Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  “The reason nobody remembers Orfia is because she moved out of here as a young girl,” she said. “Being the eldest citizen in town, I can cast my mind back the farthest.” She reached out and tried to grasp my hand. After a few times, I gave in and let her hold it.

  There had been some trouble and Orfia’s parents took her and her older brother and moved away. What kind of trouble?

  “Those days or these, what’s the difference?” said Flava, blinking her faded eyes. “There’s so much distress, who can keep track? But the fact is I don’t really know. Orfia was a good little student, sharp as a whip and eager to learn. I seem to recall it had something to do with her injuring another student, supposedly beat him up pretty badly though I saw him the day after they said it happened and I can swear he hadn’t a mark on him. Orfia and her family moved right after that. Of course it’s possible the two incidents weren’t connected. My memory isn’t all that trustworthy.”

  She went on to tell me about how the town had gone through a period of change before reverting back to its original condition. “The so-called good life of the late last century didn’t get up to these parts until a few decades ago but all it did was spoil most of the people in this town. Used to be we fished for a living when the water was fit and we had all the lamps and coal we needed. The new energy took most of our life away because it made us fat, lazy and good for nothing. Instead of wondering how to get supper we wondered how to pass away the minutes and hours of every day.”

  “Is it better now?” I asked.

  She squeezed my arm, invited me to come closer and didn’t seem offended when I declined. “If human beings are happy it doesn’t matter about energy and comforts. This town is a tottering derelict because the people in it think they can’t live their lives without the government telling them how. They’re all waiting for the lights to come back on.”

  “They’ll have a long wait.”

  “Won’t they, though? The whole idea is to get something to eat and a place to sleep. There are modern ways to do that and there are the old simple ways.”

  Before I left, I leaned down and let her kiss me on the cheek. Her lips were paper-thin and delicate. Like the town, they threatened to blow away with the first brisk wind.

  At least I learned the name of the boy Orfia had supposedly tried to kill. Carston. Neither he nor his family lived there anymore but I found an old librarian who told me Carston had moved to Stillwell which wasn’t far away. So I went to Stillwell and was told Carston had moved north. Where? I might try his cousin who lived in the yellow house at the end of town except that she was in California and wouldn’t be back for a month or more. Where in California? Nobody seemed to have the address.

  Back at Mutat, I invited Tedwar to visit my farm in New Jersey. Instead of turning me down with words he threw a twenty-pound dictionary at me. Limping down the hall to my room I considered the virtues and advantages of never again inviting him to go anywhere or of even being in his vicinity.

  Browsing through the newspaper ads a day or so later I came across one that made me sit up straight: URGENT MEET ME PEORIA NOON TUESDAY. It was then Monday so I hoped I had only missed seeing the ad the past week. I jumped out of a school window into Waterworld the next day and went directly to the cornfield. Croff didn’t show. Not that day or the next Tuesday.

  By the time I decided to go to Atlanta to try and track him down he was already buried. No one was safe from robbers, according to one of his neighbors, and of course that was how Croff had died, by a nasty specimen who liked to break people’s bones. Whoever did it had worked quietly and gained entry into the apartment by removing an entire window after which they beat the owner to death and made off with the valuables. Would I like to visit the grave? No, if the victim had left any messages for anyone the neighbor knew nothing about that. All the old man’s personal belongings had been gathered up by a niece who lived in Virginia. Wasn’t it tragic how some brilliant and famous people lost their sanity and became common dregs? It was a fact the old man had money in the bank. Several banks, in fact, and under different names. The niece had been quite surprised about it.

  I went to my farm in Jersey, took Bandit and Googs and escaped into the peace of the woods, remained there until I ran out of tins of dog food and the old hound began trying to run down rabbits. She couldn’t have run down a turtle so I took her back to Olger.

  Why had they killed Croff? He had been doing exactly what they wanted, stayed out of sight and existed as a nonentity.

  “I’ve decided to be firm with you,” Gorwyn said to me. “What are you, fifteen now? A long way from your majority which means you have no rights.”

  “That doesn’t sound very democratic or Christian.”

  “I was speaking from an abstract viewpoint. I’ve received reports about your running across the grounds, leaping into rings and scaring people half to death.”

  “What people?” I said. “Nobody comes near this place. Have you noticed how orphanages have an abandoned look about them? It’s because the inmates are the public’s responsibility and we all know what the public does with its responsibility.”

  “If this were an orphanage I’d have you transferred to a detention center. From now on you can’t leave the premises without permission. Do so and my best runners will be after you pronto.”

  “Like who?”

  “Padarenka and Mikala.”

  My mouth must have been hanging open because he told me to close it.

  I went to hunt up my old friends. “You were already killed once because of something that had to do with me,” I said. “Don’t you ever learn?”

  “Stop flattering yourself,” one of them said. “That didn’t really have anything to do with you, and besides, what we do is none of your business.” They looked to be in fine health, had obviously eaten well during their absence, wore new clothes, moved with confident airs. I smelled bribery.

  “You sold out,” I said.

  “To whom?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “We work for nobody but Gorwyn. If you have any more questions, direct them at him because we find you boorish and a brat. We’re glad you helped us once and we’ll pay you back sooner or later. Meanwhile don’t run or we’ll chase your tail off.”

  “You spilled your guts to Gorwyn about me, didn’t you?”

  “You keep harping on that. Who cares what a freak you are?”

  The fact was they were too dumb to make a living at a real job. Dumb and lazy. And ungrateful.

  Gorwyn told me later he had rehired them because they were good runners and because their looks were an asset to the place. Sometimes agents from government or industry came to interview a prospect and it didn’t hurt to have handsome people on the staff.

  “Why am I never interviewed?” I asked.

  “You’re underage.”

  “All prospects start out that way. I get older every day.”

  “The fact is I’ve been forbidden to offer you to anybody.”

  “By whom?”

  “The juvenile courts. You’re a pauper, you’re physically incapacitated because of your amnesia, and furthermore—”

  “Never mind.”

  Sometimes he let me help him with his pointless experiments. At least most of them seemed pointless to me. He was such a dry stick of a man with no sense of humor and no tolerance for error. What made this a luckless attribute for him was that he made more mistakes than anyone I knew. He was clumsy, impulsive, impatient, unimaginative, gullible and even sadistic in a way, propelling terrified experimental subjects into rings when they didn’t perform to suit him, cuffing others, depriving them of rewards. Usually, though, he was just ludicrous.

  He had a small lab close to a ring channel at the edge of the property, nestled in high shrubbery so that he was nearly always able to work in solitude. Except when I barged in. The small concrete building wasn’t situated so close to the channel that the primary stream of rings penetrated its area but t
here were enough circles drifting away from the main course and coming through the walls to us. They were mostly small and slow moving which was what Gorwyn wanted.

  “Did you know animals are like us?” he said. “Only some of them can see rings.”

  “What’s the ratio?”

  “I think about fifteen percent of humans can see them compared to about sixty percent for animals. That isn’t limited just to warm bloods. I’ve known snakes to have a good eye, also fish, frogs, even insects. It’s a matter of physiology and has little to do with intelligence. The fact that a brain and pair of eyes perceive a ring automatically sets up all the other stages of the muting process. For instance, you see a ring because your body and your mind are capable of melding with the ring in the mutating process. If you can’t see one it’s because the two of you aren’t attuned to one another, having nothing in common, aren’t mutually attracted, or whatever. That’s why rings constantly move through non-perceptive organisms without affecting them. There’s no kinship.”

  He didn’t break the law too much, retrieved most of the creatures he sent to other dimensions. It was illegal to enforce travel on anything, the idea being that reality was precarious enough without adding more unknowns. No one knew what might happen to interdimensional equilibrium if experimenters were permitted to shove just anything through. It was assumed that human travelers did no harm since they returned to D-i and thereby reestablished the status quo. Anyway, Gorwyn was good at making harnesses that didn’t mutate into something too different from the originals to do the job, even had a bug net that brought them back alive and well.

  He had a workable monitoring system consisting of sensitive cells that registered changes in the atmosphere of the room. The rings themselves were too alien or tenuous to detect but their color was something that could be perceived by instruments. The first row of cells on a squat black machine registered color and size, the second row read and reported both so that Gorwyn pretty much knew at all times what was in the room and where it was.

  “I’ll tell you something I’ll bet you don’t know,” he said. “My readers show there are more than just green, blue and yellow rings. There are also blacks, browns, reds, grays and whites. The only problem is, people and animals can’t see them.”

  “Is that so?” I said, remembering another time when a dead man named Deron called me a liar because I said I saw other rings. “What about all this non-organic junk you send through? It doesn’t have eyes to see.”

  “The rules are different in that area. Some junk in the company of living organisms goes on through while some can actually go through by itself. For instance, my instruments tell me there’s a small blue ring in the comer of this room. If you carried this insect net with you and went through it, your clothes would disappear and reappear only when you returned but the net would become a clay sphere that could hold any number of flying creatures. If you simply tossed it in by itself, it would become a piece of shale.”

  “What happens to my clothes?”

  “Theoretically they’re in limbo or a dead area that exists between dimensions. Clothes don’t mutate so they only go part way in. I assume, of course, you’re accepting my explanations knowing they’re only opinion. There are others who’ve done more research than I. Go up north and you’ll find a slew of people who spend most of their lives studying the subject. I just dabble at it. It’s my hobby.”

  Having had enough learning for one day, I skipped the rest of my classes and went to Waterworld, tucked myself inside an empty shell and went to sleep.

  A clanging in my head awakened me. My shell was washing against a steel girder. By accident I had found the metal monstrosity again, or subconsciously I had chosen the correct-colored ring.

  Following the girder’s contours was difficult because I was so small but by frequently stopping to rest I managed to cover considerable territory in the next several hours. Here and there landing platforms stuck out from the metal and I could see nets floating free. They were empty so I didn’t stop but continued onward in what seemed to be an upward course. In Waterworld I never really knew north from south, east from west.

  On through water that grew murky I went until eventually I came to what seemed to be the ceiling of the green dimension. And all along I had assumed the place was boundless. It felt like such a hard and metallic ceiling, so cold and impersonal and I didn’t know what to make of it when the vibrating started. Beneath me maelstroms were created.

  The concussions on the other side of the wall or within it were regular like a vehicle running over evenly spaced ruts in a road and generating rhythmic bumping sounds. In fact I thought I could hear the thumps when I pressed my forehead to the cold surface.

  So intent was I on the sounds that I failed to perceive the band of swimmers until they were too close for comfort. They were approximately five meters below me, too near for me to try and run for it. Flattening my back against the hardness of Waterworld’s ceiling, I maintained my position without drifting which wasn’t easy to do since the steady thuds above me tended to propel me away.

  Had I been of normal size they would have been on me in an instant. Or so I thought. Their failure to see me might have had something to do with the fact that a big shadow suddenly fell over me. There were five of them swimming leisurely as if out for an afternoon constitutional but I knew they were scouts on the hunt for snoops like myself. It was also my suspicion that they worked for a bone-breaking psychotic by the name of Erma.

  All five were big and strong and could have swum rings around me but, since they didn’t expect any danger from tiny intruders, they were conducting their sweep well below the wall they were supposed to protect. Their eyes were directed downward and I counted myself fortunate as they swam under me and moved on out of sight. After a long while I decided it was safe to move. They really ought to have seen me. I couldn’t see how they missed.

  Continuing my investigation, I snooped and pried for what seemed hours before finally discovering it was a huge, round pipe above me and not a flat wall or ceiling.

  I didn’t learn it all in one day. It took me three weeks of coming to Waterworld in the afternoon and swimming for several hours before I found out where the pipe went. It was the same old one I had found in Gothland, except that this was the beginning of it. Propped on floating girders, it plunged through a big blue ring.

  It was a letdown for me to realize Erma was like every other criminal. She wanted the pot at the end of the rainbow. She was like any alchemist who dreamed of mutating muck into gold. The fluid in Waterworld was piped into Gothland where it changed into a thick, acidic substance that hurtled on into Earth as an entirely different combine. It didn’t take me long to realize what that combination of elements was. Black, thick and rare, it seemed to mean the difference between civilization and the Stone Age. Erma was up to her neck in oil.

  Pat and Mike came to pester me every time I showed up at Mutat.

  “I can’t help it if I see rings better than you,” I said.

  “Baloney on that,” said one of them. I think it was Mike. She had a tiny mole right in the center of her forehead. “Luck is the only reason you take off so fast without our seeing you. We’re supposed to keep you in your classes. Don’t you care about our jobs?”

  “Not particularly.”

  For that remark they put the leather harness on me and made me walk around the grounds like a dog. Occasionally they booted my tail.

  “Cogitate upon that,” said Pat. “How do you appreciate it? Our livelihood is more important than your pride. Why don’t you say that over and over again until it sinks into that thick skull of yours.”

  11

  I can truthfully say that in all the time I knew Gorwyn I never really liked him. He was clever, intelligent, prissy, chilly, pedantic, dictatorial, cranky and an odd bird. He was, however, the only man in town, or in other words I had nobody else to talk to. The twins were dum dums, Tedwar always threw something at me whenever I went near him, th
e other students my age were all male and not inclined to notice me as anything but an outsider. At first they made crude remarks whenever I passed them in the halls, until I began devising things to dump on them such as ink balls, balloons of honey, stink bombs and such. I became known as that skinny wretch who took everything seriously.

  I talked to Gorwyn who listened with a contemptuous air and continually made condescending responses. Practically everyone I knew agreed he was off his shelf. He hadn’t been director of the school very long. He sometimes leased practically every student in the place to industries, other schools or individuals in need of muters. He kept close tabs on them by sending runners to make sure they weren’t being neglected or abused and he made certain they were returned on time but I didn’t think his heart was in it. If we had all dropped dead he would have gone right on experimenting in his lab.

  He sent me into D to gather drees and worm shells so he could test their normal counterparts to see if and how their stay in another dimension had affected them. Of all the transmutations I witnessed or heard of, the process of a turtle becoming a worm in a shell once it entered D was the most cut and dried. That animal simply never became anything but a worm in a shell whether it went into Gothland or Waterworld and the differences between the two alterations were miniscule. One had a tough exterior capable of withstanding high temperatures and corrosive elements while the other had the same tough outside capable of absorbing and using water. The worm part looked exactly the same though their internal workings had to be poles apart.

  Gorwyn said he had heard a horse did the same thing, changed into a winged organism like Pegasus no matter which dimension it entered. There weren’t too many opportunities to check it out since horses were expensive and scarce and the extra-large rings seldom touched down on the ground.