In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  They roamed for what seemed a lifetime. The skyles fed them and the fallpath carried them. They, visited clan sites and mingled with the Foke, but they never went to Tarfeather. There was too much else to see for them to return to the moving capital and perhaps provoke Allin and his clan's wizan with the fact of Carl's freedom. They had sentenced him to slavery, though he bore no grudge against them; their rejection, after all, had sent him to Rhene and Evoe. He was not eager' to confront them again.

  Among the wet, cloudbroomed skyles in a far corner of the Werld, they met a wizan clan that specialized in Werld knowledge. They were the closest thing to scientists Carl had met among the Foke. They had no hardware, none of the apparatus he associated with science. They were not technicians.

  They were, rather, historians, pooling and recording the knowledge of droppings like himself What they learned was preserved in books that they published with their own presses.

  Next to food, the written language was adored by the Foke. Everyone read and wrote, and each clan had its own press. Because of the difficulty of obtaining materials, only wizan were freely published. Others had to work hard for the right. Religious tomes and cookbooks were the most common publication. But Foke were also fond of journals and treatises.

  Carl and Evoe met the scientific wizan at the Cloudwall.

  That was far across the Werld, on the blue side, at the apparent perimeter. The clouds piled up there into a virtual wall that no one had ever penetrated because the Werld literally ended there.

  The wizan had gathered in this place not so much to study the Cloudwall as to stay hidden from the zotl. They were compiling a New History of the Werld, and they needed the obscuring mists of the Cloudwall to cover their operation.

  Carl was surprised by how much the wizan knew of the universe. The Werld was self-contained, yet generations of contact with droppings dating back to their own origins one hundred and fifty cycles ago had revealed a fairly accurate depiction of the cosmos. They were happy to see Carl, for he spoke their language and could more easily relate what he had learned. There was, however, little he could add to their understanding.

  The wizan knew the universe was closing up. They were the last human age; and that knowledge spurred their mystical pursuits: The meaning of life, for the wizan, was meaning itself-the discovery or, when necessary, the invention of meaning.

  They believed that ail creation was light and light's gradients, and so all beings, to them, were equal. The Werld was clement enough and big enough to sustain this philosophy. Foke communities made up the rules they chose to live by, and individuals unhappy with the collective -were free to leave and find or start cummunities more to their liking.

  The wizan were appalled by Carl's stories of earth:

  Old age, .disease, 'prison, and human-slaughtering war were horrors alien to -the Foke way. In the telling, Carl amazed himself at having endured life on earth. Compared to the Werld, even with the zotl and gumper hogs, -earth was a synonym for hell.

  Among the wizan, living from meal to meal in their simple routines, unashamed of time, Carl was grateful to be free of his past, all the incomprehensions and indecisions of existing at the ass end of earth's most violent millennium. He was free. He had been delivered from a madness that he had once thought was all there was. And now here he was, in a world of secret places, bonded to a woman he loved. Life was good:

  Evoe, too, was caught up in Carl's happiness. Her life since meeting him had been a continuous surprise of feeling.

  She had loved before and had reared children, but she had lost them all to zotl and the wild things of the Werld. Death's indirections had long ago liberated her from love-until now.

  Black memory faded before the brilliance of her lover's smile.

  He made her feel strong with life. His touch pried her loose from herself, and his embrace carried her loneliness. She would die before she would let herself lose him.

  Carl and Evoe's time among the sapient and gentle wizan of the Cloudwall left them peaceful and not as guarded as the dangers of the Werld demanded. During their long journeying, they had witnessed both the wonders and the hostilities of the skyles. Sickness was practically unheard-of, as the eld skyle had foretold, and no one aged beyond his full maturity. Yet the Werld's population was relatively scant. The treacheries of the fallpath crippled and killed many Foke all the time. Certain magnetic skyles were renowned for the healing of bones, and Carl had spent some time there himself with a snapped wrist.

  Other skyles, especially the larger ones, were lethal with the presence of preda

  tors. But the greatest risk to Foke life was the zotl raid.

  The zotl used the radar in their nimble needlecraf to fly through the clouds that spiraled the length of the Werld. The only safe place for Foke along the Cloudriver was beside the Wall. The wizan told Carl that gavitational fluctuations along the Wall had destroyed many a zotl craft, and the paineaters rarely flew there now.

  When Evoe and Carl left the wizan, they traveled on the fog-tattered fringe of the Wall until they came to where it joined the Cloudriver and they had to move inward. No Foke could travel in the Cloudriver for very long: Vision was an empty lilac-gray, and one had to gauge the fallpath by feel alone. Landing anywhere was out of the question. Not only were those cloudforest skyles evil with bizarre predators, but there was no sure way to catch the fallpath. The visual clues were not there. One had to jump into the wind and pray.

  So Carl and Evoe stayed above the clouds, looking for a well of clear space and lighted skyles that tunneled through the Cloudriver. The fringe was a tricky place, since the wind could suddenly shift and smother the fallpath and nearby skyles with blinding clouds.

  Just that was happening to them, as it had happened numerous times before. Cauliflowering clouds loomed out of the Cloudriver, billowing purple and gold. Around them, rain girandoled, a gray halo sheeting the flowlines of the fallpath and smoking over the skyles.

  They soared toward a flower-bright skyle where heat shimmered in the cup of a small valley. When Carl glanced back to gauge the advance of the cloudfall, he saw them, and it was already too late.

  They, had hidden in the Cloudriver and had approached with the blossoming clouds until they were close enough to strike. Carl thought in that first instant

  that they were Foke. They were human, and all six wore finsuits.

  But in the next instant, he realized they were moving too fast for Foke. He noticed the black thrusters on their backs the same moment Evoe spotted them.

  Without hesitation, she unsnapped a naphthal pod from the belt under her robe and flung it toward them. The fireball caught one of the flyers head-on and splashed with the impact, searing two others. All three whirled out of control and spun flapping flames into the cathedral buttes of a skyle.

  The remaining three were already-too close for another naphthal pod, and Carl unholstered his gun. He never even had the chance to aim. Evoe glanced about and saw a steep-banking plunge in the fallpath below them. She grabbed Carl in both of her arms and pulled him close.

  "Carl, I love you," she said, and her face was a blaze of feeling, her soul leaning against the opal light in her eyes. "Stay alive."

  He burbled the beginning of some reply, and she twisted him about, tripped him with a swing of her legs, and toppled him into the drop of the fallpath that sheared away from them. Carl was too clumsy to stop or even slow his fall. He watched Evoe distance away.

  The three flyers were almost on her. One of them peeled off to pick Carl up, and Evoe drew her gun and fired several rounds, her body wrenching. with the coil of each shot.

  Then the two flyers were on her, and she was bowled over, snagged by their grapnels, and swung away.

  Carl jerked about to see his pursuer rolling lifelessly in a cloud of his blood. Trying to brake himself, Carl went into a roll. He tumbled head over heels in a

  freefall and was soon lost among the skyles whipping past him like freights.

  Panic harden
ed to clarity, and he utilized the techniques Evoe had been teaching him to slow a fall. He pulled his finsuit sleekly against him before carefully unfurling its fins to cup the air. His fall relaxed to a float, and he swam toward the contraflow that always paralleled a fallpath.

  - The contraflow was there, and he swooped back toward Evoe.

  He swung around the obstructing skyles in time to see the two pirates carrying her limp body away.

  He'd lost his gun in the fall, but that's not why he hung back.

  Emerging from the Cloudriver was the black chevron of a jumpship. He watched helplessly as they boarded and the jumpship slinked back 'into the colossal clouds.

  Carl raged. His blood sang with despair, and he howled at the Cloudriver, dashing in and out of its blankness hoping to be taken by the pirates and joined again, at least in fate, with his Evoe.

  They were gone.

  Carl was alone, staring into the long emptiness of his life.

  In the end, there was only one place for him to go. If Evoe was imprisoned in Rhene, he couldn't hope to free her. And if she was in Galgul, an army couldn't save her. At the end of his hysterics and his heroic and fatalistic strategies, only one hope remained. The eld skyle.

  He journeyed eldward, stopping only for the sustenance he needed to travel. His sleep-frayed alertness went into rage-drive, automatically guiding him through the brightening heights toward the feathery radiance of the Welkyn. Only after he saw the rainbows threading

  the glass minarets of Rhene did he seek a brambly covert and sleep.

  He nightmared Evoe's abduction and woke sick with anguish.

  His pain led him finally to the slow whorl of the Gate, the down-moving fallpath that was the only entrance to the Welkyn. Claws of frustration tore his insides as he circled the vast area, hunting a way up the gravity slope.

  Carl lay spraddled in a field of golden grass among bells of green flowers, charred inside from his thwarted approaches: His grimaced mind was contemplating the madness of entering Rhene alone for a flyer when he saw a brown tumbleweed rolling toward him across the meadow.

  Its tangled form unwrapped as it approached, wobbling into a wreath of tufted vines, and finally stopped ten paces away and lifting to its full stature. It was a thornwing, a crumpled mass of thistly, snarled twine with a tiny hooked head at the crest of its amorphous shape. Long talons flexed on the ends of its two thickest vines. By the bright-green scar that creased its back, Carl knew it was the thornwing that had carried him and that Allin had wounded.

  "How did you find me?" Carl asked with a jubilation that sat him up. "How could you know?"

  It stared back with the dark clarity of a shoeshine.

  As Carl stood up, one of its arm-thick vines rose above the golden grass. Carl went over to it and let it coil itself about him. His feet eased o$' the ground as the creature hugged him to itself and began its loping run. The golden grass blurred beneath them, and they leaned upward against the air.

  The gold-and-blue meadow pulled back to a glint near the top of a ravine-haggard skyle as they caught the lift of an outward-Fund fallpath.

  The Cloudgate's iridescent clouds filled half the visible Werld, a vast sea anemone of thunderheads flicking lightning near its black mouth. They flew directly for that center. Below and behind them, skyles sparkled like charms, bright with the delicate and luminous structures of Rhene. Jumpships and flyers dusted the vast interstices with the continual flow of their movement.

  The thornwing rolled, and Rhene slipped from sight. The air went cool as ether, and Carl saw only cliffs of stormcloud splintered with lightning. He stilled himself, awaiting guidance from an inner voice, a telepathic link with the thornwing or the eld skyle that was guiding it.

  Nothing.

  Its body shuddered with the strain of its flight. The rush of wind strengthened, a wind blue with the scent of lightning. And in the distance, the howling began.

  They slashed in and out of the clouds, and Carl closed his eyes against the wind-teasing sight. The cry of the wind sharpened to a screech. He knew by 'that sound of ripping metal that they were at the neck of the Cloudgate where the shear winds were closest to becoming a garroting whirlpool.

  The sound of the screaming winds sluicing through their arteries of gravity knotted in Carl's brain with the struggle of the thornwing. It was heaving itself upward through the soldering cold like a salmon.

  By arching his head, Carl could see its head, the black diamonds of its eyes clasped with intensity. His insides cramped with the joltiness of the flight, stalling before the metallic shriek of the Cloudgate.

  - A jumpship slid by fifty meters away, its engines spinning flames like a furnace. The thornwing twisted and unsprang into a mighty lurch, and Carl's heart almost pulled free of his ribs. The devil whistle of the

  wind muted as they caught the wake of the jumpship's ascent.

  The thornwing hurtled with acceleration, riding the drag wind of the large craft. Its grip slackened with its acceptance of the lift, and Carl slid low enough in its coiled grip to see beyond the skeletal frame of the thornwing to the vista looming ahead.

  The clouds on all sides brailed into azure radiance, and the whirlpool of the tearing winds opened into a luminous cornucopia.

  The jumpship tipped away, and they caught the drift of a fallpath through the bright ring of the Cloudgate and into the glare of the Welkyn.

  Far off along the wheel of Carl's sight, black spheres clotted the spaces among the skyles. That was Galgul. The atmosphere around it was soiled with the vapors steaming from the seams of the City of Pain.

  The blood banging in his skull drummed louder with the thought that Evoe could already be in the alien city, suffering. His tension was conveyed to the thornwing, and its grip squeezed more snugly. The charge in the air from their passage through the Cloudgate flickered bluely on the thorntips of the creature, crackling as it spun away from Galgul, strong as a shout.

  Carl had known from the instant he recognized the thornwing that it would take him to the eld skyle that had reshaped his life, and his soul was a ferment of questions, rage, and pain. But. the Welkyn calmed him.

  The silvery light smashing against the featherbraided clouds was entirely diferent from the dusky cloud towers of Midwerld.

  Rainbows sheeted the spaces between skyles, and even the undersides of the forested asteroids were bright with ambient light.

  The return journey to the eld skyle turned his thoughts back to his first flight through the Welkyn. He had been smallminded then, unready for the marvelous, a fool of the unexpected. And he saw then that in

  his despair for Evoe he had almost wholly returned to his clangorous selfishness. That insight dispelled his anguish, and he returned to his staring senses.

  Carl hung in the thornwing's sky alert as a hawk, studying the wilderness of skyles drifting by All at once, vision jumped. His whole body flinched, though their flight was smooth. He didn't understand what he'd experienced, until it happened again some long while later. While he was following the forest pattern of a skyle, it vanished in an eyeblink and he was seeing a new panorama.

  He hadn't passed out. He had passed through.

  A word trembled into his awareness. Lynk. He'd heard the word before . in conversation with wizan. Lynks were corridors that connected far-apart points in the Werld. Midwerld had few lynks, and that's why Carl hadn't thought much of it before. The languageinstilled knowledge informed him that the Welkyn became more and more populated with lynks near the eld. The topmost lynks were the ones of the eld skyles used to plant their spores in other universes, for the outmost lynks connected with the cosmic stream through the center of the ring singularity. But here in the Welkyn, the lynks interconnected. Somehow the thornwing knew how to find the lynks that would take them to one specific eld skyle among the millions.

  Not long after this understanding, Carl recognized the dolmen slabs of rock squaring the shape of the eld skyle that had re-created him. The thornwing dangled him ou
t over the dragon-long lake, and he saw himself cliff-faced, bearded and rugged as a Viking in the water's slick surface before it dropped him.

  The water was hot. It seared his eyeseams and earholes and stung his lips. He held his breath and curled into an upward stroke.

  But he wasn't rising. The

  water that he remembered as being firmly buoyant was pressing him down.

  His held breath went stiff in his throat and skewered the back of his mouth. He retched with the impulse to breathe, his arms and legs flailing for the air. But down he went. And soon after the glaring pain in his eyesockets vapored into nervelight, the last of his breath spurted out of him and the hot fluid of the skyle pierced his body.

  His horror squealed with pain. All sensation, every pinpoint cell of him, squeezed out its agony. And he went dead.

  Nothing.

  Then darkness healing to the darkest blue.

  "Welcome back, Carl," the solemn voice of the eld skyle sounded through him. Its familiarity struck him alert in the deaf-and-dumbness.

  " I see you've changed a great deal within yourself," it noted, and Carl gleamed with the affection he heard there.

  "Eld skyle?" Carl thought with all the mental power he could focus through his dead-stillness.

  "Not so loud."

  "Sorry" Carl responded reflexively. "Eld skyle--am I glad to see you."

  "Because you think I can help you recover your beloved Evoe-is that right?"

  "Can't you?"

  "Of course. That's why I had you returned to me. I am, I told you, a five-space consciousness. I know your needs better than you do."

  Carl felt like a lab animal, floating in stillness, stripped to the flatness of his life. He glowed with relief. "It's good to be back. But I can't stay long. Evoe's been taken away from me by the zotl. They could be pain-sowing her now"