Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

"He's obviously an eld dropping," a male's coarse voice said. "Let's leave him here."

A shouted "No!" jumped from the women in the small crowd. "We must bring him to the wizan," one of the women.

spoke. "It is the law"

"Crawl" The man's voice coarsed again. He stepped forward where Carl could see him: a bleak man in wolf and snakeskins, his youthful blackbearded face already sharp and hard as a flintedge. At his hip, in a lizardhide holster, was a handgun. "I'm the chief of this run, and I say we leave him. If he's alive when we circle, back this way, we'll take him to Tarfeather."

"Right, Allin!" another of the men called out. "Let's get to Rhene and free our Foke now"

"Please; go," Carl agreed from where he was back=

sprawled. He cast a glance over the forest-hackled ridges of the skyle. "I can make myself comfortable here if you'd leave me some clothes."

Silence boomed. Allin took one step closer to Carl. "You speak Foke."

"He's not a skyle dropping," one of the others guessed.

"I think I am," Carl said, sitting up. "Me eld skyle gave me your language before sending me out into the Werld. You're the Foke, right? From Tarfeather."

Mutters shivered through the group. Allin hushed them with a slant of his cubed head. His black hair was pleated tightly to his skull and dangled in corded bangles to his shoulders.

The small hairs at the crown of his forehead twitched. "You are the first dropping that I've heard speak." His tiny eyes were brown and flecked with gray glints as though they were sweating. "Where are you from?"

"Uh-earth. A planet that existed a very long time ago.> ..

Allin cut him off: " No, fool. Where in the Werld are you from?"

"The eld skyle?" Carl offered.

Allin snorted with frustration. One of the others stepped closer, a broadfaced woman with short, brindled hair; she said to Carl: 'Allin wants to know where the thornwing picked you up.

There are millions of eld skyles. What you saw on the path you flew from there to here could help us a great deal."

"Craw, it could save our lives!" Allin snapped.

"Did the thornwing fly the Cloudgate?" the brindlehaired woman asked. "You know the Cloudgate."

Of course he did. The information was there with the language, rising to his awareness as an image: Clouds swirled like the wheel of the galaxy, helixing a 'spiral that. corkscrewed the length of the Werld. Because of the large-scale gravitational refraction of the infalling light, one side of the Werld glowed bluish and the. other side ruddy. The direction of the cloud's drift toward either of those different sky colors told which side of the Werld one was on. Also, the intensity of the light revealed depth from the Eld, which was the fire of photons and nucleons falling through the event horizon. The Eld's. antipode was the Rim, the land of night and the lower edge of the Werld where spacetime funneled rapidly toward the core of the black hole.

This information bristled in him, but he lacked the Specific knowledge-he did not remember the shade of haze in the sky or the drift of the clouds. He told them as much, and Allin turned away from him with disgust.

"Wrap him up," the leader ordered, "and let's go. It's a long journey to Tarfeather."

Before Carl could react, several of the men seized him and bound him with leather cord in a plump,

scratchy blanket. Two men carried him like a rolled-up rug, and everyone ran through the trees toward the falloff of the ledge. Carl's head was free, and he saw the front runners bound off the cliff, somersault in midair,

and shoot high into the sky. Carl gawked to see the feet of the men carrying him rush through a crinkling of dead leaves to the edge of the ridge and leap. A veil of forest unfolded-below them, and Carl clenched against the tug of gravity. Instead, the forest spread below him and retreated. A powerful undertow was hoisting them upward. The skyle they had been on fell away, and they were sailing swiftly into a lake of empty space. There, the contour of banked space leveled, and they positioned their bodies to glide in the direction of their choice.

Allin led them toward a keyhole of brilliant light among a cluster of skyles. The flight was a lengthy one, for on the other side of the cluster was another, huger sea of emptiness. Deprived of the familiar temporal rhythms of night and day, - the many hours seemed interminable to Carl. For a while, he occupied himself with the wonder of his new experience. But that was too bulky.

Everything was so new to him that the information that the eld skyle had implanted in him packed his mind, and nothing was clear.

He concentrated and saw the Werld in his mental eye the way the Foke did: The fierce light of the collapsing universe came through the Eld and fell first into the Welkyn, the upper Werld; then through the gold spiraling clouds to the crepuscular Midwerld, where they were now; and finally down - into Rataros in the darkness at the Werld's edge-the Rim. Flexing his neck, he could see the arc of the sky and just barely discern the pastel difference in shades between the red and blue extremes. He dozed and pondered and dozed again.

Carl was roused when the men guiding him along their fallpath took a firm grip and pulled him sharply to one side.

His insides lurched, and he woke to find himself gently rolling in the sky toward a tiny crevassed skyle. "Where are we?" he asked in English and then again in Foke.

"Be quiet," one of the carriers admonished. "We're being stalked."

They rotated him so that he could see the black, boomerang-shaped craft that was hovering a thousand meters away. It looked like a splinter in the dusk.

"They haven't seen us yet. We're going to hide and wait until-"

A star glinted at the head of the viper-flat craft, and the air around them thumped with the pressure of a nearby explosion. By the time the boom erupted, they had rolled through the sky to the other side of the skyle.

Another blast scythed the top off the small skyle and fountained the surrounding space with gravel.

The poke touched down on the tiny skyle and licked off again: immediately, bounding toward the next nearest skyle.

Before they reached it, the small skyle they had thrust off wobbled under repeated fire. The din ruptured hearing, and with a deafening force, the skyle shattered.

The pulverized rock spun away from a writhing, electric-blue bolt of ionized air. A spearhead of crushed stone pierced the skull of the man carrying Carl. His partner clutched at Carl, and the two whirled with the humbling force of the devastation.

A dizzying plunge whipped seeing to a blur. Impact jolted sense out of Carl, and he lay spraddled face up, staring at the distant black grin of the killer ship, "Get up, you foal!" Allin's angry voice cut deeper than Carl's daze.

Carl sat up and realized that the binding straps had burst.

The rug moved slickly under him. He had landed on the man who was carrying him. The dead man's face was twisted around a purple scream.

"Come on, idiot!" Allin shouted again. "Get over here before they fire again."

Carl staggered to his feet and gawked at the spired precipice he was on. Allin was waving to him from another skyle across a gap that dropped into gaudy, cloud-fiery distances.

Carl balked. Allin called out once more: "Just leap as hard as you can! The fallpath will carry you."

Carl's muscles were stymied with fear. Allin moved to bound toward him, but at that moment the gunship fired again. A brain-stuffing roar shook Carl to his knees. The ship had hit the spired skyle he was on.

Voices cried through the muddy echoes of the blast. He looked up and saw five of the Foke vaulting toward him. The sight of them coming for him stood him up. He waved, the ship flashed again, and the five flyers burst like blood bags.