Because I could see the slender spindle-shape of the fourth-dimensional being, sliding from dream to dream, parallel to the ship, but in a space skew to our space.
'I see him now. Tiny little thing, isn't he?' Colin made a grabbing gesture with his hand, like a man slapping a fly. 'Got 'em. Ow! It stung me.'
Colin's eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell to the deck. Mist began trickling out of his mouth and nose.
'Colin!' I knelt and put my arms around him. 'Oh, dear God, Colin!'
Blue light stabbed out of Victor's eye and bathed Colin. 'An electromagnetic field is disintegrating him. I've stopped the field, but I cannot stop the effect,' said Victor. 'Put the ring of Gyges back on him.'
I said, 'The ring's broken. Maybe I can try to fix it. Who had it last?'
Colin groaned muddily. 'It's all going away.'
'What?' I said.
'The dream of the world. All going away...'
Victor said, 'It's on his finger.'
Foolish of me. There it was. It had a controlling monad, just like a living being. The monad had been forced out of alignment by an Amazonian azure ray, and the internal nature of the ring had turned into something materialistic, dull, and inert.
I twisted the monad back into shape, but the internal nature of the ring did not change. Mending the break in a glass after the water had run out.
'Nothing's happening,' I said.
Victor said, 'Can you reproduce the effect Miss Daw used to propel you out of the fourth dimension? I've neutralized all energy flows in this area; he should not be able to track us, either by magic or by electronics-'
'Wait! I see something!'
'Report.'
'It's the corpse. The giant whatever-it-is inside the hollow horse coffin. The genie in the ring, do you know who I mean?'
Victor said, 'The icon representing the ring of Gyges.'
'He says there is an object in our future. No one can defeat the God of Speed in a race; no one can outrun him. It's fate.'
Vanity said, 'Don't listen to him! He's lying! Don't believe it.'
I looked at Vanity. She was kneeling, cradling Quentin in her arms. Quentin stirred and moaned feebly. He was not dead.
She said, 'Dead people work for the bad guy, remember? The guy with the keys to the underworld?'
Victor said, 'Amelia, what were the four steps needed for us to undo an Olympian decree of fate?'
I said, 'It is complex, but I can sum it up: Each of us has a part to play. First, I am supposed to give the destiny enough free will to allow it to be changed.
'Second, a destiny is a curse. It uses sympathy and contagion to organize the spirits of the universe to want a certain outcome. To annul that requires magic: Quentin's paradigm.
'Third, a destiny is fixed and inescapable, as dispassionate as a law of nature. That's you. I think you take away the free will I give the destiny-force, so that it acts according to a mechanistic cause and effect.
'I was told that finally, a psychic event of a type and kind unknown must take place at the final step to make it permanent. Unknown to my people! My sister Circe has a blind spot, because of her paradigm: She didn't know what Colin's role was supposed to be.' I swallowed. 'I volun-teered, you know. It was to get that message through that I came into this world, and suffered all this, and met you.'
Vanity cut in impatiently, 'Do we need that last part? Do we care if it is permanent or not, at this point? If we just temporarily made it possible to outrun Trismegistus, then we could outrun him, right?'
I said to Victor, 'There was one thing more: Time-space must be arranged to permit the laws of nature under which these four events may take place. That sounds like a Vanity thing to me.'
Victor said to me, 'How close is he to overtaking us?'
I looked back. I saw the fourth-dimensional shape of Trismegistus, but he was not behind us, not anymore. He was ahead of us.
I saw an explosion in the fourth dimension, another clash caused by the violent intersection of two mutually contradictory laws of nature. Trismegistus had seized the segment of dream-space through which our elevator shaft was running, and shoved it into the middle of downtown Los Angeles, back on the material plane, Earth. All our running: We had run in a circle, like some wounded game creature.
