Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

THREE KILLED BY LASER MONSTER

The headlines glared from where they lay on -the mail carriage that 'clanked by Zeke Zhdarnov's room six days a week. He wasn't allowed newspapers-they fed his delusions-but Chad, the attendant, usually placed the papers on top. of the mail carriage and left it where Zeke could read them through the steel mesh of the door.

Lately Zeke had not been coming to the cage door.

He was dreamward again--inspelled, he called it. Dr. Blau said it was catatonia simplex. For Chad, big gladsome Chad, it was the prelude to Out, that wakeful, brotherly, and voluble state Zeke got into after inspelling. He came out of his trances hungry for human contact. And Chad was always happy to face into his light-yearlong stare and listen to his mild, almost fatherly rantings about ghost holes, inertial waves, and infinity.

Chad was happy to indulge this lunacy because when the old man was through he was in a grateful mood and he always showed his gratitude by naming -a winner in the next day's Daily. Chad never told him that he played the horses, the old man just told him the winners' names on his own. And he was always right. The winners were invariably low-paying odds, but Chad had become accustomed to the regular stipend. And he'd learned not to question, Zeke-the old man babbled like, a washer-cracked faucet anywhere near a question. And, of course, he never told anyone else. It would have watered his odds at the track, and no one would really have believed him anyway.

He'd seen the old man do wilder magic than horsebetting with Dr. Blau, the chief of staff, and no one was impressed. Like the time Zeke knew everything about Dr. Blau, even his family secrets from the Great War, and the chief of staff explained it away as an afflux of the collective unconscious and ordered the old man shot up with depressants.

But drugs didn't affect him. After the shots, Zeke slumped to sleep,, and once the staff were gone he'd get up. When Zeke was medicated, Chad sometimes pretended to work in the rose garden,, near the vine-knotted trellis from where, with the slant of the afternoon rays, he could see into Zeke's room. The old man moved about his cubicle with slow-motion ecstasy, arms

held up limply like an orangutan's, face luminous as a child's. He was talking with the cosmos.

Zeke, naturally, was not really an old man. He was thirty-six.

But in the last two years every strand of his black hair had gone white, and he had grown a full beard that on his brawny frame made him look like an aged mountain peasant.

He himself no longer knew if he was mad. And he didn't care.

He had tapped a creative surge within himself that endowed him with a calm self-absorption. The surge was cosmic. It'waved through him with the rhythms of cloud-shadows, the spill of the wind. He couldn't predict or command it, but when the surge was on him, everything seemed possible. The buzzing chords of his body relaxed, and a soft alertness rose through him, peaked to an energetic wherewithal, and eventually eased into a quiescent clarity.

Zeke had found this rhythm before he had been brought to the asylum. He had found it the rainpattered night he had decided not to question his feelings but to search for Carl wherever the search led.

The conclusions his reasoned search had found were so bizarre that no one thought them real. And when he took them seriously, his former friends and colleagues avoided him. He didn't blame them. He no longer belonged in society. He was a cosmic man now. What else could he be after pondering Carl Schirmer's fate and deciding he had actually become light?

In the journal he kept to monitor the evolution of his thoughts, a journal he had named The Decomposition Notebook to signify Carl's transformation though it just as aptly applied to himself, he wrote: "Ignorance is worse than madness." Arid soon after that his inspelling went deeper and he woke up in the asylum.

During one of his first inspells, a year before, lying on his back among his scattered books and papers, seeing the blank ceiling as a vast cloud of atoms, he felt a fantasy with the musculature of a conviction. He imagined that Carl's body of photons had not only collapsed through a ghost hole but had expanded through that same hole into another universe. And not an entirely random universe. Whatever had collapsed Carl had used its own inertia to guide Carl's light through the ghost hole to itself.

This hypermetric entity Zeke called an urg, because it sounded like erg, which was the quality that this thing had turned Carl's 150-pound mass into. E = mc2, eh? Then, 69-kilo Carl became 61.2

million billion billion ergs. Enough energy to vaporize Manhattan if he hadn't collapsed into the urg.

And for what purpose? Zeke felt that there could be only one purpose for a complexly organized polydimensional being like an urg to snatch a scrawny, bald bartender. Carl was food.

Food to a metaspatial being was bound to be something like and quite unlike food to a human. Something like, in that nutrition would be extracted from the process. But what would an nth-dimensional being's nutritional needs be?

Zeke figured an urg needed more than energy, because what people defined as food energy was not photons themselves but the timebound process of releasing photons. And a hungry urg, with the resources to reach outside of its own time and implode a man to light, could certainly satisfy its energic needs locally.

Eventually, Zeke reasoned it was Carl's inertia, the sumful potency of his wee mass within the cosmic mass of the universe, that the urg wanted. Inertia, as light, was timefree and could be transported through ghost holes to the urg's hypermetric locus where no human mind could reason its digestion.

One grand consequence of this trance-found theory

was that Carl, who had inertia but was not as a mind any particular inertia, would survive. Zeke's hyperbolic mentations assured him that it was unlikely that Carl had been harmed at all. As Carl's inertia was extracted, the alien's equivalent inertia was excreted=and because the basic conservation laws of the universe insisted on equivalency, the alien's inertia was excreted as -another, identical Carl-identical but for his inertia.

Insights like that inspired Zeke's science fiction novel Shards of Time. And the writing of the book inspired more inspelling and more insights. The syndrome was devastating to Zeke's life in society, since he spent most of his time communing inwardly in states of mind that looked to others like coma.

But he didn't care. He was happy only when he was inspelling, which, now that he had arrived at the asylum, was almost continually.

Chad left the newspapers near Zeke's mesh door, and he was surprised when he came back to see the old man reading them.

"So you're Out," Chad chirped. "What galactic insights do you have for me today Zeke?"

"Hmm." Zeke was leaning against his gate, reading what he could see of both papers simultaneously. "Have you read the lead story?"

"The raygun killer?" Chad asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, that is wild. Seven witnesses and a video clip. from the murder in the bank. Check out those photos." Chad opened the folded newspapers and revealed the front-page photographs of a human-shaped glare, a security guard, and a man in a three-piece suit. In one of the shots, the bank manager was furry with tufts of light, his horrified face twisting with the force of a blow while the man-shaped glare pointed at him with a wand.

When Chad looked at Zeke for his response, the old man wasn't looking at the paper anymore. His ducal face was staring through the rose trellis and into some subtle reality. "I think it's time I gave you a big winner," he said in a voice iffy as fog. He was inspelling, touching his will to the torrent of power sluicing through his deepest cells-and the sparks flew in his mental eye, flaring off his willful image of a big purse at a racetrack, until the name of the track, the horse, the jockey, and the race sparkled their brief instants in his mind.