Orphans of Chaos

Colin said, “You are not honestly expecting us to recognize those names, are you?”

I said, “Isn’t Enyo a singer? I love her music.”

Colin said, “Yeah, and Dino is the dog on the Flintstones.”

Quentin looked a little miffed. We were talking about his mothers, after all. “We read about them in Hesiod’s Shield of Hercules and in the Pythian Odes of Pindar. You did those assignments, right? They were the Graeae, the three women, gray-haired from birth, the sisters to the Gorgons. Don’t you remember the Perseus myth? The three Gray Sisters had but one eye and one tooth to share between them, and they passed it back and forth between them to see and to chew. Perseus stole the eye until they told him the secret way to the cave of the Medusa, whom he slew.” He looked back and forth between us.

We returned blank stares.

“Well,” he muttered, “there is a constellation named after him, and one for Andromeda. We’re not exactly talking about the most obscure of Greek myths here. It’s in Hyginus, the Poetica Astronomica.”

I said, “We didn’t have to do the Hyginus. Mrs. Wren let us translate Sappho instead.”

“Well, I did that one on my own.”

Colin said, “And what myth is Proton from? I thought that was the name of a molecule or something.”

“Proteus is mentioned in the Odyssey of Homer. Menelaus tells Telemachos how he found his way home from the Trojan Wars. Menelaus hid under a seal skin, and when Proteus came by, Manelaus leapt from hiding. Proteus turned into a lion, a bull, running water, raging flame, but Menelaus kept hold of him, and he had to answer his questions. It was said Proteus knew the past and future, and all things.”

Colin asked in a lofty tone, “All things except the fact that there was this guy sitting under this seal skin waiting to jump out on him. I don’t remember that part of Homer at all. Was it before the Cyclops thing?”

Said Quentin, “The first part of the story where Telemachos is looking for his father, Odysseus. I think you skipped that part and went on to the sea adventure stuff in the middle. You paid me in honey bread to do your first four books of translation for you, remember? It was the thing we did right after the Iliad.”

“My first and worst don rag. I still have nightmares,” reported Colin. “What was I doing while you did my homework?”

“You were writing love letters to actresses in—Hey! Did I tell you? Those Hollywood girls wrote back. Virginia Madsen and whoever else you wrote to. Boggin intercepted them.”

“Well, well!” said Colin, looking as pleased as I ever have seen him, folding his arms behind his head with a look of infinite satisfaction. “I really do have psychic powers after all.”

Vanity said, “And a photographic memory like Victor! Hey, dodo, you don’t have to worry about grades ever again. It doesn’t matter what is on our permanent records. We’re all princesses and sons of kings from other dimensions or beyond the edge of space and time. No more lessons! No more books! No more Grendel’s dirty looks!”

We all sat in our circle on the ground, looking smug and well pleased.

I said, “You know, there is one thing that worries me.”

Colin said, “Oh, don’t spoil it. Britney! Tiffany! Natalie! Did they all write me back?”

I said, “However our home dimensions are run, they cannot be Democracies. There’s no point in holding the daughter of a Prime Minister hostage.”

Colin said, “Look, who cares how they run things? If our families have psychic powers, they’d end up running things. And now it’s clear we all have powers.”

Victor stood up. “I am not sure we do. Watch this.”

He stood up and dropped a fork on the snow.

Then he stooped, picked up the fork again, and dropped it again.

Colin said, “This is supposed to mean something to us, for what reason, again?”

“It didn’t float,” said Victor.

Colin said, “Forks don’t.”

Quentin put his hand out to where his walking stick lay on the ground, frowning. He didn’t touch the stick; he just frowned at it.

Victor said, “Powers off. We must be too far from the school boundaries. Amelia, did you say your bag was getting heavier?”

2.

Quentin was looking more and more pensive as we walked on, staring left and right across the snowy tree scape, as if searching for something. Colin trudged along, scowling and answering any comments with curt sarcasm. Vanity was happily depicting her future life in London as a model or actress. I was daydreaming about the new Age of Discovery that would follow once I told the men on Earth that there were other dimensions to be found and named and mapped, and other worlds in them. Victor marched without pause and without fatigue, slightly ahead of us, expressionless.

Vanity commented to Colin, “There’s no need to be so bleak! Everyone else on Earth gets by without magic powers. We can live our whole lives as normal people, free, doing whatever we want!”

“Great,” Colin muttered back, “there’s a zenith for you. I can climb the adverse cliffs and after fateful struggle find what’s shining at the utmost peak: the triumph of being ‘normal.’ Write that down in the history books. They’ll name cars after me.”

Vanity said, “Well, for you, getting to the level of ‘normal’ will involve a climb.”

“Sure. And your dream for your new life is what again? To be a clerk in a shop, or wait tables, and haunt bars after hours to find a lonely butcher or an investment broker to marry?”

Vanity snapped back: “It will be better than your new life as an inmate in the psychiatric hospital for the criminally stupid.”

I said, “Actually, we do not know if we are interfertile with human beings. Or, for that matter, with each other. We’re not the same species.”

Colin said, “If we must test it, we must. I’ll make the sacrifice for Science. Do you girls want me to do you both at once, or one after another, or…”

Quentin said suddenly: “It doesn’t make sense.”

Colin said, “I’ll say it doesn’t. What does ‘species’ mean to shape-changers? We should be able to alter our sperm and sexual organs to be able to…”

Quentin said quietly, “Why didn’t they build the school here?”

Colin said, “What? In the woods?”

“In a spot where our powers didn’t work. Why raise us on the estate grounds, if our powers worked there? Why not raise us five miles East or West? Or in Timbuktu?”

I said, “I can think of several reasons. One: We might have needed our powers to keep us healthy when we were babies; Boggin said something to that effect. Two: Our powers might have arisen back so slowly, that they don’t even know we have them yet, and the original estate was wide enough to keep the boundaries out of range. Three: Boggin actually wanted us to develop our powers, because he wants to use us on his side of the war. Four: Our powers only work when there are Greek gods around, and, no matter where we were raised, Boggin had no choice but to be nearby himself to…”

Quentin interrupted me, which was unusual. “Or we are under a curse. Remember how you said Mrs. Wren stopped Dr. Fell. We crossed a ward of some sort, or violated a prohibition. It was just after lunch.”

Vanity said, “Dr. Fell. He could have put something in the food.”

Victor stopped. We all stopped.

He was a score of yards ahead of us, climbing a gentle slope where broken rocks protruded through the snow. Ahead of him, we could see the tops of the trees growing on the far slope. The far slope must have fallen sharply away before Victor’s feet, because the crowns of these trees were no higher than he was.