Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

His tears drained his grief and left him dulled. He

looked closely at the lance in his right hand. The gold metal returned a bellied reflection hatched with the black branchings of circuit lines. His face looked belligerent and stronger than he imagined himself.

At the muzzle end of the lance, an amber lens grinned a rainbow. Opposite that, at the hilt, a black rectangle pulled off in his strong grip. It was his lynk. It looked nothing like the cumbersome metal arch the zotl had built in Ridgefield. This was just a black square he could hide, in his hand, yet the inspiriting of knowledge that had come with the armor assured him that this dense, apparently inert object could transport tons of earth mass to the far end of time.

Holding the lynk, Carl's purpose flushed stronger in him. He snapped the lynk back onto the lance's hilt and walked off the roof through a firedoor and down the stairs to the street. At a nearby clothier's, he used some of his cash to purchase underwear, an expensive gray suit, tan shoes, a silk shirt and tie, and gray aviator sunglasses.

He neatly folded his finsuit top, strider pants, and sandals into a leather and wood attache case. He also bought a black umbrella and in the secrecy of the dressing room fitted his lance into it, using gentle welding bursts to secure it to the umbrella's metal ribs.

Then he used a pay phone first to call the bank he had hired to handle his affairs and then to order a limousine from a local taxi service. While waiting for his car, he had lunch at the best restaurant he could find in the small town.

Carl had no real appetite. In fact, the armor, which was a unit small as a dime and impacted at the base of his skull and which projected, the iridescent field of force around him when he commanded it, also sustained his biologic processes. Food was unnecessary as long as he activated his armor regularly. But the taste and texture of the meal comforted him with the animal recognition of eating, and he ate a large meal while he pondered his situation.

He resolved, between a course of split-pea soup and broiled trout, to do what he had been sent to accomplish, but to do it with as little reliance on his armor as possible. The musical program in the background faded, and a news bulletin announced .the bizarre raygun deaths of three people in Ridgefield, Indiana; earlier that day.

Carl's interest in food faded in midbite, and he paid his bill and went outside to wait for his limo. The long black car pulled up to the restaurant ten minutes later, and he had the driver take him to the address that the bank had given him.

The ride cruised out of town, wound through the surrounding braes and hills, and eventually hissed up a newly graveled road to a long warehouse luminous with fresh paint.

A chocolate-brown Mercedes was already parked in the lot in front of the warehouse's giant sliding doors. He dismissed his driver with two hundreddollar bills and walked over to the warehouse.

Silverhaired Mr. Powells, the man Carl had hired to oversee his enterprise, was inside the air-cooled, dimly lit building with two of his assistants, examining the three huge mounds of pig manure heaped on the concrete floor. The stink kicked like a mule.

"Mr. Omega," Mr. Powells acknowledged Carl, offering his hand and a generous smile.

"Al, please." Carl shook his hand and nodded to the others. They met his stare deferentially, obviously surprised by his elegant and conservative appearance, having expected to see him again in his Foke attire. "Three point five tonnes?"

"Accurate to within a few pounds on the heavy

side, Al," Mr. Powells assured him. "It's raw, untreated pig manure. The largest pile in the county."

"Good." Carl motioned everyone outside. "Let's get some breathable air."

He walked to the Mercedes, and faced Powells there. "You have the papers?"

Mr-Polvells handed him the contract the bank had drawn up to his specification, and . Carl examined it. The papers simply bound Powells and the others to secrecy in return for which they would receive substantial sums each month. After he signed it, Carl accepted the warehouse keys.

"Would you like me to arrange for a distributor?" Mr.

Powells asked. "I assume all this crap is going to be processed into fertilizer:"

"No-1 mean, yes-but I'll take care of that;." Carl answered.

"You'd better do it fast," one of the assistants said.

"You'll want to recycle that stuff before it really festers. Even in this cool weather it won't be long before it gets very ugly"

Carl just smiled. He waved as they left. Once they had pulled out of sight, he turned on his armor and went back into the warehouse.

He waded into the dung, using his lance to clear his way.

As near to the center as he could estimate, he placed the small, rectangular lynk. Nothing happened, but he knew in his special way that the lynk had already begun converting the inertia of the tonnage.

He locked up the warehouse and launched himself into the sky. The armor urged him southward toward the polar wastes, but his will forced against those inner promptings, bending the impulse of his flight, and he flew west toward a new freedom.

Zeke sat facing the rose garden through the cross-hatch of the -gate that confined him to his small room. He stroked his lion-grained beard, and his black eyes were empty as an open grave.

Where was Alfred Omega?

Dr. Blau's green stare silently asked him that at every encounter, in a mocking way that hoped to break his "insanity."

And Chad, who had won big enough at Aqueduct to quit his job, still came by every week to see how he was doing and to ask with his mundane stories his unspoken query: Where was Alfred Omega?

Thoughts like brambles tangled Zeke's emotions with hurt and doubt. Maybe he was wrong-wrong about everything. Maybe nothing he had found in his surges was right. Maybe the mirror that never forgot Carl's last image was faithful to a different meaning than the one the science of his imagination had revealed.

He was trapped, deep in the labyrinth of events that were heavy with madness. But the events were real: Carl had become pure light. The surges from far in his solitude had provided clews of ideas that had led him on---and on-but not yet out of the labyrinth.

Shaking with doubt, fearful of his own suffering, he had to admit he was wrong about Alfred Omega. Why had he ever thought Carl would come back? The thought was simply imaginary, something he had dreamed up after his novel and then taken seriously because the subtle thread of his extrapolations had led him that way through the labyrinth. And now he realized the thread had woven a trap. He'd made a fool of himself. Worse he'd convinced everyone he was mad.

He quaked for several more minutes, then shrugged off his self-pity. So he had guessed wrong about Alfred Omega. He wasn't Christ. He was just a scientist. He didn't do miracles. They did him.

The Field was real.

And the power of the Field was real. He was living on it. The rest was just guesswork, mere hypotheses.

Zeke cradled his heavy head in his hands, and the pain of his doubt cut his wonderings back to the split of mind and being where everything is given.

The ominous drone of the wind rivering over the Rockies blanked Carl's mind, and he stood gleaming in his armor on a ledge among the sharktooth crags of the Sawatch Range. Rushets of cloud shredded through a blood-colored sky, and the mountain range loomed below him in the gold mist of a set sun.

Carl was budging himself into no-time, but the troubling thoughts that he wanted to escape dangled with him in the lustrous spaces of his armor.

Three people had died to readmit him to earth.

And this wasn't even his earth. What was earthtwo? These mountains had the same secret design as the mountains on earth-one. The same eagled cliffs, the same uplifted slants of ancient seabottoms, and the same stars tapping on in the dizzy peak of the sky.