My insanity is really that I don't know if I am mad or not.
Reality is an open mystery, and I've closed myself off too long with my ideas and emotions. If I have to go mad to understand what happened to Carl, I won't regret it. Ignorance is worse than madness.
Where grief meets hope we are all ghosts of our blood, limbs of the wind, unknown to ourselves.
Just as lines of force end nowhere, my own connections are wider than metrics. I am not imbedded in space. I am not flowing through time. I am spacetime. And more. For spacetime is not faithful to the quantum principle. I won't expound on geometrodynamics here except to say that I belong not to spacetime but to
superspace, the reality "below" the Planck distance (10-'cm) that projects the manifest world we live in.
At the level of superspace, the gravitational collapse that began and will end our universe is continuing now, seething everywhere as everything. Lines of force nowhere end, so the Field is here with me. Even in the void between galaxies, virtual pairs of positive and negative electrons, mu mesons, and baryons are continually being created and annihilated. Created by what? By the Field-the pregeometry underlying spacetime. It is here, right here where you are. You are made of it. You are it. The point of departure. The metric elasticity of the vacuum energy. You are nothing becoming everything.
KILL GOD with the dead of night and the wound of dawn becomes your wound.
Lack leads the way in.
I rest my life on the darkness. I lay down my soul. I am nothing.
Last month, I was arrested. I hadn't paid rent or bills for three months, and one day the police came. I was inspelling when they arrived. They thought I was in a coma. So I was taken to a hospital and from there I was brought here to this narrow bed in this empty room. They say I'm crazy. I've tried to explain about inspelling and how the mind is a condensation of the Field. But my explanations do sound like madness.
I don't know yet why this has happened to me. But the knowledge is here somewhere. The knowledge is always here. Like inertia, holding us in place, keeping us whole.
I'm sure my imprisonment will end soon. I sense an ending that will clarify all beginnings. I tease the
guards and staff with a cartoon personification I've begun doodling everywhere: Alfred Omega, a voltlegged imp with with powers strong as a god's.
Look, I tell them-I tell you-there are ghost holes all around us.
And inside us! They are carrying us down the years. And as we go, anything can happen.
Living in the world, life is home,
death is life
having its way with us, and pain is the piece of our mind we give
back.
-excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke Zhdarnov
Quills of stratus clouds glowed red in the purple sky, and several meteors flicked over the streetlighttrellised skyline of Ridgefield, Indiana. From the toolshed on the knolly backland of his farm, Gareth Brewster could see across the dark lumpy hills to the town's business center. He worked there in a bank as the credit-card manager. And at the end of the day, he liked to walk out to the toolshed on the grassy hummock and look at the bright amulet of the city.
Gareth had been doing that for years. now. But this one night was somehow like no other. The ambered horizon beneath the last sliver of the hatched moon mesmerized him. The wind smelled of the meadows-and something new, a thin line of acrid burning. At first, he thought that was .the industry at Gary, and he fulminated mentally about writing the environmental board .... His thoughts stilled. The wind wasn't blowing from Gary.
The brittle stink blew louder, and Gareth turned to follow its direction. He looked up at the glassy stars saw another needle of meteor light-and waded through the long grass after the scent. It thickened to a vile billow near the woodshed. The door was slightly ajar, and the grass leading to it from the road was recently pressed down. He stared to see if there was a fire. Not seeing smoke or flames, he turned and jogged back across the feld to his house.
His wife was in the kitchen. He waved as he passed and went straight to the garage. When he came out with a shovel and a lantern, she had the window open.
"What are you doing, honey?" she asked.
`An animal got into the toolshed," he replied. "I'll be right back."
"Leave it till morning."
`And have it topple the workbench and all my tools? No, I'd better. take care of it now."
"Those tools have been sitting there for months. They can wait till morning."
Gareth ignored her and loped over the soft land to the shed.
The stink was gone. No-there it was, only slimmer now. The air seemed to pulse with it when he stood before the door to the toolshed. He nudged it open with the shovel and shone the lantern in. .
The workbench with its spread of tools was untouched.
Gareth entered and swung the light around. In the far corner of the rectangular room, a tall black bale leaned. His eyes skittered to see what it was. Closer up, it looked like the back of a hunched-over gorilla. It shivered, and the air quaked with a charred stench.
Gareth gasped and lurched about to leave. From the raftered ceiling, a shadow scuttled. Gareth stopped to see what it was, and a writhing spider, big as his hand, dropped into the beam of his lantern, Gareth swung at it with the shovel, and it snagged the edge of
the spade with its crablike legs and spurted down the length of the wood handle to his arm.
With a shout, he dropped the shovel, but too late. The thing was on him! In his terror to swat it off; he dropped the lantern. It rocked to its side and filled the room with an orange, fractured light.
Almost instantly, the spider dashed over his shoulder and onto his back. .With flailing arms, Gareth tried to brush it off while he rushed to the door. Its legs scratched .the back of his neck and tangled in his hair, and as he reached for it, the thorns spurring the creature's long front legs stabbed his wrists. He slammed into the doorjamb, and spun about to see the black shivering bale in the corner lean over and reveal a glistening blue slugface, frothing with a putrescent ferment of juices. The sight of it made him scream.
The spider gripping the back of his head shimmied tight against his nape, and its powerful beak jabbed him, piercing his skull with a sound like the crunch of gravel. Its probe needled into his brain, and jagged electric colors tore through Gareth with a searing agony. His body thrashed, and his brain went rubbery. He couldn't move. He couldn't yell.
But then he was moving. Through the jackhammer throb of his hurt, through the sheets of flame snapping within him, he saw himself weightlessly rising to his feet and sleepwalking toward the slugfaced thing in the corner.
Horror was a mote in the hugeness of his pain. The very grip of his skull seemed a mere bauble in an ocean of boiling. Freezing torment scalded him, and he was floating through it to the mucus-webbed fibrils of the thing. His body bent at the waist, and his face fit into the quivering maw of the slugface.
The racheting anguish of his body stropped sharper, walloping him to an excruciating pitch of dying.
An hour later, his wife went out to the toolshed to find her husband. All was dark. The air smelled doomful. She called his name several times.
"Gareth?" The toolshed shambled with noise.
"Gareth." The door lazed open.
"Gareth!" He appeared in the doorway, pop-eyed, his face shining with the chrism of his possession. The. terrible hurt dawdled on his wrung features. His face went slack, and finally his lips bent like iron into an overjoyed leer.
"Gareth-are you all right?" His wife didn't dare touch him.
His face looked sunburned. "What's happened to you?"
His voice was tricked with grogginess. "I stumbled and took a fall. I'm a little dazed."
"What's that on your face?" she asked, wincing against the brunt of the malodor clinging to him.
"Turpentine. I knocked over my paint bottle when I tripped. I'd better get cleaned up."
"I'll call Do
c Burkard."
Gareth's pop-eyed gaze thumped with alarm. "No! "
His wife touched his shining neck fur. "Your neck is cut open, Gareth!"
"I'm all right," he assured her in his numb voice. "It's just a scratch. Believe me."
With much trepidation, his wife obeyed him. By the next morning, she was glad she had. Gareth was himself again, and the wound under his skull looked like nothing more than a welt.
Gareth went off' to work as usual. All the habits were still there, intact. His laughter was warm, his handshake crisp. No one thought for a moment that he was different--except for the two others who were as different as he.
They met at lunch in a local diner. Nothing unusual was said among the two men and the woman who
gathered there, but a foul stain spread in the air around them. And when they broke up after lunch, the diner smelled sour as an: outhouse and customers turned away.
The fetor was under control by the next day. The zotl had made the fine adjustments to this more acidy breed of Foke. The brain of this food was much the same as the Foke brain and an equally bounteous producer of the adrenergic pain molecules the zotl craved. Here was a whole planet swarming with these slow-motion delicacies, and they had stumbled upon it wholly by accident. Their mission had been to ride the Rim looking for gateways out of the black hole. When they had crossed through one, they were to test the lynk technology they carried with them.
No one had expected this test run to find food. They immediately set to work constructing a lynk large enough to accommodate their jumpships.
Carl Schirmer watched the zotl from inside his light lancer armor deep in Enderby Land, Antarctica. His armor had sensed the zotl as he entered the blue shadow of the atmosphere at the end of his flight from the Werld. It informed him that a squadron of zotl needlecraft had lucklessly detected his timelag echo the moment the Rimstalkers propelled him into the center of the ring singularity. His drop into the superspace of the black hole etched a minute trail of doppler-shifted photons on the roiling surface of the Rim's event horizon. By ill chance, a zotl squadron were scanning that exact region at that exact moment. They interpreted the tiny gravity hole as a natural phenomenon, one of the frequent wormhole percolations along the Rim's horizon, and they were able to ride his lynk through the gateway to the multiverse, arriving on earth shortly before he did. Only later in Galgul, when the flight records were finally examined, would the zotl realize that the lynk was Foke-shaped. His armor detected them at once and took him south, landing him among the fields of wind-combed snow and pack ice.
Examining himself, Carl saw a body of iridescent energy, opalescing in the polar darkness. He felt invisible. No awareness of cold or warmth. Only a sense of center, a jewel-cut silence, temple-spaced inside him. From there, his armor showed him everything.
He witnessed the three needlecraft that had slashed to earth before him, and he saw the bulky females dragging themselves into coverts while the needlecraft were hidden underground. In the earth's buoyant gravity, the arachnoid males easily hovered into an attic, a tree, and the rafters of a toolshed to await their new hosts.
Since the zotl and Carl had come from the same fargone place in the cosmos, they were inertially bonded. The sensors in Carl's armor telepathically connected him to them. He was there when Gareth Brewster and two others like him were taken. He felt the lightningflash of the zotl stab, gouging the brain, dazzling the body with another will.
He stayed in a dreamstate with that ugliness, his armor standing in the lucent darkness of Antarctica and the wraith of him nightmaring what the aliens were doing with their stolen bodies.
Eventually, the zotl were at home with their new lives, and the whale music of their thoughts settled into the steady rhythms of their work. Days had passed.
Carl felt no hunger or fatigue. His armor had liberated him from the physical dimension and sustained him in a luminosity of euphoric alertness and stupendous rest that he called no-time. He named it that because when he was in that state, what seemed moments were really days. Time was easy.
When the snow plumed around him with the
thrust of his departure, the armor made him know how long he had waited and where he was going. Armor was not an exact enough name for what enclosed him. He seemed sheathed in lightning, a slick spectral mist that covered him from head to foot. He jetted north into the sunrise, and where the light hit him he glossed like gold.
Carl's long travels on the fallpath had well prepared him for flight, and he was comfortable with the motion-bristling terrain running below him. The strangeness for him was the emptiness of the sky, the fierce circle of the sun, and the endless continuity of the geography. This wasn't the. Werld anymore.
Villages and towns darted by. Forests and jagedged cities. A coma of blue water. Islands. The bayou cities and a bullet-fast run up the Mississippi River. Some people on boats and in planes saw Carl, but they didn't know what they were seeing. He was traveling low and at a blur that most people never noticed or simply ignored.
Over Arkansas, Carl banked through the clouds and stayed out of sight. He didn't have to see where he was going. His armor knew. Minutes later, he landed in the tree haunts of the Barlow, Arkansas, city park.
His armor shut down, and he wobbled against gravity. Earth air, fragrant with pondy odors, webbed about him, and he noticed that the Rimstalkers had clothed him in Foke strider pants, something like coarse jodhpurs, and a silky red finsuit top, flouncy with vents. He looked like a Vegas act. In his right hand he even had a baton. The black-latticed gold rod was his light lance. It had the heft of a lead bar.
Carl sauntered out of the park and stopped cold at the sidewalk. The streets were filled with silent cars in styles he had never seen. How long had he been away?
He went over to the kiosk at the mouth of the park and looked at the newspaper.
WORLD UNION OKAYS TRADE RULES. The date was two years after he had vanished. A perusal of the newspaper revealed that this Was quite a different earth from the one he had left. Cars were electric. Electricty itself was generated in vast arrays of solar panels in orbit about the earth and beamed to communities as microwaves.
There seemed to be only one government worldwide but that was all he could surmise at once, since the vendor was making noises and he had no money.
In Carl's sleeve pocket was the imp, the magnetic plate the eld skyle had promised would be as good as money. It was entirely blank until he tilted it toward the light; then, the name ALFRED OMEGA winked at him.
The divining power in Carl tingled, and he knew that this was the name the eld skyle had chosen for him. He didn't take to it at once. It seemed silly at first, then flippant, but ultimately apt. Alpha Omega was the beginning and the end: Alfred was an Anglo-Saxon name meaning "supernaturally wise"-and he certainly had found, or been found by a wisdom at the end of time, the omega point, that to him and to any human would seem supernatural.
Carl walked immediately to a bank and inserted the imp card in the automatic teller. The crystal display showed that he had several hundred thousand dollars at this branch. He withdrew the card and entered the bank.
The bank officer who greeted him at her desk commented favorably on his attire, asking him where he had gotten his heel-thonged sandals.
"Crafts fair," Carl told her and then quickly brought the subject back to finance. She helped him to withdraw several thousand dollars on the validity of his ID.
The blank imp was sponsored by a magnetic imager
that projected directly into the visual cortex of the brain whatever an individual needed to see to approve of Carl-or, rather, Alfred Omega. Carl accepted the money with fingers that felt like fog. He was beginning to glimpse the power the eld skyle had warned him to control.
The bank officer also helped him to plug into the financial trunkline and assess all his holdings at other branches and even at other banks. They never finished counting his assets. They gave up after a half billion, and with the bank preside
nt they called together several lawyers and established a regional corporate subdivi-sion of Alfred Omega Ltd.
They appointed a president, and as the first order of business, Carl charged him to begin at once to purchase three point five tonnes of fresh pig manure.
To allay suspicions and grease the wheels, everyone involved was paid handsomely on the spot, and princely salaries were meted out to the people Carl selected to work for him.
Carl didn't actually select them. Carl didn't do anything but respond to the eidetic suggestions spilling out of him. The gravity of large sums of money drew together the people needed, and he merely released those funds through his imp. It was all transacted by computer, and he signed nothing.
Once his business had been completed, Carl left the bank and returned to the park. From a maple-hung bunker hidden from the fairway of the park by a large boulder, Carl activated his light lancer armor and arrowed into the clouds above Barlow.
A moment later, the armor put him down behind the empty stadium at the University of Arkansas. The idea kindled in him to go to the School of Science and Technology, a congeries of buildings gleaming in Arkansas red marble on a nearbv knoll. In the central building, he asked one of the secretaries to put his imp card in the school computer's magnetic reader to see if his scholarship funds had cleared.
The secretary politely referred him to the bursar's office. Carl smiled charmingly and held up his imp card.
"Why didn't you say you were a Union scholar?" the secretary asked incredulously, taking his card.
He shrugged, and she inserted the card in the slot of a computer console beside her. The video display crawled with data about world history and then went blank. The card popped out.
"That's weird," the secretary wondered. "I've never seen it do that before."
'Arid it probably never will again," Carl said, reaching over and taking the imp from her hand. " I accidentally dropped it in front of a skateboard yesterday. I'll take it back to the registrar.
Bye."
Carl was barely out the door when his armor flashed on and he was boosted into the empty Sky. No one had seen him. The armor had an uncanny sense about that, and Carl queased with the thought that the weapons he had been given were smarter than he was.
In Other Worlds Page 9
