Titans of Chaos

I knew that the virtue gardens of my father were grander and wilder than those known elsewhere,for he had located that tiny spot of darkness Saturn made, and he saw the sorrowing of soulstrapped in there, and he had vowed a great vow of compassion.

But none who walks into one of those virtue gardens returns unchanged, nor can the changes beknown beforehand. The moral obligations affect and are affected by the observer.

In the dream, I emerged from my father's virtue garden, stern and frightened, and took a singlestep to activate a soul-path that hung to one side of me. The specialized cluster of hyperspatialbubbles wherein both my private chambers, and my childhood memories, dwelt were linked by thissoul-path to a distant spot where a time-mirror hung. Its glass showed me images, not merely oflinear future and past, but planes of probability, volumes of potential, hypervolumes ofrationality. One image in the mirror of time shifted from being an alternative version of me tobecome my sister, the sweet Lampetia.

In the hands of Lampetia the Bright was a silver shepherd's crook, made of solidified time-energytaken from a logic tree. Her hair was disheveled, and her face was weary with tears shed for me.

Behind her was a field of thought, and behind the field, the outer spacer and earlier time-segmentsof Myriagon: In this darkness, the simpler and older creatures of Myriagon rose up, roaring andlamenting.

Lampetia said, "Despite our father's pleas, O Phaethusa, do not look into the dark world; do notgo into the tiny cosmos of crooked Saturn."

"I must," I said, or seemed to say in the dream. "The awkward primordial beings whom wedisplaced as rulers here, the original inhabitants, recall Saturn's great crime, and know how manyliving beings he trapped within the linear collapse of entropy, when cosmos was created. Shall alltheir suffering be in vain?"

"Why you, beloved Phaethusa? Why not me? The theft of those spirits, loyal to the Bright One,which Saturn in mirth calls the cattle of the sun, was as much my fault as yours, for we both creptinto the Garden of Virtue and saw the moral obligations leading from our perfections into thelapsed worlds of Saturn."

I said, "I am more suited to go. There in the distance is the ocean of moral obligations. Here arethe positive and negative values of each monad-atom. You may check my calculations."