A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds

"Now I want you to stand up," she informed him.
He looked at her as though she had asked him to kill himself.
She pulled off the wires taped to his body, and he leaned his face into the shoulder of her white jacket. The purple odor there reminded him of the kindly
matrons that came to St. Tim's on holidays to play with the children.
"We've taken the armoring chip out of your skull," she said, helping him to stand. "We couldn't take the chance of leaving it in. And even with it out, we've kept you unconscious just to be sure. You've been out for three days now, and in that time we've examined you and your artifacts thoroughly."
Carl wobbled, and the scarlet-suited bouncer who had stepped into the chamber steadied him. Commander Leonard unfolded a green hospital gown. While she dressed him, she spoke: "You have the chromosomes of a newborn-no chipping on any of the alleles, and the supercoiling of your genomes is tight as it gets. You're genetically perfect. And that means you're somehow artificial. You're not really human."
The pain in his head was dimming, and psychic space rippled like wind-bright curtains.
"The painkiller should be coming on about now," Commander Leonard said, fastening the gown's ties behind his back. "I think you can walk. Please, try."
He swayed forward, and the guard guided him. At the hatch, his escort put a hand on his head to keep him from braining himself as he went through. The outside of the chamber was darker and cooler. The guard led him down a melon-pale corridor past doorless ofce stalls. To one side was a burned-out cavity that had once been an office. The black, tar-droopy shapes of a desk and chairs were discernible in the ash-slush.
"That's where Sheelagh caught light," Commander Leonard's grandmotherly voice said. "No one really believed her story until that happened. Fortunately, the agent interviewing her fled when he saw green fire crawling over her."
"Sheelagh-" Carl's voice cracked. "I infected her."
"Yes, and two others in the apartment building you bought her have also caught light in the last two days."
Carl wanted to speak, to explain himself, but his mind was tenanted with grief. "I didn't want this to happen-" he managed lamely. The guard nudged him beyond the cindered room, and anguish turned in Carl like a sense. "I'm sorry-believe me."
"We believe everything now," the commander said. "'Mat's why we've gotten you up."
They came to an open elevator. It closed behind them and with a barely perceptible hug silently carried them up. "Your actions have threatened all life on earth," Leonard spoke. "You're a selfish, thoughtless man, Carl, and you should be punished for what you've done. But for now, we need you. And maybe bur need is punishment enough."
Terror bristled in him. "The zotl."
The commander's lizard eyes nodded. "The lance has been calling for you. It started at midnight. Listen."
Carl heard it: a rumbling, inchoate as thunder.
The elevator stopped, the doors parted, and the thunder became a bellowing that forced hands over ears. The guard pushed Carl into the withering roar. The cacophony stopped instantly.
Carl looked around. He was in an amphitheater ringed with computer panels and viewscreens. The floor of the chamber was a maze of consoles. People in uniforms and lab suits were coming out of the soundproofed siderooms where they had been waiting. At the center of the electronic labyrinth was a gray velvet pedestal on which lay the gold lance and the electricitycolored armoring chip. A technician .in a green smock picked them up in surgery-gloved hands and began working his way through the maze to them.
The viewscreens came on, revealing a milky dawn
sky. Pins of cold light flashed on the monitor screen with the glinting swiftness of rapiers. "Needlecraft," Carl clattered more than said.
"If you can't stop them," Commander Leonard said stiffly, "the spore you infected us with won't have its chance to kidnap us."
One of the screens displayed an array of missiles with makeshift warheads. Their exhaust fires redshadowed the sky as they crossed the space where the needlecraft had been moments before. "Radar-where are they?"the commander queried.
"They're not showing up on radar," the reply came.
The technician with the lance and the chip stood before them.
Commander Leonard looked into Carl sternly. "You're the criminal who caused all this evil. None of us wants you to have your power back. But you're the only hope of stopping this invasion. Do you want to help us?"
"Yes-I'll do anything to make up for what's happened." He bustled with sincerity.
"Turn around, Carl," the commander ordered. "Let's hope this works."
Carl' couldn't believe it. They were giving his armor back to him. But could they? They, weren't Rimstalkers. They were just desperate. Carl prayed with all his vital fibers and the hollowness they held, praying for connection. Please, God-give it back to me. 1 won't trip up this time. Please!
The gloved technician peeled off the thick bandage at the back of Carl's head and inserted the chip in the plastic-prised incision there.
Dazzling pain kicked Carl forward, and the guard holding him staggered. A red-blue spark jumped from the incision like a viper, and everyone stepped back.
Carl's headache wisped away. Colors seemed to go brighter.
Space became translucent with energy. Some
thing like a steel, spring coiled tightly inside him, and the inspiriting
began. The fires of his body gusted with the internal force of the
armor, and when he turned about and faced the commander, he
had the visage of a chieftain.
"Where are we?" the armor asked through him.
"At a missile-firing range on the tip of Long Island," Commander Leonard responded. She took the lance from the technicians and handed it to him. "We're a thousand feet underground. The elevator will take you out."
The touch of the lance quickened him with bright force, intoning the urgency of his mission with the drive to move. He strode into the elevator and jabbed the top button.
On the ride up, he caught himself in the gap between his feeble humanity and the armor's power. He felt like the muddy center of the universe. How had he come to this? He was Carl Schirmer, the avatar of ennui, the eternal ephebe, always more eager for ambience than destiny. He had never expected, much less asked, for his fate, least of all the ravishments of Evoe. It was losing her that had driven him mad. He was a false hero, a fool at the limits of reality. But his love for her was real. And he was thinking of her when the elevator stopped and the door opened.
Dawn gashed the sky. Carl settled into the embrace of his ribs, leaned back against his spine, and stepped out of the bunker onto the wide, saltgrass-tufted field. His armor came on, and like a piece of the sun, he lifted into the blue sky.
Needlecraft flitted in every direction, and the armor spun him, punching out with laserlight. The sky erupted with blue and green roses as each of the zotl craft was hit. The rumble of their destruction zeroed in
all directions. Carl circled about, waiting for more craft to come through the lynk.
The atmosphere above him limbed with a startling luminance,-and a bulbous, spidery shape of gluey blue fire appeared overhead.
Carl wanted to fly off, but instead the armor lowered him to the rock-strewn range. The sandy ground was flat to a horizon rimmed with sand bluffs. The silverblue spider landed in a torrent of dusty light. And just looking at it, Carl knew, the lance would be useless. This was Rimstalker armor fitted to a zotl.
With grim resoluteness, Carl's armor stalked toward the fang-grinning abstraction, and Carl went brainless with fear.
The zotl snapped forward. At the instant of contact, the two light lancer armors flashed with molten sparks. The armors grappled, and their tormented shapes . flexed larger than life, quaked brightly, and disappeared.
Carl's bare feet stunned onto the rocky terrain, and the salt air gripped him. His rusty hair and the loose material of his hospital gown jumped with the clap of wind that followed the armor's shutdown. A stink of soured flesh slicked by, and he reeled backward at the sight of the unarmored zotl that appeared before him. The male and female zotl were not together. The bulging sac of the female was an arm's length away, the orange slug-mawed crown drooling its vomit stench as it gilled the planet's thin air.
Carl looked swiftly about for the male. It was hovering just behind him, and as he turned, it slashed forward. Its blade-curved beak gouged his scalp, and the hook-spurred legs dug into his face and neck. Carl beat the spidershape with his lance, and it sprang loose and jumped over him. He dodged instinctively, and the. creature's sharp beak hacked the air just above his ear, its jabbering mouthparts flaying his scalp and chewing
mad sounds in his ear. He batted it away and swung toward the barrelshaped female.
The male dove at Carl in a frenzied attack, cutting the flesh on his right hand and making him drop the lance. The jointed legs dexterously retrieved the .lance and flung it away.
Carl-tackled the female, pulling the thing over by the shocks of its ape-thick hide. It took him down with it, and the male's legs ripped into his, shoulder while its feedtube desperately lanced at his throat, seeking the carotid. His right arm was pinned under the female's bulk and his left hand cramped with pain as it reached up and lay hold of the frantic sticklybacked thing.
The hot blood spilling over his face blinded him, and he squeezed shut his eyes and contorted the length of his body to avoid the spider's scissoring jaws and razored feedtube. With terror's adamant strength, he tore the zotl from his flesh. He held the mad, writhing shape in his gory grip, away from his face, as he heaved the female over and freed his right arm. Its cries throbbed in the air.
Carl clenched a handy rock, the earth's first weapon, and pounded it into the spiderbeing. Spurts of black blood slapped him, and a haggard wail bawled from the female. It was rolling and twisting, spewing putrid ichor in long convulsive arcs. Carl picked up a flat, two-handed rock and used it to crush the zotl. The work was ugly. The inside of his face was scalded with the sick smell, and the gash wounds on his body screamed with pain. The rock slab beat down hard on the. split chiton and jumping viscera of the monster until his armor snapped on with a crack of lightning.
He recovered the lance and bathed himself with anesthetizing pulses. The armor directed the lance, and the wounds were sonically cleansed and cauterized. Miraculously, no tendons or major bloodways had been
cut. Then with the sun spread out on the horizon like a red river, the armor lifted him and ricocheted him off the sky.
Ames, Iowa, was untouched. A few of the townspeople had seen needlecraft arrowing through the sky that night, but none had landed and none had been seen since. Carl's armor detected no zotl activity any-, where. He was glad for the miles of unsullied land that surrounded Ames. He was sick from the zotl killing and was grateful that no humans had been killed, including himself.
The sight of the lynk warehouse was a relief. Carl was sure it would have been a target, but the zotl in the short time before his armor was returned had obviously never found it. He touched down before the partly open sliding door. His wounds were glossy, lacquered with the first sheen of scabs.
"Zeebo!" he called out as he entered. Beer-colored klieg lights gushed from the arched ceiling over the expansive interior. The living quarters looked lived-in: The giant TV was on, glowing with coverage of the worldwide UFO sightings. He turned the screen off. "Zee-where are you?"
Carl roamed through the kitchen and sleeping quarters to the back of the warehouse. The lynk field tingled over him as he approached the hill of tarpcovered pig dung. He rounded the far end of the mound and was frozen by what he saw.
A bloated human figure was bent over a zotl female, face forward in its ooze-bubbling mouth. The male was clasping the back of the bruise-stained head. The body jerked upward and pivoted about. Through the blue-puffed features and the
gangrenously swollen body, Carl recognized his friend. It was Zeke. The
agonized eyes nailed him, and the– turgid body careened forward.
Carl glimpsed a hip-high parabola of glassy metal-a lynkre he dodged Zeke. A silvergreen light streamed through the parabola; which he could just see beyond the stout shape of the zotl female. He fired an inertial pulse at it, and the barrel shape burst apart.
Before he could fire again, Zeke grabbed him. They struggled across the floor of the warehouse to the back wall. Zeke had Carl in a headlock, and Carl was hooking back with his legs, trying to trip him. He beat the lance against Zeke's sides, not wanting to fire on him. Their locked forms smashed against the back door of the building, and it burst open under the impact. They fell through, and Carl twisted out of the powerful grip and rolled to his feet.
Zeke was on his hands and knees, cumbersomely rising. Carl fired a carefully aimed pulse to the back of Zeke's head, and the zotl spider fell away, its feedtube sliding out of the skull slick with blood chime.
Carl rolled Zeke over. The blue thick face was crazed, the eyes yellowed, unfocused. The lance magnetically soothed the brain and sheathed the body in a flux of vitalizing energy. Soon Zeke's gaze was focusing and his voice mouthing toward sound.
'16d-lynk," Zeke rasped.
"I know," Carl reassured him. "I saw it. I'll go back in and destroy it."
Zeke clasped a black-fingernaded hand on his arm, .his bruise-quilted face gasping to speak. Before be could, the air shocked to an icy brilliance. The warehouse was filled with an enormous light. The radiance seeped through the cracks of the walls and streamed in great beams out of the windows and the back door. Then darkness.
The armor filled Carl with understanding: The
zotl lynk had inadvertently provided the necessary inertia to lynk the pig manure with the Werld-two weeks early. The armor also inspirited the news that unless he got himself into the warehouse within the next few minutes, while the lynk echoes were still strong, he would be unable to lynk at all. He would be permanently stranded on earth-two.
He peered down at Zeke, whose tormented face was relaxing toward the semblance of a smile. "Go-" he husked. –He wanted to tell Carl so much-about the. marvels of pain the zotl had revealed-about the supernatural calm inside the emptiness of the spirit where only pain can go-but his mouth barely worked. "Youcan't do-anything for me." His lips hooked toward a smile. "Go-"
Carl used the lance to radio for help. He made Zeke as comfortable as he could, laying him in paineasing currents from, the lance. If only he could take Zeke with him-but his friend's inertia belonged to earth-two, not the Werld. Carl's insides were jumping with the eagerness to go, but he still had to force himself to turn away from his friend. At the back door, he looked around and waved. Zeke's finger twitched. Carl walked into the warehouse.
A moment later, the door and windows flashed with a majestic fulgor. The darkness that settled back was salty with tiny lights for a long time afterward.
Carl appeared for a few seconds in Rataros. The black flames were frozen, still as megaliths, and in this pitch dark, the animal in him was close. He felt fear like a wetness inside him, cold and electrical. He was alone with that fear within the vacuum of himself. The armor had been taken away again.
Suddenly, horizons of red clouds appeared. Great strides of clouds! He tumbled into a gulf of skyles and cloudlanes, falling from lynk to lynk on his light-second-long journey to the eld skyle. The lance was still in his hand, and he clutched the weapon close to his body. He noticed then that he was garbed in a leather finsuit and strider sandals.
He was numb with the horror of losing Zeke, yet by the time the sky had brightened to the beaten bluegold luster of the Welkyn and the eld skyle's giant moss-veined walls were turning below him, awe had softened his feelings. The black waters of the eld skyle's lake gleamed deeply as opal. –
He slid over a fallpath to the wall of the lake. Thornwings were everywhere, cruising low over the water and dropping in dark bales. As he climbed down the wall, he saw the mound of pig manure on the'beach below him. Thornwings were gathering the dung and dispersing it on the waters.– Among the slopes of dung were scattered articles from the .warehouse: a chair, a houseplant, pots and pans, and Zeke's black-and-white-speckled notebook. He picked up the notebook and looked out over the lake, waiting for the eld skyle to speak.
Nothing happened. He waded into the lake and even immersed himself in the thick water. Still nothing. On shore, while he waited, he flipped through Zeke's journal. He read:
"Emptiness. Carl is gone. I'm alone. Really, alone. The connection with the armor has vanished. For the first time in over two years, I am just myself again. No inspelling. No surges. Strangely enough, that doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I'm glad. I guess I've finally learned: A man must love his own to stay a man."
The gravel clacked behind Carl, and he jumped about with a shout. He saw a brown tangle of vines and vetch with a green scar glowing behind a fist-sized
birdhead. The thornwing's stately walk stopped a pace away;, and its tendriled arms lifted and opened.
""You've come for me, my old friend," Carl acknowledged. "Okay-we'll go." He looked out over the eld skyle's lake one more time. The other thornwings were still splashing bales of manure into the lake. Somewhere in its depths Sheelagh's strangeness was being digested. And others, too. Someday he might meet them. If he hadn't killed the eld skyle by overloading, it. A pang of guilt cramped through him.
"Don't worry about me," he heard the eld skyle's voice, far, far within himself. He startled. When he strained to hear, it was gone. Then: "The spores you released were limited. Only eighty thousand or so people will catch light before the number of spores is exhausted. Their strangeness feeds me well. It pulls me away from you."
The eld skyle thinned o$: Feebly, the voice returned, inside the ringing of his earbones: "But listen. Though the Rimstalkers have taken back their armor, they've left you the lance."
"Great," Carl grumped. "A sword and no shield."
"More than a sword," the shadow-thin voice said. "It is a
bomb. When you pull o$' the hilt, it will trigger a starfire geyser that will cut off any approach-a wall of impenetrable energy. Use it to save your Evoe. The thornwing knows where to take you. That is all I can do for you-all that is left in me of you. Goodbye, Carl Schirmer. And glad fortune to you."
Silence hissed.
Carl smiled sadly and proudly. He saluted the eld skyle with his lance and stepped backward into the bristly embrace of the thornwing.
The thornwing carried him through several natural lynks, rolling down a fallpath in the intense, bluegold light of the Welkyn. The pure white and languorous clouds poured through the skyles on their endless spiral climb toward the shear winds of the Eld. Their gray velvet interiors blanked his thoughts, and he burned in the sliding silence with the power of his return. Zeke's notebook tucked into the back of his finsuit and the wounds from his zotl fight were the emblems of his striving. And Evoe was at the end of this journey. The lance in his firm grip was cold. Its alien works clicked and purred. In the open spaces, Carl took shots at rock spires and treetips, remembering the use of the lance. It was difficult without the armor to help him select the lance function and to aim. Then they dove through the Cloudriver for a long time, and there was nothing to see. The emptiness jammed him toward sleep.
When the clouds burst apart, they were within sight of Galgul. The roots of Carl's blood flinched at the dark sight of the City of Pain. Cindered debris plumed the sky casting a gravelly black pall over the remaining zotl spheres. And though this was the Welkyn, the light was dim and redlong.
The thornwing hauled Carl through one of the dusty flightlanes that unfurled in carbon-black arcs about the broken city. Galgul was bound in a knot of clogged sky cut by fallpaths. But in the interim since the gravity wave had ruptured these spheres, the fine dust had settled with the heavier mangled shards into, ribboning bands outside the free lanes of the moving fallpaths, and the thornwing could skim over the charred litter toward the core of Galgul.
Needlecraft cruised among the plasteel debris, but they were no threat. The lance alerted "him with tones to the approach of the zotl, and the thornwing was able to move with the streams of detritus closer to the cracked-open sphere.
As the shattered spheres neared, Carl glimpsed
through the cumbering fields of shrapnel one sphere that gleamed. His eyes strained, and his heart pounded with the effort to discern what was ahead, but the rubble had become too dense. The fallpath ahead grinded with orbiting gravel. The thornwing's flight faltered and stopped. It could carry Carl no farther.
Carl thought of clearing a path with the lance, but nixed the idea when he realized the next moment that it would draw the zotl to him. He would have to go on alone.
He reached out and took hold of a scorched boulder. The thornwing let him go, and he was left hanging on the edge of the fallpath with the other debris. His weight nudged the housesized boulder, and in the diminished gravity they began a slow rotation. The tumbleweed that was the thornwing rolled toward the clear flightlanes with a farewell squawk and banked out of sight.
Movement in the distant direction it flew caught Carl's eye. He scrambled against the spin of the big rock and climbed to the turning edge where he could see human figures galumphing over the choked edge of the fallpath. Black dust swarmed about them like a haze of flies. By their silhouettes against the ,luminous blue shadow of the Welkyn, he saw that they were Foke and that they wore the black strider tunics of a suicide squad.
They were approaching, and Carl bent down and walked in synchrony with the rock's movement, staying in one place, . ready to drop out of sight. The group bounded through the smoky air close enough for him to see their faces. They were strained with flight, eager to cover distance.
Carl's focus locked on the blackbearded, gangstergrim face of the chief: It was Allinl The thornwing had .carried Carl to Allin-by its own design or the eld
skyle's, Carl had no time to guess. Allin rushed by meters away.
Carl moved to join them, and that instant the sky convulsed with the compression of a big explosion. A trollish cry gulfed hearing, and Carl threw himself flat. A tiny sun ignited from where the Poke had come, lashing the space around it with hot flechettes of slag. A needlecraft had tripped the Foke's plastique bomb. The jumpship it had been escorting veered sharply to avoid colliding with the fireball. The needlecraft trailing the jumpship spotted the fleeing Foke and broke off to run them down. Laserfire twinkled from the attack ships and thumped the rocks around the Foke to fiery bullets
Carl took aim with his lance and fired. A beam of soothing infrared streamed from the muzzle. He cursed and twisted the calibrated hilt until it clicked to –the setting that he had learned was gravity-sheathed laser bursts. He aimed again, and the first two bursts caromed off floating debris. The third hit the lead needlecraft by accident when it rolled into an evasive run, and it billowed into green fire and black smoke. The other needlecraft pulled away.
Carl turned the lance's wavelength cylinder to its longest extreme-gravity waves-and set the lance to fire a tightly compacted charge. He aimed at the black shining nacelle of the jumpship in the pinpointed distance and fired. He missed by a thousand meters, but it didn't matter. The immense shockwave of the blast flipped the jumpship out of the clearing and into a steel-strewn fallpath. The shock of its eruption ignited the needlecraft that had swung back to protect the ship, and the gray sky flared.
Recoil from the shot pushed Carl backward off the boulder, and he sailed into sight of the Foke. They were cowering behind whatever protection they could find, expecting the bowshock of such a strong blast to sweep
over them. Carl knew from experience that the lance's gravity bursts were shaped to scatter perpendicular to the line of fire. He curled to slow his recoil and used his fins to set him down on a chunk of blistered plasteel overlooking the Foke.
"Why are you wearing– a black tunic, Allin, if you're going to hide?" he called down to them.
"It's the dropping!" one of the band identified him.
Allin was too astonished to speak. He looked for the shockfront and saw far off the fire lickings where the jumpship and the needlecraft had been. He looked back at Carl agog.
"You came here to die," Carl spoke to the band. 'And you'd be little more than seared meatballs now if I hadn't come along." He held up the lance and manipulated the hilt so that the muzzle flashed once with starpointed radiance. "The eld skyle and the
Rimstalkers have given me this-a light lance. I want to use it to free the imprisoned Foke." He pointed the whitesmoldering lance at the distant zotl sphere. "Will you give me your lives?"
The Foke had floated out from their coveys, and they stared at Carl in his leather finsuit and scarred face with wonder-loud eyes. Allin pulled himself up beside Carl. The Foke's dark-coiled bangles were pulled back from a face fierce as a Comanche's. He looked at the lance and into Carl's broad stare.
"You've just paid me for the lives you lost," he said in his gritful voice. "I will attack Galgul with you. But not for you. I go to this death for our Foke."
He started to take off his holster, symbol of the band's leadership, and Carl stopped him. "You'll lead the squad," he told the Foke chief. "I'll keep the zotl off us."
Allin agreed, and he put a hand on Carl's shoulder. "We'll die together."
"Who said anything about dying? I just want a hit-and-run rescue." Carl looked down into the squad's ferine faces. "Nobody is going to get killed. Right?" They stared back with the clarified power of animals. He looked back to Allin: "You sure know how to pick them."
They flew a fallpath close to the floating heaps of cinders and jumped a ride on boulders big as streetcars to keep– out of sight. When the boulders' gliding orbit about Galgul came within sight of the ruptured sphere, they slipped of and tacked across the fallpath.
The city-sphere filled space like a murky grotto. Diamond grains sparkled in its depths. Allin's spyglass revealed them to be tiers of glastic-encapsuled Foke. Somewhere in there was Evoe. The lance was already buzzing Carl's fingertips with her proximity; and by aiming it at the cavernous sphere, he could tactilely feel the level where she was located.
Allin pointed to a scattered flock of jumpships in the umber aura of the sphere. Their range of fire swept every approach to the structure. And inside the cordon, the flightlanes twitched with needlecraft.
Carl nodded, visualizing his attack. He signed the Foke to lie low and adjusted the lance for rapid-fire gravity bursts. But the setting wouldn't hold. The lance didn't have that capacity. He would have to single-five the bursts, which meant that if he rhythmed the attack wrong, if even one jumpship escaped his barrage, they'd be frittered by laserfire.
Allin hung beside Carl in the cloud of clacking rubble that circled Galgul, and he saw the problem. There was no cover this close to the flightlanes. Plastique and handguns were useless. The only thing to do was to scatter and wait for Carl to attack.
Carl looked overhead to see that the space for his recoil was clear; then he sighted the lance on the
swarming needlecraft below and fired. The force of the discharge flung him outward, and he spun with the bore of his flight and fired three more bursts in the vicinity of the hovering jumpships.
The pounding roar of the first shot resounded from inside the cracked-open sphere, and the nigrescent space thudded with the rutilant explosions of needlecraft. The three other pulses hit in quick succession. One of them banged into the horizon of the sphere and gored a hole in it, clouting nearby jumpships with molten fragments. One hit a jumpship broadside and blasted it and the four around it into blazing
dust. The last missed entirely and boomed a long way off among the circling scrag.
Two nearby jumpships were left unscathed and they swiveled in the direction of the firing, scanning for targets.
To draw .their attention away from Carl, Allin signaled his band to advance, and they dropped from their balled-up coverts and slid along the fallpaths curving down into Galgul.
Carl was a whip of arms and legs, still whirling from the ungrounded' recoils. Allin, swooped over to him and grappled him in a steadying bearhug.
One of the jumpships had spotted the band, and the blue light of its laser cannon trembled along the grinning seam of its prow. With Allin stabilizing him, Carl aimed and fired again. The direct hit inflamed the dust-shadowed sky.
Allin whooped with excitement.
An orange, searing bolt of laser light cut the air a meter away, and he cried out again, in alarm. The stormy smell of burned air billowed over them, and Allin swung Carl about to face the jumpship that was diving toward them. The craft was too close for a gravity burst. Carl snapped the lance into laser, mode, hot
enough to cut open atoms, and fired a steady stream of white starfire. The beam hit the black metal hull in a wincing flare of vaporizing plasteel, and the jumpship screamed and swooped toward them. Carl didn't flinch, and Allin held him tighter. The chief's eyes were big with alertness as he watched the black skin – of the jumpship peel away like burning wallpaper.
\ The wail of laser-slashed metal bowled them backward the instant before the jumpship's tormented hulk freight-trained by –them, almost within reach. The drag of the plummeting craft whipped Allin and Carl after .it, and they toppled behind. Squealing with sparks and smoke, the jumpship plunged toward Galgul and splattered into a firestrewn smear across the curve of the metal horizon.
Carl flapped for balance, and Allin gripped him by the collar and, straining every instinct from a lifetime on. the fallpath, tumbled, rolled, and sledded with Carl through the stinging smoke into the grotto of the fractured sphere.
The squad was watching them from the torn edge of the massive stock chamber. A honeycomb of capsuled Foke dangled toward the interior of the sphere. Allin jumped with Carl, and they tumbled onto the buckled plasteel ledge. Carl swayed to his feet with the help of several Foke and glanced around at the crystalfaced shelves of inanimate figures. The weapon whined with the release-signal the Rimstalkers had programmed into it.
Warming lights came on, lighting up the grotto, and all the capsules opened with a collective sigh.
"Allin!" Carl pulled the chief away from his amazement at the sight of thousands of stirring Foke. "We have to move quickly and get the Foke to the Cloudgate. The zotl's whole army must be on the way by now. I won't be able to hold them off for long. Take them out
that way" He pointed through the glowering embers of. the shattered jumpship cordon. "That'll keep this sphere between us and the rest of Galgul."
. "But that'll leave us wide open out there," Allin complained. "We should travel along the edge of the fallpaths."
"That'll take too long," Carl said. "You have to go straight across the clearing. That's the fastest way to the Gate. Don't worry about the zotl. Leave them to me. just get the Foke moving."
Carl turned away from Allin and let the lance's slow humming guide him in the direction of Eva& She was downward from where he was, and he scampered over the warped surface of the ledge to the sinuous, metal-coil scaffolding the zotl used as catwalks. On the way down, he looked across the bowl of opened sleepunits and saw scattered skirmishes where zotl guards with lasers in their pincer grips were attempting to herd the Foke. But the humans outnumbered the guards. From the upper ledges, Allin and his group were lighting naphthal flares to guide the crowds toward the nearest jump points for the fallpaths.
The hum in Carl's lance led him onto a level packed with Foke bustling to get out. He shouldered his way in the direction the hum pointed until the bobbing heads and unfamiliar faces suddenly hazed out of focus around a coraline-stitched black robe hooding a cat-angled face with wide graygreen eyes. Carl's blood turned to electricity.
The next instant, Evoe saw Carl. Moments ago she had been dreaming that she was old. In that dream, she didn't know what was happening to her. She thought she was sick; she had never felt such impuissance. The desire for rest seethed in her. Then Carl's face appeared, sweet as bread. They made love in a jasmine-fusky grove. And when they were done, she was herself
again, lavish with energy. The dream had burst into the grim waking reality of Galgul. At first she thought the zotl had come for her. But the chamber ceiling had been blown away, and she could see the nests of fire and coils of smoke from the battle. She emerged from her sleep capsule with a shivering heart and was shocked to see everyone moving. She moved with them, toward, the torn-open wall of the sphere where Foke were waving flares. At the sight of Carl, her whole body pulsed. They shoved through the crowd toward each other and collided into an embrace that locked out the Werld.
"Carl," the spice of her breath whispered along his cheek. "I had the most wonderful dream of you. I knew you would come back for me."
Carl soaked up the ferny fragrance of her. This was the pearled moment he had lived for. The feel of Evoe against him was lustrous, and his heart warbled with jubilation. Everything that was driven in him yielded. He stopped. It was not even necessary to go on living, repeating the farewell. This was the tip of being. From here he reached out with his soul and felt the empty spirit, the vacant poise of everything. He could die here.
Tears welled in them to the very brink of their eyes. "Evoe-" He searched for some scrap of language to dress his naked feelings.
Screams and the scuffle of a fight pulled, his attention from her. A zotl guard was flying over the crowd, shooting its laser wildly. Carl fired from the hip and smashed the thing to a fireclot.
He took Evoe's arm, and they moved with the crowd toward the naphthal flares. Needlecraft slashed overhead, and he unloosed another gravity pulse, dropping this one deep into the sky so that the implosion would pull the needlecraft away from the sphere. The
earnumbing thunder of the pulse roared hearing to a muffed, bulging silence, and the encroaching needlecraft went off like flashbulbs.
The peristalsis of the crowd squeezed them up a wobbly rampway to the melted-lookirfg edge of the sphere. The jump
point was before them, but Carl held back. He had to get everyone out to complete the symmetry of his joy. While Evoe used the naphthal flare to direct the crowds, Carl watched the ash-choked sky. The flightlanes lifting away from Galgul toward the Cloudgate beyond the rubble were crowded with Foke. Needlecraft occasionally darted in from over the horizon of the sphere to strafe the exodus, but Carl stabbed at them with laser bolts and brought some of them down.
After a while, the air attacks stopped. Allin had come down from the crest of the stock chamber, his body sparking with sweat. "We're all out," he announced.
Some dim explosions sounded from within the building. "Those are the plastique traps we set on the access ports. The zotl are coming in from the back of this chamber. They'll have lasers."
Carl hugged Evoe. "Go with him," he told her. "I'll be right behind you."
"No." Her eyes were certain as a staring angel's. "I'm not leaving you again."
At the far end of the chamber, sparks flurried, and the wall crumbled like incandescent cheese. The opening writhed with the arachnid shapes of the zotl, and spurs of crimson laserfire flicked across the chamber at them. One bright bolt scorched the ground nearby and skipped vaporing plasteel between Allin's legs. He stood firm, but his whole body grimaced, anticipating the fleshmelting impact of a laser bolt.
Carl gripped the hilt of the lance and twisted it through a tight series of clicks until it snapped off. A foam of purplesilver light frothed from the muzzle end of the lance, and Carl quickly placed the weapon on the ground. He grabbed Evoe, and with Allin they fled from the zotl attack and the jumping clots of sightcramping radiance.
In an eyeblink, the onrushing zotl and the sharp, crisscrossing tracery of their laserfire vanished in a sheeting flow of white incineration that nothinged everything before it.
Allin led the jump to the fallpath. Evoe and Carl leaped after him, hand in hand. They fell through a wind=flapping drop before the fallpath lifted them like a song above the char and the billows of killing smoke. Behind them,, the lance squandered matter to light, and the zotl sphere blustered with white fire. Ahead, the Foke rose out of the ruins on slants of light.
Carl and Evoe clamped their bodies together and sweeled away from Galgul, riding the steep current of a fallpath outward toward flamboyant cloud gorges iridescent with rain.
Epilog
Caitlin, with her grizzled hair hanging over her small shoulders, hooding the ruddy woodgrain of her face, stood at the glass-paned door. She was staring across the patio at the gazebo where Zeke sat motionless in a rocker, watching pillars of rain move across the wide lawns. Stormlight shone slantwise through the aspen, illuminating tall hedgerows powdered with mist. Several months ago, she and Zeke had been brought to this estate on Long Island by the government. There were seventy-two of them then, people with the highest chance of catching light. There were twenty-six now.
At the first letup in the rain, Caitlin opened the door and walked across the glossy flagstones and the sequined grass to
the gazebo. Zeke didn't budge his stare from the sky, where the clouds were hitting a cold front and shredding like galactic vapors. His beard and hair had grown back in white goat tufts, and his former
bulls had thinned to a skeletal frame. The zotl clawmarks on his face and neck had faded to smoky bruises in his pale flesh like striations floating in marble.
"Two people in Maryland and one in Vermont have caught light," she reported, sitting herself in the rocker beside him. "The spores can't be contained."
Since their internment, Caitlin had been coming to Zeke, hoping to get from him some hope for her daughter. Instead, she had found peace, the humbling of life to memory and perception when all hope is lost.
"Gentleness and love will survive," Zeke spoke, his voice swollen with silence. He didn't care about the world's plight. The remorseless agony of his zotl possession had purged him of all caring. Pain and pleasure had become for him two ends of the same board, the flimsy plank of his body; floating on a sea of electrons, riding the long currents of time to wherever. .He felt more clarity than any man alive.
"What are you thinking?" Caitlin asked. The storm had frenzied again; and needles of rain prickled her skin.
"Why do people think heaven is up?" he replied. "I mean, look at it. The sky is tearing itself apart. I wouldn't want to go up right now"
Caitlin grinned at that –thought and turned her attention to the wheeling sky. She hadn't had a drink since, she was brought here, yet at that moment power was flushing through her like a shot of whiskey. The drugs that controlled her tremors usually left her dense with torpor. Now, watching the storm clouds stampeding like white bison, she was exhilarated: Something was going to happen.
"I'm leaving soon myself," Zeke said at last, and when his thin black eyes touched hers, she saw the happiness in his harrowed face. His short hair was bristly, and the blue regulation fatigues they both wore
looked wrinkled and ill-fitting. She reached out to touch his
mottled hand, and a spark cracked between them. A gasp hissed
through her lips.
"You want it?" he asked.
"Yes," the old woman answered.
Zeke peeled o$' a splinter from the arm of his rocker and lanced his left thumb. He offered her his hand and its gem of blood.
Caitlin's forefinger smeared the blood when a spark jumped to it from his thumb. She brought her finger to her mouth, and the taste of iron chilled her.
That evening, one of the residents complained that Zeke was glowing. Guards in bright-orange jumpsuits, hooded goggles, and gasmasks found Zeke in the gazebo grinning with muscular ecstasy. They took him to a protective chamber monitored only by cameras. He wrote a note to Caitlin, and fifteen minutes later, he caught light and vanished.
Caitlin received the note the next morning at breakfast. Even among the sinuous fragrances of coffee and toast, she could still smell the blue scent of a windshaken mountaintop on the paper. It read– .
Caity-
What goes up is
futileunless it goes
out.