Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

Chemical "madness" has collapsed me into the center of my monad. I'm becoming a black hole, locking into myself through the immense gravity of the metaconscious.

The illusion of individuality is almost gone. My pen is a rivering of Change, my hand is the story it writes, and I am

One week before Alfred Omega (twelve hours later) the pivot of stillness before a falcon dives.

Alfred Omega

Squirms return: The black hole has exploded!

Twenty-eight days after Alfred Omega Withdrawal was explosive. Deprived of iproniazid and the other drugs, the Archon vanished, and the black hole of my hallucination exploded into the thin colors of skulllocked ordinary reality.

Only, reality ain't ordinary no more. Carl has come back from Timesend as Alfred Omega! I feel that I've burst into another universe where my madness is reality. What I thought I was imagining is real( These very words are quashed by the weight of their meaning, so it must read as if I'm insane. If the iproniazid and the rest of those mind chemicals hadn't been stopped, the irreality would have broken my mind. We need our brains to protect us .from reality.

It's taken me a month to get up the nerve to write again. I know I should at least outline what's happened in the last twenty-eight days, but I'm still gonging with implications. I must understand who I am. How is it possible that I could write Shards of Time and describe exactly what was happening to Carl? I wasn't drugged, except by my adrenals from the anxiety of those exiled days. My writing, somehow, was telepathic-but what is telepathy?

Lord knows, I can't do it at will, anymore.

I at least have some idea how I may have known things I could not have known while I was in Cornelius. Chad would be amused

just long enough to ask me for another winner. I think my body acted something like a cross between an antenna and a hologram.

The tryptamine soaking my brain had an affinity for synaptic DNA and replaced the serotonin that usually bonds with the RNA receptor sites in the synapse. The tryptamine inserted itself in the RNA by pi-cloud stacking across the hydrogen bonds linking the two bases. The result was a charge-transfer, that is, an electron passed from the RNA to an empty energy band on the tryptamine. The swift bonding twisted the helix, and because this was happening in the electric field of my synapses, an electromagnetic signal was generated. The wave was instantly absorbed by low-energy electrons in the tryptamine, saturating their energy bands. That canceled the polarization of the base pairs, and the RNA rung rejoined, priming itself for the next charge-transfer.

This oscillation broadcast its own signal in harmonic resonance with all the RNA-bonded tryptamine in all the synapses of my body, setting up a three-dimensional standing waveform inside my skull and turning my brain into a radio-cybernetic matrix.

Information flooded into me from

hyperdimensional realms. I experienced telepathy, conscious projection outside my body, and a spooky ability to predict events. f was turned on.

Thirty-two days after Alfred Omega

Carl has no idea who he is. He thinks he's a man. I've tried to tell him: There are no men, and there are no women. There are only fields of force.

Our bodies are starships. The Archon has spent four billion years building them. The equipment is all there, inside us, as our neurology, but the demons keep the Lord from using us. Ile demon psychoids of the unconscious have possessed all ten billion of the, humans that have ever lived. Only a few of us have sensed the Archon. And of them, only a handful have consciously learned how to activate that power in our own bodies.

Thirty-six days after Alfred Omega

Aeschylus expressed -it well when he had Prometheus say:

I caused men to no longer foresee their death. I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.

Carl has stolen fire from the Archon. The lance makes him a god among us. Yet he remains enraptured by his momories of Eves. Perhaps I should be thankful the archon of

- love has claimed him rather than the archon of power. I'm sure that's the doing of the urg. It wants Carl back. The inertial displacement between them must be immense, and every' cell in Carl's body must be craving to return to the Werld. No wonder dominance of this faraway planet seems puny.

But I have no inertial homecalling to dampen my imagination or quell my will to power. Carl has seen me looking at the lance in reverie. It is not the power itself I crave:

The power is a shadow of the metaconscious.

The lance is merely a symbol of what I want.

"A balmy wind spills off the Hudson," Zeke wrote, watching a breeze unpleat the drapes of his window and fill the bedroom with the smell of the river. "I've nightmared Nam again. Like everything of this temporary earth that tries for something greater, my mind strains to understand why I am living in two different worlds, one of peace and one of pain. The answer I sense through my inspelling is almost unbearable: Contrastive thinking is an elaborate hallucination.

Worse, it is the viper I have mistaken for a rope."

Zeke turned off the light, and in the shuttered darkness, a hypnagogic spun before him. It was a retinal mandala, a rosemaling of torn limbs and glutinous napalm-melted flesh, all blurring together in the surfglow of his closed eyes. Before shutting his journal, he wrote in it by feel: "The hand is not different from what it writes down."

Galgul was a cloud of rubble. Two black spheres and three cracked egg shapes were the only traces of order in an amorphous sprawl of floating debris. Blasttwisted shards of metal and coils of black dust looped with the fallpaths.

Anything organic had been seared to ash by the firestorm that had gulfed the exploded, structures. Inert, jagged forms hovered like a black aura around the ruins of Galgul.

Five of the twelve clustered city-spheres had been destroyed. Their three-kilometer-wide plasteel shells had been shattered into junk by a gravity wave that had bounded out of a lynk in one of the spheres. The lynk had connected with a four-space, positively curved stellar zone one hundred and thirty billion light-years

away. Three zotl needlecraft had established the lynk after following a Foke-shaped gravity echo into the Rim. The conclusion was obvious. A Rimstalker had armored a Foke, had sent him to a Foke-fertile planet where the food lure to the zotl would be irresistible, and had used the lure to attack the zotl through their own lynk. The plan had been a cunning and devastatingly effective one.

Like two spider gods, the remaining city-spheres of Galgul hung in a web of broken metal, misty against the whorl of the Cloudriver. The broken hulks of the ruined spheres dangled like torn roots among clots of fused metal. Needlecraft sparkled among the rocksmoke and the avalanches of destroyed shapes.

Camouflaged by the tumult of devastation were jumpships, black boomerangs with laser cannon, waiting in ambush for any Foke or Rimstalker aggression.

Zotl and Rimstalkers had warred since the zotl first arrived in the Werld, seventy-two cycles ago. Though the two species occupied the two distant poles, a Werld apart, they were both four-space creatures, and they conflicted in the tesseract range that contained the Werld. Their battles were timeflux distortions in superspace, and they fought over which species would occupy the narrow tetrad vector field that connected the Werld with the multiverse.

The Rimstalkers had dominated this gateway to infinity for the three hundred cycles of their time in the Werld before the zotl arrived. Rimstalker technology was by far the most advanced, but zotl four-space awareness was innately more adroit. After forty cycles of zotl incursions into the disputed tetrad vector. field, the spider people established a beachhead and, by dint of their elusive four-space awareness, were able to evade Rimstalker timeflux distortions and develop a lynk technology of their own. In another two or three