Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

'Carl told it, and Zeke listened with a face bright as noon.

His eyes bugged when Carl showed him the light lance. He handled it with the reverence of a priest. "Nothing like this was in your book," Carl said. "In your story, Eve and Ken live happily ever after in Timesend. But in my life she was taken by the zotl. And now here I am warehousing pig manure; three people dead, and maybe even Evoe. It's crazy" .

"It's crazier even than that," Zeke told him after a respectful pause.

The emotions that his retelling had churned went still in Carl. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, the urg-the eld skyle, whatever you want to call it-it didn't tell you the truth:"

"About what?"

"The eld skyle told you that the Werld was inside the cosmic black hole. The final black hole. There's no such thing."

"Why would it lie?"

"It. was easier," Zeke replied, smiling thinly as a

philosopher. "You see, there no end to the universe. It's forever."

"Yeah, the multiverse. I've heard of that. But our own universe is-just a bubble, expanding now but eventually collapsing in on itself and maybe starting over again."

"That's the contemporary myth, and that's why the eld skyle told you that. It knew you would believe it. If you'd been a medieval European, it would have told you you'd made it to the empyrean. To a Babylonian the urg would call itself Utnapishtim and welcome you to Aralu. "

..'Why?..

"I told you. It's easier. The truth is too strange."

"Well-don't keep me hanging. What do you know, and how do you know it?"

"I don't know it, Carl. I feel it, when the surges come on me. I've seen that the universe is eternal. It's an infinite continuum, Squirm. There's no final collapse. And there's no Big Bang."

"Come off it, Zee." He looked at his friend with eyes still slippery from laughing. "What about the cosmic temperature the radio telescopes found?"

"The background radiation of space is not the relict temperature of the Big Bang. It's the heat of the Field, the inertial unity of the continuum. A black hole is not a permanent grave, either. A black hole grows. The energy it swallows is locked into it by its gargantuan gravity, right? Well, inside the almost absolute zero cold shell of its event horizon, it's the hottest object in the cosmos. Eventually, its heat gets so unbelievably intense that even gravity breaks down--and the black hole blows up! It's not an immense explosion. Nothing like a supernova. The enormous gravitational and magnetic fields muffle the blast, and the star plasma and synchrotron radiation are channeled by lines of force to both poles, where they jet into space. Over time, the material is recycled into new stars, and the press begins again."

"So where is the Werld if there is no final black hole?"

"It probably. is a gravity vacuole in a colossal black hole one hundred and thirty billion years from now, nearing the time of its own explosion. But where is now? I'd bet this earth isn't the earth you knew before the urg caught you."

"You're right. Where I come from, there was a second world war, we've only gone to the moon twice, twenty million people starve to death each year, and we've been teetering on the brink of nuclear war for decades."

"Sounds like a real shitpot. You must be glad you got out."

"I'd be happier with Evoe, where I belong."

Zeke took Carl's arm in a grip like rage. "Take me with you when you go back!"

Carl shrugged indifference. "It's a bizarre place, ZeeZee."

"I've got to see it. I'll sit with pigshit for a couple of months and contribute my inertia to the lynk."

"There may be no way back once we get there."

"There's nothing here for me to come back to. I'm a lunatic in this world."

"Well, we're not through with this place just yet. It'll be two months before the lynk is ready to go. Caity and Sheelagh know about me. I got a little overgenerous with them, and last night one of the. Werld's less docile beasts-a blood beetle-dropped through the lynk corridor to the apartment where we're staying. I was just lucky it wasn't zotl or a gumper hog. I had to explain."

"No kidding. Do they accept what you've told them?"

"I think so. My light lance put them into a trance, and I left them sleeping."

The conversation shifted to their shared past, and Carl learned that earthtwo had a St. Tim's where a muscular Zeke Zhdarnov once protected a wimpy Squirm from the abuses of the older kids.

But Zee's parents hadn't died in Poland after shipping him to an aunt in Newark who died before he got to her. His parents were killed in a Hoboken house fire. And instead of Nam, ZeeZee had served three years in the World Guard and with the Corps of Workers, quelling riots in Jakarta and Singapore and harvesting rice in Laos. The parallels with earth-one were approximate but consistent.

Back at the Sutton Place apartment, they found Caitlin and Sheelagh awake in the living room before the wide windows, watching the East River slide to the sea. They both had drinks in their hands.

"I got Zeke out, girls," Carl said in a rhythm of friendly banter.

They watched him with the feral solemnity of witches. "So now it's a fugitive we have to contend with," Caitlin said darkly.

"Excuse me, Zeke." Her face melted to a sisterly warmth, troubled with regret, and she went over and kissed him on the cheek, though he looked like a wild mountain man. Her face darkened again as she faced Carl. "You have to stop now, Carl, and examine your soul before you damage-or destroyany more lives."

Carl stood squat and mute as a bureau. Sheelagh looked on from nearby, wanting to go to him, but held back by Zeke's mad presence.

"Nothing's wrong with my soul, Caity," he said. "I've lived a new life. And I'm going back to it, as soon as my work is done here.

But while I'm -here I wanted to see you again and share my blessings, strange as they are."

"Carl, I'm glad you've come back to us," Caitlin said, though her voice had a shiver of uncertainty in it. "And there may be hope for you, though you've got the mark of the invisibles on you.

They've made you beautiful in this world. They've eaten your old, face. Even so, you still have your soul. But you have to give up any thought of going back."

Carl's slack face hardened. "Caitlin, what are you saying? I have to go back."

"No, you don t." Pins of light gleamed in her hard stare. "You can renounce this whole thing while you still have. a breath of life.

Don't you see? You've been entranced. You're dealing with the invisibles-the faery folk! You can't take Anything of theirs and hope to keep your own freedom.

"it's not that way," Carl answered with a disappointed sigh.

"The eld skyle is a being like us. Zpke can tell, you. It's an organism in five dimensions. It lives, thinks, and dies just as we do, only it's not human."

"And not God-minded, either," the old woman stated. "It wants a demon offering. It wants pig dung. Don't you know about the Pig?"

Carl shook his head sadly.

"The Pig is the old god of the first Druids," Caitlin went on.

"It's a god-pig. Not swine but the power of swine in all of us. The Kingdom of God is within. And

sIs the hunger and the demonic cunning of the Pig. It o s is the malevolence of the old kingdoms, the beast-time, before the sacraments: The invisibles get their power from our animal selves, our oldest ancestors. You mustn't let them ally with the Pig in you."

"Caity." Carl took her hands in his and held her milky gaze with his leveled stare. "These are not spirits 'I'm talking about. They're not faeries. They're aliens."

"Aliens. Spirits. Faeries. What does it matter what we call them?" Her grip of his hands was cold. "You say

you' want to share your blessings with us, but you've only frightened us, Carl. And that beast that followed you here from hell could have killed us. What was that, if not a demon? it would have been better if you'd kept your money and left us alone. Look at yourself. You've got their mark on you. And unless you give up their way, you're doomed. For eternity"