into porcelain.
So there she was, kneeling with her hands up in her hair, elbows up and back arched, not exactly the pose of the Venus de Milo, and here was Quentin, wearing little more than shorts and a smock, all covered with clay, scraping with a sharpened wooden spoon at the five-foot-tall mass of white clay he had heaped up before him. To one side was a bucket of water in which a rolled-up shirt was soaking, an impromptu sponge.
There were other figurines sitting in the shade of a tarp along a section of broken wall, about a dozen, and all were smalclass="underline" a seagull, a mouse, a fish, a snake, all perfectly realistic and glazed white. The face and shoulders only just now emerging from the clay mass did look remarkably like Vanity. Professional-level work. It was a skill I never would have suspected in Quentin.
She saw me, and must have seen the dubious look on my face, for she stood and, with more dignity than I have seen her use before, excused Quentin. That's right; she told him to go and he just nodded his head, like a little bow, and went away without a word.