Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

Not long after this understanding, Carl recognized the dolmen slabs of rock squaring the shape of the eld skyle that had re-created him. The thornwing dangled him out over the dragon-long lake, and he saw himself cliff-faced, bearded and rugged as a Viking in the water's slick surface before it dropped him.

The water was hot. It seared his eyeseams and earholes and stung his lips. He held his breath and curled into an upward stroke.

But he wasn't rising. The

water that he remembered as being firmly buoyant was pressing him down.

His held breath went stiff in his throat and skewered the back of his mouth. He retched with the impulse to breathe, his arms and legs flailing for the air. But down he went. And soon after the glaring pain in his eyesockets vapored into nervelight, the last of his breath spurted out of him and the hot fluid of the skyle pierced his body.

His horror squealed with pain. All sensation, every pinpoint cell of him, squeezed out its agony. And he went dead.

Nothing.

Then darkness healing to the darkest blue.

"Welcome back, Carl," the solemn voice of the eld skyle sounded through him. Its familiarity struck him alert in the deaf-and-dumbness.

" I see you've changed a great deal within yourself," it noted, and Carl gleamed with the affection he heard there.

"Eld skyle?" Carl thought with all the mental power he could focus through his dead-stillness.

"Not so loud."

"Sorry" Carl responded reflexively. "Eld skyle--am I glad to see you."

"Because you think I can help you recover your beloved Evoe-is that right?"

"Can't you?"

"Of course. That's why I had you returned to me. I am, I told you, a five-space consciousness. I know your needs better than you do."

Carl felt like a lab animal, floating in stillness, stripped to the flatness of his life. He glowed with relief. "It's good to be back. But I can't stay long. Evoe's been taken away from me by the zotl. They could be pain-sowing her now"

"Not yet. But soon."

"Eld skyle-please, help me." Carl's desperation flared before the blankness of his' suspension quashed it.

"I need you, too, Carl."

The absurdity of that thought dumbfounded Carl. "For what?

You're a five-space consciousness."

"But I can't move in three-space. You must move for me."

Carl hung silent, becalmed with curiosity.

"I need your full and absolute cooperation in this venture." Its voice went still as the hum of an electrical storm. "You do indeed have free will, Carl Schirmer. And if you misuse it now, you could destroy a world. Your world."

Carl missed two beats. "Earth?"

"Then you do remember earth? It certainly remembers you.

ZeeZee thinks of you quite often. Your abrupt departure has had a profound effect on him. You recall, he was a scientist. Well, what spoor you left behind before coming here has forced him to some very cutting conclusions."

"Zee-" Carl's soul squirmed. "That's the past, eld skyle. I need your help now, with Evoe"

"You're also frequently in Caitlin Sweeney's thoughts," the eld skyle continued, heedless of Carl. "You were her friend, her one real friend, lost devilishly, taken in an ungodly way into the Unknown. Her drink has gotten the best of her now, and the Blue Apple is about to be closed. Sheelagh can't run it without you."

Those names jolted Carl like blows. "I don't want to go back to them. What are you talking about?"

"You are going back, Carl. I need something, and I want you to get it for me."

"What is it?"

"Three point five tonnes of pig manure."

A zest of levity sparkled through -Carl. "Three point five tonnes of pig manure," he echoed.

"Yes, Carl. That is the medicine I need to survive. My ecology is off. I've been toxifying for over a century now, and you're the first one to come through me with the chance of helping me. I need to introduce a certain kind of organism, a bacterium, that will redress my biokinesis and stop my body's degradation. That organism does not exist in the Werld. But it does on earthin pig manure."

'And Evoe?"

"If 'you get me the pig manure, I'll help you get her back from the zotl."

"There's not enough time."

"No, Carl. You are wrong. Here in the Werld, there is all the time there ever was. I have the means to return you to earth for as long as is necessary, then bring you back here in only moments of Werld time."

Carl's mind prickled with thoughts. "Why are you telling me all this about pig manure now? Why didn't you just send me for it when I first arrived?"

"And not introduce you to Evoe? Risk your staying on earth and leaving me here alone, sick and dying? No, I had to be sure you would return." `

-In the gust of the moment, all emotion cooled in Carl. He went calm as a storm-eye. Maybe the eld skyle had shifted his blood chemistry, he thought.

"Blood physics," the eld skyle corrected. "Chemistry is molecule-size physics. Biology is human-size physics. Astronomy is galaxy-size physics."

"Okay-okay. Are you jerking me around or not?"

"If I were not modulating your blood physics you'd be hollowed out with horror now"

"Try me."

"Don't tempt me."

A kelpy feeling wavered in Carl's stomach, hurry ing toward nausea. "Stop it," Carl cried. "You've made your point."

The axle of calm returned, and the' queasiness passed.

Unhampered by emotion, Carl's fatefulness looked geometric. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"Listen to me very carefully," the voice responded darkly.

"You will be endowed with powers more subtle and direct than anything your kind have known. Consider this: Where has everything come from? The calcium in your bones, the oxygen in your brain? All the nuclei of your body more complex than hydrogen were forged in the thermonuclear furnaces of stars that twinkled ten to the ninth years before you were born. And the hydrogen of those ancient stars and all the subnuclear particles that exist everywhere in the universe-where are they from?"

'"Me Hamptons. What do I know?"

"They are remnants of the most violent event of all--the gravitational collapse at the beginning of time. The radiation universe, to which your body and' mine belong is the shed skin of a living process bigger than universes. What you know as inertia is the most direct physical link you have with this metareality."

"And I thought I was an orphan."

"Have you ever thought about inertia? Few humans have, and then only briefly. There isn't much for a human of your time to think. The best minds of your history had only begun to suspect that inertia reflects the profound unity of the cosmos. What keeps matter at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless some external force acts on it?

When you take a hairpin turn, what is the force that pulls you to the side? Your scientists believed it was all the distant matter in the universe constraining movement: The Ail acting on the Part."

"What has this got to do with Evoe or pig manure?" 'As a scientist of your time, Niels Bohr,' said: A great, truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.' The Part can act on the All. Here in the Werld there are beings, far from human, who have mastered inertial principles much as your species controlled electromagnetic laws. They are Rimstalkers, and, as their name implies, they dwell in the Werld's dark zone, Rataros, near the Rim. They are the ones, as my allies, who will provide the technology for our venture."

"Okay, already. Give me the details."

"They will give you a portable lynk that you will use to transport the manure here, to me. The thornwings will help me distribute it. The lynk they will give you is nine centimeters long, five wide, and two thick. Very easy to hide. Bury it in the mounds of manure. It will take ten weeks to inertially convert three point five tonnes of manure, and during that time you must protect it. The lynk won't be vulnerable to your fellow humans. It has a field projector in it that will make it impenetrable to all human devices. But the zotl have a radiation technology sophisticated enough to disrupt the field and destroy the lynk." .