In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  The light lancer armor flew him south, back to Antarctica.

  He came down beside the mile-high terminus of a glacier where the moraine rocks covered the ground like knives. The armor glowed more softly, and Carl slipped into no-time.

  During those early days back on earth, Carl was still ringing with what the eld skyle had told him. He wasn't human anymore, and he didn't try to act as if he were. He thought idly about Evoe and the utter beauty of the Werld-a place where colors and moods existed that could never be real on earth. The snarling shapes of windcut ice and the hurtling winds in the darkness at'

  the world's -edge were more beautiful to him than the settled places he had seen on his flight.

  After the open simplicity of the Foke, ironwrought human cities seemed oppressive-and after the bold glassy architecture of Rhene and the gravityfree jumpships and flyers of the zotl, human science seemed puny.

  What did grip Carl's attention was the revelation that this earth was not the earth he had come from. Finding out where he had arrived was the reason he had gone to the university. Its computer was patched into WEB, the World Educational Board, and the imp had absorbed its encyclopedic data.

  At Carl's leisure in no-time, he learned about earthtwo.

  History was skewed, but only in recent times. World War Two never happened. World War One was so terrible with air torpedoes of nerve gas and rocket-launched germ bombs that the Twenties were putrid with global plague. The world population was halved.

  Political boundaries collapsed. What was left of the Bolshevik Revolution and the League of Nations unified in the early Thirties.

  Ideology was abandoned, and medical and agricultural technology became the necessary focus of civilization. Power brokers still ran the world, but the disruption of nationalism and the emergence of a planetary identity initiated a peaceful and creative era in human history.

  Earthtwo was smaller in population by over a billion, but it was larger in extent. The moon had been colonized for mining and research purposes since the Fifties. Two manufacturing centers in cislunar orbit had been producing a third of the earth's steel from lunar rock since the late Sixties. And now in the Eighties, the planet was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of famine and the fiftieth anniversary of the World Union.

  Problems were no longer political but class-based.

  Robots were replacing the working class and computers the managers. The greatest problem facing the Union was how to handle the riots of the many who wanted more than the standard provisions they were allotted.

  The struggle for money and power was the same as on the world Carl knew, but the context was safer. Without nuclear weapons and international boundaries, the planet was a more secure place, and Carl anguished in his brief spells out of no-time that he had poisoned the earth with zotl.

  In no time, he monitored the aliens, feeling their sinewed fusion with their hosts and hearing the clicks and whistles of their thoughts. Work on their lynk was going well. No one in the community had yet suspected the zotl's existence, and there wasn't the slightest alarm among the residents of Ridgefield.

  Most of the possessed citizens' relatives and friends were pleased with the changes they detected in their loved ones, a few were exuberant, and none thought the worse for the cordial behavior these people displayed. The zotl had to be liked by their prey until the lynk was done.

  Carl waited, dreamstrung in no-time. Question was asleep. He did not question. He did not think. The drumbeat of his life lolled him peacefully until he felt that the zotl had completed their work.

  That instant, his armor surged, and his eyes jumped open to see talons of icebergs clawing far below him. Dawn had come to the south. The horizon was rubyrimmed with the seasonal change.

  Autumn leaves the colors of firecrackers whirled through the streets of Ridgefield. Evening's pumpkin light glimmered over the town, and the streetlamps mixed hazily. Gareth Brewster was one of the last to leave the bank. He waved to another manager still at

  her calculator and joked about late hours with the security guard at the door.

  A silvery abalone Might flashed through the plateglass windows. The lock on the revolving door snarled a spark, and the door whirled with a cold fire. The figure of a man garbed in light stepped into the bank's marble foyer.

  He held up a gold rod circuited with black lines, and with a loud pop Brewster erupted into sparkling silverblue flames. He was kicked backward by the force of the blow, and his flame-jetting body careened over the glossy floor and hit the tellers' wall with a splash of fire.

  The manager, who had seen this from her desk, screamed, and the security guard crouched with fear at the appalling sight of Gareth's blackened body hived with wormy energy.

  When the guard reacted, spinning about, his pistol drawn, the figure of blinding abalone light was gone.

  The light lancer armor had done the killing. Carl moved with it, knowing the fire-gusting body had been zotl-infected-possessed because of his return-but not feeling that knowledge. Nothing reached him at a feeling level. Not until after he arrived at the toolshed on the backlot of Brewster's land where the lynk was being built.

  The remaining two zotl were there with the females. One had already been sent back to Galgul through the lynk, a chrome parabola enclosing a crystal light iridescing with movement. After the female had crossed, the light went out.

  An explosion shook the air, and Carl came through the wall.

  A side of the shed collapsed, bruising the night with the glaring hues of the lynk's frame.

  A woman with gray bobbed hair and black marmoset eyes stood before him, shaken with fear. She was zotl, Carl knew. The other zotl, a bald, jowled man in a T-shirt was loading a female onto the wood ramp sloping to the lynk.

  "Rimstalker!" the woman awed.

  Carl willed himself to finish these two and be done, but the armor did not respond.

  "Rimstalker, we are zotl." The old woman stepped closer.

  "We are not here to fight. Don't provoke us."

  While she spoke, the man edged toward the workbench at the side of the lynk. He jumped, snatched an object off the bench, and rolled toward the lynk in a blur of inhuman speed. The crystalline light jumped brightly inside the lynk.

  The armor, which Carl had been urging with all his mental powers to react, moved suddenly. A flare of energy squashed the man and a second burst kicked the woman into a blazing husk.

  Carl went over to the lynk and picked up the object the man had grabbed. He knew then why the armor had waited. The object was the gate device for the lynk. Only a zotl will could activate it.

  Once the zotl had opened it, the armor had slain them.

  Carl approached the open lynk and pointed his light lance into it. The lance bucked like a shotgun, and the lynk hues vanished.

  Carl pushed the chrome arch down, jumped into the sky, and dropped a ball of writhing electric vipers onto the toolshed. The entire hillock disappeared in a white blare of silence and reappeared an instant later inside an oceanful roar of thunder. The toolshed was gone, and a broth of silver mist swirled in the crater where it had been.

  The armor shot Carl high over the avalanching thunder, and he was told what had just happened: The armor had waited for the lynk gate to be opened so that it could fire a gravity pulse into the lynk. The pulse was amplified by a tunneling efect and came out the other

  end as a gravitational tsunami. Half of Galgul was probably destroyed outright, and the zotl Werld empire seriously crippled.

  The information swept through Carl like a black undercurrent. Evoe! He had probably killed Evoe. But not him! It was the armor!

  The despair of that thought clashed with the armor's mounting wavefront of euphoria, and a felt-before craziness, like a dream remembered only in sleep, shuddered his mind. He flew through the length of the night, until the brink of the world fell below him and the sun jolted his eyes.

  Who was living him? All at once the idea of abrogating hi
s will to the Rimstalker's armor was a horror. The zotl were gone and the eld skyle's medicine being gathered, but his Evoe had been sacrificed. A scream banged for a way out.

  Carl forced his attention into himself. He wanted to feel his own will, slight and muddling as it was. He didn't want to scream.

  He wouldn't break down. He just wanted some control of his own actions.

  The armor obliged, and Carl, hagggard with uncertainty, flung himself toward the wall of dawn.

  SCI-FI MURDERER SLAYS THREE

  THREE KILLED BY LASER MONSTER

  The headlines glared from where they lay on -the mail carriage that 'clanked by Zeke Zhdarnov's room six days a week. He wasn't allowed newspapers-they fed his delusions-but Chad, the attendant, usually placed the papers on top. of the mail carriage and left it where Zeke could read them through the steel mesh of the door.

  Lately Zeke had not been coming to the cage door.

  He was dreamward again--inspelled, he called it. Dr. Blau said it was catatonia simplex. For Chad, big gladsome Chad, it was the prelude to Out, that wakeful, brotherly, and voluble state Zeke got into after inspelling. He came out of his trances hungry for human contact. And Chad was always happy to face into his light-yearlong stare and listen to his mild, almost fatherly rantings about ghost holes, inertial waves, and infinity.

  Chad was happy to indulge this lunacy because when the old man was through he was in a grateful mood and he always showed his gratitude by naming -a winner in the next day's Daily. Chad never told him that he played the horses, the old man just told him the winners' names on his own. And he was always right. The winners were invariably low-paying odds, but Chad had become accustomed to the regular stipend. And he'd learned not to question, Zeke-the old man babbled like, a washer-cracked faucet anywhere near a question. And, of course, he never told anyone else. It would have watered his odds at the track, and no one would really have believed him anyway.

  He'd seen the old man do wilder magic than horsebetting with Dr. Blau, the chief of staff, and no one was impressed. Like the time Zeke knew everything about Dr. Blau, even his family secrets from the Great War, and the chief of staff explained it away as an afflux of the collective unconscious and ordered the old man shot up with depressants.

  But drugs didn't affect him. After the shots, Zeke slumped to sleep,, and once the staff were gone he'd get up. When Zeke was medicated, Chad sometimes pretended to work in the rose garden,, near the vine-knotted trellis from where, with the slant of the afternoon rays, he could see into Zeke's room. The old man moved about his cubicle with slow-motion ecstasy, arms

  held up limply like an orangutan's, face luminous as a child's. He was talking with the cosmos.

  Zeke, naturally, was not really an old man. He was thirty-six.

  But in the last two years every strand of his black hair had gone white, and he had grown a full beard that on his brawny frame made him look like an aged mountain peasant.

  He himself no longer knew if he was mad. And he didn't care.

  He had tapped a creative surge within himself that endowed him with a calm self-absorption. The surge was cosmic. It'waved through him with the rhythms of cloud-shadows, the spill of the wind. He couldn't predict or command it, but when the surge was on him, everything seemed possible. The buzzing chords of his body relaxed, and a soft alertness rose through him, peaked to an energetic wherewithal, and eventually eased into a quiescent clarity.

  Zeke had found this rhythm before he had been brought to the asylum. He had found it the rainpattered night he had decided not to question his feelings but to search for Carl wherever the search led.

  The conclusions his reasoned search had found were so bizarre that no one thought them real. And when he took them seriously, his former friends and colleagues avoided him. He didn't blame them. He no longer belonged in society. He was a cosmic man now. What else could he be after pondering Carl Schirmer's fate and deciding he had actually become light?

  In the journal he kept to monitor the evolution of his thoughts, a journal he had named The Decomposition Notebook to signify Carl's transformation though it just as aptly applied to himself, he wrote: "Ignorance is worse than madness." Arid soon after that his inspelling went deeper and he woke up in the asylum.

  During one of his first inspells, a year before, lying on his back among his scattered books and papers, seeing the blank ceiling as a vast cloud of atoms, he felt a fantasy with the musculature of a conviction. He imagined that Carl's body of photons had not only collapsed through a ghost hole but had expanded through that same hole into another universe. And not an entirely random universe. Whatever had collapsed Carl had used its own inertia to guide Carl's light through the ghost hole to itself.

  This hypermetric entity Zeke called an urg, because it sounded like erg, which was the quality that this thing had turned Carl's 150-pound mass into. E = mc2, eh? Then, 69-kilo Carl became 61.2

  million billion billion ergs. Enough energy to vaporize Manhattan if he hadn't collapsed into the urg.

  And for what purpose? Zeke felt that there could be only one purpose for a complexly organized polydimensional being like an urg to snatch a scrawny, bald bartender. Carl was food.

  Food to a metaspatial being was bound to be something like and quite unlike food to a human. Something like, in that nutrition would be extracted from the process. But what would an nth-dimensional being's nutritional needs be?

  Zeke figured an urg needed more than energy, because what people defined as food energy was not photons themselves but the timebound process of releasing photons. And a hungry urg, with the resources to reach outside of its own time and implode a man to light, could certainly satisfy its energic needs locally.

  Eventually, Zeke reasoned it was Carl's inertia, the sumful potency of his wee mass within the cosmic mass of the universe, that the urg wanted. Inertia, as light, was timefree and could be transported through ghost holes to the urg's hypermetric locus where no human mind could reason its digestion.

  One grand consequence of this trance-found theory

  was that Carl, who had inertia but was not as a mind any particular inertia, would survive. Zeke's hyperbolic mentations assured him that it was unlikely that Carl had been harmed at all. As Carl's inertia was extracted, the alien's equivalent inertia was excreted=and because the basic conservation laws of the universe insisted on equivalency, the alien's inertia was excreted as -another, identical Carl-identical but for his inertia.

  Insights like that inspired Zeke's science fiction novel Shards of Time. And the writing of the book inspired more inspelling and more insights. The syndrome was devastating to Zeke's life in society, since he spent most of his time communing inwardly in states of mind that looked to others like coma.

  But he didn't care. He was happy only when he was inspelling, which, now that he had arrived at the asylum, was almost continually.

  Chad left the newspapers near Zeke's mesh door, and he was surprised when he came back to see the old man reading them.

  "So you're Out," Chad chirped. "What galactic insights do you have for me today Zeke?"

  "Hmm." Zeke was leaning against his gate, reading what he could see of both papers simultaneously. "Have you read the lead story?"

  "The raygun killer?" Chad asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, that is wild. Seven witnesses and a video clip. from the murder in the bank. Check out those photos." Chad opened the folded newspapers and revealed the front-page photographs of a human-shaped glare, a security guard, and a man in a three-piece suit. In one of the shots, the bank manager was furry with tufts of light, his horrified face twisting with the force of a blow while the man-shaped glare pointed at him with a wand.

  When Chad looked at Zeke for his response, the old man wasn't looking at the paper anymore. His ducal face was staring through the rose trellis and into some subtle reality. "I think it's time I gave you a big winner," he said in a voice iffy as fog. He was inspelling, touching his will to the torrent of power sluicing through his de
epest cells-and the sparks flew in his mental eye, flaring off his willful image of a big purse at a racetrack, until the name of the track, the horse, the jockey, and the race sparkled their brief instants in his mind.

  "Put it all on Blue Karma in the second race at Aqueduct tomorrow. Hidalgo will be riding. Got that?"

  "Yeah, Zeke," Chad answered in a quiet tone. "But why'

  re you giving me a big winner? I mean, I'm happy with a small purse, long as it's regular."

  "You guessed right, Chad," Zeke responded, his slim, black eyes focusing again. "Our game won't be regular anymore.

  In fact, this is your last chance for a sure win. I'll be leaving here pretty soon."

  "Where're you going?" Chad asked anxiously.

  "I don't know, yet. But I'll be gone before the week's out."

  "How can you say that?"

  "You see that newspaper?" Zeke nudged his jaw toward the splayed photos of the bank murder. "That man is on his way here to take me out. That, my friend, is Alfred Omega."

  "Your cartoon character?" Chad was incredulous. "Man, you've amazed me too many times for me to disagree with you. But if you call this one right, you ain't human."

  "Oh, I'm human, all right. And so is he," he answered, looking at the news photos of the raygun killer. "But I don't think those three he put away were. I figure they must have been spider people or this wouldn't have happened."

  "Spider people?" Chad folded up the newspapers.

  "You mean, like in your novel? Spider people from Timesend?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "You really think everything you've written is true."

  "Not everything, Chad. Just Shards of Time. I didn't actually write it. It was written through me by the inspelling.

  Somehow I'm connected with another world-I think inertially, but not in the physical sense that we usually mean when we use the word inertia."

  "Clam it, Zeke-here comes the doc."

  A frail, cleanshaven, elderly man with green eyes and a woeful expression entered the rose garden. 'Ah, Zeke, I'm glad to see you commiserating again."