A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds

"The hand is not different from what it writes down."
Galgul was a cloud of rubble. Two black spheres and three cracked egg shapes were the only traces of order in an amorphous sprawl of floating debris. Blasttwisted shards of metal and coils of black dust looped with the fallpaths. Anything organic had been seared to ash by the firestorm that
had gulfed the exploded, structures. Inert, jagged forms hovered like a black aura around the ruins of Galgul.
Five of the twelve clustered city-spheres had been destroyed. Their three-kilometer-wide plasteel shells had been shattered into junk by a gravity wave that had bounded out of a lynk in one of the spheres. The lynk had connected with a four-space, positively curved stellar zone one hundred and thirty billion light-years
away. Three zotl needlecraft had established the lynk after following a Foke-shaped gravity echo into the Rim. The conclusion was obvious. A Rimstalker had armored a Foke, had sent him to a Foke-fertile planet where the food lure to the zotl would be irresistible, and had used the lure to attack the zotl through their own lynk. The plan had been a cunning and devastatingly effective one.
Like two spider gods, the remaining city-spheres of Galgul hung in a web of broken metal, misty against the whorl of the Cloudriver. The broken hulks of the ruined spheres dangled like torn roots among clots of fused metal. Needlecraft sparkled among the rocksmoke and the avalanches of destroyed shapes. Camouflaged by the tumult of devastation were jumpships, black boomerangs with laser cannon, waiting in ambush for any Foke or Rimstalker aggression.
Zotl and Rimstalkers had warred since the zotl first arrived in the Werld, seventy-two cycles ago. Though the two species occupied the two distant poles, a Werld apart, they were both four-space creatures, and they conflicted in the tesseract range that contained the Werld. Their battles were timeflux distortions in superspace, and they fought over which species would occupy the narrow tetrad vector field that connected the Werld with the multiverse.
The Rimstalkers had dominated this gateway to infinity for the three hundred cycles of their time in the Werld before the zotl arrived. Rimstalker technology was by far the most advanced, but zotl four-space awareness was innately more adroit. After forty cycles of zotl incursions into the disputed tetrad vector, field, the spider people established a beachhead and, by dint of their elusive four-space awareness, were able to evade Rimstalker timeflux distortions and develop a lynk technology of their own. In another two or three
cycles, .they would have begun establishing a multiversal empire.
The zotl had been taken by surprise when the Rimstalkers abandoned their superspace forays to attack Galgul with a three-space gravity wave. Within moments, the zotl capital had been reduced to ruins. Only two city-spheres were left intact. Three were crippled, and the rest utterly demolished. And now, Foke-zotl food-were using the rubble-clogged fallpaths to penetrate zotl defenses and sabotage the cleanup and repair work.
This was the darkest time the zotl had known in the Werld, and their keening warbled across the tesseract range to Rataros, where the Rimstalkers were equally shocked. They had issued the, armor to Carl Schirmer as a favor to an eld skyle that had opened a channel to the tetrad vector 'field when the Rimstalkers were in need. Unlike the zotl, the Rimstalkers did not rely on organic sustenance. Their nourishment came directly from the hyperphotons of the tetrad vector field, and when the zotl began to expropriate vast swaths of the tetrad field for their own expansionist strategies, Rimstalkers starved.
Eld skyles, as five-space beings, were in a position to direct the four-space vector field to some degree.
One eld skyle had been able to channel enough hyper-photons to save the lives of over a thousand Rimstalkers. In return, the Rimstalkers had armored Carl and sent him to fetch the three-space substance that the eld skyle needed for its own survival. ''
. The Rimstalkers had never guessed that the zotl would detect the fraction-of-a-second echo in the tetrad field, let alone follow it to its destination. That the armor had demonstrated the wit and initiative to wait for, the zotl to set up a lynk and then use the zotl lynk to assault Calgul was not as surprising. The armor, after all, had its own artificial intelligence loyal to its creators, and it was only slightly hampered by the emotional organ the creature it occupied called a brain. But now the Rimstalkers had a problem.
If the Rimstalkers had planned this offensive, they would have used a light lance with the power to destroy all of Galgul. Instead, the zotl had been badly hurt but not eliminated. The Foke harassing them could not hope to overcome them. So, in a cycle or two, the zotl would be back in the tetrad vector field and more aggressive than ever.
Some of the Rimstalkers wanted to armor more Foke and direct an assault against the remnants of Galgul. But that idea was dismissed at once in the face of the realization that the zotl, if pressed to the wall, could use their budding lynk technology to disrupt the gravity matrix that gave the Werld its shape and collapse the entire Werld into, the black hole that held them all.
The Rimstalkers understood: A three-space war against the zotl was. out of the question. They had to capitulate.
In return for a zbtl agreement to stay out of the tetrad vector field for five cycles and then only to occupy regions designated by the Rimstalkers, the Rimstalkers acknowledged that the gravity wave that had blasted Galgul was an accident, not the prelude to a three-space war. As a token of retribution, the Rimstalkers gave the zotl a light lance and armor of their own.
The appeasement was tiny. The armor and lance were designed to implode if their interiors were tampered with, so the zotl could learn nothing from them. Also, they were useless anywhere near Rataros, so they were no good against the Rimstalkers. The only immediate use for the armored lance was as an instrument of revenge. The Foke who had fired the gravity wave into
Galgul would be destroyed, and the Foke-fertile planet that had served as a lure would become the first conquest of the zotl's multiversal empire.
To celebrate this new determination, the best of the suspended Foke were revived and milked.
The choice stock of Foke delicacies was located in one of the mangled spheres. There, behind fumestained glastic panels, were several thousand human bodies asleep in no-time. The myriads of Foke were individually encapsulated and stacked upright to facilitate –their gravity-pumped life support.
Among the stock was a slender woman with a quiet face and strawberry flecks in her drowsy gray eyes.
"Evoe is alive," Zeke told Carl. Zeke's eyes were blurry with drowsiness. His bear-sized frame leaned in the doorway to his bedroom, his baggy black silk pajamas scarred with sleep creases.
Carl had already shaved and dressed, though dawn was still a dark hour away. He wore a beige pair of trousers, sneakers, and a purple pullover sweater. He was sitting in the living room practicing touch control with his lance by changing channels on the TV from across the room. When he heard Zeke, his hand twitched,
and the TV flew off its stand and smashed into the wall. Sparks and glass spurted, and Carl leaped up from the cushioned chair where he was slouched, "tire you sure?"
Zeke stepped over the shattered corpse of the TV and stretched out on the sofa. "I saw her in Galgul," he replied in a sleepwrung voice. "The place is a bigger mess than that TV You really rocked it, buddy. Ewe's okay, though. I saw her in a kind of suspended animation. The zotl are saving her for a special dinnercommemorating the conquest of the earth."
"You sure this is a real lynk-dream?" Carl asked, his head effervescent with euphoria. He wanted to
believe him, but Zeke had been in a loose frame of mind since Carl had gotten him out of Cornelius. His attention had been wavery as a candleflame, and he had slept as much as he had been awake. Carl had purchased a spacious apartment on Claremont Avenue near Columbia University, and they had holed up there while Zeke suffered through the withdrawal from the chemistry set Dr. Blau had hooked into him over the past year. Today was the first day that Zeke had woken with a clear face, unscowled with confusion or pain.
The last month had been tedious for Carl. Manhattantwo was a quieter place than the New York he was used to. The hum of the electric trafc was not audible from their top-floor suite, and the serenity was driving him mad: He had used his armor to visit all the round corners of the earth while Zeke slept or Caitlin and Sheelagh were watching him. The quiescence of the cities, the geometric order of the farmlands, and the harmony of the people wherever he went spooked him. The world was closing in on utopia, and with his perpetual anxiety about Evoe and the zotl he felt out of place and even dangerous to the world. He had already decided then if Evoe was dead he didn't want to live. It sounded stupid, but it felt right. So when Zeke told him she was alive, his blood shimmered.
The flesh of Zeke's face looked tired, yet the wakefulness in his stare was strong as black coffee. "The hallucinations are over," he announced. "The lynkdreams have begun again-only now I know they're lynk-dreams."
"What about your nightmares?"
"I was in Nam again last night. Before Galgul. Still can't figure out how. Some kind of inertial-"
"-resonance," Carl said with him. "I know. What'd you see in Galgul?"
"Ruins. The fallpaths are so clogged with fired
debris you can walk on them. In one of the half-gutted spheres there's a stock vault, ripped open to external view. I saw-tiers of bodies stacked in transparent shells. They're all alive but sleeping, waiting to be milked of their pain. Evoe was there. I recognized her at oncefauny hair, flecked eyes, and those cheeks, hollow as a cat's."
Carl looked up to the ceiling and howled, arms outflung.
"Don't get too excited," Zeke warned, when Carl was done and his face, red and polished with joy, was looking at him. "We've got some time left before we can lynk to the Werld."
"ZeeZee, you've just put meaning back into my life!"
Zeke watched him somberly. "Well, you'd better hear the rest of what's going on." He told him about the Rimstalkers giving the zotl light lancer armor. "And you know it's you the spider people are going to hit with that armor."
.Carl's heart became a paperweight. "Maybe well get out of here before they show up."
His hopefulness cowed before Zeke's stare. With his head and face shaved, Zeke had. the sober demeanor of a monk. "You can't avoid them, Squirm," he said with certainty. "But you don't have to fear them. You didn't destroy more than half of Galgul. Your armor did. Let it' protect you."
Carl spun about and ran both hands through his hair. That gesture usually reassured him, reminding him that he had been remade, that life was new. But now he felt closed in, and he went to the tall sliding window gazing west over the Hudson and opened it. The winter air cleared his sinuses.
The dark sky seemed empty: in the direction his armor told him to look. The lynk of his lance to the
Werld manifested in the space of his immediate vicinity and in a larger probability zone a mile above his head, tilted twenty-six degrees toward the north magnetic pole. The lynk space around him was big enough only for human-sized transits like blood beetles, which his lance could easily disperse as they appeared. The jumpships and needlecraft would come in above him where they could scatter quickly and avoid his lance fire-until their own light lancer armor came through. His armor did not know if it could match the zotl armor. .
The wind turned, and the air smelled of burning leaves. A new feeling glided in under his fear and elation, elusive as an unwritten poem. It was –awe. "Geezus, Zeke," Carl said in a slow voice. "It's strange."
"It's always been strange," Zeke confirmed, "only now it's gotten weird enough for you to notice." He sat up. One hand tugged at the ghost of his white beard before finding his chin, and he gazed at Carl, ruminative as Moses. "Carl, I've got to talk with you."
Carl turned from his window reverie. Zeke had never appeared as composed as this before, and the poise in his stare drew Carl closer. "What more can you possibly have to say?" he asked, sitting in the plush chair beside the sofa.
"Ever hear of Egil Skaldagrimson?" Zeke asked.
'An uncle of yours?"
"He was ancient Iceland's most original poet," Zeke said. "But in his own day he was better known as a ferocious manslaughterer called a berserkir. One day late in his life after earning the fierce respect of his people as a warrior, a poet, and an autocrat, he was out for a stroll. As he passed one of his men who was bending over, adjusting a sandal, Egil swiftly drew his sword and-zockl-cut the man's head off. The reason
he gave for doing it is famous: 'He posed so conveniently for a blow."'
Carl looked at his friend more closely to see if he was launching into one of his ."surges." The strong face was as sensible as the Buddha's. "Okay. So what about it?"
"You're like Egil's soldier," Zeke replied. "You're picking your toes. You carry a sword, but you've lost the spirit of the sword."
I'm not sure I follow you, old buddy," Carl confessed in a piqued tone. "If you're worried about the zotl's surprising me, dolt. My imp has a warning tone."
"The enemy I'm worried about is you. You're in some kind of trance."
"Me?" Carl was surprised. "This is the first day since I got here that I've seen both of your eyes working together."
"Sure, I've been chemically pummeled. But you've been adamized. You're supposed to be perfect."
"I'm nowhere near it."
"That's for sure. But to the urg, you're perfect. A perfect gofer. It's got you locked into its strategy, friend. You have the power, but your will has been castrated so that it won't interfere."
"Aw, cut it out, Zee." Carl sank back in the chair. "Caitlin's been trying to save my soul. Sheelagh wants to make love to me. And you think I'm a will-less zombie."
"Not a zombie, just a sleepwalker." Zeke's bushy white eyebrows, lifted. "And why don't you make love to Sheelagh?"
Carl sat back as if slapped. "I'm in love, Zeebo. Remember that feeling? It's a little ways north of lust."
"Love has blinded you."
"Blinded me to what?"
"To power." Zeke's hand flashed out, and he picked up the lance –from where Carl had placed it on the coffee table. "This is powerl" He waved it under Carl's nose: "When are you going to use it?"
"When I have to," Carl answered softly.
"If you don't use the power you have, the will weakens," Zeke said, returning the lance.
"Hey, keep in mind whose weak will uncanned you last month."
"I'll never forget it." Zeke smiled briefly. "But that was last month. What've you done since?"
"What's to do? I mean, the eld skyle didn't send me after the Golden Fleece or the Grail. We're just waiting for the lynk to convert some pig stool and then we're gone. Unless the zotl stop us."
"Forget the zotl." Zeke's gaze pressed into him. "If you're just waiting for the lynk, why'd you come back for me? And why'd you spill the beans to Caitlin and Sheelagh?"
"What the hell are you driving at?"
"Don't get excited." Zeke was glad to see that Carl could get excited.
"Just what are you trying to tell me? That I'm loose-tipped?"
"That you're talking in your sleep. The urg has put you in a trance, and you're not seeing things clearly. If you're loose-tipped it's because there's some of your old self left that wonders what's going on. That's why you sought out your old friends, to connect with your past and the old meaning of your life. You've lost that, and now you don't know what's– up or down."
"And you do?"
"I know only one thing for sure." He leaned closer. "We're made out of light. And light is action."
"Huh?"
"Light is action." Zeke looked amazed. "Come on, Squirm, you remember quantum theory: Light is trans
mitted in whole units. Those units are called quanta of action. They're photons: Don 7t get me started on this subject. The point I'm trying to make is this: All creation acts. Continuously. There is no stillness. Even the void between galaxies buzzes with Field particles. Action is reality. For a human, that reality is choice. You have to act positively, and by that I mean your choices have to be creative, not historical."
"All right, already ZeeZee. I get the idea. You think I'm
lazy"
"Well, when's the last time you worked out?"
"I don't believe this."
"The urg gave you an adamized body, but how do you expect to keep it strong without using it?"
Carl was on his feet. "Riding a fallpath is a workout and a half, believe me." He strode back to the window and slammed it shut.
"The only fallpath here is down."
Carl shrugged. "My heart isn't here, Zeke. Working out's too much of a pain. I'd just as soon wait till I get home."
"That's a negative choice. Soon you'll be as flabby as you ever were. You've got to stop avoiding pain, and you've got to stop seeking your pleasure in some faraway future."
"Why?"
"It's been done to death, billions of times already. Those are the historical choices. After all that's happened to you, you can't just react. You've got to be creative."
"But why?"
"Because you've got the power, man." Zeke was standing up. As he spoke, he wended his way around the coffee table and over the gutted TV to Carl. "What's happened to you is now. It's a mandate to be original, despite the pain. You've got to use your body till it hurts. Use your brain till it's exhausted. Don't seek
pleasure for its own sake. That's the game that trips up almost everybody. Let the pleasure come to you on its own-and when it comes, take it. And when it's gone, keep it a memory, not a hope. Don't look for it. Keep your focus on what you can give to others from the hurtfully alive center of yourself."
"Spare me your philosophy," Carl asked in cold exasperation.
Zeke looked down into him. "I would if there were any other way to live without 'regrets."
Carl ignored Zeke and turned his face toward the dark window. He couldn't take his old friend seriously, because for one thing, the man wasn't behaving at all like the ZeeZee he'd known all his life. Carl figured that was the result of the huge difference in earth-two's history: The Zeke he loved had come from a harder world where he had killed and seen friends killed in war, where death was meted out with the indifference of financial transactions-a world where the spiritual beliefs that this Zeke espoused could not be taken seriously. ZeeZee had given up all fantasies – of dominance in Nam-and yet here was this look-alike ranting about power. The inconsistency left Carl with a filthy feeling, as if the memories, the life, the very flesh he was made of were not real. The eld skyle had told him that he was shaped out of sludge. And this world? Was it any different? It was made from star dung. The crap of spent galaxies. Reality was shit. The horror, for him, was crazy Zeke's belief that the cosmos was infinite. The Zee he knew, the world he had known, believed the universe with all its brutal ironies was doomed like the rest of them, as finite as everything smaller than itself.
The serrated aroma of fried onions and garlic accompanied the chatter of hot oil from the kitchen, where Zeke had gone to prepare a meal. Carl's ponderings
smoked away, and he stepped back, from the dark window. The sun's blot was behind him and below the horizon, –but charred-looking clouds glowed in the east like a dragon's smoke-belch.
The pleats of cooking odors were, a pale tease of memory, hinting at the pungencies and savor of the Foke meals he had known. For the thirty-seventh time in as many days, he craved a braised slamsteak and stream-chilled owlroots. His stomach growled like a rockcrusher, but he was too wrought to eat. He had to clear his head.
He told Zeke he was going out for a walk and took the stairs fifteen floors down to the street. He was flushed when he got there and satisfied. He wasn't lazy about using his body, as Zeke believed. He was afraid to use it. If he gashed himself or if he even got a nosebleed, he would probably be killed. The light lancer armor was set to implode if his spore-carrying blood was spilled. .
Carl had told no one about this, and Zeke for all his apparent prescience had not found out.
He walked down the steep hill of 116th Street and entered Riverside Park. The dark blue of night was standing in the tree clumps, and the plangent fragrance of the river drifted up the terraced slopes. Why had he come back, really? Was he seeking something from his past? Of course. Yet how could he tell this Zeke about his fear of the armor? Not just the. anxiety of bleeding and being collapsed smaller than an atom, but the cruelty of hosting the armor's mind inside his ownthat terrified him. He had wanted to talk about it, and so he had sought out his .old friends. They were all stranger than he remembered them, though. Or was it the armor mechanicking him that made them seem strange?
The moon looked like a Quaalude over the Palisades. The silvered clouds around it rhymed in his memory with the griffons of cloud that strode through the open spaces of Midwerld. Carl sat at an empty park bench, and in the long light remembered Evoe. A youth went by, shouldering a radio big as an air conditioner, and the music blaring through it was her song.
Sheelagh was still asleep when Carl entered her apartment. Several weeks ago, in a schoolgirlish rush of love and gratitude, she had given him the key to her apartment on Sutton Place. Her mother had railed against her, but Sheelagh didn't care. Caitlin had her own apartment on a different floor. The old woman disapproved of fey Carl, but she didn't eschew his booty. She was fond of having her friends come by and being able to give them enormously generous gifts from the seemingly inexhaustible bank accounts Carl had set up for her.
Sheelagh was not as happy with her money. She wanted Carl. The first few weeks, she had made a fool of herself over him. She had shown up at his apartment on the West Side, ostensibly to help with spaced-out Zeke, and instead had sat in Carl's bedroom when he was out and smelled his clothes. His odor to her was meadow-green, hummocky, and lustful as a satyr. She was uninterested in being around anyone else, and her friends began avoiding her. Her old boyfriend disgusted her with his unlikeness to Carl, and she was happy when he stopped calling and she heard he 'was with someone else.
Not having to .work anymore, being able to go anywhere and do anything, meant startlingly little without the man she loved. She didn't know that Carl's alpha androstenol, which the Ad skyle had fitted for Evoe, approximated the sex-cueing hormonal receptors deep in her own limbic brain. And she wouldn't have
felt otherwise if she had known. Carl's mountain-valley scent had led her to the heart's edge, high above reason. There she lived for him, working out daily in the building's spa to keep toned, reading everything she could find in the libraries about black holes, and
waiting.
She had not seen Carl in over a week the dawn he came to her bedroom. He was relieved she was not with someone else. He had been oblivious to her when she last came by Claremont Avenue to see him. He hadn't known Evoe was still alive then, and he was in a deathful mood. Afterward, he was sure he'd never see her again.
Zeke had grunted about the idiocy of hurting someone who knew as much as she did, but he didn't care. He had the lancer armor and the lynk, and he'd fend off the whole planet for the next twenty-two days if he had to. That arrogance was the numb callus of his soul. It shielded him from the pain of a life without Evoe. Now that he knew his mate was alive, he had become vulnerable again. He had someone to live for-and dying became frightening again.
Carl did not go to Sheelagh for sex, though the anxiety in his thews was erotic. The zotl were coming to kill him, and Evoe was waiting for him not to fail. The tension of terror and hope trilled in him with the same voltaic resonance as lust. The energy had floated him down Riverside, across Seventy-second Street, through Central Park, and east along Fifty-seventh Street to Sutton Place.
Zeke's speech had replayed in him several times, running on the charge from his tension, and he had decided to take what comfort he could in Sheelagh.
Sheelagh roused from sleep gently, cooed awake by subtle magnetic pulses from the lance tucked up the sleeve of Carl's sweater. The fragrance of sunridden
grass rushed her awake, and she sat up surprised to find Carl beside her. "Carl!" Her red-blond hair was tangled in sleep curls, and when she lifted her arm to unsnaggle it, the bedsheet dropped enough for Carl to see the pale, ample curves of her breasts. "What are you doing here at this hour?"
"I've got to talk to somebody." Carl slid the lance out from his sleeve and held it in both hands across his lap. "I'm sorry to sneak in here like this. I should have waited in the TV room till you woke up. But the craziness of all this is zooming in. Its all too weird. I had to be with someone I trust. Zeke is just coming out of his chemical mixup, and your mom thinks I'm Satan's protege. You're the only one I can turn to."
"Wait a minute." She hopped out of bed and capered naked to the bathroom.
Carl sprawled across the bed. He felt mischievous with desire-the first conscious lust he'd felt since losing Evoe.. The Foke were not monogamous, and he knew Evoe would encourage him to be socially sexual while they were apart. The Werld, after all, had no venereal disease. The thought of her warmed his desire. At least she was alive. Only the zotl and one hundred and thirty billion light years separated them, obstacles which seemed small beside the infinite abyss of death.
He moved to place the lance on the nightstand and noticed a book on gravity waves and cosmology. Sheelagh cared enough about him to want to learn about the universe that had changed him, and that insight sundered the desire in him. Why had he implicated this girl in his grotesque fate? Why had he come here this morning except to use her to counter his anxiety? He felt ashamed of his selfishness, and he was at the bedroom door, on the way out, when Sheelagh stepped back in from the bathroom.
"Please-don't go." In the chalky dawnlight, her nakedness glowed, e
Carl paused in the doorway, awed by her lovesick body. His shame was slipping away like sleep. Her milkwhite breasts swayed
with her advance, and he let his eyes drop to the garnet-yellow hair between her thighs. He closed the door, and they sat down on the bed together. She took the lance from him and laid it on the floor. The words he wanted to speak went breathless in him as she pulled off his sweater and unbuckled his pants.
He felt the hungriness of a cloud of mosquitoes in his loins, and as the last shred of restraint frayed, the light lancer armor inspirited a thought. Carl suppressed the chilly sensation of the other inside him. He had gotten good at ignoring the armor since he had found something like a no-time within himself. The Zone, as he called it, was a recess in his psyche where all the sounds, sights, odors, and textures of the day went within his head. With a little concentration, he could drop the armor's psychic intrusions there, too. All he wanted to know from the armor was when the zotl had arrived for dinner. The white noise of the Zone smothered the armor's inspiriting, and Carl turned away from his farflung hopes and fears for the lubricious moment.
Sex was a lens of exhilaration, amplifying parts, like the shifting rococo of her hair on the pillow and her eyes like decorated glass, chromed with tears of joy as his hand fetched the lily of her genitals. His touch floated like a piece of light, and they twined together like music. He timed his deft massage to the green pulse of a vein in her throat and the rhythms of her breasts. Her song steepened and then frenzied as an orgasm bloomed through her. She clawed at the hand welded to her bluehot center and cried.
A scream cracked the tempo of her pleasure, and she was rudely shoved aside as Carl bounded to his feet: "Hee-yipes!" he howled, clutching his hand. His face-was skullwhite as he examined the hand and saw two thin wires of blood glinting from his knuckles to his wrist.
"What's the matter?" Sheelagh asked in a hurt voice. "It's just a scratch."
. He faced her with a stare like an ax. "Oh, cod," his huge face whispered. His wild eyes searched the room and fixed on the doily under the nightlamp. He ripped the doily from under it with such force that the lamp was dashed to smithereens. He clamped the cloth against his cut hand.
Sheelagh curled up with fright. "Carl, what's wrong? It's just a scratch."
He picked up his lance and aimed it at her. "Put out your hand. Hurry."
She balked, cringing with fear, and he grabbed her hand and irradiated it with UV But the lance shut down before it would damage her.
Carl dropped the lance, bolted to the bathroom, banged around there, and burst into the laundry closet. When he lurched back into the bedroom, he was uncapping a jug of bleach. "Give me your hand," he ordered.
Sheelagh crawled into the corner. "What are you doing?"
"Just give me your hand, goddammit!" He was splashing bleach all over the bed, and when she hesitated, he seized her wrist and doused her whole arm in bleach. While she wept, he soaked her fingernails. Sweat beaded like mercury across his brow, and his face trembled.
"I'm sorry-I'm sorry," he mantrumed while he finished immersing her fingertips in palm-cupped bleach. Then he clambered into his clothes. "Stop crying
please! It's not you. It has nothing to do with you. Do you
understand?"
"No!" she blubbered.
"I have to get out of here." He backed toward the door.
"Don't go."
"I'll come back," he lied.
"You're lying. You're leaving for good. I'll never see you again. I know it."
"No. Don't talk like that," he said from the doorway. "But I've got to go now. Please-forgive me."
Sheelagh sat hunched over her tears in fearful confusion, and when Carl galloped out of the apartment and the door banged behind him, she collapsed under an avalanche of sobs.
Carl phoned Zeke from Ames, Iowa, and had him take the next flight out. The trip was Zeke's first time out in the world by himself in a long time. He dressed inconspicuously in loafers, gay slacks, blue shirt, bowtie, and tweed blazer. He was apprehensive about being recognized, and a fugitive anxiety accompanied him even in the privacy of the cab to the airport. His mind was clear, however, and he was pleased with how easily he flowed back into the stream of things.
A limo picked him up at the Des Moines airport and drove him through the long fluent miles of resinous land to a lonely warehouse big and empty as a ship's hull. Workers toiled with electric saws, hammers, and welders, fitting living quarters into a corner of the warehouse.
Carl met him– at a scaffolded loading dock cluttered with lumber, fixtures, and pipes. They sauntered toward the warehouse under streamers of construction noise, and Carl told him about the spore.
Zeke went moth-white and fluttery. His eyes were glazed brown fruits when they saw the bandage strapping Carts hand. Carl explained about Sheelagh and him, and Zeke sat down on a stack of cinderblocks.
"You've known about this all along?" he asked in a shadowy voice. "Why did you come back?" The answer returned to him with the shock of a revelation: Carl had never left. His bodymind had journeyed among universes but his soul was everyone around him-all complicit with his betrayal of life on earth. A-shudder twitched through him.
All Zeke could think to say was: "I can't believe you've had the balls to shave each morning."
Carl's contrite face brightened. " I don't. I use this." He lifted his left arm, and the red lens of the lance glinted from under his cuff.
Zeke experienced a warm flush on his cheeks and chin, and he looked down to see a fine dust of whiskers' powdering his shirtfront. "You're, the crazy one," he said, challenging Carl with the boldness of his stare.
"You're surprised at that?" Carl responded. "After all I've lost, you expect me to be sane?"
"Lost?" The veins in Zeke's temples drummed. He thought of slugging Carl, but knowledge of the spore dissuaded him. "You've got a perfect body, an armor with godful powers, and a lance that gives a great shave. What've you lost? Earth-one, a savage greedconfounded toxic dump? Evoe? Does she love you with more passion and more surrender than Sheelagh? Is she more beautiful?"
"It's not that."
"Damn right. What have you lost?" "The ordinary." He dragged out a sigh. "It's strange now. I can barely remember when life was ordinary enough to be boring. I miss that. "
"So you've endangered a whole world to recapture
a feeling?" Zeke thwacked– his notebook across his knee and looked away.
"You're the one that believes the universe is infinite. What are you worried about? There are plenty of other earths, right? And besides, you're the one who told me to take my pleasure when I found it."
"Mat was before I knew you had parasites." Zeke stood up and looked about at the hustling workcrews. "What the hell is all this about?"
"It's a place for you to stay while the lynk converts you for. the jump. We go in three weeks, but now it's too dangerous to stay in New York. So we're going to have to stay with the lynk."
"But the lynk is with the pigshit in Barlow"
"I'm moving it. Now that I've so handily charmed Sheelagh, I've got to cover our tracks. The dung and the lynk will arrive here tomorrow at the end of a trail of redtape that completely buries any tie between this place and Alfred Omega. I started the process weeks ago, after you told Dr. Blau who I was."
"That's the smartest thing you've done yet," Zeke muttered as a foreman approached Carl and presented an order sheet for his signature.
When they were alone again, Carl confessed: "It was the armor's idea."
"I should have known." Zeke's heart was erupting with feeling. The shock of what Carl had revealed mingled hotly with the gleeful expectation of the journey ahead. He felt gargoyled. "Perhaps Sheelagh won't go to the authorities. Maybe the spore wasn't released. It is just a scratch, right? And the armor hasn't imploded you." –
"Sheelagh may be all right," Carl agreed. "But if I were her-
"You mean, if, the armor were her-"
"Yeah, it's the armor's belief that Sheelagh is going to turn us in. It's her only way of keeping me here."
"The armor's right. I asked Sheelagh once if she'd come with us. Her look would have poached an egg. She wants you, and she wants you here."
"But we're so close to getting away, Zeebo. I'm going to see if I can talk her out of interfering."
Zeke's face bobbed forward. "You're what?"
"I'm going to talk with her."
"You're not going back?"
"I want to see for myself if the authorities are on to us."
Zeke slapped his forehead as if suddenly comprehending. "Of coursel And if they are?"
"Confront them." Carl pointed his left arm at a screwdriver on a workbench and it propellered into the air and stabbed ,a wind-gusting paper scrap to the plank wall of the storage shed. "I'll make a deal. We still have the trump cards."
"Yeah,' Zeke concurred in a breath of awe that went flat. "For now"
Carl glanced up at the blue silence of the sky. "For now"
That night while Zeke slept in one of the mobile homes parked at the site, Carl stood outside and used his lance to magnetically stroke the sleep channels in his friend's brain.
When he was sure that Zeke was slumbering deeply, he entered the trailer and went directly to Zeke's notebook. He opened it to the latest entry and by the scalloped light from his lance, he read:
"Carl called today, from central Iowa. I've flown out of my past and am interfacing the future here in Ames. The old horror is over: My mind is clear again. But a new horror-threatens. Carl carries the urg's spore. The whole planet is endangered by his presence. He is a
living nightmare and also the gateway to forever. I feel as if I were in a B-movie: Should I kill or worship him? If he bleeds on me, I'd be adamized. Do I want, that? In an infinite cosmos all directions are strange."
Carl returned the notebook to where he'd found it and left quietly. The next day Zeke did not wake up. Nor– the day after that. The armor, through the magnetic caress of the lance, had stroked him into a psychic trance. Zeke floated in a region fringing four-space. Carl called this egoless, dimensionful area the Zone. It was the emptiness where he dumped all undesirable thoughts. For Zeke, this new, dreamwide state was the pivot of the Moment, the needle's eye through which he could thread his attention into any space at all.
Zeke found himself circling like smoke through a room of bronzed light. Sheelagh sat in a reclining chair, her scalp and fingers wired to a console where three technicians sat. The elderly, snake-eyed woman interrogating her wore an officer's lapel pin identifying her as Commander Leonard. She was obviously having a hard time believing Sheelagh's story, even though the technicians were confirming her testimony.
That scene unwalled to a vista of stars. The blue cloud-gained sphere of the earth lifted into view, and Zeke realized he was flying with Carl. He could feel Carl's thoughts, slow-bursting like flowers, as he pondered his life. He had just come from Sheelagh's apartment, but she was not there. The moon stared from the dark side of the earth. '
A sudden lassitude pollarded Zeke's sensations, and when he came to he was in his bed in the mobile home. He felt gigantic with understanding. Everything in the last two years finally made sense. The inspelling he had used to write Shards of Time and the telepathic surges that had followed in the asylum were the result of Carl's armor. Zeke had been in union with it long
before Carl even arrived on earth. Rimstalkers were four-space beings. To them, Carl and Zeke, as lifelong companions, were one worldline. The armor's inspiriting was Zeke's inspelling. The Rimstalkers had been in four-space communion with Zeke all his life-and at last he recognized the phantasmal daydreams of those dreary afternoons at St. Tim's as the armor's tesseratic presence. And the intuition that had rolled him to his feet that night in Nam on earth-one when the enemy were swarming toward him-the sixth sense that had gums him through the bamboo to the riverbank rathive where he had holed up till an ARVN patrol found him the next morning-that luck was his lifelong bond to the armor. He and the armor had been interfused all along; at a level deeper than time. The contact was purposeless, merely the overspill of knowing Carl, who was the true contact with the Rimstalkers. If Zeke hadn't felt sorry for that spindly, doe-eyed twerp the other kids liked to head-dunk in the toilet bowls and forcefeed cockroaches, he would never have found the vantage from
file:///F|/rah/A.A.%20Attanasio/Attanasio,%20A.A.%20-%20In%20Other%20Worlds.txt where the world is transparent.
The strong sunlight diffusing through the glass roof of the warehouse reminded Carl of the blue brightness of the Welkyn. He sat in a hammock-chair and surveyed the expansive interior. The living area had a waxed wooden floor, round, cushiony chairs, tapestries and bookshelves to hide the support ribbing, and a wallsized TV screen with an imaging, computer hookup and an enormous video library. When he lay back in the hammock and rocked among the hanging plants under the liana arbor, a peaceful ambience saturated him.
The butcherblock kitchen had a seawater aquarium –built inta the counters. Zeke was sitting on a barstool with a frosty bottle of Lone Star in his hand, watching the. fish. Since Carl had told him about the spore and
Zeke had informed Carl of his bond with the light lancer armor, they had become closer. Their secrets had bonded them. And their time together once more had the relaxed spontaneity of their early friendship.
Zeke looked through the aquarium and. with a water-bent smile said: "A toast to the Continuum."
Carl picked up his lukewarm bottle from the soil bed of the hydrangea beside him. "if there is a Continuum." He swigged the flat beer. "And if there's not." He drank again.
"You still think the universe is finite? After all your misadventures?" Zeke looked disappointed. "What's the objection this time?"
Over the last few days as they put the finishing touches on the warehouse, Zeke had explained the cosmology he intuited from their bond with the armor. The expansion of the universe was the result of the repellent force of radiation inertia, the pressure of light pushing the galaxies apart. The weakness of radiation thrust required enormities of time to cause a response, and so the Continuum never reached static equilibrium. The –slow-motion see-thing activity of the galaxies pendulumed eternally with internal expansions and contractions in a dynamic balance.
"What about Olber's Paradox?" Carl asked. "I read once
that-"
"That if the universe were– infinite and crowded uniformly with stars, how come the night sky isn't blazing with their light?" Zeke finished for him. ""That should be obvious-unless you're predisposed to think and perceive finitely. The more we amplify the weak optical resolution of the human eyes through lenses and photon receptors, the more crowded with stars the black spaces between the visible stars get. All photonsensitive plates react with a limit, and so we can't see everything that is there. It's the biological fallibility of the human mind that keeps us from accepting the infinity of the Continuum."
Carl was only half listening. He had grown accustomed to Zeke's prattle, and his inner attention went through the kitchen to the back of the converted warehouse. There, under slick black tarpaulins, were three point five tonnes of pig manure. Nothing but the tarps covered the stuff, yet not a whisper of manure tainted the air. And when Carl had examined the mound, he had found that the-dung looked as fresh as the day it was dropped. The lynk field had permeated it. Soon, the lynk would be strong enough to carry them and the whole mound of feces across the universe.
"Another beer?" Zeke asked.
Carl shook his head. "With the wild ideas you-have for company," he said, rising to his feet, "you shouldn't be drinking." He walked to the kitchen and put his empty beer bottle in the trash. "This is a comfortable waiting room for the next world."
"I still wish you'd rethink going back to New York."
"I've got to face them. You know that. If what the armor showed you about Sheelagh is true, I'd better show myself soon or they may decide to visit us in a less friendly fashion."
"They don't know we're-here."
"For all the precautions I've taken, I'still have this anxiety that they'll find us, Zeebo. "
"Let them. Let the future come to you. You're too dangerous for the world." They had had this conversation before, and when Zeke recognized the unlistening patience in his friend's stare, he stopped and took another slug of beer. "Just remember," he added. "You're the master of the precipitate. You're not thoughts or bones. You're freedom itself. You're light."
"Sure." Carl avoided his buddy's gaze and watched the flakes of life skittering through the kelp shadows.
For all Zeke's mumbo jumbo about .light and infinity he was as intensely in this world as a mineral shard, and Carl felt unreal as a ghost. Nothing, seemed as real as his memories of his lost life. The armor had him wholly in its grip. "Look, I'm going to be on my way," Carl said.
"Okay, then." Zeke led him to the sliding door. They stood together for a while in the chilled and loamy air. of the churned earth. The dark land furrowed away on all sides.
"Be easy with Sheelagh," Zeke advised. "And be ready for the unexpected. Okay?"
"You have any prescient dreams you've been holding
out?"
"No, but I can feel the uneasiness of the armor. Four-space is murky up ahead. Keep alert."
Carl nodded, slapped Zeke on the shoulder. "If there's any trouble, stay close to the lynk. The lance has cued your molecules to pass through the field membrane. No one can reach you there."
Carl walked out into the field. His armor lightningflashed, and he was gone. t
That evening, after eating microwaved lasagna and watching a Lakers game on the giant TV, Zeke lay down on the waterbed under a skylight meshed with stars. In moments, he was asleep, flying across the dizzy space of a dream.
He saw the silverblue scimitar of the earth cutting the night, and the beryl sparks of Steel Wheel I and II, the cislunar factories, glinting in the span of emptiness between the earth and the lopsided moon.
The dreamflight pitched steeply, and all at once Zeke's awareness was mizzling in a sparse, modern apartment. Sheelagh and Carl were there before a window glittering with the constellations of the Man
hattan skyline. He Couldn't hear what they were saying at first, but he didn't need to. Sheelagh was undressing, her valentine-face mirthful as a mask. Her hair looked teased and her lispy mouth nervous. If she was hiding something, Carl didn't seem to notice. He was asking his armor if there were any threatening psyches nearby.
file:///F|/rah/A.A.%20Attanasio/Attanasio,%20A.A.%20-%20In%20Other%20Worlds.txt The armor detected none.
Then sound swarmed over Zeke's ghost presence:
"You loved me once," Sheelagh was saying in a voice like an empty seashell. She opened her wrinkled blouse and slinked off a sleeve.
"That was before Evoe," Carl answered, dryly. Sheelagh was fragrant as warm rain, but he was not going to be tempted. "Come off it, Sheelagh. I'm here because I know you blabbed on me."
Her features went slick with surprise. "I didn't."
"It's all right. I'm not angry."
"You're not?" Her lipsticked mouth looked petulant again.
"Why should I be?" Carl smacked the lance against his palm like a nightstick. "I'm leaving this rock as soon as the lynk can carry me, and nobody can stop me. I want you to tell them that. Make them understand=-so no one tries to stop me."
"There's still time." Her face was moony with love in a halo of static-frizzed hair. "Stay with me. And talk with them, yourself. Let them hear what they can before you go." ,
"No, Sheelagh. I came back to see you, not them. I have to explain why I behaved so wildly with you the other night."
"Sit down and tell me." She put her hands on him to guide him toward a Morris chair, and two blue sparks snapped from her fingertips.
Carl's eyes went fish-round. He looked again at her hair and the wrinkled blouse clinging to her pale flesh.
"I wasn't thinking clearly," he said in a voice crispy with apprehension. "The zotl had me freaked. And I just felt I had to be with you. I needed sympathy"
"Tell me about it." She steered him to the upholstered chair, and the smell of her was fresh as the browse of a summer shower. "Here, sit down."
"I got selfish," he continued through the static of his nervousness. "And, well, to get to the point –I think I exposed you to the same spore that first turned me into light. The spore's in my blood, and-"
"You what?" Her romantic mask curdled to a scowl.
""The euphoria you're feeling-the sparks…" His hands opened futilely before him. "They're all symptoms, Sheelagh! But you don't have to be afraid-"
"You infected me?" Anger and fear pulsed in her eyes. "I'm going to be taken to that other world?" Her breath spit with her shock. In a gesture made strong with her sudden loathing, she shoved Carl, and he dropped backward into the plump chair.
The springloaded hypodermic hidden in the cushion punched him squarely in the upper right quadrant of his buttocks, and his face buckled with shock. Zeke felt Carl's outrage as he realized he had been duped. He raised the lance at Sheelagh, and she gasped, the angry flush of her face draining to the color of metal. But the drug was a nervelock, and one second later, Carl was paralyzed. Another second, and he was unconscious.
Time collaged, and Zeke witnessed the arrival of the police and the siren-whirling transport of Carl's body to a surgery room in Sloan Kettering. The images shrank and went colorless, wrinkling up like a mushroom, collapsing into the dark duff of sleep.
Carl woke to a searing headache. His brain felt sunburned. When he opened his eyes, the blisters
inside his skull winced with the weight of the light. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were so much cooked squid. The brash light sat on his– chest, and his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that he
was in a white-tiled observation chamber. An overhead camera silently watched him. His hands fluttered over his body, and he felt wires taped to his nakedness.
"Carl Schirmer," a woman's voice spoke. "I am Commander Leonard. You are in my charge now, and I've placed you under maximum security watch-for obvious reasons. Are you willing to cooperate with me?"
Carl squinted up at a whitehaired old lady with cheeks brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Her iguana eyes regarded him dispassionately.
"What've you done to me?" Carl groaned. He was hollowed out, and the gonging emptiness terrified him.