Titans of Chaos

Vanity Island was long and narrow, maybe three miles long and half a mile wide, a rough daggerof land with no springs or other freshwater sources. To my special senses the ring of reef allaround the island was black with utter uselessness, with an interior nature that was coarse,crooked, treacherous. To the north, the reef extended nearly half a mile.

There were small lagoons filled with brackish water, and the sides carved by heavy tools: Thesewere the remnant of some old excavation. Also black with uselessness.

I decided my race must be city folk. No matter how pretty nature's wild might seem to the humaneye, every object in a cityscape is man-made and shines with human purposes, human uses.

We discovered a ditch of mud overgrown with weeds, marked by the stumps of man-made posts.

This formed the remains of a road or tramway running from a grove of coconut trees near themiddle of the island down to the westernmost jut of the island. We followed the ditch to whatseemed the ruins of a plantation. We could see the square discolorations, mounds of collapsedtimber and tin overgrown with weed, grass, and fern, where there had been houses or barracks.

The ground here was overrun with brilliant flowers and edible plants whose ancestors had longago escaped from decorative window boxes and vegetable gardens. Some of the flowers wereEuropean and had killed off the native flora.

Some of the weird bulbs dangling in heavy clusters from the trees shone brightly in my utilitysense. They were useful to us. I looked inside the green husk and saw a golden oblong I had onlyseen carved in fruit dishes before. It took me a moment to figure out that these plants growingeverywhere were papayas: We were not going to starve.

There was one place where the builders had poured concrete for a foundation: a blank square ofgray surrounded by ferns and palm trees, empty except for the whitish stain where lead pipes hadrusted to nothing.

I saw a spot beneath the ground where the texture was different, and, more out of curiosity thananything else, I moved into the "red" direction, pushed my way through the heavy medium ofhyperspace, and stepped past the ground without moving through it. The interior volume of theearth was like a flat wall next to me. Embedded in it was a buried rubbish heap. I gathered themass in my tendrils, picked it up (or, should I say, picked it "blue" since it was moving in adirection neither up nor down, left nor right), and hauled it up a few feet (and now I do mean