Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

Carl's eyebrows shrugged, and he let her hands go. "I guess I'm doomed, then." He sat down, dispirited. "I've brought nothing but trouble with me', all for some pig crap. Amazing. I think I'll just go back to the mountains until it's time for me to leave."

"You can't leave, Carl," Caitlin grumbled. "You'll lose your soul."

"Worse than that," Sheelagh spoke up. Her face was boisterous with emotion. "The world will lose you. We need you here. You have powers no one else does. There's so much you could accomplish."

"Listen to her, Carl," Caitlin said. "You belong here." She turned to Zeke. "What do you think, Zeke? Are we wrong?"

Zeke looked up at her from the sofa A where he had plopped down. "You want the opinion of a madman?" He was still humming with the light from his last surge at Cornelius. The polychrome faces looking at him were friendly but stiff as masks.

"I don' t believe you're really mad," Caitlin answered. "You're cursed with Carl. I don't know how the Lord lost you two boys.

That book you wrote is a devilwork. How could you know what was happening to Carl at the end of time unless you were possessed by demonic powers?"

"What makes you think the power is demonic?" Zeke asked, his arms crossed behind his head.

"What good has it done?" Caitlin riposted. "So far you're just a freak."

"Zeke the freak." He laughed gustily. "Sheelagh and Caitlin are right, Squirm. We've been too selfish."

"Selfish?" Carl rose up in his leather chair, amazed.

"You've been in an insane asylum until an hour ago."

"Because I was selfish," Zeke explained, sitting up from the sofa. His eyes buzzed, and he spoke like a machine gun: "I had incredible knowledge there-the hyperaware vantage of my surges-but I never used that knowledge. I wanted the knowledge to act on me-to save me. Just as you've surrendered to your armor and let it think and even act for you. We've been slaves to ourselves. We have to free the restraints of our fate and act creatively"

"What are you saying?" Sheelagh asked.

"That we should combine our resources and apply them toward a noble goal," he responded in a burning. voice.

"That's comic-book philosophy, buddy," Carl interjected.

"Besides, I already have my goal. I'm going back to the Werld and freeing Evoe."

"And what about us?" Sheelagh cried, the mica of tears flashing in her eyes. "You can't deprive the whole world of the wonders you've been given just for one woman."

"I'm going back," Carl said strongly. "I only looked you up to share my fortune for a time. Don't make me sorry I know you."

"Hey, look," Zeke interceded. "We all have to compromise a little to get some good out of this unexpected life. Sheelagh, Caitlin-we can't ask him to stay here with us forever. This isn't even his earth. But, Carl, while you're here, you must use the power you have to make a positive difference in the world."

"I'm not a , crusader, ZeeZee. " Carl was feeling harried. He had expected gratitude from his friends, not demands.

"We're not asking you to quell our riots for us," Zeke clarified. "But with your imp card, you could defuse the riots at their source. You could fill in the economic gaps that have frustrated millions."

"Yeah, and I'll probably wind up destabilizing the whole world market," Carl added.

"Don't play God, Carl," Caitlin warned. "You're right to know that no good can come of that."

"Let the scientists see your lance and your card, Sheelagh suggested. "They could learn about stuff they never thought existed."

"Nah," Zeke objected. ":Too many cooks and we'll lose our soup. We have to work secretly."

"Satan works in secrecy," Caitlin admonished.

Carl got up and went to the window to stare across at the riverlit cliffs: His friends continued their debate behind his back.

Their voices sloshed around him abstractly, for he was listening to them the way a Foke would, hearing English voices as boiling sounds, meaningless. Outdoors, the burning zero of the sun hung over the boxes where people lived in this world. The narrowness of those boxes and the sharp heat from the blinding pan of light in the sky choked him with strangeness.

He wanted to go home.

The Decomposition

Notebook

A great battle raged against the twilight. Above a stand of palms, the bluebright strokes of tracer bullets lanced the darkness, sparking from the hulks of two hovering Hueys. A 2.5 rocket streaked from one of the helicopters and exploded in the bamboo.

The red flash eeried the landscape, revealing the long body of a river.

By the fireflash, the enemy could be seen splashing through the milky water, driving a herd of water buffalo before them. The cattle bellowed with terror as the 20mm fire from the helicopters pounded into them. White phosphorus grenades glared with hurting brilliance among the advancing buffalo, and instantly the battle was cut into diamond clarity.

PFC Zeke Zhdarnov hunched deeper into the slick mud beneath the riverbank's root-tangle. The M-16 he clutched wobbled with his fear as he witnessed the immensity of the assault. Beyond the onrush of the

black herd, a battalion of NVA crowded the streambed. Dozens of them were climbing the glacis, scrambling up the side of the hills, clutching their SKS carbines with bayonets fixed. Zeke turned a frantic glance to the RTO sitting above him in the root-tangle.

'They're outflanking us! Let's get out of here."

But the radio operator sat unmoving.

Zeke twisted about on the mudbank and, pulled himself upward by the loops of vine and root. The PRC-25 on the operator's back was smashed, and by the echolight of the phosphorus, he saw death in the man's face. From somewhere above, a familiar voice was shouting: "Get the cows!"

Two bullets sucked past Zeke's head and made the RTO's body jump with their impact.

"Medic! Medic!"-the cries arose out of the dark, and Zeke lurched over the rootweave toward them. -The air was blue with bullets. Buffalo cried, and men screamed. The roar of the choppers narrowed closer.

Zeke bellycrawled into a foxhole. "RT's dead and there's a whole battalion coming down the river," he chattered to the field officer there.

"Get hold, soldier," the sergeant barked into his face, seizing Zeke's trembling shoulders. "The choppers will break the assault."

He spun Zeke about: "Now get up and fire."

The rattle of a .50 machine gun sluiced from close by but Zeke forced himself into a standing position and opened up with his M-16, firing into the blackness of the river.

At the far end of the stream, sunset illuminated the water with blood colors. Earlier that day, Zeke had helped to shovel a ton of rice from a captured VC cache into the river. Now, that rice had swollen and dammed the waterflow. In the glare of mortars, he could see the corpses of cows and soldiers bobbing in the swollen stream. Fifty black-clad figures were rushing along the bank where the command post had been.

"CF's down!" Zeke cried to the sergeant behind him.

"Charlie's all over it."

"1 know that, son. We're alone up here."

"Christi" The word was brittle with the shakes from his ,gun. The enemy were mounting the rootweave where he had just been. In moments, he would be overrun.

Then, the sky shook. Both Hueys made a run over the bamboo, the M-79 grenade launchers in their noses blasting a hundred rounds into the mudbanks.

"Sergeant let's go!" Zeke bawled against the thunder of the explosions.

The sergeant shook his head. "They'll chew us up in the bambool Stay low. Wait for the choppers."

Zeke fired a stream of bullets into the nightshadows before his rifle clip was empty. His cartridge belt was also exhausted, and he unholstered his .38 revolver.

The night curdled bright and hot, and the men looked up to see that one of the Hueys had been hit by a rocket. Its tail burst into an orange fireball, and the body of the ship careened wildly into the, dark bamboo field. A wall of flame erupted, and its ghastly glow silhouetted the advancing enemy.