Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

He stayed in a dreamstate with that ugliness, his armor standing in the lucent darkness of Antarctica and the wraith of him nightmaring what the aliens were doing with their stolen bodies.

Eventually, the zotl were at home with their new lives, and the whale music of their thoughts settled into the steady rhythms of their work. Days had passed.

Carl felt no hunger or fatigue. His armor had liberated him from the physical dimension and sustained him in a luminosity of euphoric alertness and stupendous rest that he called no-time. He named it that because when he was in that state, what seemed moments were really days. Time was easy.

When the snow plumed around him with the

thrust of his departure, the armor made him know how long he had waited and where he was going. Armor was not an exact enough name for what enclosed him. He seemed sheathed in lightning, a slick spectral mist that covered him from head to foot. He jetted north into the sunrise, and where the light hit him he glossed like gold.

Carl's long travels on the fallpath had well prepared him for flight, and he was comfortable with the motion-bristling terrain running below him. The strangeness for him was the emptiness of the sky, the fierce circle of the sun, and the endless continuity of the geography. This wasn't the. Werld anymore.

Villages and towns darted by. Forests and jagedged cities. A coma of blue water. Islands. The bayou cities and a bullet-fast run up the Mississippi River. Some people on boats and in planes saw Carl, but they didn't know what they were seeing. He was traveling low and at a blur that most people never noticed or simply ignored.

Over Arkansas, Carl banked through the clouds and stayed out of sight. He didn't have to see where he was going. His armor knew. Minutes later, he landed in the tree haunts of the Barlow, Arkansas, city park.

His armor shut down, and he wobbled against gravity. Earth air, fragrant with pondy odors, webbed about him, and he noticed that the Rimstalkers had clothed him in Foke strider pants, something like coarse jodhpurs, and a silky red finsuit top, flouncy with vents. He looked like a Vegas act. In his right hand he even had a baton. The black-latticed gold rod was his light lance. It had the heft of a lead bar.

Carl sauntered out of the park and stopped cold at the sidewalk. The streets were filled with silent cars in styles he had never seen. How long had he been away?

He went over to the kiosk at the mouth of the park and looked at the newspaper.

WORLD UNION OKAYS TRADE RULES. The date was two years after he had vanished. A perusal of the newspaper revealed that this Was quite a different earth from the one he had left. Cars were electric. Electricty itself was generated in vast arrays of solar panels in orbit about the earth and beamed to communities as microwaves.

There seemed to be only one government worldwide but that was all he could surmise at once, since the vendor was making noises and he had no money.

In Carl's sleeve pocket was the imp, the magnetic plate the eld skyle had promised would be as good as money. It was entirely blank until he tilted it toward the light; then, the name ALFRED OMEGA winked at him.

The divining power in Carl tingled, and he knew that this was the name the eld skyle had chosen for him. He didn't take to it at once. It seemed silly at first, then flippant, but ultimately apt. Alpha Omega was the beginning and the end: Alfred was an Anglo-Saxon name meaning "supernaturally wise"-and he certainly had found, or been found by a wisdom at the end of time, the omega point, that to him and to any human would seem supernatural.

Carl walked immediately to a bank and inserted the imp card in the automatic teller. The crystal display showed that he had several hundred thousand dollars at this branch. He withdrew the card and entered the bank.

The bank officer who greeted him at her desk commented favorably on his attire, asking him where he had gotten his heel-thonged sandals.

"Crafts fair," Carl told her and then quickly brought the subject back to finance. She helped him to withdraw several thousand dollars on the validity of his ID.

The blank imp was sponsored by a magnetic imager

that projected directly into the visual cortex of the brain whatever an individual needed to see to approve of Carl-or, rather, Alfred Omega. Carl accepted the money with fingers that felt like fog. He was beginning to glimpse the power the eld skyle had warned him to control.

The bank officer also helped him to plug into the financial trunkline and assess all his holdings at other branches and even at other banks. They never finished counting his assets. They gave up after a half billion, and with the bank president they called together several lawyers and established a regional corporate subdivi-sion of Alfred Omega Ltd.

They appointed a president, and as the first order of business, Carl charged him to begin at once to purchase three point five tonnes of fresh pig manure.

To allay suspicions and grease the wheels, everyone involved was paid handsomely on the spot, and princely salaries were meted out to the people Carl selected to work for him.

Carl didn't actually select them. Carl didn't do anything but respond to the eidetic suggestions spilling out of him. The gravity of large sums of money drew together the people needed, and he merely released those funds through his imp. It was all transacted by computer, and he signed nothing.

Once his business had been completed, Carl left the bank and returned to the park. From a maple-hung bunker hidden from the fairway of the park by a large boulder, Carl activated his light lancer armor and arrowed into the clouds above Barlow.

A moment later, the armor put him down behind the empty stadium at the University of Arkansas. The idea kindled in him to go to the School of Science and Technology, a congeries of buildings gleaming in Arkansas red marble on a nearbv knoll. In the central building, he asked one of the secretaries to put his imp card in the school computer's magnetic reader to see if his scholarship funds had cleared.

The secretary politely referred him to the bursar's office. Carl smiled charmingly and held up his imp card.

"Why didn't you say you were a Union scholar?" the secretary asked incredulously, taking his card.

He shrugged, and she inserted the card in the slot of a computer console beside her. The video display crawled with data about world history and then went blank. The card popped out.

"That's weird," the secretary wondered. "I've never seen it do that before."

'Arid it probably never will again," Carl said, reaching over and taking the imp from her hand. " I accidentally dropped it in front of a skateboard yesterday. I'll take it back to the registrar.

Bye."

Carl was barely out the door when his armor flashed on and he was boosted into the empty Sky. No one had seen him. The armor had an uncanny sense about that, and Carl queased with the thought that the weapons he had been given were smarter than he was.

The light lancer armor flew him south, back to Antarctica.

He came down beside the mile-high terminus of a glacier where the moraine rocks covered the ground like knives. The armor glowed more softly, and Carl slipped into no-time.

During those early days back on earth, Carl was still ringing with what the eld skyle had told him. He wasn't human anymore, and he didn't try to act as if he were. He thought idly about Evoe and the utter beauty of the Werld-a place where colors and moods existed that could never be real on earth. The snarling shapes of windcut ice and the hurtling winds in the darkness at'

the world's -edge were more beautiful to him than the settled places he had seen on his flight.

After the open simplicity of the Foke, ironwrought human cities seemed oppressive-and after the bold glassy architecture of Rhene and the gravityfree jumpships and flyers of the zotl, human science seemed puny.