Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

"Put it all on Blue Karma in the second race at Aqueduct tomorrow. Hidalgo will be riding. Got that?"

"Yeah, Zeke," Chad answered in a quiet tone. "But why'

re you giving me a big winner? I mean, I'm happy with a small purse, long as it's regular."

"You guessed right, Chad," Zeke responded, his slim, black eyes focusing again. "Our game won't be regular anymore.

In fact, this is your last chance for a sure win. I'll be leaving here pretty soon."

"Where're you going?" Chad asked anxiously.

"I don't know, yet. But I'll be gone before the week's out."

"How can you say that?"

"You see that newspaper?" Zeke nudged his jaw toward the splayed photos of the bank murder. "That man is on his way here to take me out. That, my friend, is Alfred Omega."

"Your cartoon character?" Chad was incredulous. "Man, you've amazed me too many times for me to disagree with you. But if you call this one right, you ain't human."

"Oh, I'm human, all right. And so is he," he answered, looking at the news photos of the raygun killer. "But I don't think those three he put away were. I figure they must have been spider people or this wouldn't have happened."

"Spider people?" Chad folded up the newspapers.

"You mean, like in your novel? Spider people from Timesend?"

"Uh-huh."

"You really think everything you've written is true."

"Not everything, Chad. Just Shards of Time. I didn't actually write it. It was written through me by the inspelling.

Somehow I'm connected with another world-I think inertially, but not in the physical sense that we usually mean when we use the word inertia."

"Clam it, Zeke-here comes the doc."

A frail, cleanshaven, elderly man with green eyes and a woeful expression entered the rose garden. 'Ah, Zeke, I'm glad to see you commiserating again."

"I'm glad you're glad, Dr. Blau," Zeke said. "What brings you to the zoo today?"

"My usual social call." He unlocked the cage door and opened it. "Routine unless you've had some kind of insight into your condition. Is that so?"

"You mean have I abandoned my insights?"

"Your delusions, Zeke," Dr. Blau corrected, stapping the cuff of a sphygmomanometer onto Zeke's left arm.

Dr. Blau was baffled by Zeke. The patient in no way displayed the classic symptoms of the cyclothymic schizophrenic that the medical review panel had labeled him; that is, he wasn't disassociative in his lines of thought or extreme in his emotions, and he displayed no fixated neuroses except his delusion that his fiction was real. His catatonic episodes, the "admitting symptom" that had eared him his cubicle in the asylum, were profiled by singular EEG readings, topsy-turvy with theta waves at exotic intervals. Physically, his patient was sound, virtually a model of physical health. And that, too, was a problem, for Zeke barely ate enough to keep a man half his size alive. Dr. Blau had agreed to hold off forced feedings and intravenous supplements for as long as Zeke's body weight and

blood chemistry remained. stable. And that, now, had been the full eight months that he had been here. Initially, there had been some instabilities when they weaned him from alcohol, but after the first six weeks hi's metabolism leveled, and lie seemed to be drawing sustenance from a current of power he called the Field.

Chad had strolled off with the mail carriage, and Dr. Blau let him go, though he had some questions for him about the newspaper they were discussing that he knew Zeke would not answer. Like: "Why did the news interest you today? I notice you hardly pay any mind to current events."

Zeke watched Dr. Blau remove the arm cuff and then place the stethoscope to his heart. Zeke's face was benign and seemed to have all the layers of light of a diamond.

'Are you getting enough sun, Zeke?"

"Now that the solar maximum is passed, I may spend more time lolling in the sun. We'll see." Zeke smiled and buttoned his shirt. "How'm I doing?"

"You have the blood pressure and heart strength of a teenager," Dr. Blau responded and led Zeke by the hand out of his cubicle. The sunlight bounded off Dr. Blau's white coat, and Zeke squinted to look at him. "You eat so little," Dr. Blau said. "How do you manage to thrive?"

"How do you grow your hair?" Zeke walked into the shade of the rose arbor. "The body does it. I don't think about it."

"But I need more than four hundred and fifty calories a day to keep growing my hair. Do you have any thoughts on why you don't?"

"In fact, I have," Zeke said, smelling a rose. "But I don't feel like telling you."

"Tell me anyway."

"Why should I?"

"Because I want to know you."

"You've had eight months to study me. You know what I would say."

Dr. Blau nodded, put a wingtipped oxford on the edge of a stone bench, and leaned his arm on his knee ruminatively: "Yes, I suppose I do." He leveled his most earnestly friendly stare on Zeke.

"You still believe the 'Field' sustains you?"

"Call it the earth's biomagnetic field, if you prefer that nomenclature. But that, too, is a misnomer. The Field interpenetrates all spacetime. Here in the solar biopause we call it life. But when you're aware of the Field, you see that everything is living-rocks, atoms, even the vacuum."

"I see." Dr. Blau stood upright and jammed his hands into his pockets. "But why can you utilize this Field and I can't?"

"You could if you wanted. Look, I've told you all this before.

The Field is there. We wouldn't be standing here talking about it unless it was real. But if you want to be conscious of it, you have to empty your head to make enough room for the experience. It's big, Doc. And without neurotransmitters like LSD to help turn off the inhibitors, the brain stays locked in its chemical habits. The mind is so much a part of the Field, it doesn't normally sense it."

"Go on."

"That's all I'll be telling you about the Field, Doc."

Dr. Blau shrugged. He signed to two beefy whitesmocked guards that had been watching their conversation from the other side of the rose garden, and they approached to escort Zeke back to his cubicle. "I'm sure in a few days you'll be happy for the company," Dr. Blau said, turning to go. "We can talk then."

"I won't be here."

Dr. Blau stopped. "Oh, really?"

Zeke walked back into his room and gently closed the mesh gate after him. "Sometime in the next few days, my dear doctor, Alfred Omega will be coming for me."

"In the flesh?" Dr. Blau asked with raised eyebrows.

"Decidedly."

Dr. Blau's gray, wirestrand eyebrows lowered slowly as he mulled this over. "I'll be looking forward to meeting him at last," he said with his usual spry humor, though concern clouded him. This was the first time that his patient had expressed a deadline for his delusion. The inevitable disappointment would be a blow that could finally collapse the whole delusional system-. Excitement competed with anxiety in the psychiatrist, for a collapse could be the turning point of a cure.

Dr. Blau smiled his sad, open smile and patted the mesh gate.

"When Alfred Omega gets here, we'll all have a good chat."

The dark hills of the Ozarks bowed below Carl Schirmer like the bent backs of migrant workers. The sun was high, and his armor flashed bluegold as it guided him down the sky to Barlow, Arkansas. His heart was heavy as metal, and when -he alighted on a rooftop in the downtown district, he sat on the edge of a skylight and wept.

Evoe was probably dead-killed by the vindictive strategy of his armor. His armor? He had not planned to fire a gravity wave into the zotl lynk, nor had he intended to kill human beings even if they were possessed by zotl. He had trusted the light lancer armor, and it had used him for its grim purposes.

Rimstalker strategy, he thought, remembering chillfully the black devil-flames of Rataros. His armor was the master-and he was the weapon.