Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

cycles, .they would have begun establishing a multiversal empire.

The zotl had been taken by surprise when the Rimstalkers abandoned their superspace forays to attack Galgul with a three-space gravity wave. Within moments, the zotl capital had been reduced to ruins. Only two city-spheres were left intact. Three were crippled, and the rest utterly demolished. And now, Foke-zotl food-were using the rubble-clogged fallpaths to penetrate zotl defenses and sabotage the cleanup and repair work.

This was the darkest time the zotl had known in the Werld, and their keening warbled across the tesseract range to Rataros, where the Rimstalkers were equally shocked. They had issued the, armor to Carl Schirmer as a favor to an eld skyle that had opened a channel to the tetrad vector 'field when the Rimstalkers were in need. Unlike the zotl, the Rimstalkers did not rely on organic sustenance. Their nourishment came directly from the hyperphotons of the tetrad vector field, and when the zotl began to expropriate vast swaths of the tetrad field for their own expansionist strategies, Rimstalkers starved.

Eld skyles, as five-space beings, were in a position to direct the four-space vector field to some degree.

One eld skyle had been able to channel enough hyperphotons to save the lives of over a thousand Rimstalkers.

In return, the Rimstalkers had armored Carl and sent him to fetch the three-space substance that the eld skyle needed for its own survival. ''

. The Rimstalkers had never guessed that the zotl would detect the fraction-of-a-second echo in the tetrad field, let alone follow it to its destination. That the armor had demonstrated the wit and initiative to wait for, the zotl to set up a lynk and then use the zotl lynk to assault Calgul was not as surprising. The armor, after all, had its own artificial intelligence loyal to its creators, and it was only slightly hampered by the emotional organ the creature it occupied called a brain.

But now the Rimstalkers had a problem.

If the Rimstalkers had planned this offensive, they would have used a light lance with the power to destroy all of Galgul.

Instead, the zotl had been badly hurt but not eliminated. The Foke harassing them could not hope to overcome them. So, in a cycle or two, the zotl would be back in the tetrad vector field and more aggressive than ever.

Some of the Rimstalkers wanted to armor more Foke and direct an assault against the remnants of Galgul. But that idea was dismissed at once in the face of the realization that the zotl, if pressed to the wall, could use their budding lynk technology to disrupt the gravity matrix that gave the Werld its shape and collapse the entire Werld into, the black hole that held them all.

The Rimstalkers understood: A three-space war against the zotl was. out of the question. They had to capitulate.

In return for a zbtl agreement to stay out of the tetrad vector field for five cycles and then only to occupy regions designated by the Rimstalkers, the Rimstalkers acknowledged that the gravity wave that had blasted Galgul was an accident, not the prelude to a three-space war. As a token of retribution, the Rimstalkers gave the zotl a light lance and armor of their own.

The appeasement was tiny. The armor and lance were designed to implode if their interiors were tampered with, so the zotl could learn nothing from them. Also, they were useless anywhere near Rataros, so they were no good against the Rimstalkers. The only immediate use for the armored lance was as an instrument of revenge. The Foke who had fired the gravity wave into

Galgul would be destroyed, and the Foke-fertile planet that had served as a lure would become the first conquest of the zotl's multiversal empire.

To celebrate this new determination, the best of the suspended Foke were revived and milked.

The choice stock of Foke delicacies was located in one of the mangled spheres. There, behind fumestained glastic panels, were several thousand human bodies asleep in no-time. The myriads of Foke were individually encapsulated and stacked upright to facilitate -their gravity-pumped life support.

Among the stock was a slender woman with a quiet face and strawberry flecks in her drowsy gray eyes.

"Evoe is alive," Zeke told Carl. Zeke's eyes were blurry with drowsiness. His bear-sized frame leaned in the doorway to his bedroom, his baggy black silk pajamas scarred with sleep creases.

Carl had already shaved and dressed, though dawn was still a dark hour away. He wore a beige pair of trousers, sneakers, and a purple pullover sweater. He was sitting in the living room practicing touch control with his lance by changing channels on the TV from across the room. When he heard Zeke, his hand twitched, and the TV flew off its stand and smashed into the wall. Sparks and glass spurted, and Carl leaped up from the cushioned chair where he was slouched. "tire you sure?"

Zeke stepped over the shattered corpse of the TV and stretched out on the sofa. "I saw her in Galgul," he replied in a sleepwrung voice. "The place is a bigger mess than that TV You really rocked it, buddy. Ewe's okay, though. I saw her in a kind of suspended animation. The zotl are saving her for a special dinnercommemorating the conquest of the earth."

"You sure this is a real lynkdream?" Carl asked, his head effervescent with euphoria. He wanted to believe him, but Zeke had been in a loose frame of mind since Carl had gotten him out of Cornelius. His attention had been wavery as a candleflame, and he had slept as much as he had been awake. Carl had purchased a spacious apartment on Claremont Avenue near Columbia University, and they had holed up there while Zeke suffered through the withdrawal from the chemistry set Dr. Blau had hooked into him over the past year. Today was the first day that Zeke had woken with a clear face, unscowled with confusion or pain.

The last month had been tedious for Carl. Manhattantwo was a quieter place than the New York he was used to. The hum of the electric trafc was not audible from their top-floor suite, and the serenity was driving him mad: He had used his armor to visit all the round corners of the earth while Zeke slept or Caitlin and Sheelagh were watching him. The quiescence of the cities, the geometric order of the farmlands, and the harmony of the people wherever he went spooked him. The world was closing in on utopia, and with his perpetual anxiety about Evoe and the zotl he felt out of place and even dangerous to the world. He had already decided then if Evoe was dead he didn't want to live. It sounded stupid, but it felt right. So when Zeke told him she was alive, his blood shimmered.

The flesh of Zeke's face looked tired, yet the wakefulness in his stare was strong as black coffee. "The hallucinations are over," he announced. "The lynkdreams have begun again-only now I know they're lynkdreams."

"What about your nightmares?"

"I was in Nam again last night. Before Galgul. Still can't figure out how. Some kind of inertial-"

"--resonance," Carl said with him. "I know. What'd you see in Galgul?"

"Ruins. The fallpaths are so clogged with fired

debris you can walk on them. In one of the half-gutted spheres there's a stock vault, ripped open to external view. I saw-tiers of bodies stacked in transparent shells. They're all alive but sleeping, waiting to be milked of their pain. Evoe was there. I recognized her at oncefauny hair, flecked eyes, and those cheeks, hollow as a cat's."

Carl looked up to the ceiling and howled, arms outflung.

"Don't get too excited," Zeke warned, when Carl was done and his face, red and polished with joy, was looking at him. "We've got some time left before we can lynk to the Werld."

"ZeeZee, you've just put meaning back into my life!"

Zeke watched him somberly. "Well, you'd better hear the rest of what's going on." He told him about the Rimstalkers giving the zotl light lancer armor. "And you know it's you the spider people are going to hit with that armor."