The resistance of the earthly gravity made folding space impossible at first. Then I discovered if Iattempted a lapse on a submicroscopic level, where the position of particles of known mass wasuncertain in any case, even the nearby mass of the Earth did not bother to hinder the effect.

You cannot really call it "falling up." It was a series of perspective adjustments taking place morerapidly than the acceleration due to gravity: My frame of reference was moving upward morequickly than I was falling downward within my frame of reference.

Imagine the space like a bit of paper. I fall down nine meters per second: I fold ten meters of thepaper and introduce an uncertainty as to my location, and move up one inch across the fold. Isnap the paper open, and find myself ten meters up: net gain of a meter.

In reality the effect was too small to see, a million times per square inch in continuous ripplesdown my body as I soared aloft. I could see little nets of light and dark shimmering down mylimbs, as my submicroscopic-size, submicrosecond-long space warps were deflecting photons fromtheir straightline paths. Even in the air, I looked like a swimmer in the water.

Spacelapsing is not so tiring as it sounds, and I was in good shape. It was like long-distancerunning. I was glad I put in all the hours at the gym at school: Whoever says athletics areunladylike-come, sir, and try to catch me in midair!

I thought it would be cold this high, but the faster-than-sound friction of the ascent was heatingmy cap and jacket. I had to keep rotating several bodies (actually, three-dimensionalcross-sections of one body) into and out of the three-space to give the skin of one body a momentin hyperspace to cool down before plunging it back into the screaming hurricane of air. (Forobvious reasons, four-dimensional objects lose heat more slowly than three, but I found aheat-dispelling geometry.)

I could see the utility shining from my velocity. Too dim. Not useful. I was not achieving the speedI wanted.

I tried a new technique: finding the monads or controlling principles of the incoming airmolecules. I granted them free will and asked them nicely not to buffet me. Oh, and while theywere at it, could they form a cloud of breathable atmosphere at a temperature and pressurecomfortable 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 inhyperspace that did not need to breathe. I could have used it, I suppose. But what girl does notlike 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. Butthe statistical majority of them did as I suggested and did as their neighbors were doing, and thereseemed to be a general drop of the amount of free will as peer pressure brought the halo ofbreathable air into conformity. My own little pressure suit without the suit But it is thenonconformists who pull the stunts.

The air around my head flared up with strange light, and I saw I was leaving a contrail ofmulticolored smoke and swirls of glitter behind me. Some of the air molecules, granted theirfreedom, were deciding to turn into light or diamonds or notes of music or Cherenkov radiation. Ihad a tail like the aurora borealis shining behind.

But my speed increased, and the friction dropped. I also noticed that the thickness of hyperspacefell off much more quickly than the air pressure dropped. The difference between aninverse-square and an inverse-cube law, I suppose.

Higher and higher. Vast, so vast, this wide world: at fifty-five thousand meters, eight hundredkilometers of ocean were in one glance beneath my feet. It might have been a floor of rippledbluish marble, only inches from my pointed toes. Below, the sea was dark purple, its color madebluish by the intervening masses of air. The horizon was curved, and seemed to have a glowingblue swath of light following its bow. And above! Above the sky was black, the freedom ofunobstructed outer space. I could see the dim, un-twinkling lights of brighter stars, the coloredpoints of planets.

Here, only my earthly eyes were useful. I could not pick up the internal natures of the distantworlds and suns, and their utility to me was nothing, so far out of reach; I could sense nocontrolling 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 willunderstand me if I said, staring at the indifference of the cold heavens, that I never felt lessreligious than in that moment, but staring at their majesty, the grandeur, I never felt more. CruelSaturn's created world was worthy of awe.

Lapsing space was easier this far from the Earth. The friction of hyperspace had dropped nearlyto nothing, so that I could put more of my fourth-dimensional limbs into the act, grab widersections 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 wouldpermit. I was about to assume a shape something more like a dolphin made of light: It was across-section of mine I suspected might be spaceworthy. Vacuum and hard radiation form anenvironment 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 earthlyform, which has the best eyesight, and pulled in my extra energy-fans, so that I was little morethan 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, itbecame visible: a streamlined shape of golden metal, its blunt head reddish with friction, an auraof heat around it. With my upper senses, I could tell it was propelling itself upward bymanipulating magnetic energy, powered by some sort of controlled hydrogen-fusion reactiontaking place in the chest cavity. There was a trail of expelled metallic motes behind it: Wherecosmic rays or other high-speed particles had disturbed the body on a cellular level, it had ejectedthe 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 mydirection. Like all forms of communication, I can read the internal nature and intention of themessage, 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 thatdon't exist in nature, some of them radioactive and highly visible. You may have given away ourposition. Come back down to Earth. We are going to have to sneak back to the island by acircuitous 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 justas she was posing nude for little Quentin. Quentin had dug up some white mud that, with Victor'shelp (and of course I noticed that no one can get anything done without Victor's help, the manwho should really have been in charge this whole time) had been transmogrified via molecularengines into a serviceable fine clay. Quentin had no kiln other than a corner of concrete withsome parts of a stone wall still standing, but he had Victor to come by and superheat his clayfigurines into porcelain.

So there she was, kneeling with her hands up in her hair, elbows up and back arched, not exactlythe pose of the Venus de Milo, and here was Quentin, wearing little more than shorts and asmock, all covered with clay, scraping with a sharpened wooden spoon at the five-foot-tall massof white clay he had heaped up before him. To one side was a bucket of water in which a rolled-upshirt was soaking, an impromptu sponge.

There were other figurines sitting in the shade of a tarp along a section of broken wall, about adozen, and all were small: a seagull, a mouse, a fish, a snake, all perfectly realistic and glazedwhite. The face and shoulders only just now emerging from the clay mass did look remarkably likeVanity. 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 moredignity than I have seen her use before, excused Quentin. That's right; she told him to go and hejust nodded his head, like a little bow, and went away without a word.

Now she wrapped herself in a white towel, and with her pinkish-red complexion, under the tropicdaylight, even in the striped shade of the palms, she looked flushed and hot and too freckled. Isuppose the equatorial clime did not agree with her. Certainly her look was disagreeable.

"Well, Miss Windrose?" she said, just as if she were a headmistress or something, not a girlyounger and shorter than me wrapped in a towel.

"I was just doing as ordered, Leader."

"Breaking orders, you mean! Do you want to get us captured? Do you want to get us killed? Noone goes off alone. That's the rule. All of you chaoticists have a weakness, a power you cannotstop. Suppose Echidn- I mean, suppose the fishmonger had just glanced up at you, just a glance,while you were flying off at Mach twenty-four! You would have just fallen to Earth and died! Youweren't even wearing a parachute! Then your family, your kingdom, your creatures, whatever theheck they are, the fourth-dimensional people, attack the universe and destroy everything! Is thatwhat you want?"

"Leader, don't be silly," I said sharply. "We don't even have a parachute. Besides, at that speed,the reentry heat would have killed me much quicker... Say, did I actually achieve Machtwenty-four?" That was below escape velocity, but it was above orbital velocity, at least for somealtitudes.

"Victor measured it and yes it was fast and don't change the subject. What's your excuse?"

"Do I need an excuse, Vanity?" I said back. Well, maybe I raised my voice a little. It was hot here,and I wasn't wearing a nice cool towel, but a heavy leather jacket, jodhpurs, gloves, scarf, andleather cap. "Do I need an excuse? You've been pushing me to try out my powers, to experiment,and now you're barking mad because I did what you said! You're snapping at me because I mighthave attracted spies, but did you say anything to Victor when he blew a hole in an underseamountain with a death ray? You give one order and then directly contradict it, and you makethese stupid work schedules, except Quentin never seems to have work to do: When is the lasttime he chopped down a tree?"

"Mr. Nemo," she said in a voice so icy that it hardly sounded like Vanity, "has successfullydiscovered how to emerge from his body and assume an insubstantial form. This could prove to bequite useful to our little company. Last night, he entered the body of the fish he made from clay,and animated it, and he swam quite naturally and freely in the sea. He has discovered the secretof how his people, the Fallen, make new shapes for themselves. In the meanwhile, you havediscovered how to moon around after Victor and take leisurely swims in your bathing suit."

"At least I wear a bathing suit," I said with a snort. Okay, maybe I rolled my eyes a bit.

"That comment was quite a bit out of line, Miss Windrose, and you will apologize for itimmediately." I swear she sounded just like Boggin when she said that. No emotion at all. Not

"you shall apologize," like a demand, but "you will," like a predicted certainty.

No, not like Boggin. Like Nausicaa, a princess from a Bronze Age Greek culture of supernaturalbeings.

If I had been leader, and she'd caught me nude, I would have tried to make a joke out of it. Iwould have handled it better. I would have...

But I was not leader. Right or wrong, I had to support the group. So I apologized. "Sorry, Leader.

Please forgive me, Leader."

"Apology accepted," she said curtly. "Let us say no more about it."

"How did you get to be leader, anyhow?" I burst out. That kind of surprised me. If you had asked,I would not have said I felt any resentment. But no eyeball can see its own interior; no mind canknow its own buried thoughts.

"You were there. I cooked breakfast."

"That's so... so... chauvinist! It is such a stereotype! The girl cooking breakfast. Victor's a bettercook than you! Victor's better at everything."

She crinkled her little freckled nose. "Is that what this is about? You think I am upstaging Victor?

Listen, Amelia. The boys were all disorganized after our first campsite floated away. They neededsomething reassuring, domestic, orderly. I had to bring order to the chaos. I got things going, hadfirewood brought, found a clean pan. I notice when people are paying attention, what they arelooking at. I notice details. I knew which foods each boy liked because I remembered what he hadpicked out in the stops during our supply run. Victor's a better cook, but he didn't think of feedingthe depressed and disorganized troops.

"Once I did that, I had to organize the schedule for training. I had to decide," she said gravely.

"There was no one to ask. On the one hand, there is a chance that any use of our powers can bedetected by means we can only guess. Oracular owls or orbital spy-rays or periscopes fromdimensions even you don't have a number for. On the other hand, we have to get stronger. Wehave to get smarter. We have to figure out what it is we can do that makes them so afraid of us.

That means everyone works on schedule, including tree chopping to break up the monotony ofexperiments. Tell me: Did you enjoy getting back to them, after all that mindless work? Yes? Sothat's how I got to be leader. That is what leaders do.

"Speaking of what leaders do, I have good news and bad news. Bad news: I still have to assignyou some sort of punishment detail, to keep order in the ranks. The good news is that we canthrow you a birthday party after."

"What? No one knows when my birthday is."

"No one knows when baby Jesus was born, but there is a date all picked out for Christmas, isn'tthere? As leader, I can assign a date. Your birthday is the day after next. Then, the next bit ofgood news: the final exam!"

"Leader, what is going to be on the final? I mean, the reason why I got in trouble flying off... Well,you should tell us what we should be preparing for, right?"

"For the final, we are going to be sneaking back into civilization. Colin needs a piano orsomething. He should be practicing music. Quentin needs all sorts of supplies, everything fromtarot cards to real clay. We need to replace missing mess gear."

"That doesn't seem that hard." I remember a distinct feeling of disappointment.

Now she smiled, and her eyes twinkled, and she knelt down again beside me to speak in a lowvoice. It is the kind of voice you use when you are telling a secret, whether there is anyone aroundor not. "We are going to see if we can help your old friend Sam. The drayman who gave you alift."

Less than thirty-six hours later, after an afternoon of punishment chores I do not want toremember, and the most charming birthday I do not want to forget, we five were aboard theArgent Nautilus, in a fogbound Irish Sea, rolling and pitching in the choppy waves, and thesmothering cold was leaving droplets on our thick woolen sea-coats.

Sam had mentioned to me that he had a nephew in an institution with a mental disease. I hadonce, half-jokingly, offered to grant him a wish. He wished for a cure.

Now we would see what we could do.

Pallid Hounds A-Hunting

This trip, we had bought supplies with more forethought. We had drifted off the coast of the Isleof Man. Quentin had passed across the waves as silently as a shadow, to approach Castletown, onthe south of the island. He returned with the sweaters and jackets and caps we wore, and a heavybackpack filled with chow. We were still low on some things, but he had restocked our larder.

There was no piano to buy for Colin on the Isle of Man.

"The severed head of Bran has not seen us yet," said Quentin as he stepped out of the shadowsand down to the deck. "The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, merely a possession ofthe Crown. I saw the shivering ghosts of Vikings, still hungry for blood, but no sigils of Arthur, noravens loyal to the spells of Elizabeth the First. Officially, I did not step foot on the soil Branprotects. Now, since we are coming on a mission of mercy, perhaps, even when we do, he will notinform the gods of our coming. Perhaps." He gave Vanity a look of doubt, but said no more. VeryVictor-like.

A few hours later, after midnight, we had crossed the rough North Sea and were approaching theopposite coast. Quentin, on the bow, summoned friends of his from below the waters, while we allhuddled in the stern, trying not to overhear the sinister whispers. But that worked, or somethingdid, and the fog thickened as we crept silently into the mouth of the river Wear, with the lights ofSunderland above us. A short way up the river were the ancient stone bridges and modern ironshipyards of Durham.

Quentin hissed when we passed the peninsula where Durham Cathedral rose up against the foggylights of the city. He announced that certain of his "covenants" would not operate here, since thebone of Saint Cuthbert scared his allies away.

Edgestow is just north of Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Durham. We disembarked and sent theArgent Nautilus away to lead Mestor's needle somewhere else, and we spent most of the nighttramping down roads, or occasionally crossing fields and climbing over walls and hedgerows.

(Yes, hedgerows, just the kind you think they don't make in England anymore, but this was theNorthwest.)

It was a bitter January night, and the snow lay wet and thick on the ground, trampled into mud bythe roads. The stars were hidden, but the moon rode veiled between tattered streamers of coldclouds.

Between my higher senses, Quentin's divining rod, Colin's hunches, and Victor's tapping into theglobal-positioning satellites, without trouble we found the tiny institution just before dawn.

We were all behind a snowy hedge, dressed in our thick blue coats and white turtlenecks, lookinglike a bunch of fishermen. Sneaky fishermen. The boys and Vanity were peering suspiciously downat an empty, snowy road- which looked sickly and yellow beneath the unflickering streetlamps-atthe ugly cubical building of glass and concrete beyond.

We could see the ancient buttresses and Gothic spires of some ancient buildings on our side of thestreet. Perhaps the mental ward had originally been associated with the medical college here; atleast, the solemn beautiful architecture of the ancient buildings looked like a campus to me, and Iknow what a campus looks like.

Orange light pollution lit the sky in one direction, and there was a dim noise of traffic elsewhere,but there was nothing in our immediate environment but those college buildings, an empty fieldwe'd cut across, a white graveyard to one side, and beyond it, a chapel wearing a wimple of snow.

I should mention there was a smaller graveyard at the crossroads, not on the chapel grounds.

Quentin, following a croaking raven and carrying an entrenching tool, went off to do his spookybusiness there, while we shivered in the cold, waiting. Warlocks are something like doctors, Iguess. No matter how much you like them personally, there is quite a bit of nasty mess involved intheir line of work.

By the time Quentin got back, Vanity was casing the joint through the snowy twigs of the hedge,and listening to Colin and Victor give her completely contradictory advice about a plan of attack.

Vanity asked us all to report on what we could see.

I was standing farther from the hedge, two paces down the slope. I did not bother to turn my headin the direction of the modern building.

Now was my chance to show my time on the island had not been all wasted. I took my glass globeout of my pocket, unfolded it into a hypersphere. In that thick light, I could examine theimmediate fourth-dimensional environment. A trick I'd learned allowed me to send the light downone of my limbs (a part of my body that looked like a strand of music) to shine it against distantobjects. Down that same strand, I reached a cluster of sense-receptors.

The three-dimensional building was laid out before me like a blueprint. To my fourth-dimensionaleyes, it looked flat. I could see internal natures, utility, monads, all that 4-D stuff. But now, I couldagitate the photons in the area, give just enough of them free will to ask them to carryinformation back to my eyes, so that the number of nonconformist photons who went giggling offas rainbows was relatively small. In effect, I had just made the dimensional periscope Vanitymentioned earlier. Into any one of the squares of the rooms or corridors, I could dip aphoton-freeing note of energy and get a 3-D picture of what was in there, too.

I reported my findings. "He's alone. Sleeping on a cot in a cell. Window has steel netting across it,and the door is locked. I can see wires on the main doors into the wing, but no security cameras oranything like that. The alarms back on campus were more sophisticated. There is one guy onguard duty, two floors down, and he is sleeping in his chair."

Vanity said, "Can you confirm that this is the right guy?"

To them, it must have looked like I merely reached my hand up into the air and had it bendstrangely, turn red, vanish, and reappear. In my hand was a clipboard. I had merely picked it upwith a gleaming whiplike tendril, pulled it "blue" an inch or two, and then pushed it "red" into thehand of my three-dimensional cross-section. One hundred yards in three-space, slightly longerthan that in four-space, I could reach with some straining.

"Mortimer Finklestein," I read off the top sheet. "List of the stuff they are doping him with. Whathe eats, when he cra-uh, goes potty. Hunh. Here is the diagnosis and history. He was out huntingin Teesdale. Wandered off by himself. When his friends found him, he had the mind of afive-year-old."

Colin said, "I thought hunting was illegal now. No more toffs trampling through other people'sgardens, you know, killing innocent foxes."

I checked the date. "This was years ago, back when Englishmen still had rights. He was in theestuary below Middlesbrough, hunting small game birds, which were every one as guilty as sin,I'm sure. Anyway, the diagnosis here is of a trauma to the diencephalic-mesencephalic core-anyone know what that means?"

"It's part of an auto," Colin offered.

"It's part of his head," Quentin said. "Cephalic is from the Latin for 'head.'"

"The chart mentions severe cognitive impairment. And something happened to his Ommaya andGennarelli. No, wait, that's the name of the scale he was tested against." I breathed a sigh.

"Leader, I'm sorry. I've studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as astronomy, music, arithmetic,and geometry, but I cannot read a medical chart. This is written in another language onlyremotely related to the Queen's English. At a guess? Mortimer here went into the marsh and cameout stupid. They think he fell and hit his head."

We had discussed the plans for this exhaustively during the boat fide. Vanity stepped down towardthe road, found a manhole cover, which, at Victor's gesture, flew open silently. She descended aladder to where, not by coincidence, she "found" a large underground river. She called her boat.

Then she scampered back up the ladder.