Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

"Let's hope not," Carl said, easing her away from him. "I want to keep as low a profile as possible. I've made a lot of money, and I want to share it with you, but I've also made a lot of enemies, and I need to stay out of sight."

"Nobody makes real money. without making enemies," Caitlin said, her filmy eyes narrowing to better study him. "How much danger is there for us?"

The question was an honest one that rang alarms in the mental spaces of his armor. Theoretically, zotl, or any other Werld creature, could appear in the immediate vicinity of his armor at any time. So far, only airborne bacteria had drifted through the lynk corridor that perpetually connected him with the Werld. Following the cues of his armor, he had occasionally purged the air about himself with ultraviolet light intense enough to kill the microorganisms. But it was unwise for him to spend too much time around anyone.

"The danger is mine, not yours," he lied to Caitlin, and she looked as though she knew damn well he was lying.

"Mom, please," Sheelagh said, taking Carl's arm. "This is Carl.

He's come back to help us."

Caitlin said nothing more critical that day. He was indeed Carl Schirmer; she could see that now that she had been watching him.

And he did have money. Lots of it. He took them uptown to the fancy boutiques on the, East Side and spent thousands on clothes for the two of them. They ate at several swank restaurants,

sampling the specialities of each place .and getting wildly drunk.

Carl was happy, and his disguise faltered only once. At one of the cafes a tune came over the radio that brittled the laughter in his mouth and turned his eyes to December roads. The music was a synthesized pop version of the song he had composed for Evoe.

Sheelagh took his hand when she saw him distancing -away, and he snapped out of his spell..

Later that day, he installed his friends in a twofloor condominium in a luxury tower on Sutton Place. The cost was phenomenal, setting up an opulent arrangement literally on the spot, but Carl seemed not one whit drained. Caitlin's anxiety slackened, especially since now her drunken fits did not have to be melancholy.

Her daughter's future had instantly gone from bleak to posh, and that more than anything eased her. If only Carl didn't smell so strange.

At night, exhausted from Jheir busy day Carl, Sheelagh, and Caitlin were sitting in the penthouse sprawl of the two-story apartment, watching the sprinkle of lights on the East River. They were sipping fine Irish whiskey, and Caitlin's eyes had cleared to a shining glow. "What I don't understand, Carl, is the mirror."

"What mirror?" The whiskey had made him feel limber, and the company of his two friends over the last couple of days had unshackled him from his concerns about Evoe and the zotl.. He had to wait out the two months before he could leave, and this was a lot more comfortable than a polar aerie.

"Zeke, the friend of yours who found your burnedout apartment, also found an image of you in the bathroom mirror,"

Caitlin said.

"He used a computer to make it clearer," Sheelagh added, "and it looks like you-that is, like you used to look."

"Zeke." The sound of his old friend's name felt unfamiliar in his mouth. What had the eld skyle said about Zeke? Carl couldn't recall. "What is the image?"

"It's a picture of you," Sheelagh said. "Somehow the fire captured it."

"But you say you were in Bolivia," Caitlin put in, her voice dark with doubt. "I don't see how. You worked in the Blue Apple that night."

They waited for Carl to answer, but he had sunk backward into himself, remembering that night a soul ago. He had been stepping out of the shower when he caught fire. His last memory of earth-one came back-.

the black kicking him into an orgasmic blackout. The ice rattled in his drink.

"What really happened that night?" Caitlin wanted to know. "The police never figured it out."

"I couldn't possibly tell you about that night," he replied softly. "The fire..." He stalled.

- "The bathroom was a burnedout hole," the old lady said. "Not even the fire department could make sense of it."

"It's something I can't explain now" Carl stared up at the ceiling, fighting the impulse to tell them everything. The armor's inspiriting reminded him of the three that had died in Ridgefield, and the urge to explain himself dissipated. "The night was a strange one. It began a new life for me. You're my past. My dear and treasured past. I wanted to share the bounty of my fortune with you before I burdened you with the pain of it all."

"That sounds understandable to me," Sheelagh said.

"It sounds satanic to me," Caitlin flared. "LookI've talked with the police and the fire officials.. They're baffled. I've seen the mirror-held image of you. And it is you. Or it was." She sipped her drink. "Zeke, at first,

thought you had combusted by yourself. Then he started getting these ideas about ghost holes. Either way, he says that for part of a second, your bathroom was hotter than the skin of the sun. That's supernatural.". "Mom." Sheelagh glared at her mother.

"Don't look at me like that," she said to her daughter; then to Carl: "An unexplainable fire, a locked mirror, a long absence, and then you return with fabulous wealth and the looks to rival Dorian Gray. Carl, tell us the truth. Have you made some kind of satanic pact?"

"Mother!" Sheelagh was at the edge of her crushed-leather chair.

"There's nothing supernatural about this," Carl said, affecting an amused smile. "What's happened to me is mysterious but not occult. It'll all make sense someday when I can talk about it. But now, I want to know about Zeke. How is he?"

Caitlin's response was sharp as a whip: "He went mad."

Carl shifted in his seat, alarmed by the old woman's antagonism: The eld skyle had known Zeke had suffered. The confirmation of it burned. "Where is he?"

"At the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel. It's an asylum on Long Island," Sheelagh told him. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. The solid muscle banding his wrist amazed her. "He's pretty bad now. But for a while, just before his breakdown, he went through a brief creative spell. Painting, plasticine models. He even wrote a novel."

"You have a copy?" he asked.

"Somewhere. It'd be easier to get one at a book-store. I see it around. It's called Shards of Time. It's science fiction."

Carl uncoiled from his seat. "Want to come with me?" he asked.

"It's eleven oclock, " Sheelagh answered, getting up anyway. "All the stores are closed."

"We'll break in. Come on." He motioned for Caitlin to join them, but she just stared at him across her drink, cold with suspicion.

Carl got a copy that night by paying a ludicrous sum to a night watchman at Brentano's. He and Sheelagh went back to the Sutton Place suite. Caitlin was asleep where they had left her. Sheelagh put her to bed, and when she came back, Carl was immersed in the book, his face stony and pale. She waited around to see if he might show some interest in her, and when he didn't, she went to bed.

A rage of disbelief mounted in him the more he read. The monotonous fear that had inhabited him since Evoe had been taken away blew off in a cold blast of horror. The book he was reading was an account of his life in the Werld!

The names were different: The eld skyle was called an urg, skyles were skylands, the Foke were the People, zotl were spider people, and the Werld was Timesend. It was a story in the bold, often bloated style of science fiction:

The flyer landed on a skyland cliff among spires of fir. The,pod went black.

"We'll send the flyer back," Eve's alto voice said in the darkness. "`They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do we'll be long gone."

The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in. I rolled out of the flyer, and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. My eyes must have looked like raisins, for Eve sang with laughter.