Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

The brittle stink blew louder, and Gareth turned to follow its direction. He looked up at the glassy stars saw another needle of meteor light-and waded through the long grass after the scent. It thickened to a vile billow near the woodshed. The door was slightly ajar, and the grass leading to it from the road was recently pressed down. He stared to see if there was a fire. Not seeing smoke or flames, he turned and jogged back across the feld to his house.

His wife was in the kitchen. He waved as he passed and went straight to the garage. When he came out with a shovel and a lantern, she had the window open.

"What are you doing, honey?" she asked.

`An animal got into the toolshed," he replied. "I'll be right back."

"Leave it till morning."

`And have it topple the workbench and all my tools? No, I'd better. take care of it now."

"Those tools have been sitting there for months. They can wait till morning."

Gareth ignored her and loped over the soft land to the shed.

The stink was gone. No-there it was, only slimmer now. The air seemed to pulse with it when he stood before the door to the toolshed. He nudged it open with the shovel and shone the lantern in. .

The workbench with its spread of tools was untouched.

Gareth entered and swung the light around. In the far corner of the rectangular room, a tall black bale leaned. His eyes skittered to see what it was. Closer up, it looked like the back of a hunched-over gorilla. It shivered, and the air quaked with a charred stench.

Gareth gasped and lurched about to leave. From the raftered ceiling, a shadow scuttled. Gareth stopped to see what it was, and a writhing spider, big as his hand, dropped into the beam of his lantern, Gareth swung at it with the shovel, and it snagged the edge of

the spade with its crablike legs and spurted down the length of the wood handle to his arm.

With a shout, he dropped the shovel, but too late. The thing was on him! In his terror to swat it off; he dropped the lantern. It rocked to its side and filled the room with an orange, fractured light.

Almost instantly, the spider dashed over his shoulder and onto his back. .With flailing arms, Gareth tried to brush it off while he rushed to the door. Its legs scratched .the back of his neck and tangled in his hair, and as he reached for it, the thorns spurring the creature's long front legs stabbed his wrists. He slammed into the doorjamb, and spun about to see the black shivering bale in the corner lean over and reveal a glistening blue slugface, frothing with a putrescent ferment of juices. The sight of it made him scream.

The spider gripping the back of his head shimmied tight against his nape, and its powerful beak jabbed him, piercing his skull with a sound like the crunch of gravel. Its probe needled into his brain, and jagged electric colors tore through Gareth with a searing agony. His body thrashed, and his brain went rubbery. He couldn't move. He couldn't yell.

But then he was moving. Through the jackhammer throb of his hurt, through the sheets of flame snapping within him, he saw himself weightlessly rising to his feet and sleepwalking toward the slugfaced thing in the corner.

Horror was a mote in the hugeness of his pain. The very grip of his skull seemed a mere bauble in an ocean of boiling. Freezing torment scalded him, and he was floating through it to the mucus-webbed fibrils of the thing. His body bent at the waist, and his face fit into the quivering maw of the slugface.

The racheting anguish of his body stropped sharper, walloping him to an excruciating pitch of dying.

An hour later, his wife went out to the toolshed to find her husband. All was dark. The air smelled doomful. She called his name several times.

"Gareth?" The toolshed shambled with noise.

"Gareth." The door lazed open.

"Gareth!" He appeared in the doorway, pop-eyed, his face shining with the chrism of his possession. The. terrible hurt dawdled on his wrung features. His face went slack, and finally his lips bent like iron into an overjoyed leer.

"Gareth-are you all right?" His wife didn't dare touch him.

His face looked sunburned. "What's happened to you?"

His voice was tricked with grogginess. "I stumbled and took a fall. I'm a little dazed."

"What's that on your face?" she asked, wincing against the brunt of the malodor clinging to him.

"Turpentine. I knocked over my paint bottle when I tripped. I'd better get cleaned up."

"I'll call Doc Burkard."

Gareth's pop-eyed gaze thumped with alarm. "No! "

His wife touched his shining neck fur. "Your neck is cut open, Gareth!"

"I'm all right," he assured her in his numb voice. "It's just a scratch. Believe me."

With much trepidation, his wife obeyed him. By the next morning, she was glad she had. Gareth was himself again, and the wound under his skull looked like nothing more than a welt.

Gareth went off' to work as usual. All the habits were still there, intact. His laughter was warm, his handshake crisp. No one thought for a moment that he was different--except for the two others who were as different as he.

They met at lunch in a local diner. Nothing unusual was said among the two men and the woman who

gathered there, but a foul stain spread in the air around them. And when they broke up after lunch, the diner smelled sour as an: outhouse and customers turned away.

The fetor was under control by the next day. The zotl had made the fine adjustments to this more acidy breed of Foke. The brain of this food was much the same as the Foke brain and an equally bounteous producer of the adrenergic pain molecules the zotl craved. Here was a whole planet swarming with these slow-motion delicacies, and they had stumbled upon it wholly by accident. Their mission had been to ride the Rim looking for gateways out of the black hole. When they had crossed through one, they were to test the lynk technology they carried with them.

No one had expected this test run to find food. They immediately set to work constructing a lynk large enough to accommodate their jumpships.

Carl Schirmer watched the zotl from inside his light lancer armor deep in Enderby Land, Antarctica. His armor had sensed the zotl as he entered the blue shadow of the atmosphere at the end of his flight from the Werld. It informed him that a squadron of zotl needlecraft had lucklessly detected his timelag echo the moment the Rimstalkers propelled him into the center of the ring singularity. His drop into the superspace of the black hole etched a minute trail of doppler-shifted photons on the roiling surface of the Rim's event horizon. By ill chance, a zotl squadron were scanning that exact region at that exact moment. They interpreted the tiny gravity hole as a natural phenomenon, one of the frequent wormhole percolations along the Rim's horizon, and they were able to ride his lynk through the gateway to the multiverse, arriving on earth shortly before he did. Only later in Galgul, when the flight records were finally examined, would the zotl realize that the lynk was Foke-shaped. His armor detected them at once and took him south, landing him among the fields of wind-combed snow and pack ice.

Examining himself, Carl saw a body of iridescent energy, opalescing in the polar darkness. He felt invisible. No awareness of cold or warmth. Only a sense of center, a jewel-cut silence, temple-spaced inside him. From there, his armor showed him everything.

He witnessed the three needlecraft that had slashed to earth before him, and he saw the bulky females dragging themselves into coverts while the needlecraft were hidden underground. In the earth's buoyant gravity, the arachnoid males easily hovered into an attic, a tree, and the rafters of a toolshed to await their new hosts.

Since the zotl and Carl had come from the same fargone place in the cosmos, they were inertially bonded. The sensors in Carl's armor telepathically connected him to them. He was there when Gareth Brewster and two others like him were taken. He felt the lightningflash of the zotl stab, gouging the brain, dazzling the body with another will.