Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

Whales of river-glistening skyles sailed past and then the choked blackness was over him again. The no-world endlessly unwound

Midwerld's violet shadow-eagled clouds flung by and the sudden black again.

The blackness was big as a planet. Carl stopped moving. He was standing in the absolute black, breathing shallowly to hear through the darkness. Noises shadowy as music stared at him from all directions..

Sparks like fangs winced nearby, and Carl jumped. He Was naked and cold with fear. The sparks vipered around him. His feet shuffled, feeling the ground and sensing a firmness without texture.

"Hello?" he said, and his voice was an astral thinness in a vast space.

An echo seesawed around him: "Lo.-lo-lo..."

The snaky lights jagged closer, and by their illumination, Carl glimpsed garish images, torrid shapes, coal-glinting like black flames.

The fire-slinky forms edged nearer; and the air smelled baked.

The animal in Carl was running, but he knew that any sudden move would be hurtfully, fatal. He knew with the clarity of his imprinting that he was already seized.

The monstered dark around him were the Rimstalkers, the alien smiths that in a blaze of blackness were forging his weapons.

And the skills that went with them. His life was to be subdued to his weapons, to the

patience in all things. That thought came through him as the air went womb-hot and the circle of nightshapes rushed inward.

Worm-gut moistness mashed Carl, and he couldn't move or breathe. A dragonish odor of burned clay shook him. The gluey gouts of writhing muscle that gripped his body pulsed like a fever, and he went into a glide.

The cindered smell of something broken stung him awake. He was blind. For one moment, he sensed the geometry of his body, gaunt and clear as a diamond, filled with transparency, the willingness of light, but held in blackness, replete. He was a thing, waiting to be filled with his own light. He was a purpose and not a will.

The blackness wrenched away, and Carl was launched into a wilderness of stars. The brute force of light assaulted his brain, and a galactic vista burst open before him.

Welts of brilliance swelled against the emptiness of space, and as his eyes adjusted he saw the welts were clouds of stars-galaxies.

As fast as a lazy thought, he vaulted toward one feathery wheel 'of light and arced through lanes of radiance and bands of star-chipped dark.

A yellow star hurtled closer, and the motes of planets about it caught the light in glints. One glint flashed to a shard and went filmy blue as it marbled into view.

With the memory of Evoe and their life inside a sunset that never knew night, Carl opened himself to his fall. With the weight of winter in his heart, he fell to earth.

Alfred Omega

I went down to Chinatown today for some dim sum and saw a Kwan Yin temple defaced with graffiti: NO BUDDHA! KILL GOD! So I went inside and looked around. The place was empty and cluttered with trays of spent incense and shelves of offerings to the Goddess.

I sat at an offering table and wrote this poem:

NO BUDDHA only a statue, gold paint, wood, and a visage calm as a face in a womb-only incense smoke unwrapping in silence, a movement between a ghost and nothingness.

Ever try to write a story? Notice how the characters get out of hand almost at once? That's because they partake not only of our imagination but also of our will.

Regrets and expectations. That's all I am when I'm not writing. And when I do write, I am the thing the stories come through. I am less than myself and my characters more than me.

My science fiction novel, Shards of Time, did pretty well for a first novel. A lot of people read it. It was nominated for a Nebula Award, and I had chances to talk with large groups about my ideas.

But I couldn't get them to believe. My ideas were just ideas. No one really thinks ghost holes are real. Or that a man could fall into one and appear elsewhere, anywhere, even as far away as the end of time. Perhaps I am mad. My idea for skylands is based on a flagrant interpretation of gravitational geometry. I think I answered the meteorology of the Werld correctly, if my hunch about gravity vacuoles in the cosmic black hole are reasonable. But these are trivialities. To believe that Carl has gone to this place-that is madness.

My insanity is really that I don't know if I am mad or not.

Reality is an open mystery, and I've closed myself off too long with my ideas and emotions. If I have to go mad to understand what happened to Carl, I won't regret it. Ignorance is worse than madness.

Where grief meets hope we are all ghosts of our blood, limbs of the wind, unknown to ourselves.

Just as lines of force end nowhere, my own connections are wider than metrics. I am not imbedded in space. I am not flowing through time. I am spacetime. And more. For spacetime is not faithful to the quantum principle. I won't expound on geometrodynamics here except to say that I belong not to spacetime but to

superspace, the reality "below" the Planck distance (10-'cm) that projects the manifest world we live in.

At the level of superspace, the gravitational collapse that began and will end our universe is continuing now, seething everywhere as everything. Lines of force nowhere end, so the Field is here with me. Even in the void between galaxies, virtual pairs of positive and negative electrons, mu mesons, and baryons are continually being created and annihilated. Created by what? By the Field-the pregeometry underlying spacetime. It is here, right here where you are. You are made of it. You are it. The point of departure. The metric elasticity of the vacuum energy. You are nothing becoming everything.

KILL GOD with the dead of night and the wound of dawn becomes your wound.

Lack leads the way in.

I rest my life on the darkness. I lay down my soul. I am nothing.

Last month, I was arrested. I hadn't paid rent or bills for three months, and one day the police came. I was inspelling when they arrived. They thought I was in a coma. So I was taken to a hospital and from there I was brought here to this narrow bed in this empty room. They say I'm crazy. I've tried to explain about inspelling and how the mind is a condensation of the Field. But my explanations do sound like madness.

I don't know yet why this has happened to me. But the knowledge is here somewhere. The knowledge is always here. Like inertia, holding us in place, keeping us whole.

I'm sure my imprisonment will end soon. I sense an ending that will clarify all beginnings. I tease the

guards and staff with a cartoon personification I've begun doodling everywhere: Alfred Omega, a voltlegged imp with with powers strong as a god's.

Look, I tell them-I tell you-there are ghost holes all around us.

And inside us! They are carrying us down the years. And as we go, anything can happen.

Living in the world, life is home,

death is life

having its way with us, and pain is the piece of our mind we give

back.

-excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke Zhdarnov

Quills of stratus clouds glowed red in the purple sky, and several meteors flicked over the streetlighttrellised skyline of Ridgefield, Indiana. From the toolshed on the knolly backland of his farm, Gareth Brewster could see across the dark lumpy hills to the town's business center. He worked there in a bank as the credit-card manager. And at the end of the day, he liked to walk out to the toolshed on the grassy hummock and look at the bright amulet of the city.

Gareth had been doing that for years. now. But this one night was somehow like no other. The ambered horizon beneath the last sliver of the hatched moon mesmerized him. The wind smelled of the meadows-and something new, a thin line of acrid burning. At first, he thought that was .the industry at Gary, and he fulminated mentally about writing the environmental board .... His thoughts stilled. The wind wasn't blowing from Gary.