nervous system. Something in Colin's driving passion woke something deep in me, and, all at once, I was aware of a wide area of time and space, dream and reality, multiple levels of the complex web of unknowns we called the universe.
Admiration. It was not his thanks that opened up my powers; it was his admiration. Hero- worship (heroine-worship?) burned like a fire in him; he touched me with it; I was ignited. He thought I was wise; I became wise. My eyes opened in many dimensions, seeing many things, imaginable and unimaginable.
I saw the final cause, or the for-the-sake-of-which, of the radar beams the Amazons had bounced from us. It was child's play to rotate them into self-awareness and self-being, and send them merrily on their way. False messages were sent to the ranging circuits in the Amazon guns. Shells fell among the maenads, rather than among us.
The army, acting as a unit, had formed an artificial unity-of-purpose. It was like a monad, but larger. I twisted the monad. I sent it to attack the nymphs.
The conceptual unity of the Amazon army was broken at that moment. All those calm, automaton-like fembot women in their black armor now were no longer programmed to act as one. They woke to independent thought: Some fired at the nymphs, some at the maenads, some at us. It was chaos on a mental level.
Too many fired at us. The shells fell. I could deactivate one or two dozen, but many dozens more were still coming.
I reached out with limbs made of energy, took up my friends, sent a line of force into Vanity's ship, found another deck resting deep in another pocket in time-space, and rotated us all through overspace into the pocket.
I do not know what the others saw, what I looked like to them, or what they looked like to themselves. Vanity screamed and screamed. Maybe she could see all of her bones and organs clearly. She folded in half, like a paper doll lifted too suddenly from the flat surface, and her feet were occupying the same space as her skull, brain, eyes.
Something that lived inside Quentin's chest, something bright and pure, seemed to wake up and look around curiously.
I could hot move Colin. He seemed solid. I could not lift him out of the hyperplane.
Boom. An explosion went off where we had been standing. The shock wave raced out in three dimensions, but did not reach us. Ripples on a pond cannot touch a bird hovering above it.
I stepped belowdeck into a small cabin. It was paneled with pale wood and lit with a silver lantern. There were barrels lashed to the cabin wall to our left, a small stack of square crates lashed down to the right.
Then I pulled my companions carefully-ever so carefully-down into the plane with me. I made sure all wrinkles were smoothed out, and that they were flipped the right way, not lefthand-righthand reversed.
The echoes of the explosion were ringing overhead. Vanity stopped screaming once her body was twisted from Escher-shape back to normal, but she looked greenish.
Quentin was...
I caught my breath. Quentin was made of clay. His face and hair were now composed of pale and dark layers of fired ceramic___
His real body was like the doll he made of Vanity. He had no real body. He was an exiled spirit trapped in matter.
Then he stirred, breathed, and a flush of color came back into his skin. The clay vessel looked like human flesh again.
He said, 'Where is Colin?'
I said, 'I can't move him. He's back up with the explosion.'
He said to me, 'Why didn't you bring Victor?'
Vanity said, 'Victor melted. He's dead.'
Quentin said harshly to her, 'Victor is the dragon. He shed his human shape.' To me, 'Go get him! We are vulnerable only when we are apart!'
I said, 'I think it hurts him when I pull him through four-space. He's not built for it.'
Vanity said, 'Oh! Look! My turn! Mine! Watch this! I can reach him, Leader! There is a path to Victor. Things are calm around him, or something.' And she pulled open a switch hidden behind one of the crates.
The deck overhead opened.
Colin, still playing his angry guitar, sparks shooting from his hand, was standing on the head of the dragon-thing.
A hundred guns and emission antennae peeped out from firing turrets that opened along the dragon's armored sides. Tracer fire and directed energy lanced from the huge dragon-shape in every direction. Like some steel instrument of medical torture, the mandibles opened again, the mouth gaped wide, showing a concentric funnel of crystal shark-teeth, the blue orb surrounded by its banks of amplifiers and augmentation-circuits glowed brightly, and the main beam of azure plasma licked out, so bright as to make all the laser fire seem dim by contrast, so loud as to make the other incendiaries seem
