A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds

"What are you doing, honey?" she asked.
"An animal got into the toolshed," he replied. "I'll be right
back."
"Leave it till morning."
"And have it topple the workbench and all my tools? No, I'd better, take care of it now."
"Those tools have been sitting there for months. They can wait till morning."
Gareth ignored her and loped over the soft land to the shed.
The stink was gone. No-there it was, only slimmer now. The air seemed to pulse with it when he stood before the door to the toolshed. He nudged it open with the shovel and shone the lantern in. .
The workbench with its spread of tools was untouched. Gareth entered and swung the light around. In the far corner of the rectangular room, a tall black bale leaned. His eyes skittered to see what it was. Closer up, it looked like the back of a hunched-over gorilla. It shivered, and the air quaked with a charred stench.
Gareth gasped and lurched about to leave. From the raftered ceiling, a shadow scuttled. Gareth stopped to see what it was, and a writhing spider, big as his hand, dropped into the beam of his lantern, Gareth swung at it with the shovel, and it snagged the edge of
the spade with its crablike legs and spurted down the length of the wood handle to his arm.
With a shout, he dropped the shovel, but too late. The thing was on him! In his terror to swat it off; he dropped the lantern. It rocked to its side and filled the room with an orange, fractured light.
Almost instantly, the spider dashed over his shoulder and onto his back. .With flailing arms, Gareth tried to brush it off while he rushed to the door. Its legs scratched .the back of his neck and tangled in his hair, and as he reached for it, the thorns spurring the creature's long front legs stabbed his wrists. He slammed into the doorjamb, and spun about to see the black shivering bale in the corner lean over and reveal a glistening blue slugface, frothing with a putrescent ferment of juices. The sight of it made him scream.
The spider gripping the back of his head shimmied tight against his nape, and its powerful beak jabbed him, piercing his skull with a sound like the crunch of gravel. Its probe needled into his brain, and jagged electric colors tore through Gareth with a searing agony. His body thrashed, and his brain went rubbery. He couldn't move. He couldn't yell.
But then he was moving. Through the jackhammer throb of his hurt, through the sheets of flame snapping within him, he saw himself weightlessly rising to his feet and sleepwalking toward the slugfaced thing in the corner.
Horror was a mote in the hugeness of his pain. The very grip of his skull seemed a mere bauble in an ocean of boiling. Freezing torment scalded him, and he was floating through it to the mucus-webbed fibrils of the thing. His body bent at the waist, and his face fit into the quivering maw of the slugface.
The racheting anguish of his body stropped sharper, walloping him to an excruciating pitch of dying.
An hour later, his wife went out to the toolshed to find her husband. All was dark. The air smelled doomful. She called his name several times.
"Gareth?" The toolshed shambled with noise.
"Gareth." The door lazed open.
"Gareth!" He appeared in the doorway, pop-eyed, his face shining with the chrism of his possession. The. terrible hurt dawdled on his wrung features. His face went slack, and finally his lips bent like iron into an overjoyed leer.
"Gareth-are you all right?" His wife didn't dare touch him. His face looked sunburned. "What's happened to you?"
His voice was tricked with grogginess. "I stumbled and took a fall. I'm a little dazed."
"What's that on your face?" she asked, wincing against the brunt of the malodor clinging to him.
"Turpentine. I knocked over my paint bottle when I tripped. –I'd better get cleaned up."
"I'll call Doc Burkard."
Gareth's pop-eyed gaze thumped with alarm. "No! "
His wife touched his shining neck fur. "Your neck is cut open, Gareth!"
"I'm all right," he assured her in his numb voice. "It's just a scratch. Believe me."
With much trepidation, his wife obeyed him. By the next morning, she was glad she had. Gareth was himself again, and the wound under his skull looked like nothing more than a welt.
Gareth went off' to work as usual. All the habits were still there, intact. His laughter was warm, his handshake crisp. No one thought for a moment that he was different-except for the two others who were as different as he.
They met at lunch in a local diner. Nothing unusual was said among the two men and the woman who
gathered there, but a foul stain spread in the air around them. And when they broke up after lunch, the diner smelled sour as an: outhouse and customers turned away.
The fetor was under control by the next day. The zotl had made the fine adjustments to this more acidy breed of Foke. The brain of this food was much the same as the Foke brain and an equally bounteous producer of the adrenergic pain molecules the zotl craved. Here was a whole planet swarming with these slow-motion delicacies, and they had stumbled upon it wholly by accident. Their mission had been to ride the Rim looking for gateways out of the black hole. When they had crossed through one, they were to test the lynk technology they carried with them. No one had expected this test run to find food. They immediately set to work constructing a lynk large enough to accommodate their jumpships.
Carl Schirmer watched the zotl from inside his light lancer armor deep in Enderby Land, Antarctica. His armor had sensed the zotl as he entered the blue shadow of the atmosphere at the end of his flight from the Werld. It informed him that a squadron of zotl needlecraft had lucklessly detected his timelag echo the moment the Rimstalkers propelled him into the center of the ring singularity. His drop into the superspace of the black hole etched a minute trail of doppler-shifted photons on the roiling surface of the Rim's event horizon. By ill chance, a zotl squadron were scanning that exact region at that exact moment. They interpreted the tiny gravity hole as a natural phenomenon, one of the frequent wormhole percolations along the Rim's horizon, and they were able to ride his lynk through the gateway to the multiverse, arriving on earth shortly before he did. Only later in Galgul, when the flight records were finally examined, would the zotl realize that the lynk was Foke-shaped. His armor detected them at once and took him south, landing him among the fields of wind-combed snow and pack ice.
Examining himself, Carl saw a body of iridescent energy, opalescing in the polar darkness. He felt invisible. No awareness of cold or warmth. Only a sense of center, a jewel-cut silence, temple-spaced inside him. From there, his armor showed him everything. He witnessed the three needlecraft that had slashed to earth before him, and he saw the bulky females dragging themselves into coverts while the needlecraft were hidden underground. In the earth's buoyant gravity, the arachnoid males easily hovered into an attic, a tree, and the rafters of a toolshed to await their new hosts.
Since the zotl and Carl had come from the same fargone place in the cosmos, they were inertially bonded. The sensors in Carl's armor telepathically connected him to them. He was there when Gareth Brewster and two others like him were taken. He felt the lightningflash of the zotl stab, gouging the brain, dazzling the body with another will.
He stayed in a dreamstate with that ugliness, his armor standing in the lucent darkness of Antarctica and the wraith of him nightmaring what the aliens were doing with their stolen bodies. Eventually, the zotl were at home with their new lives, and the whale music of their thoughts settled into the steady rhythms of their work. Days had passed.
Carl felt no hunger or fatigue. His armor had liberated him from the physical dimension and sustained him in a luminosity of euphoric alertness and stupendous rest that he called no-time. He named it that because when he was in that state, what seemed moments were really days. Time was easy.
When the snow plumed around him with the
thrust of his departure, the armor made him know how long he had waited and where he was going. Armor was not an exact enough name for what enclosed him. He seemed sheathed in lightning, a slick spectral mist that covered him from head to foot. He jetted north into the sunrise, and where the light hit him he glossed like gold.
Carl's long travels on the fallpath had well prepared him for flight, and he was comfortable with the motion-bristling terrain running below him. The strangeness for him was the emptiness of the sky, the fierce circle of the sun, and the endless continuity of the geography. This wasn't the. Werld anymore.
Villages and towns darted by. Forests and jagedged cities. A coma of blue water. Islands. The bayou cities and a bullet-fast run up the Mississippi River. Some people on boats and in planes saw Carl, but they didn't know what they were seeing. He was traveling low and at a blur that most people never noticed or simply ignored.
Over Arkansas, Carl banked through the clouds and stayed out of sight. He didn't have to see where he was going. His armor knew. Minutes later, he landed in the tree haunts of the Barlow, Arkansas, city park.
His armor shut down, and he wobbled against gravity. Earth air, fragrant with pondy odors, webbed about him, and he noticed that the Rimstalkers had clothed him in Foke strider pants, something like coarse jodhpurs, and a silky red finsuit top, flouncy with vents. He looked like a Vegas act. In his right hand he even had a baton. The black-latticed gold rod was his light lance. It had the heft of a lead bar.
Carl sauntered out of the park and stopped cold at the sidewalk. The streets were filled with silent cars in styles he had never seen. How long had he been away?
He went over to the kiosk at the mouth of the park and looked at the newspaper.
WORLD UNION OKAYS TRADE RULES. The date was two years after he had vanished. A perusal of the newspaper revealed that this Was quite a different earth from the one he had left. Cars were electric. Electricty itself was generated in vast arrays of solar panels in orbit about the earth and beamed to communities as microwaves. There seemed to be only one government worldwide but that was all he could surmise at once, since the vendor was making noises and he had no money.
In Carl's sleeve pocket was the imp, the magnetic
plate the eld skyle had promised would be as good as money. It was entirely blank until he tilted it toward the light; then, the name ALFRED OMEGA winked at him. The divining power in Carl tingled, and he knew that this was the name the eld skyle had chosen for him. He didn't take to it at once. It seemed silly at first, then flippant, but ultimately apt. Alpha Omega was the beginning and the end: Alfred was an Anglo-Saxon name meaning "supernaturally wise"-and he certainly had found, or been found by a wisdom at the end of time, the omega point, that to him and to any human would seem supernatural.
Carl walked immediately to a bank and inserted the imp card in the automatic teller. The crystal display showed that he had several hundred thousand dollars at this branch. He withdrew the card and entered the bank.
The bank officer who greeted him at her desk commented favorably on his attire, asking him where he had gotten his heel-thonged sandals.
"Crafts fair," Carl told her and then quickly brought the subject back to finance. She helped him to withdraw several thousand dollars on the validity of his ID. The blank imp was sponsored by a magnetic imager
that projected directly into the visual cortex of the brain whatever an individual needed to see to approve of Carl-or, rather, Alfred Omega. Carl accepted the money with fingers that felt like fog. He was beginning to glimpse the power the eld skyle had warned him to control.
The bank officer also helped him to plug into the financial trunkline and assess all his holdings at other branches and even at other banks. They never finished counting his assets. They gave up after a half billion, and with the bank president they called together several lawyers and established a regional corporate subdivision of Alfred Omega Ltd.
They appointed a president, and as the first order of business, Carl charged him to begin at once to purchase three point five tonnes of fresh pig manure. To allay suspicions and grease the wheels, everyone involved was paid handsomely on the spot, and princely salaries were meted out to the people Carl selected to work for him.
Carl didn't actually select them. Carl didn't do anything but respond to the eidetic suggestions spilling out of him. The gravity of large sums of money drew together the people needed, and he merely released those funds through his imp. It was all transacted by computer, and he signed nothing.
Once his business had been completed, Carl left the bank and returned to the park. From a maple-hung bunker hidden from the fairway of the park by a large boulder, Carl activated his light lancer armor and arrowed into the clouds above Barlow.
A moment later, the armor put him down behind the empty stadium at the University of Arkansas. The idea kindled in him to go to the School of Science and Technology, a congeries of buildings gleaming in Arkansas red marble on a nearbv knoll. In the central build-
ing, he asked one of the secretaries to put his imp card in the school computer's magnetic reader to see if his scholarship funds had cleared.
The secretary politely referred him to the bursar's office. Carl smiled charmingly and held up his imp card.
"Why didn't you say you were a Union scholar?" the secretary asked incredulously, taking his card.
He shrugged, and she inserted the card in the slot of a computer console beside her. The video display crawled with data about world history and then went blank. The card popped out.
"That's weird," the secretary wondered. "I've never seen it do that before."
'Arid it probably never will again," Carl said, reaching over and taking the imp from her hand. " I accidentally dropped it in front of a skateboard yesterday. I'll take it back to the registrar. Bye."
Carl was barely out the door when his armor flashed on and he was boosted into the empty Sky. No one had seen him. The armor had an uncanny sense about that, and Carl queased with the thought that the weapons he had been given were smarter than he was.
The light lancer armor flew him south, back to Antarctica. He came down beside the mile-high terminus of a glacier where the moraine rocks covered the ground like knives. The armor glowed more softly, and Carl slipped into no-time.
During those early days back on earth, Carl was still ringing with what the eld skyle had told him. He wasn't human anymore, and he didn't try to act as if he were. He thought idly about Evoe and the utter beauty of the Werld-a place where colors and moods existed that could never be real on earth. The snarling shapes of windcut ice and the hurtling winds in the darkness at'
the world's –edge were more beautiful to him than the settled places he had seen on his flight.
After the open simplicity of the Foke, ironwrought human cities seemed oppressive-and after the bold glassy architecture of Rhene and the gravityfree jumpships and flyers of the zotl, human science seemed puny.
What did grip Carl's attention was the revelation that this earth was not the earth he had come from. Finding out where he had arrived was the reason he had gone to the university. Its computer was patched into WEB, the World Educational Board, and the imp had absorbed its encyclopedic data.
At Carl's leisure in no-time, he learned about earth-two. History was skewed, but only in recent times. World War Two never happened. World War One was so terrible with air torpedoes of nerve gas and rocket-launched germ bombs that the Twenties were putrid with global plague. The world population was halved. Political boundaries collapsed. What was left of the Bolshevik Revolution and the League of Nations unified in the early Thirties. Ideology was abandoned, and medical and agricultural technology became the necessary focus of civilization. Power brokers still ran the world, but the disruption of nationalism and the emergence of a planetary identity initiated a peaceful and creative era in human history.
Earth-two was smaller in population by over a billion, but it was larger in extent. The moon had been colonized for mining and research purposes since the Fifties. Two manufacturing centers in cislunar orbit had been producing a third of the earth's steel from lunar rock since the late Sixties. And now in the Eighties, the planet was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of
famine and the fiftieth anniversary of the World Union.
Problems were no longer political but class-based. Robots were replacing the working class and computers the managers. The greatest problem facing the Union was how to handle the riots of the many who wanted more than the standard provisions they were allotted.
The struggle for money and power was the same as on the world Carl knew, but the context was safer. Without nuclear weapons and international boundaries, the planet was a more secure place, and Carl anguished in his brief spells out of no-time that he had poisoned the earth with zotl.
In no time, he monitored the aliens, feeling their sinewed fusion with their hosts and hearing the clicks and whistles of their thoughts. Work on their lynk was going well. No one in the community had yet suspected the zotl's existence, and there wasn't the slightest alarm among the residents of Ridgefield.
Most of the possessed citizens' relatives and friends were pleased with the changes they detected in their loved ones, a few were exuberant, and none thought the worse for the cordial behavior these people displayed. The zotl had to be liked by their prey until the lynk was done.
Carl waited, dreamstrung in no-time. Question was asleep. He did not question. He did not think. The drumbeat of his life lolled him peacefully until he felt that the zotl had completed their work.
That instant, his armor surged, and his eyes jumped open to see talons of icebergs clawing far below him. Dawn had come to the south. The horizon was rubyrimmed with the seasonal change.
Autumn leaves the colors of firecrackers whirled through the streets of Ridgefield. Evening's pumpkin light glimmered over the town, and the streetlamps mixed hazily. Gareth Brewster was one of the last to leave the bank. He waved to another manager still at
her calculator and joked about late hours with the security guard at the door.
A silvery abalone Might flashed through the plateglass windows. The lock on the revolving door snarled a spark, and the door whirled with a cold fire. The figure of a man garbed in light stepped into the bank's marble foyer.
He held up a gold rod circuited with black lines, and with a loud pop Brewster erupted into sparkling silver-blue flames. He was kicked backward by the force of the blow, and his flame-jetting body careened over the glossy floor and hit the tellers' wall with a splash of fire.
The manager, who had seen this from her desk, screamed, and the security guard crouched with fear at the appalling sight of Gareth's blackened body hived with wormy energy.
When the guard reacted, spinning about, his pistol drawn, the figure of blinding abalone light was gone.
The light lancer armor had done the killing. Carl moved with it, knowing the fire-gusting body had been zotl-infected-possessed because of his return-but not feeling that knowledge. Nothing reached him at a feeling level. Not until after he arrived at the toolshed on the backlot of Brewster's land where the lynk was being built.
The remaining two zotl were there with the females. One had already been sent back to Galgul through the lynk, a chrome parabola enclosing a crystal light iridescing with movement. After the female had crossed, the light went out.
An explosion shook the air, and Carl came through the wall. A side of the shed collapsed, bruising the night with the glaring
hues of the lynk's frame.
A woman with gray bobbed hair and black marmoset eyes stood before him, shaken with fear. She was
zotl, Carl knew. The other zotl, a bald, jowled man in a T-shirt was loading a female onto the wood ramp sloping to the lynk. "Rimstalker!" the woman awed.
Carl willed himself to finish these two and be done, but the armor did not respond.
"Rimstalker, we are zotl." The old woman stepped closer. "We are not here to fight. Don't provoke us."
While she spoke, the man edged toward the workbench at the side of the lynk. He jumped, snatched an object off the bench, and rolled toward the lynk in a blur of inhuman speed. The crystalline light jumped brightly inside the lynk.
The armor, which Carl had been urging with all his mental powers to react, moved suddenly. A flare of energy squashed the man and a second burst kicked the woman into a blazing husk.
Carl went over to the lynk and picked up the object the man had grabbed. He knew then why the armor had waited. The object was the gate device for the lynk. Only a zotl will could activate it. Once the zotl had opened it, the armor had slain them.
Carl approached the open lynk and pointed his light lance into it. The lance bucked like a shotgun, and the lynk hues vanished.
Carl pushed the chrome arch down, jumped into the sky, and dropped a ball of writhing electric vipers onto the toolshed. The entire hillock disappeared in a white blare of silence and reappeared an instant later inside an oceanful roar of thunder. The toolshed was gone, and a broth of silver mist swirled in the crater where it had been.
The armor shot Carl high over the avalanching thunder, and he was told what had just happened: The armor had waited for the lynk gate to be opened so that it could fire a gravity pulse into the lynk. The pulse was amplified by a tunneling efect and came out the other
end as a gravitational tsunami. Half of Galgul was probably destroyed outright, and the zotl Werld empire seriously crippled.
The information swept through Carl like a black undercurrent. Evoe! He had probably killed Evoe. But not him! It was the armor!
The despair of that thought clashed with the armor's mounting wavefront of euphoria, and a felt-before craziness, like a dream remembered only in sleep, shuddered his mind. He flew through the length of the night, until the brink of the world fell below him and the sun jolted his eyes.
Who was living him? All at once the idea of abrogating his will to the Rimstalker's armor was a horror. The zotl were gone and the eld skyle's medicine being gathered, but his Evoe had been sacrificed. A scream banged for a way out.
Carl forced his attention into himself. He wanted to feel his own will, slight and muddling as it was. He didn't want to scream. He wouldn't break down. He just wanted some control of his own actions.
The armor obliged, and Carl, hagggard with uncertainty, flung himself toward the wall of dawn.
SCI-FI MURDERER SLAYS THREE THREE KILLED BY LASER MONSTER
The headlines glared from where they lay on –the mail carriage that 'clanked by Zeke Zhdarnov's room six days a week. He wasn't
allowed newspapers-they fed his delusions-but Chad, the attendant, usually placed the papers on top. of the mail carriage and left it where Zeke could read them through the steel mesh of the door.
Lately Zeke had not been coming to the cage door. He was dreamward again-inspelled, he called it. Dr. Blau said it was catatonia simplex. For Chad, big gladsome Chad, it was the prelude to Out, that wakeful, brotherly, and voluble state Zeke got into after inspelling. He came out of his trances hungry for human contact. And Chad was always happy to face into his light-yearlong stare and listen to his mild, almost fatherly rantings about ghost holes, inertial waves, and infinity.
Chad was happy to indulge this lunacy because when the old man was through he was in a grateful mood and he always showed his gratitude by naming –a winner in the next day's Daily. Chad never told him that he played the horses, the old man just told him the winners' names on his own. And he was always right. The winners were invariably low-paying odds, but Chad had become accustomed to the regular stipend. And he'd learned not to question, Zeke-the old man babbled like, a washer-cracked faucet anywhere near a question. And, of course, he never told anyone else. It would have watered his odds at the track, and no one would really have believed him anyway.
He'd seen the old man do wilder magic than horsebetting with Dr. Blau, the chief of staff, and no one was impressed. Like the time Zeke knew everything about Dr. Blau, even his family secrets from the Great War, and the chief of staff explained it away as an afflux of the collective unconscious and ordered the old man shot up with depressants.
But drugs didn't affect him. After the shots, Zeke slumped to sleep,, and once the staff were gone he'd get up. When Zeke was medicated, Chad sometimes pretended to work in the rose garden,, near the vine-knotted trellis from where, with the slant of the afternoon rays, he could see into Zeke's room. The old man moved about his cubicle with slow-motion ecstasy, arms
held up limply like an orangutan's, face luminous as a child's. He was talking with the cosmos.
Zeke, naturally, was not really an old man. He was thirty-six. But in the last two years every strand of his black hair had gone white, and he had grown a full beard that on his brawny frame made him look like an aged mountain peasant.
He himself no longer knew if he was mad. And he didn't care. He had tapped a creative surge within himself that endowed him with a calm self-absorption. The surge was cosmic. It'waved through him with the rhythms of cloud-shadows, the spill of the wind. He couldn't predict or command it, but when the surge was on him, everything seemed possible. The buzzing chords of his body relaxed, and a soft alertness rose through him, peaked to an energetic wherewithal, and eventually eased into a quiescent clarity.
Zeke had found this rhythm before he had been brought to the asylum. He had found it the rainpattered night he had decided not to question his feelings but to search for Carl wherever the search led.
The conclusions his reasoned search had found were so bizarre that no one thought them real. And when he took them seriously, his former friends and colleagues avoided him. He didn't blame them. He no longer belonged in society. He was a cosmic man now. What else could he be after pondering Carl Schirmer's fate and deciding he had actually become light?
In the journal he kept to monitor the evolution of his
thoughts, a journal he had named The Decomposition Notebook to signify Carl's transformation though it just as aptly applied to himself, he wrote: "Ignorance is worse than madness." Arid soon after that his inspelling went deeper and he woke up in the asylum.
During one of his first inspells, a year before, lying on his back among his scattered books and papers,
seeing the blank ceiling as a vast cloud of atoms, he felt a fantasy with the musculature of a conviction. He imagined that Carl's body of photons had not only collapsed through a ghost hole but had expanded through that same hole into another universe. And not an entirely random universe. Whatever had collapsed Carl had used its own inertia to guide Carl's light through the ghost hole to itself.
This hypermetric entity Zeke called an urg, because it sounded like erg, which was the quality that this thing had turned Carl's 150-pound mass into. E = mc2, eh? Then, 69-kilo Carl became 61.2 million billion billion ergs. Enough energy to vaporize Manhattan if he hadn't collapsed into the urg.
And for what purpose? Zeke felt that there could be only one purpose for a complexly organized polydimensional being like an urg to snatch a scrawny, bald bartender. Carl was food.
Food to a metaspatial being was bound to be something like and quite unlike food to a human. Something like, in that nutrition would be extracted from the process. But what would an nth-dimensional being's nutritional needs be?
Zeke figured an urg needed more than energy, because what people defined as food energy was not photons themselves but the timebound process of releasing photons. And a hungry urg, with the resources to reach outside of its own time and implode a man to light, could certainly satisfy its energic needs locally.
Eventually, Zeke reasoned it was Carl's inertia, the sumful potency of his wee mass within the cosmic mass of the universe, that the urg wanted. Inertia, as light, was timefree and could be transported through ghost holes to the urg's hypermetric locus where no human mind could reason its digestion.
One grand consequence of this trance-found theory
was that Carl, who had inertia but was not as a mind any particular inertia, would survive. Zeke's hyperbolic mentations assured him that it was unlikely that Carl had been harmed at all. As Carl's inertia was extracted, the alien's equivalent inertia was excreted=and because the basic conservation laws of the universe insisted on equivalency, the alien's inertia was excreted as –another, identical Carl-identical but for his inertia.
Insights like that inspired Zeke's science fiction novel Shards of Time. And the writing of the book inspired more inspelling and more insights. The syndrome was devastating to Zeke's life in society, since he spent most of his time communing inwardly in states of mind that looked to others like coma.
But he didn't care. He was happy only when he was inspelling, which, now that he had arrived at the asylum, was almost continually.
Chad left the newspapers near Zeke's mesh door, and he was surprised when he came back to see the old man reading them.
"So you're Out," Chad chirped. "What galactic insights do you have for me today Zeke?"
"Hmm." Zeke was leaning against his gate, reading what he could see of both papers simultaneously. "Have you read the lead story?"
"The raygun killer?" Chad asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, that is wild. Seven witnesses and a video clip, from the murder in the bank. Check out those photos." Chad opened the folded newspapers and revealed the front-page photographs of a human-shaped glare, a security guard, and a man in a three-piece suit. In one of the shots, the bank manager was furry with tufts of light, his horrified face twisting with the force of a blow while the man-shaped glare pointed at him with a wand.
When Chad looked at Zeke for his response, the old man wasn't looking at the paper anymore. His ducal face was staring through the rose trellis and into some subtle reality. "I think it's time I gave you a big winner," he said in a voice iffy as fog. He was inspelling, touching his will to the torrent of power sluicing through his deepest cells-and the sparks flew in his mental eye, flaring off his willful image of a big purse at a racetrack, until the name of the track, the horse, the jockey, and the race sparkled their brief instants in his mind. "Put it all on Blue Karma in the second race at Aqueduct tomorrow. Hidalgo will be riding. Got that?"
"Yeah, Zeke," Chad answered in a quiet tone. "But why' re you giving me a big winner? I mean, I'm happy with a small purse, long as it's regular."
"You guessed right, Chad," Zeke responded, his slim, black eyes focusing again. "Our game won't be regular anymore. In fact, this is your last chance for a sure win. I'll be leaving here pretty soon."
"Where're you going?" Chad asked anxiously.
"I don't know, yet. But I'll be gone before the week's
out."
"How can you say that?"
"You see that newspaper?" Zeke nudged his jaw toward the splayed photos of the bank murder. "That man is on his way here to take me out. That, my friend, is Alfred Omega."
"Your cartoon character?" Chad was incredulous. "Man, you've amazed me too many times for me to disagree with you. But if you call this one right, you ain't human."
"Oh, I'm human, all right. And so is he," he answered, looking at the news photos of the raygun killer. "But I don't think those three he put away were. I figure they must have been spider people or this wouldn't have happened." "Spider people?" Chad folded up the newspapers.
"You mean, like in your novel? Spider people from
Timesend?"
"Uh-huh."
"You really think everything you've written is true."
"Not everything, Chad. Just Shards of Time. I didn't actually write it. It was written through me by the inspelling. Somehow I'm connected with another world-I think inertially, but not in the physical sense that we usually mean when we use the word inertia."
"Clam it, Zeke-here comes the doc."
A frail, cleanshaven, elderly man with green eyes and a woeful expression entered the rose garden. 'Ah, Zeke, I'm glad to see you commiserating again."
"I'm glad you're glad, Dr. Blau," Zeke said. "What brings you to the zoo today?"
"My usual social call." He unlocked the cage door and opened it. "Routine unless you've had some kind of insight into your condition. Is that so?"
"You mean have I abandoned my insights?"
"Your delusions, Zeke," Dr. Blau corrected, stapping the cuff of a sphygmomanometer onto Zeke's left arm.
Dr. Blau was baffled by Zeke. The patient in no way
displayed the classic symptoms of the cyclothymic schizophrenic that the medical review panel had labeled him; that is, he wasn't disassociative in his lines of thought or extreme in his emotions, and he displayed no fixated neuroses except his delusion that his fiction was real. His catatonic episodes, the "admitting symptom" that had eared him his cubicle in the asylum, were profiled by singular EEG readings, topsy-turvy with theta waves at exotic intervals. Physically, his patient was sound, virtually a model of physical health. And that, too, was a problem, for Zeke barely ate enough to keep a man half his size alive. Dr. Blau had agreed to hold off forced feedings and intravenous supplements for as long as Zeke's body weight and
blood chemistry remained, stable. And that, now, had been the full eight months that he had been here. Initially, there had been some instabilities when they weaned him from alcohol, but after the first six weeks hi's metabolism leveled, and lie seemed to be drawing sustenance from a current of power he called the Field.
Chad had strolled off with the mail carriage, and Dr. Blau let him go, though he had some questions for him about the newspaper they were discussing that he knew Zeke would not answer. Like: "Why did the news interest you today? I notice you hardly pay any mind to current events."
Zeke watched Dr. Blau remove the arm cuff and then place the stethoscope to his heart. Zeke's face was benign and seemed to have all the layers of light of a diamond.
'Are you getting enough sun, Zeke?"
"Now that the solar maximum is passed, I may spend more time lolling in the sun. We'll see." Zeke smiled and buttoned his shirt. "How'm I doing?"
"You have the blood pressure and heart strength of a teenager," Dr. Blau responded and led Zeke by the hand out of his cubicle. The sunlight bounded off Dr. Blau's white coat, and Zeke squinted to look at him. " You eat so little," Dr. Blau said. "How do you manage to thrive?"
"How do you grow your hair?" Zeke walked into the shade of the rose arbor. "The body does it. I don't think about it."
"But I need more than four hundred and fifty calories a day to keep growing my hair. Do you have any thoughts on why you don't?"
"In fact, I have," Zeke said, smelling a rose. "But I don't feel like telling you."
"Tell me anyway."
"Why should I?"
"Because I want to know you."
"You've had eight months to study me. You know what I would say."
Dr. Blau nodded, put a wingtipped oxford on the edge of a stone bench, and leaned his arm on his knee ruminatively: "Yes, I suppose I do." He leveled his most earnestly friendly stare on Zeke. "You still believe the 'Field' sustains you?"
"Call it the earth's biomagnetic field, if you prefer that nomenclature. But that, too, is a misnomer. The Field interpenetrates all spacetime. Here in the solar biopause we call it life. But when you're aware of the Field, you see that everything is living-rocks, atoms, even the vacuum."
"I see." Dr. Blau stood upright and jammed his hands into his pockets. "But why can you utilize this Field and I can't?"
"You could if you wanted. Look, I've told you all this before. The Field is there. We wouldn't be standing here talking about it
unless it was real. But if you want to be conscious of it, you have to empty your head to make enough room for the experience. It's big, Doc. And without neurotransmitters like LSD to help turn off the inhibitors, the brain stays locked in its chemical habits. The mind is so much a part of the Field, it doesn't normally sense it."
"Go on."
"That's all I'll be telling you about the Field, Doc."
Dr. Blau shrugged. He signed to two beefy whitesmocked guards that had been watching their conversation from the other side of the rose garden, and they approached to escort Zeke back to his cubicle. "I'm sure in a few days you'll be happy for the company," Dr. Blau said, turning to go. "We can talk then."
"I won't be here."
Dr. Blau stopped. "Oh, really?"
Zeke walked back into his room and gently closed the mesh gate after him. "Sometime in the next few days, my dear doctor, Alfred Omega will be coming for me."
"In the flesh?" Dr. Blau asked with raised eyebrows.
"Decidedly."
Dr. Blau's gray, wirestrand eyebrows lowered slowly as he mulled this over. "I'll be looking forward to meeting him at last," he said with his usual spry humor, though concern clouded him. This was the first time that his patient had expressed a deadline for his delusion. The inevitable disappointment would be a blow that could finally collapse the whole delusional system-. Excitement competed with anxiety in the psychiatrist, for a collapse could be the turning point of a cure.
Dr. Blau smiled his sad, open smile and patted the mesh gate. "When Alfred Omega gets here, we'll all have a good chat."
The dark hills of the Ozarks bowed below Carl Schirmer like the bent backs of migrant workers. The sun was high, and his armor flashed bluegold as it guided him down the sky to Barlow, Arkansas. His heart was heavy as metal, and when –he alighted on a rooftop in the downtown district, he sat on the edge of a skylight and wept.
Evoe was probably dead-killed by the vindictive strategy of his armor. His armor? He had not planned to fire a gravity wave into the zotl lynk, nor had he intended to kill human beings even if they were possessed by zotl. He had trusted the light lancer armor, and it had used him for its grim purposes.
Rimstalker strategy, he thought, remembering chillfully the black devil-flames of Rataros. His armor was the master-and he was the weapon.
His tears drained his grief and left him dulled. He
looked closely at the lance in his right hand. The gold metal returned a bellied reflection hatched with the black branchings of circuit lines. His face looked belligerent and stronger than he imagined himself.
At the muzzle end of the lance, an amber lens grinned a rainbow. Opposite that, at the hilt, a black rectangle pulled off in his strong grip. It was his lynk. It looked nothing like the cumbersome metal arch the zotl had built in Ridgefield. This was just a black square he could hide, in his hand, yet the inspiriting of knowledge that had come with the armor assured him that this dense, apparently inert object could transport tons of earth mass to the far end of time.
Holding the lynk, Carl's purpose flushed stronger in him. He snapped the lynk back onto the lance's hilt and walked off the roof through a firedoor and down the stairs to the street. At a nearby clothier's, he used some of his cash to purchase underwear, an expensive gray suit, tan shoes, a silk shirt and tie, and gray aviator sunglasses.
He neatly folded his finsuit top, strider pants, and sandals into a leather and wood attache case. He also bought a black umbrella and in the secrecy of the dressing room fitted his lance into it, using gentle welding bursts to secure it to the umbrella's metal ribs.
Then he used a pay phone first to call the bank he had hired to handle his affairs and then to order a limousine from a local taxi service. While waiting for his car, he had lunch at the best restaurant he could find in the small town.
Carl had no real appetite. In fact, the armor, which was a unit small as a dime and impacted at the base of his skull and which projected, the iridescent field of force around him when he commanded it, also sustained his biologic processes. Food was unnecessary as long as he activated his armor regularly. But the taste and texture of the meal comforted him with the animal recognition of eating, and he ate a large meal while he pondered his situation.
He resolved, between a course of split-pea soup and broiled trout, to do what he had been sent to accomplish, but to do it with as little reliance on his armor as possible. The musical program in the background faded, and a news bulletin announced .the bizarre raygun deaths of three people in Ridgefield, Indiana; earlier that day.
Carl's interest in food faded in midbite, and he paid his bill and went outside to wait for his limo. The long black car pulled up to the restaurant ten minutes later, and he had the driver take him to the address that the bank had given him.
The ride cruised out of town, wound through the surrounding braes and hills, and eventually hissed up a newly graveled road to a long warehouse luminous with fresh paint. A chocolate-brown Mercedes was already parked in the lot in front of the warehouse's giant sliding doors. He dismissed his driver with two hundreddollar bills and walked over to the warehouse.
Silverhaired Mr. Powells, the man Carl had hired to oversee his enterprise, was inside the air-cooled, dimly lit building with two of his assistants, examining the three huge mounds of pig manure heaped on the concrete floor. The stink kicked like a mule.
"Mr. Omega," Mr. Powells acknowledged Carl, offering his hand and a generous smile.
"Al, please." Carl shook his hand and nodded to the others. They met his stare deferentially, obviously surprised by his elegant and conservative appearance, having expected to see him again in his Foke attire. "Three point five tonnes?"
"Accurate to within a few pounds on the heavy
side, Al," Mr. Powells assured him. "It's raw, untreated pig manure. The largest pile in the county."
"Good." Carl motioned everyone outside. "Let's get some breathable air."
He walked to the Mercedes, and faced Powells there. "You have the papers?"
Mr-Polvells handed him the contract the bank had drawn up to his specification, and . Carl examined it. The papers simply bound Powells and the others to secrecy in return for which they would receive substantial sums each month. After he signed it, Carl accepted the warehouse keys.
"Would you like me to arrange for a distributor?" Mr. Powells asked. "I assume all this crap is going to be processed into fertilizer:"
"No-1 mean, yes-but I'll take care of that;." Carl answered.
"You'd better do it fast," one of the assistants said. "You'll want to recycle that stuff before it really festers. Even in this cool weather it won't be long before it gets very ugly"
Carl just smiled. He waved as they left. Once they had pulled out of sight, he turned on his armor and went back into the warehouse.
He waded into the dung, using his lance to clear his way. As near to the center as he could estimate, he placed the small, rectangular lynk. Nothing happened, but he knew in his special way that the lynk had already begun converting the inertia of the tonnage.
He locked up the warehouse and launched himself into the sky. The armor urged him southward toward the polar wastes, but his will forced against those inner promptings, bending the impulse of his flight, and he flew west toward a new freedom.
Zeke sat facing the rose garden through the crosshatch of the –gate that confined him to his small room. He stroked his lion-grained beard, and his black eyes were empty as an open grave.
Where was Alfred Omega?
Dr. Blau's green stare silently asked him that at every encounter, in a mocking way that hoped to break his "insanity."
And Chad, who had won big enough at Aqueduct to quit his job, still came by every week to see how he was doing and to ask with his mundane stories his unspoken query: Where was Alfred Omega?
Thoughts like brambles tangled Zeke's emotions with hurt and doubt. Maybe he was wrong-wrong about everything. Maybe nothing he had found in his surges was right. Maybe the mirror that never forgot Carl's last image was faithful to a different meaning than the one the science of his imagination had revealed.
He was trapped, deep in the labyrinth of events that were heavy with madness. But the events were real: Carl had become pure light. The surges from far in his solitude had provided clews
of ideas that had led him on-and on-but not yet out of the
labyrinth.
Shaking with doubt, fearful of his own suffering, he had to admit he was wrong about Alfred Omega. Why had he ever thought Carl would come back? The thought was simply imaginary, something he had dreamed up after his novel and then taken seriously because the subtle thread of his extrapolations had led him that way through the labyrinth. And now he realized the thread had woven a trap. He'd made a fool of himself. Worse he'd convinced everyone he was mad.
He quaked for several more minutes, then shrugged off his self-pity. So he had guessed wrong about Alfred Omega. He wasn't Christ. He was just a scientist. He didn't do miracles. They did him. The Field was real.
And the power of the Field was real. He was living on it. The rest was just guesswork, mere hypotheses.
Zeke cradled his heavy head in his hands, and the pain of his doubt cut his wonderings back to the split of mind and being where everything is given.
The ominous drone of the wind rivering over the Rockies
blanked Carl's mind, and he stood gleaming in his armor on a ledge among the sharktooth crags of the Sawatch Range. Rushets of cloud shredded through a blood-colored sky, and the mountain range loomed below him in the gold mist of a set sun.
Carl was budging himself into no-time, but the troubling thoughts that he wanted to escape dangled with him in the lustrous spaces of his armor.
Three people had died to readmit him to earth.
And this wasn't even his earth. What was earthtwo? These mountains had the same secret design as the mountains on earth-one. The same eagled cliffs, the same uplifted slants of ancient seabottoms, and the same stars tapping on in the dizzy peak of the sky.
How many earths were there-really? Infinity was not real. ,Unless it fathered another Evoe. In an infinite continuum, he could possibly find her again. But the only way to know was to finish his work here on earth-two and lynk back to the Werld and the eld skyle.
Two months to go.
No-time was not the same. Images of the three he had killed pastiched his hemiconsciousness with his memory of firing a gravity wave into the zotl's lynk to Galgul. The anxiety of his solitude made the rutilous embrace of the light lancer armor feel like a sealed bottle. The dismal birr of the mountain-cut wind help-pd to still his mind, and he bobbed miserably in and out of trance. He persisted like this for days before acknowl
edging that he had– lost access to no-time. Maybe forever.
It was night when he decided to go east, to Manhattan. What few friends he had were there. He had to see if they were the same people he had known. And if they were, if they could grace him with any sense of the familiar, he was determined to use his imp card for them. Though the eld skyle had warned him to stay away from those who knew him, the anger" of his stress strengthened his defiance, and he went with the wind, soaring through the darkness.
Dawn was sliding into the harbor when he arrived in New York. The famous skyline was turning, below him, and the dark sky around him was glittering with insect-distant jet planes. He imagined the Blue Apple and let the armor fly him in low over the East River, up Lafayette Street to Broadway, and then across Twentysecond Street to Seventh Avenue. Dozens of people saw him, but only for splintered instants, for he flew along the rooftops, a golden blur shooting among the watertanks and chimneys. The sound of his flight broke across the traffic noise, and no one heard him.
He landed in the cluttered courtyard behind the building that housed the restaurant. The ivy-clawed walls had shed their red leaves, and the birdbath, hibachi, patio table, and chairs were littered with the season's refuse. His armor shut down, and the nearby leaves dervished away from him.
Familiarity trilled about him like a birdsong, and he spun about slowly to fit everything against the template of his memory. The basil troughs had gone to seed, and most of the leaves were a crisped brown. He stooped over one of the troughs and found the thumbprint he had left when he had touched the wood with his paint-smudged hand. The print fit his thumb precisely.
Carl picked up a pebble and flung it at the window
above the back door. He tossed several more gravel stones before the window swung open and the gray sleep-tousled head of Caitlin Sweeney poked out.
"Get away from here, youl" she called down and waved her
hand at him like 'a brown sock. "This house is still mine, and I won't have you driving me out until my proper time is up."
"Your time isn't up .yet, Caitlin Sweeney," Carl called back. "Come down here and let me in."
Caitlin leaned farther out the window and stared down at him. "Who are you?" she asked, almost in a growl.
"Don't you recognize me, Caity? Has my voice changed, too?"
"You sound like-" she began, then looked more closely. "You couldn't be."
"Take another look," Carl said, removing his sunglasses. "Caity, it's me, Carl."
Caitlin's scream knotted in her throat, and her aghast expression collapsed to a wondering stare. "Carl?"
She rubbed her whole face and looked intently at him. "Carl-can this be? Jesus-"
"It is me, Caity," Carl said. "Come on-let me in."
"Sweet, sweet Jesus," she mumbled and disappeared. Moments later the back door flung open and she stood time-bent in the doorway, staring at him in pale disbelief.
"I've got more hair and muscle," Carl admitted. "And my face is a little stronger-looking, I think. But it's me. Remember that morning I spilled hot coffee in my lap while I was counting the strands on my head, and you said I had to work on my image? Hah! Remember?"
"It is yowl" Caitlin screamed and rushed into his arms. She pulled back enough for her rheumy eyes to study the small details of his face. This pugnacious, blond face was Carl's, slimmed down and tautened. And finally recognizing him, she grabbed his thick shoulders and dropped her whole weight into his embrace. "Carl( I must be dead. I can't believe you are really here. You're more solid and real than ever."
"I have a lot to tell you," he said, unprying her lamprey hold. "Let's go inside. I have to tell all this to someone."
Caitlin immediately called Sheelagh, who was now living in the dorms at CCNY. While they waited for her, Caitlin listened, and Carl lied. He told her about his riskful adventures gambling his small savings against stock index futures and then reinvesting in a dangerous but high-yield emerald-mining cartel in Bolivia.
She bought the whole story, especially after Carl made a few phone calls and arranged to buy back the Blue Apple from the bank that was foreclosing on it.
The startling change in his physical appearance he accounted for as cosmetic surgery and honest labor in a weight lifters' camp.
Carl had been sorely tempted to tell the old woman the truth, but the subtle energy sluicing into him from his umbrella dissuaded him. And more than that: After the initial excitement wore o$; Caitlin became remote. Much more than Carl's appearance had 'changed. He smelled different. The tailoring by the eld skyle of his alpha androstenol did not appeal to Caitlin. Though she did not know why, she was uneasy about Carl, and only his generosity with his stupendous wealth kept her from saying so.
The sight of the Blue Apple's interior, where he had worked so hard and .where his old dreams had thrived, charged him with a brilliant euphoria. This had been the center of the universe for him, and now, with all the bottles, chairs, and tables removed, it was the husk of his former life-and the power in him gleamed to be here and yet so very, very far away from all that this had been.
Everything looked smaller and cheaper, to him now, including Sheelagh. She entered the Blue Apple in a fleecy sweater, tight jeans, and boots. While her mother relayed Carl's storyful lie;
Sheelagh walked her amazement around Carl. "It really is you, isn't it?" she said several times, her eyes threaded with a wondering light. "We thought you died in your apartment fire."
"I heard about that fire," Carl said, looking at Sheelagh's blond-downed features, slender and attractive, yet petulant, shallow with the youth of her life. And he wondered how he could have loved this woman so madly. She had none of the clarified power that auraed Evoe, none of the sexual poise that haunted his memories of his woman one hundred and thirty billion years away.
"Yeah," Carl continued, "I even heard that I 'died' in that fire. But the delicate deal I was muscling through in La Paz didn't allow me to acknowledge my real identity. I had to let it go. And now that the deal's gone through, I'm back. I really want to make up for the anxiety I've caused you girls. We are going to celebrate."
"Buying back the Apple was a good start," Caitlin said, hugging him again but holding her breath.
"That's just the beginning, friends." Carl felt expansive staring into these two well=known faces, and he made no effort to disguise his shining feeling. "Tomorrow, we're going to buy you a couple of condos uptown and a car or two if you want. Clothes. Servants. Whatever you want."
The two women stared at him with baffled excitement, hardly believing this was real.
Sheelagh brushed her honey-toned hair back from her face, as though she needed more sir to keep from fainting. "This is so unreal." She touched the strong cast of his face. "You really have changed. I never
would have thought it was possible." She put her hands inside the cool gray silk of his jacket and hugged him with a fervor she had never used with him before. The lavender fragrance clouding about him excited her as much as the new, rough cut of his features. "I'm so glad you're back, Carl. No one is going to believe this."
"Let's hope not," Carl said, easing her away from him. "I want to keep as low a profile as possible. I've made a lot of money, and I want to share it with you, but I've also made a lot of enemies, and I need to stay out of sight."
"Nobody makes real money, without making enemies," Caitlin said, her filmy eyes narrowing to better study him. "How much danger is there for us?"
The question was an honest one that rang alarms in the mental spaces of his armor. Theoretically, zotl, or any other Werld creature, could appear in the immediate vicinity of his armor at any time. So far, only airborne bacteria had drifted through the lynk corridor that perpetually connected him with the Werld. Following the cues of his armor, he had occasionally purged the air about himself with ultraviolet light intense enough to kill the microorganisms. But it was unwise for him to spend too much time around anyone.
"The danger is mine, not yours," he lied to Caitlin, and she looked as though she knew damn well he was lying.
"Mom, please," Sheelagh said, taking Carl's arm. "This is Carl. He's come back to help us."
Caitlin said nothing more critical that day. He was indeed Carl Schirmer; she could see that now that she had been watching him. And he did have money. Lots of it. He took them uptown to the fancy boutiques on the, East Side and spent thousands on clothes for the two of them. They ate at several swank restaurants,
sampling the specialities of each place .and getting wildly drunk.
Carl was happy, and his disguise faltered only once. At one of the cafes a tune came over the radio that brittled the laughter in his
mouth and turned his eyes to December roads. The music was a synthesized pop version of the song he had composed for Evoe. Sheelagh took his hand when she saw him distancing –away, and he snapped out of his spell..
Later that day, he installed his friends in a twofloor condominium in a luxury tower on Sutton Place. The cost was phenomenal, setting up an opulent arrangement literally on the spot, but Carl seemed not one whit drained. Caitlin's anxiety slackened, especially since now her drunken fits did not have to be melancholy. Her daughter's future had instantly gone from bleak to posh, and that more than anything eased her. If only Carl didn't smell so strange.
At night, exhausted from Jheir busy day Carl, Sheelagh, and Caitlin were sitting in the penthouse sprawl of the two-story apartment, watching the sprinkle of lights on the East River. They were sipping fine Irish whiskey, and Caitlin's eyes had cleared to a shining glow. "What I don't understand, Carl, is the mirror."
"What mirror?" The whiskey had made him feel limber, and the company of his two friends over the last couple of days had unshackled him from his concerns about Evoe and the zotl.. He had to wait out the two months before he could leave, and this was a lot more comfortable than a polar aerie.
"Zeke, the friend of yours who found your burnedout apartment, also found an image of you in the bathroom mirror," Caitlin said.
"He used a computer to make it clearer," Sheelagh added, "and it looks like you-that is, like you used to look."
"Zeke." The sound of his old friend's name felt unfamiliar in his mouth. What had the eld skyle said about Zeke? Carl couldn't recall. "What is the image?"
"It's a picture of you," Sheelagh said. "Somehow the fire captured it."
"But you say you were in Bolivia," Caitlin put in, her voice dark with doubt. "I don't see how. You worked in the Blue Apple that night."
They waited for Carl to answer, but he had sunk backward into himself, remembering that night a soul ago. He had been stepping out of the shower when he caught fire. His last memory of earth-one came back-, the black kicking him into an orgasmic blackout. The ice rattled in his drink.
"What really happened that night?" Caitlin wanted to know. "The police never figured it out."
"I couldn't possibly tell you about that night," he replied softly. "The fire…" He stalled. – "The bathroom was a burned-out hole," the old lady said. "Not even the fire department could make sense of it."
"It's something I can't explain now" Carl stared up at the ceiling, fighting the impulse to tell them everything. The armor's inspiriting reminded him of the three that had died in Ridgefield, and the urge to explain himself dissipated. "The night was a strange one. It began a new life for me. You're my past. My dear and treasured past. I wanted to share the bounty of my fortune with you before I burdened you with the pain of it all."
"That sounds understandable to me," Sheelagh
said.
"It sounds satanic to me," Caitlin flared. "Look-I've talked with the police and the fire officials.. They're baffled. I've seen the mirror-held image of you. And it is you. Or it was." She sipped her drink. "Zeke, at first,
thought you had combusted by yourself. Then he started getting these ideas about ghost holes. Either way, he says that for part of a second, your bathroom was hotter than the skin of the sun. That's supernatural.". –"Mom." Sheelagh glared at her mother.
"Don't look at me like that," she said to her daughter; then to Carl: "An unexplainable fire, a locked mirror, a long absence, and then you return with fabulous wealth and the looks to rival Dorian Gray. Carl, tell us the truth. Have you made some kind of satanic pact?"
"Mother!" Sheelagh was at the edge of her crushed-leather chair.
"There's nothing supernatural about this," Carl said, affecting an amused smile. "What's happened to me is mysterious but not occult. It'll all make sense someday when I can talk about it. But now, I want to know about Zeke. How is he?"
Caitlin's response was sharp as a whip: "He went
mad."
Carl shifted in his seat, alarmed by the old woman's antagonism: The eld skyle had known Zeke had suffered. The confirmation of it burned. "Where is he?"
"At the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel. It's an asylum on Long Island," Sheelagh told him. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. The solid muscle banding his wrist amazed her. "He's pretty bad now. But for a while, just before his breakdown, he went through a brief creative spell. Painting, plasticine models. He even wrote a novel."
"You have a copy?" he asked.
"Somewhere. It'd be easier to get one at a bookstore. I see it around. It's called Shards of Time. It's science fiction."
Carl uncoiled from his seat. "Want to come with me?" he asked.
"It's eleven oclock, " Sheelagh answered, getting up anyway. "All the stores are closed."
"We'll break in. Come on." He motioned for Caitlin to join them, but she just stared at him across her drink, cold with suspicion.
Carl got a copy that night by paying a ludicrous sum to a night watchman at Brentano's. He and Sheelagh went back to the Sutton Place suite. Caitlin was asleep where they had left her. Sheelagh put her to bed, and when she came back, Carl was immersed in the book, his face stony and pale. She waited around to see if he might show some interest in her, and when he didn't, she went to bed.
A rage of disbelief mounted in him the more he read. The monotonous fear that had inhabited him since Evoe had been taken away blew off in a cold blast of horror. The book he was reading was an account of his life in the Werld!
The names were different: The eld skyle was called an urg, skyles were skylands, the Foke were the People, zotl were spider people, and the Werld was Timesend. It was a story in the bold, often bloated style
of science fiction:
The flyer landed on a skyland cliff among spires of fir. The,pod went black. "We'll send the flyer back," Eve's alto voice said in the darkness. ""They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do we'll be long gone."
The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in. I rolled out of the flyer, and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. My eyes must have looked like raisins, for Eve sang with laughter.
At dawn, he was reading the book through for the second time, terrified by the parallel reality of its words. Only the ending was different, for it depicted Eve and Ken, the narrator, going off together blissfully into Timesend.
His eyes were red, tear-torn, and his whole body hollowed, a bubble of silence. He dropped the book and shuffled out of the apartment, needing air. He walked down Fifty-seventh Street to Central Park.
Madness is lonely, he thought at the edge of the pond, dawn spreading on the water like a tree of light. The city of his mind was frenzied with the commerce of implications and ideas. "How could Zeke have known?" was the question that enjambed "What is .real, anyway?" This was earth-two. This was a place as alien as the Werld. Nothing was real. Everything was possible. Not even Evoe's song was his in this place.
Madnesses mingled in him, and he may very well have lost all perspective then and there, but the wild shout that was gathering sound in him was interrupted by the slice of a sharply pitched whistle. It was the furious sound of his mind cracking. Until he recognized whaf it must be: The whistle was coiling from his left breast pocket.
He reached into his chamois jacket and withdrew the imp card in a hand that went cold with realization. The sound was the warning tone, announcing that something sizable had come through his lynk to the Werld. He looked about him-but, of course, there was nothing Werldlike here: In his amazed stupor he had left his lance back at the apartment!
He sprinted across Fifty-ninth, caroming off braking cars and bounding around pedestrians. Whatever it VMS, it was back at the suite.
Sheelagh was asleep, but the sound from where Carl had dropped his gear woke her. It was not a recognizable noise. It sounded like oil sizzling in a pan, only louder and with a crackle that was almost electrical.
Sheelagh had left her door open in case Carl wanted to be with her, and she could see Caitlin asleep in her open room. She got out of bed, and the noise crisped sharper. She didn't bother putting a robe over her negligee but went directly to Carl's room.
The hot noise was definitely fuming from there. She knocked, and the weird sound went on heedlessly.
"Carl?" The door was unlocked. She nudged it open and saw nothing through the crack. She opened the door wide and only then saw what was making the racket.
The wall above Carl's empty bed was brown with the thick shape of a giant bug. The huge trilobite shimmered with the vibrations of its complex mouthparts and antennae.
Sheelagh screamed, and the thing scuttled off thewall and onto the bed. Its broad, flat body covered the whole quilt, its many thorn-spurred legs quivering with the insanity of its gnarled perceptions.
Sheelagh's scream woke Caitlin, and she popped out of her room in time to see the insectile head emerge from Carl's room. Sheelagh had backed into the living room on nightmare-vague legs and was trying to scream again, but her breath refused to work.
The monster crawled out of the bedroom, its hissing cry sirening louder.
In her desperation to get away, Sheelagh tumbled over an ottoman, and the thing hulked toward her. Caitlin mastered her terror and heaved a glass ashtray at it. The ashtray bounced off the calcareous plate of the creature's back, and it reared.
Sheelagh scrambled away from the beast and was clawing at the drapes to pull herself upright,, the gro
tesque eyestalks of the startled beast brushing her back, when Carl banged into the apartment.
He shouldered past Caitlin and rushed into his bedroom. The next moment, he came out with a gold rod in his hand. A sight-searing bolt of lightning lashed out of the rod and struck the knot of the monster's head. The beast's death-thrash was lost in the retinal glare.
Moments later, when Sheelagh could see again, she found herself spraddled beside the stiff upended body of the thing. Firecrackers were bursting in her muscles, and her mind jumped in and. out of herself in a tantrum of horror.
Carl touched her with the lance, and she calmed instantly.
"What's going on here?" she asked, her amazement expanding in her like light through the void. Her calm seemed permanent as the heavens, and she examined the dead thing without fear.
"Devil son of Lucifer!" Caitlin shouted.
Sheelagh got to her feet in time to keep her mother from clawing at Carl.
Carl swung his lance around and touched the old woman.
Caitlin's scowl unlocked, and she seemed to shrink as she settled back on her weight. "What have you done to me?" she puzzled. The flare of her animosity was like an evening color, an apricot dusk shriveling into the horizon.
"Wait for me in another room," he said to them. "I have to dispose of this thing, and I don't want you exposed to the radiation."
The two women retreated, his armor came on, and he used an inertial pulse to scatter the corpse's atoms. In a fraction of visible time, half of it vanished; the rest
jumped with the impact, and the. next pulse finished it. No trace remained.
Carl found Caitlin and Sheelagh in the kitchen. Sheelagh was making tea, and her mother was sitting in the breakfast nook. They regarded him charily when he entered.
The lance hummed inaudibly in his hand. "So I lied." He sat on a stool and laid his lance on the counter beside him. He told them most everything.
They listened quietly, sipping their tea, accepting what he said. When he was done twenty minutes later, their eyes were bruised with sleep. The lance was drowsing them. They went back to their beds without responding to him.
He showered, letting his anxiety drain away, dressed in a
three-piece dark-blue pinstripe suit, took his lance, and left the apartment.
Carl arrived at the bucolic Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel in a limousine. The lance inside his left sleeve was cool, almost cold, against the flesh between his wrist and elbow. He put his gray aviator glasses on and adjusted his tie by the reflection from the glass partition that separated him from the driver. The car waited for him under the ivied porte cochere while he went in.
The day receptionist was just setting up in the wake of the nightshift, and she didn't look up at him.
"I'm here to see Zeke Zhdarnov."
"Visiting hours begin at ten," the husky woman said, not taking her spectacled eyes off her work. "You're two hours early"
"Perhaps this will explain," Carl said, showing her the imp card.
She glanced at it wearily. "What's a blank card supposed to explain?"
Carl's smug look evaporated. He tucked the card back in his breast pocket, tossed his eyebrows in a
carefree expression, and walked past the receptionist toward the wide double doors with the wire-mesh-glass windows. If she didn't see anything on the card, he figured it was because she didn't have to.
"You can't go through there," she called after him. "Those doors are locked.
The lance tucked up his sleeve hummed. A spark snapped in the lock, and the doors swung open at his touch.
The corridor led through chromed examining chambers, which were empty, to a diagnostic room appointed with fluorescent X-ray reviewers on the wall, anatomical charts, a model of the brain, and a green chalkboard. On the board this was written in a strong, clarified hand: ""First find where the darkness lies. Opposite that stands a great light."
Beyond the chalkboard were three adjacent doors. Carl sensed with certitude which of the three led toward Zeke.
"Can I help you?" A short, white-haired man with the seamed face of a shrunken apple and alert green eyes stood behind Carl. An orderly with a hulking frame accompanied him. "I am Dr. Blau, the chief of staff"
"Please,, do." Carl faced him and presented the white card.
"What's this?" His wrinkled mouth turned down, puzzled. "t1 white card?"
Carl obviously didn't need him either, so he turned about and headed for the door that-led to Zeke.
"Wait, please," Dr. Blau said, and signaled the muscled orderly to stop Carl.
Carl proceeded without hesitation, and the orderly grabbed his left arm to stop him. The shout of electricity was louder than the orderly's yelp as the invisible force about Carl heaved the man away.
Dr. Blau crouched over the fallen man and saw that –he was stunned senseless but his vital functions were stable.
Carl approached the locked and bolted door that opened to the rose garden and the detention cubicles. The lock sparked open and the bolt clacked aside.
"Please, stop." Dr. Blau's voice was conciliatory. "What are you doing?"
Carl responded to the concern in the doctor's voice. "I'm
looking for my friend," Carl answered. "My best friend. Zeke Zhdarnov. He's here, I know it."
"Who are you?" the doctor asked with a compressed whine.
"Me?" Carl smiled coldly. In his three-piece suit, with the stiff white collar standing up to the belligerent thrust of his jaw, he had the appearance of an underworld muscleman. "I'm just a friend of his."
Dr. Blau followed Carl in a hurried shuffle. Carl walked under the rose arbor, directly to the gate of Zeke's cubicle. "ZeeZee, are you in there?" Carl called. "Get out here, sucker. It's checkout time."
Zeke was inspelled, sitting out of sight on his cot. An ocean of light surged against him like breakers against a jetty. He had been tranced since dawn. He had woken from a nightmare of a giant trilobite devouring a screaming woman, and the fright that shocked him awake vibrated with the relief of waking into the pelagic rhythms of the Field.
For three hours he had shot through the silvered surges like a surfer. His body and its senses were merely the coast of his being, the landfall of choice, where the freedom of the light in him found will. But he was far away from that beach when Carl called to him. The sound of his childhood name rose like an immense wave and skimmed him directly to shore.
Zeke's eyes splashed open. He was hugely awake.
A generative energy coursed in the fibers of his meat, and his bones felt weightless.
"Zeebo, if you don't come out of there now," Carl spoke loudly, "I'm coming in."
Zeke unwound from his crosslegged position, stood up, and got around the corner in time to see the mesh of the steel door flash with diamond-hard light and clang o$' its stone-rooted-hinges.
The glare hazed away, and he saw the stocky silhouette of a well-dressed man and behind him the skinny shade of Dr. Blau.
Colors swarmed into focus, and he was facing a man whose cinderblock shape, with much imagination; contained the formerly shapeless body of Carl Schirmer.
"You!" Zeke's breath jumped, though just an inch behind his startlement, he was emptiness itself. The prophecy had come true: Harsh reality was a dream. He played his part: "I had given up hope." '
"I guess that's why I'm here," Carl replied. .He was stunned by Zeke's appearance. The man before him was a Blake etching come to life: job-bearded, the gelid light –in his broad stare holy as health. "Let's get out of here. This place is creepy."
"No," Dr. Blau said flatly, his hair friseured by the ionization of the blast, his face pale as a fishbelly. "You can't go yet. I must speak with you. Who are you?"
"I told you," Carl said. "I'm his friend."
"I'm his friend, too," the doctor said. "You must tell me what is going on. How did you do this?" He gestured at the broken, metal-twisted hinges and the fallen gate.
"Don't you recognize him?" Zeke said in a voice like dust. "It's Alfred Omega."
Carl shot him a surprised stare. Alfred Omega had not appeared in Shards of Tine, and Carl was uneasy about his identity being revealed. There was the warehouse in Barlow to protect.
"Let's go, ZeeZee." Carl took Zeke's arm and guided him out of the cell.
""Wait a sec." Zeke freed his arm. "I have to get
something." He skipped back into the cell, and while he was gone, Dr. Blau approached Carl.
"Alfred Omega," the doctor said, his voice fugal with fear and awe. "That's the name Zeke began using in his delusions after he arrived here. Have you been in contact with him? Is this some ploy?"
Carl looked at him, bored.
"How did you blast open this gate?" The doctor looked again at the hinges, which were not blasted so much as ripped. "Who are you?"
"Doc," Carl said gently, "the world is stranger than you'll ever guess."
Zeke reappeared with a black-and-white school composition notebook under his arm. "The journal of my madness," he said with a smile bright as a joke. "It's all real, isn't it? Timesend? The urg?"
"More real than this place, buddy." Carl took his arm again. "Let's skip."
Zeke allowed himself to be led. Outside, where the morning sunlight drifted like sawdust over the garden, he saw the other patients standing at their gates, watching with mute wonder.
The diagnostic room was crowded with attendants, but no one moved to stop Carl and Zeke until they reached the examining room. There, the largest of them jumped out from behind a portable partition and locked Carl's arms in a bearhug. Two others grabbed Zeke.
A whipcrack of voltage hissed very loudly, and the bearhugger was cast backward like an unstrung marionette. His stupefied bulk slammed into the pursuing
Dr. Blau and knocked him onto the floor so hard he plunged into unconsciousness. The two men holding Zeke let him go.
The limousine drove them back into Manhattan. On the return trip, in the privacy of the soundproofed interior, Carl and Zeke faced each other in luminous silence for a long time.
Carl spoke first: "You've changed, ZeeZee."
"I've changed?" They laughed helplessly.
"How did you know?" Carl asked when he found his breath. "Shards of Time tells what happened to me better than I can."
"I wrote it, yeah. But only after I witnessed it. I don't really know how. I think it's some kind of inertial resonance between you and me. I was unconscious for a long time. Then my ego was killed, and I began having what I call inspelling. I think everybody has that power, but ordinary consciousness has filters that dampen the inspells to moods which most people, in the blustery course of their lives never even notice. There are so many more important things going on-like getting published and tenured, like making a success of a ratty Irish pub. Madness heals that misdirection, man. We're running one path, and only the dying and the mad know it: Yeah, well, I found that out when I couldn't get anyone to believe me."
Zeke informed Carl of his image captured in the bathroom mirror. "Everyone thought it yeas a fake. No one believed his senses. And the few that did said, 'So what? A man turned to light. What can we do, think, or feel about it? It's an epiphenomenon. A once-only event. Forgot it.' I couldn't buy that. I know you, buster. I knew you weren't a
bodhisattva or a Christ="
"Thanks."
"I just mean-what happened to you wasn't supernatural. There had to be reasons. And I looked for
them. But I didn't find anything certain until my quest had tortured me free of any hope. Hope that I would be understood. By then I was in Cornelius, and they were hitting me with drugs. The inspelling turned to surges, heavy hallucinations. I'm still streaming, man."
"I can tell. You sound like a flashback to the Sixties. But you wrote Shards of Tinie before the shrinks got you, right?"
"Yeah. My imagination was the gateway to the truth. I know it's true now, but then it was a fantasy. A lot's happened to my awareness since that time. And your –showing up is the most enormous miracle of all. But enough of my blathering-look at you! Squirm, you're a frigging bulldog now. I want to hear you tell the story"
'Carl told it, and Zeke listened with a face bright as noon. His eyes bugged when Carl showed him the light lance. He handled it with the reverence of a priest. "Nothing like this was in your book," Carl said. "In your story, Eve and Ken live happily ever after in Timesend. But in my life she was taken by the zotl. And now here I am warehousing pig manure; three people dead, and maybe even Evoe. It's crazy" .
"It's crazier even than that," Zeke told him after a respectful pause.
The emotions that his retelling had churned went still in Carl. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, the urg-the eld skyle, whatever you want to call it-it didn't tell you the truth:"
"About what?"
"The eld skyle told you that the Werld was inside the cosmic black hole. The final black hole. There's no such thing."
"Why would it lie?"
"It. was easier," Zeke replied, smiling thinly as a
philosopher. "You see, there no end to the universe. It's forever."
"Yeah, the multiverse. I've heard of that. But our own universe is-just a bubble, expanding now but eventually collapsing in on itself and maybe starting over again."
"That's the contemporary myth, and that's why the eld skyle told you that. It knew you would believe it. If you'd been a medieval European, it would have told you you'd made it to the empyrean. To a Babylonian the urg would call itself Utnapishtim and welcome you to Aralu. "
..'Why?..
"I told you. It's easier. The truth is too strange."
"Well-don't keep me hanging. What do you know, and how do you know it?"
"I don't know it, Carl. I feel it, when the surges come on me. I've seen that the universe is eternal. It's an infinite continuum, Squirm. There's no final collapse. And there's no Big Bang."
"Come off it, Zee." He looked at his friend with eyes still slippery from laughing. "What about the cosmic temperature the radio telescopes found?"
"The background radiation of space is not the relict temperature of the Big Bang. It's the heat of the Field, the inertial unity of the continuum. A black hole is not a permanent grave, either. A black hole grows. The energy it
swallows is locked into it by its gargantuan gravity, right? Well, inside the almost absolute zero cold shell of its event horizon, it's the hottest object in the cosmos. Eventually, its heat gets so unbelievably intense that even gravity breaks down-and the black hole blows up! It's not an immense explosion. Nothing like a supernova. The enormous gravitational and magnetic fields muffle the blast, and the star plasma and synchrotron radiation are channeled by lines of force to both poles, where they jet into space. Over time, the material is recycled into new stars, and the press begins again."
"So where is the Werld if there is no final black hole?"
"It probably, is a gravity vacuole in a colossal black hole one hundred and thirty billion years from now, nearing the time of its own explosion. But where is now? I'd bet this earth isn't the earth you knew before the urg caught you."
"You're right. Where I come from, there was a second world war, we've only gone to the moon twice, twenty million people starve to death each year, and we've been teetering on the brink of nuclear war for decades."
"Sounds like a real shitpot. You must be glad you got out."
"I'd be happier with Evoe, where I belong."
Zeke took Carl's arm in a grip like rage. "Take me with you when you go back!"
Carl shrugged indifference. "It's a bizarre place, ZeeZee."
"I've got to see it. I'll sit with pigshit for a couple of months and contribute my inertia to the lynk."
"There may be no way back once we get there."
"There's nothing here for me to come back to. I'm a lunatic in this world."
"Well, we're not through with this place just yet. It'll be two months before the lynk is ready to go. Caity and Sheelagh know about me. I got a little overgenerous with them, and last night one of the. Werld's less docile beasts-a blood beetle-dropped through the lynk corridor to the apartment where we're staying. I was just lucky it wasn't zotl or a gumper hog. I had to explain."
"No kidding. Do they accept what you've told them?"
"I think so. My light lance put them into a trance, and I left them sleeping."
The conversation shifted to their shared past, and Carl learned that earth-two had a St. Tim's where a muscular Zeke Zhdarnov once protected a wimpy Squirm from the abuses of the older kids. But Zee's parents hadn't died in Poland after shipping him to an aunt in Newark who died before he got to her. His parents were killed in a Hoboken house fire. And instead of Nam, ZeeZee had served three years in the World Guard and with the Corps of Workers, quelling riots in Jakarta and Singapore and harvesting rice in Laos. The parallels with earth-one were approximate but consistent.
Back at the Sutton Place apartment, they found Caitlin and Sheelagh awake in the living room before the wide windows, watching the East River slide to the sea. They both had drinks in their hands.
"I got Zeke out, girls," Carl said in a rhythm of friendly banter.
They watched him with the feral solemnity of witches. "So now it's a fugitive we have to contend with," Caitlin said darkly. "Excuse me, Zeke." Her face melted to a sisterly warmth, troubled with regret, and she went over and kissed him on the cheek, though he looked like a wild mountain man. Her face darkened again as she faced Carl. "You have to stop now, Carl, and examine your soul before you damage-or destroyany more lives."
Carl stood squat and mute as a bureau. Sheelagh looked on from nearby, wanting to go to him, but held back by Zeke's mad presence.
"Nothing's wrong with my soul, Caity," he said. "I've lived a new life. And I'm going back to it, as soon as my work is done here. But while I'm –here I wanted to see you again and share my blessings, strange as they are."
"Carl, I'm glad you've come back to us," Caitlin said, though her voice had a shiver of uncertainty in it. "And there may be hope for you, though you've got the mark of the invisibles on you. They've made you beautiful in this world. They've eaten your old, face. Even so, you still have your soul. But you have to give up any thought of going back."
Carl's slack face hardened. "Caitlin, what are you saying? I have to go back."
"No, you don t." Pins of light gleamed in her hard stare. "You can renounce this whole thing while you still have, a breath of life. Don't you see? You've been entranced. You're dealing with the invisibles-the faery folk! You can't take Anything of theirs and hope to keep your own freedom.
"it's not that way," Carl answered with a disappointed sigh. "The eld skyle is a being like us. Zpke can tell, you. It's an organism in five dimensions. It lives, thinks, and dies just as we do, only it's not human."
"And not God-minded, either," the old woman stated. "It wants a demon offering. It wants pig dung. Don't you know about the Pig?"
Carl shook his head sadly.
"The Pig is the old god of the first Druids," Caitlin went on. "It's a god-pig. Not swine but the power of swine in all of us. The Kingdom of God is within. And
sIs the hunger and the demonic cunning of the Pig. It o s is the malevolence of the old kingdoms, the beast-time, before the sacraments: The invisibles get their power from our animal selves, our oldest ancestors. You mustn't let them ally with the Pig in you."
"Caity." Carl took her hands in his and held her milky gaze with his leveled stare. "These are not spirits 'I'm talking about. They're not faeries. They're aliens."
"Aliens. Spirits. Faeries. What does it matter what we call them?" Her grip of his hands was cold. "You say
you' want to share your blessings with us, but you've only frightened us, Carl. And that beast that followed you here from hell could have killed us. What was that, if not a demon? it would have been better if you'd kept your money and left us alone. Look at yourself. You've got their mark on you. And unless you give up their way, you're doomed. For eternity"
Carl's eyebrows shrugged, and he let her hands go. "I guess I'm doomed, then." He sat down, dispirited. "I've brought nothing but trouble with me', all for some pig crap. Amazing. I think I'll just go back to the mountains until it's time for me to leave."
"You can't leave, Carl," Caitlin grumbled. "You'll lose your
soul."
"Worse than that," Sheelagh spoke up. Her face was boisterous with emotion. "The world will lose you. We need you here. You have powers no one else does. There's so much you could accomplish."
"Listen to her, Carl," Caitlin said. "You belong here." She turned to Zeke. "What do you think, Zeke? Are we wrong?"
Zeke looked up at her from the sofa A where he had plopped
down. "You want the opinion of a madman?" He was still humming with the light from his last surge at Cornelius. The polychrome faces looking at him were friendly but stiff as masks.
"I don' t believe you're really mad," Caitlin answered. "You're cursed with Carl. I don't know how the Lord lost you two boys. That book you wrote is a devilwork. How could you know what was happening to Carl at the end of time unless you were possessed by demonic powers?"
"What makes you think the power is demonic?" Zeke asked, his arms crossed behind his head.
"What good has it done?" Caitlin riposted. "So far you're just a freak."
"Zeke the freak." He laughed gustily. "Sheelagh and Caitlin are right, Squirm. We've been too selfish."
"Selfish?" Carl rose up in his leather chair, amazed. "You've been in an insane asylum until an hour ago."
"Because I was selfish," Zeke explained, sitting up from the sofa. His eyes buzzed, and he spoke like a machine gun: "I had incredible knowledge there-the hyperaware vantage of my surges-but I never used that knowledge. I wanted the knowledge to act on me-to save me. Just as you've surrendered to your armor and let it think and even act for you. We've been slaves to ourselves. We have to free the restraints of our fate and act creatively"
"What are you saying?" Sheelagh asked.
"That we should combine our resources and apply them toward a noble goal," he responded in a burning, voice.
"That's comic-book philosophy, buddy," Carl interjected. "Besides, I already have my goal. I'm going back to the Werld and freeing Evoe."
"And what about us?" Sheelagh cried, the mica of tears flashing in her eyes. "You can't deprive the whole world of the wonders you've been given just for one woman."
"I'm going back," Carl said strongly. "I only looked you up to share my fortune for a time. Don't make me sorry I know you."
"Hey, look," Zeke interceded. "We all have to compromise a little to get some good out of this unexpected life. Sheelagh, Caitlin-we can't ask him to stay here with us forever. This isn't even his earth. But, Carl, while you're here, you must use the power you have to make a positive difference in the world."
"I'm not a , crusader, ZeeZee. " Carl was feeling harried. He had expected gratitude from his friends, not demands.
"We're not asking you to quell our riots for us," Zeke clarified. "But with your imp card, you could defuse the riots at their source. You could fill in the economic gaps that have frustrated millions."
"Yeah, and I'll probably wind up destabilizing the whole world market," Carl added.
"Don't play God, Carl," Caitlin warned. "You're right to know that no good can come of that." "Let the scientists see your lance and your card, Sheelagh suggested. "They could learn about stuff they never thought existed."
"Nah," Zeke objected. ":Too many cooks and we'll lose our soup. We have to work secretly."
"Satan works in secrecy," Caitlin admonished.
Carl got up and went to the window to stare across at the riverlit cliffs: His friends continued their debate behind his back. Their voices sloshed around him abstractly, for he was listening to them the way a Foke would, hearing English voices as boiling sounds, meaningless. Outdoors, the burning zero of the sun hung
over the boxes where people lived in this world. The narrowness of those boxes and the sharp heat from the blinding pan of light in the sky choked him with strangeness.
He wanted to go home. The Decomposition
Notebook
A great battle raged against the twilight. Above a stand of palms, the bluebright strokes of tracer bullets lanced the darkness, sparking from the hulks of two hovering Hueys. A 2.5 rocket streaked from one of the helicopters and exploded in the bamboo. The red flash eeried the landscape, revealing the long body of a river.
By the fireflash, the enemy could be seen splashing through the milky water, driving a herd of water buffalo before them. The cattle bellowed with terror as the 20mm fire from the helicopters pounded into them. White phosphorus grenades glared with hurting brilliance among the advancing buffalo, and instantly the battle was cut into diamond clarity.
PFC Zeke Zhdarnov hunched deeper into the slick mud beneath the riverbank's root-tangle. The M-16 he clutched wobbled with his fear as he witnessed the immensity of the assault. Beyond the onrush of the
black herd, a battalion of NVA crowded the streambed. Dozens of them were climbing the glacis, scrambling up the side of the hills, clutching their SKS carbines with bayonets fixed. Zeke turned a frantic glance to the RTO sitting above him in the root-tangle. 'They're outflanking us! Let's get out of here." But the radio operator sat unmoving.
Zeke twisted about on the mudbank and, pulled himself upward by the loops of vine and root. The PRC-25 on the operator's back was smashed, and by the echolight of the phosphorus, he saw death in the man's face. From somewhere above, a familiar voice was shouting: "Get the cows!"
Two bullets sucked past Zeke's head and made the RTO's body jump with their impact.
"Medic! Medic!"-the cries arose out of the dark, and Zeke lurched over the rootweave toward them. –The air was blue with bullets. Buffalo cried, and men screamed. The roar of the choppers narrowed closer.
Zeke bellycrawled into a foxhole. "RT's dead and there's a whole battalion coming down the river," he chattered to the field officer there.
"Get hold, soldier," the sergeant barked into his face, seizing Zeke's trembling shoulders. "The choppers will break the assault." He spun Zeke about: "Now get up and fire."
The rattle of a .50 machine gun sluiced from close by but Zeke forced himself into a standing position and opened up with his M-16, firing into the blackness of the river.
At the far end of the stream, sunset illuminated the water with blood colors. Earlier that day, Zeke had helped to shovel a ton of rice from a captured VC cache into the river. Now, that rice had swollen and dammed the waterflow. In the glare of mortars, he could see the corpses of cows and soldiers bobbing in the swollen stream. Fifty black-clad figures were rushing along the bank where the command post had been.
"CF's down!" Zeke cried to the sergeant behind him. "Charlie's all over it."
"1 know that, son. We're alone up here."
"Christi" The word was brittle with the shakes from his ,gun. The enemy were mounting the rootweave where he had
just been. In moments, he would be overrun.
Then, the sky shook. Both Hueys made a run over the bamboo, the M-79 grenade launchers in their noses blasting a hundred rounds into the mudbanks.
"Sergeant let's go!" Zeke bawled against the thunder of the explosions.
The sergeant shook his head. "They'll chew us up in the bambool Stay low. Wait for the choppers."
Zeke fired a stream of bullets into the nightshadows before his rifle clip was empty. His cartridge belt was also exhausted, and he unholstered his .38 revolver.
The night curdled bright and hot, and the men looked up to see that one of the Hueys had been hit by a rocket. Its tail burst into an orange fireball, and the body of the ship careened wildly into the, dark bamboo field. A wall of flame erupted, and its ghastly glow silhouetted the advancing enemy.
The second Huey pulled upward, veered away, and barreled into the night.
The sergeant cursed. "We're on our own, soldier. Scramble." He heaved out of the foxhole, and Zeke hustled right behind him. Bullets buzzed in the air. They dashed ten feet, and a volley splattered the sergeant's head into gravel.
Zeke dropped to his belly and writhed hard and fast toward the tall grass, the earth kicking up all around him. When he rolled into a cane brake, he wiped the sergeant's blood off his face. Terror made his
breathing ache. He was going to die. He thought of Eleanor, the woman he had left behind in New York. Her gray eyes watched him sadly. NVA shadows flickered over the foxhole he had deserted and loomed closer.
Zeke convulsed awake. He trembled with the cold current of the nightmare and stared about the dark room for something familiar. He saw the light-flaked skyline of Manhattan, and he remembered that this was the apartment Carl had purchased on the Upper West Side. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the colorless hulks of furniture and the smeared light from the windows facing the Hudson.
He sat up and rubbed the tension out of his face. The war nightmares had begun after Carl had gotten him out of the asylum. Carl said they were Zeke's memories from his duty tour of Southeast Asia on war-hunted earth-one. Zeke had shaved his beard and clipped back his long white hair to the close lines of a Marine cut, hoping to ground those night terrors in the peaceful earth-two of his awake world.
Zeke's personal memories of Vietnam were serene. He, like most able-bodied world citizens, had served with the COW, the Corps of Workers that had begun upgrading global living conditions seventy years before and was going strong under World Union leadership. He had been stationed in Jakarta and had been transferred to the Mekong Delta to help with flood relief during the monsoons. He recalled a land of mosquitoes, stone lanterns, and an industrious, sylvan-thin people. They had appreciated his help, and Читать дальше