Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  That was the crux of the puzzling items that kept coming back time after time to nudge my consciousness. The idea of a partner for me was a fabrication dreamed up in whose mind? If it had been Kisko’s or Deron’s fantasy, Erma learned all about it when she had them propped on the brink of death and ready to shove them over. What about Wheaty? No matter what he told Erma, she had listened to the whole truth, as they believed it, from the lips of her crushed victims. That she would prefer the tale of a whole and untouched traitor rather than suffering men didn’t seem reasonable.

  Whom did that leave? Only Erma herself. She could have broken me like a stick of chalk yet here I sat hale and hearty. She could have arranged for my corpse to lie in some deep grave to the end of time yet I sat in Mutat with indigestion from eating too much ice cream.

  As I sat and thought about it, an odd idea came to life in my head. Erma had never intended killing me, not from the first moment we met in the living room at the ranch, and perhaps before that. My broken fingers and the punch on the jaw had been no more than brief sport to her.

  Ted war came up behind me and interrupted my reverie. “If I didn’t know for a fact that you have only empty space between your ears I’d swear you were thinking,” he said.

  “Disappear before I beat you up.”

  “This is as much my lounge as it is yours.”

  “Who told you that nonsense?” I said, getting up and preparing to do something meaningful. He quickly sidled out the door, stood in the hallway with his arms akimbo and a smirk on his face.

  “You’re the ugliest girl I ever saw.”

  “You’re the fattest slob I ever saw,” I said.

  “You’re the stupidest dummy who ever lived.”

  “I make better grades than you so that puts your I.Q. on the same level as a dead person.”

  He drooled on purpose, formed a lot of spit that dripped down onto his chest. ‘1 had a candy bar on my bureau but it’s gone now.”

  “Oh, yeah, I meant to thank you for that. Next time get one with more nuts.”

  “Next time I’ll sprinkle one with arsenic.” He rubbed a knot on his head, acquired earlier in the day in the gym when he tried a street-fighter chop on me and tripped over himself. “You’re scrawny and hideous and not even your parents wanted you, otherwise you wouldn’t be an orphan. I’ll bet they dumped you as soon as you were born.”

  I chased him down the hall and got in one good punch before he flew into his room and locked me out. For a fat pest he could move as if on wings.

  Groppo was good at helping me to relax and think so I went to see him, let him out of his cage and played catch with him. His tough, gnarled fingers dug into the beach ball and once or twice I thought he was going to sink his teeth into it. For a chimp he was very brainy, brown-faced and snub-nosed, about a meter and a quarter tall and fast on his feet. Gorwyn always raised the devil when he discovered I had let one of his pets out. I never told him I preferred Groppo’s company to Tedwar’s, though he undoubtedly already knew this. I hadn’t too many friends my own age in the school and they had gone home for summer vacation, so there was only Tedwar with whom I waged continual war because he seemed to want it that way, and there was also Groppo for whose existence I was grateful since he was at least intelligent enough to know that company was better than solitude.

  We sat on the floor and shared a banana and then he went to sleep with his head on my lap while I leaned against the wall and thought about my problems.

  I had to be particularly on the watch for Tedwar during physical fitness class. He could be formidable when in full flight, like a battering ram, and every so often during body building period I would look around and see flapping red curls, wet mouth and furrowed brow as he tried to run me down. There weren’t so many students present that I got lost in the shuffle. I was good on the ropes and bars and could match anyone my size at running and team games. However, nobody else in the class was my size so I fell behind in track and went back to my room every day to count my new bruises acquired during contact sports.

  I knew Gothland was too big to search but I tried anyway, first visiting all the familiar haunts and then branching beyond into strange territory. I prowled through that dimension until I was sick of it.

  “It was madness that broke up the group,” said Croff. It was late afternoon and he was displeased because I had known how to find him. “I told you I don’t know anything about a conspiracy. To do what, for heaven’s sake? Create earthquakes? Come now! Yes, there were six of us but I spoke of that before. The others were much closer to each other than to me. I sort of stayed out of things. The madness came quite a while before we were rounded up and served with the radio receivers. It was Appy, seemed to have his brain blown out by ego or something. I believed it was a treatable condition but the idea was beneath him. No, I don’t know what happened to any of them and I’ve never met anyone named Ectri, Erma or Kisko. One thing I do know is that a man named Bud Jupiter was tied into it but I have no idea how.”

  Croff wasn’t having a difficult time of it financially as he had earned a considerable amount while he was one of the world’s leading authorities on dimensions and had possessed the foresight to transfer some of his bank accounts to his private name before disappearing into Gothland. Now he lived an obscure existence made interesting only when he felt the need to avoid a certain store or other public place.

  “Yes, I care about what’s going on but all my contacts have been broken,” he said. We were in a diner twenty kilometers from his apartment, eating spaghetti and practically gagging on the smoke coming from the candles all over the walls. It wasn’t that dark outside so they weren’t really necessary. “I used to be a person of consequence,” said Croff, sounding like an old hermit or a bum on the skids. “What are you grinning about? Never mind. Eat your dinner, which brings me to remark that you should put on some weight, else how can you experience a normal pubescence?

  I liked him and wished he were my father. How simple my life would be if there were someone to whom I could bear my troubles, confess my sins and make earnest but vain promises. Across the street the bank people lit their candles and made ready for the evening rush. They didn’t have too many fans so the interior was probably like an oven. Their computer stood in a comer, an energy-gobbling necessity or luxury of twinkling lights, infallible patterns of electronic activity and platinum facade. Banking made fun, or so their ads claimed.

  “Tell me about the madness,” I said.

  “Appy? He was always a bit eccentric, as sociable as a post and not half so friendly, but forever in the thick of things. We all thought he got the way he was dosing himself with dope before mutating. I don’t know. It was such interesting work, doubly so in retrospect and especially when I compare it with my accomplishments and activities of today.”

  “What did you learn about D?”

  Frowning, he stopped eating. “It’s an enigma, or I should say D are enigmas. It’ll take time to learn about the worlds and even more time to account for individual human differences. As for the earthquakes you seem so concerned about, they might be caused by the deep ocean drilling for oil but there isn’t anything I can do about it since I’ll be clapped in irons the moment I show my face. If I knew one honest policeman . .

  “How many dishonest ones have you approached?”

  “None, lately. I value my anonymity, my freedom and my health. Actually I prefer living in D-2, but the lure to go there is too strong to be altogether wholesome so I resist.”

  We discussed my peculiar talents or rather he did most of the talking while I listened. He was especially keen after I told him green rings mutated me into a tiny swimmer. Of course it wasn’t natural, he said, which made it even odder that I had no recollection of my background. The supposed clot in my head, still present after all the time that had passed, could be an implanted instrument, but he knew of no one who could do a thing like that and he had been in a position to know everybody who was somebody in the field of
ring research. Second-guessing such an instrument’s effect would be impossible. As he had mentioned once or twice before, if he had the time he would love to study me.

  He gave me the addresses of his former associates, not that they would do me any good as every one of them had likely fled into D with receivers in their flesh. At least I might gain some information about them from their neighbors.

  “Obviously you don’t know who you are for a good reason,” said Croff. “Why don’t you leave it alone for a while?”

  “I can’t. It’s practically all I ever think about.”

  “Of course you’ll be making an error if you assume your personal predicament is tied in with mine or the others or with the inexplicable machinery in D.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Too coincidental.”

  He was only making noise to mollify me, to alter the direction of my inquisitive nose, to divert me into a more sanguine state of mind. It was all right for him to do that and I appreciated it and never asked him how he would feel if he were young and faced with the realization that no matter what he did there was no one behind him.

  We parted outside the diner. He was apologetic because he had talked away the remaining daylight and now it was getting dark. No amount of indoor candlelight and outdoor torchlight could illuminate the wide street or its alleys. I watched Croff hurry away with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, one of the best minds in the country relegated to obscurity, nonentity and idleness by a criminal with no name. Who was Erma’s boss?

  A youth gang passed me by, began breaking the burning torches off their posts and tossed them at buildings. There weren’t many torches and after they were extinguished total darkness descended over the block. Keeping an eye out for furtive followers, I strolled along and watched the rings in the sky. They shone like strange suns that had blundered into this alien system and were looking for a way of escape. Now their coronas were invisible while only their cores glowed with color, blues, greens, reds, browns and here and there I detected orbs so ebon they were easy to spot against the sky.

  Around the comer a green glow beckoned me and I knew a ring had either grounded or was skimming the surface of the street. In fact it was parked between two buildings several meters above a youth gang who were having a confab about the evening’s business. Not one of them looked up at the gleaming green moon, no one seemed uneasy, not a member remarked over it but rather they peered through the night at one another as though there was no genuine illumination in the world, never had been and never would be.

  Generations of the dole had almost literally altered genes so that their minds worked only a certain way. There had to be a great many hours of vacancy or emptiness in their days. They called them leisure. During this time they existed. Mug, assault, do something really gray, get plenty of fun and a little dope, run errands for junior members of the local syndicate, find some action just so long as it was mostly passive action, and everything would be just fine until it all ended with a bullet, bludgeon, knife or overdose.

  They scattered when the earthquake hit, literally went in every direction as the buildings on both sides dropped rooftops on their heads, sent mortar, brick, plastic, glass and steel hurtling down through the green ring that might never have existed for all they had known or cared.

  While I helped a rescue party uncover them I thought of what Croff had told me about his having heard of other people with my special talents. “Think what that means,” he had said. “The species is building toward genetic greatness. One with such a talent might be a freak but more means natural progress.”

  Who were those people? No names, just that Appy had mentioned them once upon a time.

  Was Croff talking through his beard? Certainly the boys under the rubble hadn’t been thinking about special talents when they died and I doubt they believed the world was on its way up and out of its ghetto of misfortune.

  9

  Ectri traveled down into Jersey to a comfortable-looldng estate that wasn’t exactly a horse farm. As a matter of fact he raised ponies and dogs. The former were smaller than the latter which were the long, sleek, gray racers that liked nothing better than to chase after artificial rabbits dangling from track arms. Ectri himself never did anything much but oversee the place, or at least that was all I ever saw him do. Once in a while he rode one of the larger ponies, not industriously because they weren’t of a size to be used as mounts but were decorative oddities, housebroken like puppies and not even kept in the stable but in a comer wing of the house. The high chain link fences discouraged thieves who might otherwise snatch up the animals and stick them in their cars.

  The fences did nothing to impede the activity of a spy like myself who skulked in high grass and watched to see what the tall, menacing owner of the property was up to. How discouraging it was for me to discover he wasn’t up to much of anything and that he had obviously come there for a vacation. I watched him play with the miniature ponies, wash dogs and clip their nails, trim bushes and trees around the house, all the mundane things a menacing person wouldn’t normally do. It would have seemed more natural for him to take up a weapon and go after somebody, perhaps me.

  While I kept a more or less glum watch on him, I still had to show up in Mutat occasionally, so I often left the estate and ring traveled back to the school. The elevator guards on the third floor didn’t keep a record of people riding to the upper levels, otherwise Gorwyn would have jumped all over me.

  Tedwar was usually somewhere in the background, watching, demanding to know where I had been and what I thought I was doing, threatening, predicting dire fates for me. I told him I thought it was very considerate of him to miss me so much. He took to dogging my footsteps, undoubtedly to find out how I was getting out of the building. If a ring infrequently happened to come through the walls into our living quarters he hopped right into it and went away but he couldn’t make a ring do his bidding and come to him when he wished to go somewhere.

  One day I climbed into Ectri’s dog compound which was simply a fenced-in pasture where the animals roamed and stretched their legs. They stretched after me that day and I didn’t wait around to see whether or not they thought I was a rabbit but took off running toward the nearest fence. Having twenty-five greyhounds on one’s trail made for good speed but I wasn’t that good and they began making headway toward my heels. They weren’t nice, tame dogs. A trainer couldn’t obtain a competitor from a creature that laid around all day munching tidbits and enjoying fond pats. The hounds behind me were fiercely independent and only manageable in a cage or runway.

  I didn’t actually see the dark ring. I had never really seen any rings but the greens, blues and yellows while all those others resided somewhere in the comers of my awareness, as if they didn’t exist in the substantial world but in a misty limbo. This particular circle lurked in a niche in my psyche like a vague hint of light at the far end of a tunnel, like a trickle of water in a desert, like a patch of blue in a thunderous sky. It was hiding behind a tree stump and I didn’t see it except with a miniscule part of a comer of my eye. There was no time to find a familiar-colored ring, no time for anything but the expectation of being grounded by Ectri’s dogs.

  The forbidden ring left the vicinity of the tree stump and swooped close to me, not in front of me because then I wouldn’t be able to see it, but I made it sidle up and then I barged on in.

  Immediately I felt like a wet rag sliding down an embankment of mud. Not surprisingly, the world of this ring had no light and in fact was darker than any place I had ever been. I sensed rather than saw that this was a planet of shifting, slippery surfaces surrounded on every side by inky emptiness. My body was long and soft and created little friction between it and the slick surface upon which I lay.

  Using my seal-like appendages, I attempted to pull myself up but all the while I slowly slid down the slag, mud or slime under me. There was no one else in this part of the unlighted dimension so it wouldn’t do me any good
to call for help, not that I possessed the physical equipment to do any calling. There didn’t seem to be any assistance for me anywhere.

  Having climbed Ectri’s fence to see if his dog pasture would afford me an interesting bit of information, I might have been better off taking my chances with his gray racers. In my present condition and position all I could do was struggle to raise one weak fin to a level higher than my head so that I could do the same with my other front fin and thereby stave off sliding another centimeter toward the abyss.

  The world had no sound, or perhaps I had no ears. The wet stuff beneath me was inert, noiseless. My breath? There was no such thing here, only effort as I attempted to stave off annihilation. Blackness and silence worked against me. I wasted energy peering and listening.

  The mound suddenly swelled and I heaved myself upward just as a whole section fell away. I sensed a little unevenness in the surface now and hugged it almost with fondness, lay as flatly against it as possible. For a while nothing changed but then movement began again and the thought came to me that I was on a giant mound of jello that wobbled when someone poked it No, I was on an alien planet and it couldn’t have been more real or alien if I had boarded a spaceship, traveled to a distant light in the sky and landed on this satellite.

  When I finally fell, or was thrust off the pile by the senseless motion, I decided I was in hell. It would be a place like this, not fiery and flecked with hurtling brimstone but empty, lonely, black, hungry as a never-ending pit, deep as a chasm, quieter than any grave. There I was, falling and uselessly flailing fin-arms and fin-legs in a place where no friction could be generated and where there wasn’t anyone to hear or care.