Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  So much for friends and associates. The only one of the three back at the ranch who hadn’t wanted me to go on this suicide mission was Wheaty. Only the fact that I happened to be bigger than anybody in the neighborhood had prevented me from ending up in a slok’s belly.

  I felt low. I felt hated and neglected. I decided I needed a vacation so instead of returning to the ranch I went to Paris. It wasn’t difficult. I’d been there before and knew all the right rings to take.

  I was wearing a stetson Wheaty had given me and people stared at it. A muter always came out of D wearing the same things she had worn during or prior to her entry. My cowboy outfit was a bit out of place here. With the wages in my pocket I bought some Japanese pajamas and thongs and was thereafter ignored by everybody.

  The Boulevard Voltaire didn’t match its reputation which was primarily sustained by those who saw only picture postcards or travel brochures. In actuality the street was an anachronism existing for the tourists who liked to be reminded that once upon a time the remainder of the city and, indeed, the streets of most cities resembled this. Inside, the buildings were bulwarked with modem steel and plastic while outside, the decaying brick and clapboard were periodically sprayed with a strong, transparent glue that kept them from falling onto the pavement. At an angle overhead, the skyscrapers reared. The street’s tenants only lived in the ramshackle buildings during working hours, hurrying to their modem apartments at dusk. They were professional live-ins.

  The Bastille on the Rue St. Antoine had collapsed long ago and the ugly red structure rearing in its place was totally artificial. Tourists didn’t mind that it wasn’t genuine, nor did they stop visiting Paris simply because everything worth seeing had been copied and rebuilt in many places on the globe. The Bridge of Sighs was also in Chicago, the Tower of London jutted from the tundra of Siberia, a plastic pyramid marred the landscape of Oahu.

  Having viewed the sights to my content, I decided to conduct an experiment, located a ring channel beside a filthy river and brashly walked into it. It was a good-size channel, seemingly appearing from thin air inside a thicket and rushing for several yards along the river bank before plunging into nothingness beside a tree. At any rate, I wanted to find out whether or not I could be broken into a dozen parts and distributed haphazardly about the countrysides of D-i and D-2. How I’d extricate myself from the situation if such turned out to be the case didn’t occur to me.

  Feeling a hundred little fingers pressuring me as the rings swept by, I finally began to grow nervous. I kept telling them in my mind that I didn’t want to enter them, and I didn’t enter any of them, but their desire for me was tangible. A red circle rushed straight at me like a scarlet maw and, suddenly terrified that it wouldn’t heed my wishes, I sucked in my stomach and jumped all the way out of the channel.

  So much for friends and vacations. An hour or so later I trudged up the dusty road to the ranch. Googs was sleeping on the front porch and didn’t awaken as I sat down beside her. I stayed there for a long time, just looking at the dark horizon, and by and by someone pushed upon the screen door and came out Kisko didn’t say a word, merely stood staring at me as if at an apparition.

  5

  The old hermit was still in Gothland, though he made himself difficult to find. I tracked him for three days and finally cornered him in a cave. I think he was expecting a slok or an unfriendly goth because he almost fell over in a dead faint when I stepped into view. So shaken he couldn’t speak, he lay gasping and waving me away with a paw. I tried talking to him but it was no good. It must have taken him a long time to leam how to do it.

  “You had no right!” he said later, indignant and most of all afraid. We were now in D-i.

  “Stop looking around like that. There’s nobody here. Don’t you think I have any sense? This is a cornfield in Peoria. Who would think of looking for anyone in this spot?”

  “Ignorance is a big problem with youl” he snapped. “And quit gawking at me.”

  “I can’t help it. You look like a diplomat or an aristocrat or both. The aura around you in D-2 was plain bum.”

  “And yours was of a great lady, so we were both wrong.” He kept glancing about, primarily at the sky. “I have to go back immediately. How dare you take me by the scruff of the neck and haul me out of my home? If I wanted to live here on Earth, you wouldn’t have met me in the first place. And what’s the meaning of your turning into a pint-size moppet after being as big as a rhinoceros?” He was thin and balding, dressed elegantly in a striped suit with stiff white collar and shiny shoes. It was uncanny how his aura disagreed with his actual self. “I can’t stay,” he said. His large eyes were doleful, reminding me of Wheaty. Extending his right arm, he pushed up his sleeve and showed me a narrow scar. “There’s a radio implanted in there. They’ll be here within five minutes and that will mean the end of me.”

  “So will the sloks.”

  He shivered. “I’d rather take my chances with them. Let me go back. I’d prefer to stay here and spend a few years examining you but when it’s my life you take second place.”

  “Who’s after you?”

  “Believe me, names wouldn’t mean a thing to you.”

  “How about Ectri?”

  “Never heard of him, her or it.”

  At least he needn’t go back where the sloks were busy hunting for him. While I called a fat blue ring of familiar shade to me, he explained that five minutes had never been enough time for him to exit onto Earth and then find a more suitable place in Gothland. Like other muters, he had to rely on ring channels or the rare coincidence of a useful circle happening by.

  The ring paused beside us, hovered. “I’ve never heard of anyone like you. How long can you hold it there?” He sounded clinical in spite of his anxiety.

  “At least long enough to find out if you’re telling the truth about the radio.” No sooner had I said it than two fast ships hurtled out of the clouds and headed in our direction. They were small cruisers, streamlined and official looking.

  “I’m not a fugitive, or not the kind you’re thinking,” said my companion. “Incidentally, you may call me Croff.”

  “I’m Daryl.”

  “How do you do?” With that, he fled into the ring and I followed.

  A week later I ran away from the ranch, rode Bandit and held onto a box containing Maverick and her kittens while Googs ran along behind us. We got about twenty kilometers beyond the town before Deron came with the trailer to take us back. I had nothing to say and refused to answer any questions.

  “Of course I did nothing to make her angry,” said Kisko. It was night and I lay in bed staring at the dark ceiling, listening to them.

  “Must have,” said Wheaty. “She wouldn’t get mad about anything Deron or I did. You went to Spain on your vacation, didn’t you?”

  “What of it?”

  Wheaty sounded tired. “You pay me to keep an eye on her, which is an out-and-out impossibility, but I think I understand a couple of things about her so I’m asking you what you did on your vacation.”

  “Loafed in the sun, surfed, made some business contacts. That’s it.”

  “Are you sure? No other contacts?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ladies happens to be the subject I’m sidling around the bush about.”

  “None. Oh, I ran into a woman I used to know. We had dinner and I drove her to the airport.”

  “And you kissed her good-bye.”

  “What is this?” said Kisko. “What are you driving at?”

  “The kid must have followed you,” said Deron. “She found out where in Spain you were going and then she followed you.”

  “How could she do that?”

  “Today you’re wearing the dunce cap. We’re talking about a ring-hopping flea, not an ordinary girl. She saw you playing the ardent acquaintance and now she won’t work for us anymore. She won’t even tell us about that last trip.”

  Wheaty and Kisko left the cabin and Deron
came into my room. Turning on the light, he sat down in a chair. “Wheaty said to tell you he was glad you decided not to go into D anymore. He also mentioned that if he had known I was going after you, he’d have sabotaged the trailer. Next time, he said, do it at night while we’re all asleep.”

  “I’m not particularly interested in this conversation,” I said. “I hardly ever believe anything you say.”

  “Yeah, I know. How did the pit look?”

  Weary of resisting, I said, “Deep and noisy.”

  “How many little machines?”

  “Twelve.”

  “They’ve added two. They’re power pods. They drive the engine.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Nothing, yet, except make noise ”

  “What will it do?”

  “We don’t know. That’s why we have you. I appreciate your telling me. Why don’t you just scram away from here by yourself and let Wheaty send the animals to you later?”

  “You’d get another kid,” I said.

  “What do you care? Besides, I don’t think so. The market is all dried up.” He looked at me with almond-shaped brown eyes that were steady, unfriendly and deceptive. “You can fool them but not me. You’re here for kicks, not those animals that you could have swiped a dozen times. You’re not here for money or an infantile crush on a man old enough to be your father and then some. All those things enter into your thinking, but that’s all. D doesn’t scare you. Nothing does. Why is that?”

  The library in New York had volumes of words about transmutation but very little that I wanted to know. What was a muter? Why did they have an extra chromosome? What were the other dimensions? There were answers galore in that largest of libraries in the world but none seemed accurate or to the point. A goth couldn’t talk? I knew one that could. A muter was dependent upon the chance movement of rings? I knew one who wasn’t. Muters simply traded one body mass for another? Indeed?

  The list of those who were expert in the field of transmutating was small. Biographical articles were accompanied by photographs and I was surprised and amused to see a young Croff staring up at me from a glossy page. Beside his well-bred features was the name of Ja Pari. I didn’t know or recognize any of the other faces, though one looked slightly familiar, a man named Bud Jupiter. Heavy bearded with a shock of gray hair, somewhere in his sixties, he reminded me of someone.

  “You lied to me,” I said to Croff later in Gothland. I didn’t speak with my vocal cords but made marks in the dirt beside a volcano.

  No, he hadn’t, he said. He appreciated that I had brought him here to a safe place empty of sloks, and he hadn’t lied. Pari was the name he had used at the University. It was his professional name. His real name was nobody’s business.

  To my displeasure, he soon developed a sore throat and couldn’t talk to me anymore. Meanwhile I was wearing down the claw on my right forepaw. Our communication was brought to a forced halt so I waved good-bye to him, left the dimension and went back to the ranch.

  “You’re an educated fellow,” I said to Deron, flattering him not at all. “Did you ever hear of radio implants?”

  Ever cautious, he said, “What kind?”

  “So the law can keep track of fugitives and other enemies of the realm. Don’t bother to tell me it’s illegal since I already know that. I also know it’s done all the time.”

  “If you know so much why are you bruising my skull with questions?”

  “You know those two bores in the pit?” I said. Immediately he grew tense and I took satisfaction from the fact. “I’ll run the left one down if you do me a favor.”

  He wanted to know what I meant by running down the bore so I explained that I’d find out where it went. He then said I probably wouldn’t be around to appreciate it when he did the favor if I embarked upon such a foolhardy venture.

  “Which is why you have to do your part first,” I said.

  A few days later Croff was stupefied when I went bounding up the side of a low volcano in D-2, took the scruff of his neck in my jaws and climbed through a conveniently placed yellow ring. Wheaty and Deron were there in the room waiting for us. Wheaty tore off CrofFs fancy coat, yanked up the shirt sleeve, found the scar I had described and swabbed it with antiseptic and anesthetic. Deron was ready with a wicked little knife, slit Croffs flesh and deftly scooped out the tiny receiver which was taken by Wheaty and crushed in a pair of pliers. A few swift stitches and a bandage slapped in place concluded the operation, and the dazed Croff was left staring in bewilderment at his arm.

  Wheaty and Deron exited from the room and headed downstairs. From the open hotel room window, I saw their car speed away. “Come here,” I said to Croff. A blue ring waited about ten feet below.

  “They fixed our position,” he said. “They had time. They can still find me.” He looked at the ring and then at me. “You’re joking, aren’t you?” He turned pale. “My aim was always terrible. You could lure it closer, I know, but then you’ve a mean streak in you.”

  A police cruiser dropped from the sky, swung around the building and disappeared over the rooftop for a moment, just long enough for Croff to fall, bellowing, through the blue ring. I went headfirst after him. One nice thing about going into D-2 was that a drop of twenty or thirty feet, or even more, was nothing to a goth. Our bodies were flexible enough to absorb a great deal of shock.

  The rest of that day was tedious. We weren’t in Gothland very long before Croff skipped out on me. He spied a crevice in a mountain and popped into it. I was too large to squeeze in after him. For a while I sat with my snout in the crack, snarling and spitting as I asked him what he thought he was doing, reminded him of the virtues of gratitude, but finally I realized he wasn’t coming out. He had probably already gone through another opening in the rock and escaped out the other side of the mountain.

  Back at the ranch, Wheaty and Deron made me irritable with their questions. They had agreed to help me get the radio out of CrofFs arm but now they wanted to know the wherefores of what they had done.

  “The only thing I know about him is that he was afraid of the police,” I said. The complete truth was none of their business, not that I knew it either. Filling them in on every detail hadn’t been part of the deal.

  “Where does he come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his full name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would anyone choose to live in D-2? What do the police want him for?”

  I couldn’t answer the first question to their satisfaction because they weren’t muters and, as for the second, I suggested they probably knew as much about it as I, which was practically nothing.

  “About the bore,” said Kisko, but I didn’t want to hear and walked away. He followed. “I have my doubts that you can even get into it. There are too many…”

  I didn’t say it either, but I was thinking it. Not once had any of them ever mentioned the sloks. I wondered if they had an idea of what the enemy looked like. Not much at art, I made a stab at painting a big specimen on my bedroom wall that turned out to be realistic enough to make Wheaty yell at me.

  “Why do you always have to do weird things? You do it all the time! Look at that nightmare!”

  “What are you so upset about? They’re not so bad when you get to know them. On the average they weigh a hundred and fifty kilos, own about eight dozen teeth and travel a hundred kilometers an hour when they’re perturbed, which is ninety-eight percent of the time.”

  After they decided to let me alone, I sneaked away via a ring and visited Mutat. There I ransacked the living quarters of Padarenka and Mikala. The small bungalow sat in a grove of trees on the north edge of the campus.

  Trying to describe the conglomeration of objects that would transmutate into a holster and loaded anesthetic gun was like trying to itemize the things a hard wind blew into a stairwell. There were little bits of debris all hanging on a shiny piece of string, including slivers of brick and quartz, some
hardened glue, a scrap of paper, a drop of water encased in wax, an aspirin tablet and some things I didn’t recognize. Either Gorwyn was a genius or he had to be crazy to have had the patience and tenacity to figure this out. All the junk on the string had to be there in its particular order or the process wouldn’t work.

  Very carefully I removed a loaded string from a box under Padarenka’s bed and tied it about my waist, leaving so much slack I had to hold onto it. Even so, when I landed in D-2 a few minutes later, the gun and holster were so tight on my chest I wheezed.

  Kisko was wrong when he said I wouldn’t get inside the bore in the pit. The fact was, it turned out to be a matter of agility and deception on my part plus my own private brand of recklessness. There was nothing so thrilling as a chase in D-2. The goth physique was made for just such a pastime.

  I could have found the proper ring and materialized on top of the bore but I chose to do it the tedious way, or the most interesting. Down the tunnel I prowled, dispatching the sloks hiding in the ceiling niches as I had done during my previous journey along this route, with one exception. No enemies would come down the corridor behind me for, having taken advantage of the engine’s noise, I rolled several large boulders into the tunnel and then stacked them, plugging the passageway. I had a sore nose and paws when the job was done.

  I emptied the pit by standing in the tunnel exit and spitting and snarling until all down below were inspired to climb up after me.

  One of the half-dozen or more things I should have done before going into the engine house was to practice my aim with the sleep gun. I shot a slok in the tail and it didn’t even faze him. He leaped for me so eagerly that he sailed clear over me and got kicked into the pit.

  I ought to have found out what conditions were like inside the engine house, whether or not there were doors or overwhelming odds. A single archway was open, the one leading to the left bore. Its door was sliding shut as I entered the big, shiny concavity. The goth leaning his nose against a button on a banked panel received a sleeping dart in his ear, another in the fur on his back and another in his chest before he went down. The door stopped sliding shut.