Mavors said, "Carry on."
The green stone on Boggin's toe winked and shimmered, and my upper senses turned back on. My fourth-dimensional limbs, the parts of my body made of light and music and various shades of emotion and energy, were still numb, but I was no longer blind.
I could see Victor's internal workings were undamaged. A simple twist of his monad would have restored him to action, but the manipulator I used to do that was numb.
I also saw, shining with utility, something hidden in Boggin's belt pouch. The usefulness to me was almost blinding.
It was a note. Addressed to me. Folded up, crumbled into a ball, stuck in the bowl of his clay pipe.
Right out in plain sight where I could not fail to see it.
Reading the note, I said, "Mavors-excuse me, Lord Mavors-I do have a question. Lady Phoebe, the moon-goddess, your royal sister-"
"Half sister!" he said sharply.
"-ah, half sister, she was on our trail when we fled the Earth. Am I correct in assuming she is to hunts as you are to battles? If she overtakes us..."
Mavors nodded briefly. Now he waved his spear in the air. "Hear me, O Furies! I decree, by my authority as God of Battles and Lord of Men, that the flight of the children of Chaos from Earth, and their doings there, were part of my battle with Lamia. No foxhunt can cross a battlefield.
Luna is the lowest of heavens, and the martial heavens, fifth of the Spheres, is ulterior and superior to it."
He did it right in front of me. I saw him change fate. It was complex, and I did not understand what I was seeing, but I saw it.
It was as if the reddish strands of moral energy binding me to what fate had been decreed by Lady Phoebe were parted by the sweep of that spear. Something in the future, an entity, perhaps, or a process, shifted its attention. The internal nature of objects changed slightly but definitely, losing free will in one vector of possibilities and gaining it back again in another.
Mavors ordered Boggin to return my flag to me, which he did. Then Mavors spoke one last time,
'To any who challenge my sovereignty, I will answer with a weapon, thus." And he threw the lance into the rust-colored soil at his feet, splitting a rock in half with a noise like a gunshot. The lance stuck fast and stood quivering.
This time, I saw how Boggin made himself and Mavors disappear. They had not been in the crater any more than the Mars lander had been. It was a Phaeacian technique. It looked to me like a tube of force running from this spot, up out of the continuum, through the dreamlands, and back into the continuum at another spot, their real location. The three-dimensional energies, such as light waves, as well as fourth-dimensional media, by which I perceived such things as internal natures, utilities, monads, and moral obligations, were all swept from one spot to another through the Phaeacian shortcut. Presumably, they could be manipulated, dreamed into new shapes, while they passed through the dreamlands, before being deposited here, in a spot where the laws of nature had been changed to allow for this type of illusion. The photons were not emerging from trapdoors, but from subatomic areas of uncertainty in the base vacuum of space itself.
Magnetic waves had been present, too. Something from Victor's paradigm had allowed these three-dimensional light images to manipulate my flagpole and Mavors' spear in coordination with the actions of their hands. I had not seen how the wind and air had been manipulated, but it was not hard to guess that Boreas might have fine control over such things, fine enough to make the sound waves of a spoken voice. Since I could detect no clue, perhaps Colin's paradigm was involved? Hard to say.
And also, somehow, the Phaeacian ability to detect attention must have been tied into an ability to deflect attention: The clues that would have warned me that the lander was not below as we flew down toward it had been hypnotically thrust aside in my brain.
The moment I woke up Victor, I knew why they had to knock him out. He called it cryptognosis.
He said he had detected the interference in my perception system the moment we crossed the boundary into the special laws of nature obtaining in the crater basin. He had been silenced before he could speak. He was immune to illusions woven by magic.
I attuned my senses to a distant spot, during that moment while I had the chance. The place where Boggin and Mavors had truly been standing was atop Mons Olympos, the tallest mountain in the solar system.
And it was not a barren waste: Mavors had a camp there. A camp? A city. I saw endless arsenals and munitions factories half-buried beneath the rock and crag of the mountain, manned by shark-toothed snake-skinned Laestrygonians. Poking up through the bedrock and casting long shadows across the landscape of snow and rust loomed launching towers, magnetic rails, and missile emplacements large enough to shoot down the tiny moons, cyclopean, huge and dark, beneath the dusty pink sky. The Laestrygonians manning these skyscraper-size guns wore no pressure suits on the surface: Perhaps they were the original inhabitants of Mars.
Out from this fortress-city ran corridors into the fourth dimension, shortcuts through space exactly the type Vanity had been unable to make.
I could see the distant points to where these corridors led: I saw strange cathedrals made of glass beneath black skies that rained sulfuric acid; I saw a soaring fortress, slim as an upraised sword, towering over a cratered gray land where stars burned to either side of a pitiless sun. At the end of one corridor made of darkened air, I saw a space station made of carven wood, its hull overgrown with metal trees and leaves of purest silver, hanging above cold, swirled methane-snowstorms of a gas giant surrounded by broken and scattered rings.
Venus, Luna, Neptune. Of course, I knew these places at a glance. Had I not seen a hundred artists' renditions, had I not pored over Voyager photographs, hadn't I dreamt of nothing else my whole life? These were the unclaimed worlds into whose alien soils I had meant one day to plant the Union Jack.
Someone had beaten me to it. All these planets were explored.
I saw ships plying these space routes. I saw the gilled men of Atlantis, brothers to Mestor, in shining black scale-mail, wearing neither helmets nor gauntlets, hanging weightlessly by tethers from long cylindrical vehicles of open grillework, vessels poised in the airless, interplanetary void.