Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

He moved to place the lance on the nightstand and noticed a book on gravity waves and cosmology. Sheelagh cared enough about him to want to learn about the universe that had changed him, and that insight sundered the desire in him. Why had he implicated this girl in his grotesque fate? Why had he come here this morning except to use her to counter his anxiety? He felt ashamed of his selfishness, and he was at the bedroom door, on the way out, when Sheelagh stepped back in from the bathroom.

"Please--don't go." In the chalky dawnlight, her nakedness glowed. e

Carl paused in the doorway, awed by her lovesick body. His shame was slipping away like sleep. Her milkwhite breasts swayed with her advance, and he let his eyes drop to the garnet-yellow hair between her thighs. He closed the door, and they sat down on the bed together. She took the lance from him and laid it on the floor.

The words he wanted to speak went breathless in him as she pulled off his sweater and unbuckled his pants.

He felt the hungriness of a cloud of mosquitoes in his loins, and as the last shred of restraint frayed, the light lancer armor inspirited a thought. Carl suppressed the chilly sensation of the other inside him. He had gotten good at ignoring the armor since he had found something like a no-time within himself. The Zone, as he called it, was a recess in his psyche where all the sounds, sights, odors, and textures of the day went within his head. With a little concentration, he could drop the armor's psychic intrusions there, too. All he wanted to know from the armor was when the zotl had arrived for dinner. The white noise of the Zone smothered the armor's inspiriting, and Carl turned away from his farflung hopes and fears for the lubricious moment.

Sex was a lens of exhilaration, amplifying parts, like the shifting rococo of her hair on the pillow and her eyes like decorated glass, chromed with tears of joy as his hand fetched the lily of her genitals. His touch floated like a piece of light, and they twined together like music. He timed his deft massage to the green pulse of a vein in her throat and the rhythms of her breasts. Her song steepened and then frenzied as an orgasm bloomed through her. She clawed at the hand welded to her bluehot center and cried.

A scream cracked the tempo of her pleasure, and she was rudely shoved aside as Carl bounded to his feet: "Hee-yipes!" he howled, clutching his hand. His face-was skullwhite as he examined the hand and saw two thin wires of blood glinting from his knuckles to his wrist.

"What's the matter?" Sheelagh asked in a hurt voice. "It's just a scratch."

. He faced her with a stare like an ax. "Oh, cod," his huge face whispered. His wild eyes searched the room and fixed on the doily under the nightlamp. He ripped the doily from under it with such force that the lamp was dashed to smithereens. He clamped the cloth against his cut hand.

Sheelagh curled up with fright. "Carl, what's wrong? It's just a scratch."

He picked up his lance and aimed it at her. "Put out your hand. Hurry."

She balked, cringing with fear, and he grabbed her hand and irradiated it with UV But the lance shut down before it would damage her.

Carl dropped the lance, bolted to the bathroom, banged around there, and burst into the laundry closet. When he lurched back into the bedroom, he was uncapping a jug of bleach. "Give me your hand," he ordered.

Sheelagh crawled into the corner. "What are you doing?"

"Just give me your hand, goddammit!" He was splashing bleach all over the bed, and when she hesitated, he seized her wrist and doused her whole arm in bleach. While she wept, he soaked her fingernails. Sweat beaded like mercury across his brow, and his face trembled.

"I'm sorry-I'm sorry," he mantrumed while he finished immersing her fingertips in palm-cupped bleach. Then he clambered into his clothes. "Stop crying

please! It's not you. It has nothing to do with you. Do you understand?"

"No!" she blubbered.

"I have to get out of here." He backed toward the door.

"Don't go."

"I'll come back," he lied.

"You're lying. You're leaving for good. I'll never see you again. I know it."

"No. Don't talk like that," he said from the doorway.

"But I've got to go now. Please-forgive me."

Sheelagh sat hunched over her tears in fearful confusion, and when Carl galloped out of the apartment and the door banged behind him, she collapsed under an avalanche of sobs.

Carl phoned Zeke from Ames, Iowa, and had him take the next flight out. The trip was Zeke's first time out in the world by himself in a long time. He dressed inconspicuously in loafers, gay slacks, blue shirt, bowtie, and tweed blazer. He was apprehensive about being recognized, and a fugitive anxiety accompanied him even in the privacy of the cab to the airport.

His mind was clear, however, and he was pleased with how easily he flowed back into the stream of things.

A limo picked him up at the Des Moines airport and drove him through the long fluent miles of resinous land to a lonely warehouse big and empty as a ship's hull. Workers toiled with electric saws, hammers, and welders, fitting living quarters into a corner of the warehouse.

Carl met him-at a scaffolded loading dock cluttered with lumber, fixtures, and pipes. They sauntered toward the warehouse under streamers of construction noise, and Carl told him about the spore.

Zeke went moth-white and fluttery. His eyes were glazed brown fruits when they saw the bandage strapping Carts hand. Carl explained about Sheelagh and him, and Zeke sat down on a stack of cinderblocks.

"You've known about this all along?" he asked in a shadowy voice. "Why did you come back?" The answer returned to him with the shock of a revelation: Carl had never left. His bodymind had journeyed among universes but his soul was everyone around him-all complicit with his betrayal of life on earth. A-shudder twitched through him.

All Zeke could think to say was: "I can't believe you've had the balls to shave each morning."

Carl's contrite face brightened. " I don't. I use this." He lifted his left arm, and the red lens of the lance glinted from under his cuff.

Zeke experienced a warm flush on his cheeks and chin, and he looked down to see a fine dust of whiskers' powdering his shirtfront. "You're, the crazy one," he said, challenging Carl with the boldness of his stare.

"You're surprised at that?" Carl responded. "After all I've lost, you expect me to be sane?"

"Lost?" The veins in Zeke's temples drummed. He thought of slugging Carl, but knowledge of the spore dissuaded him. "You've got a perfect body, an armor with godful powers, and a lance that gives a great shave. What've you lost? Earthone, a savage greedconfounded toxic dump?

Evoe? Does she love you with more passion and more surrender than Sheelagh? Is she more beautiful?"

"It's not that."

"Damn right. What have you lost?"

"The ordinary." He dragged out a sigh. "It's strange now. I can barely remember when life was ordinary enough to be boring. I miss that. "

"So you've endangered a whole world to recapture

a feeling?" Zeke thwacked-his notebook across his knee and looked away.

"You're the one that believes the universe is infinite. What are you worried about? There are plenty of other earths, right?

And besides, you're the one who told me to take my pleasure when I found it."

"Mat was before I knew you had parasites." Zeke stood up and looked about at the hustling workcrews. "What the hell is all this about?"

"It's a place for you to stay while the lynk converts you for.

the jump. We go in three weeks, but now it's too dangerous to stay in New York. So we're going to have to stay with the lynk."

"But the lynk is with the pigshit in Barlow"

"I'm moving it. Now that I've so handily charmed Sheelagh, I've got to cover our tracks. The dung and the lynk will arrive here tomorrow at the end of a trail of redtape that completely buries any tie between this place and Alfred Omega.