In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  "I'm glad you're glad, Dr. Blau," Zeke said. "What brings you to the zoo today?"

  "My usual social call." He unlocked the cage door and opened it. "Routine unless you've had some kind of insight into your condition. Is that so?"

  "You mean have I abandoned my insights?"

  "Your delusions, Zeke," Dr. Blau corrected, stapping the cuff of a sphygmomanometer onto Zeke's left arm.

  Dr. Blau was baffled by Zeke. The patient in no way displayed the classic symptoms of the cyclothymic schizophrenic that the medical review panel had labeled him; that is, he wasn't disassociative in his lines of thought or extreme in his emotions, and he displayed no fixated neuroses except his delusion that his fiction was real. His catatonic episodes, the "admitting symptom" that had eared him his cubicle in the asylum, were profiled by singular EEG readings, topsy-turvy with theta waves at exotic intervals. Physically, his patient was sound, virtually a model of physical health. And that, too, was a problem, for Zeke barely ate enough to keep a man half his size alive. Dr. Blau had agreed to hold off forced feedings and intravenous supplements for as long as Zeke's body weight and

  blood chemistry remained. stable. And that, now, had been the full eight months that he had been here. Initially, there had been some instabilities when they weaned him from alcohol, but after the first six weeks hi's metabolism leveled, and lie seemed to be drawing sustenance from a current of power he called the Field.

  Chad had strolled off with the mail carriage, and Dr. Blau let him go, though he had some questions for him about the newspaper they were discussing that he knew Zeke would not answer. Like: "Why did the news interest you today? I notice you hardly pay any mind to current events."

  Zeke watched Dr. Blau remove the arm cuff and then place the stethoscope to his heart. Zeke's face was benign and seemed to have all the layers of light of a diamond.

  'Are you getting enough sun, Zeke?"

  "Now that the solar maximum is passed, I may spend more time lolling in the sun. We'll see." Zeke smiled and buttoned his shirt. "How'm I doing?"

  "You have the blood pressure and heart strength of a teenager," Dr. Blau responded and led Zeke by the hand out of his cubicle. The sunlight bounded off Dr. Blau's white coat, and Zeke squinted to look at him. "You eat so little," Dr. Blau said. "How do you manage to thrive?"

  "How do you grow your hair?" Zeke walked into the shade of the rose arbor. "The body does it. I don't think about it."

  "But I need more than four hundred and fifty calories a day to keep growing my hair. Do you have any thoughts on why you don't?"

  "In fact, I have," Zeke said, smelling a rose. "But I don't feel like telling you."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "Why should I?"

  "Because I want to know you."

  "You've had eight months to study me. You know what I would say."

  Dr. Blau nodded, put a wingtipped oxford on the edge of a stone bench, and leaned his arm on his knee ruminatively: "Yes, I suppose I do." He leveled his most earnestly friendly stare on Zeke.

  "You still believe the 'Field' sustains you?"

  "Call it the earth's biomagnetic field, if you prefer that nomenclature. But that, too, is a misnomer. The Field interpenetrates all spacetime. Here in the solar biopause we call it life. But when you're aware of the Field, you see that everything is living-rocks, atoms, even the vacuum."

  "I see." Dr. Blau stood upright and jammed his hands into his pockets. "But why can you utilize this Field and I can't?"

  "You could if you wanted. Look, I've told you all this before.

  The Field is there. We wouldn't be standing here talking about it unless it was real. But if you want to be conscious of it, you have to empty your head to make enough room for the experience. It's big, Doc. And without neurotransmitters like LSD to help turn off the inhibitors, the brain stays locked in its chemical habits. The mind is so much a part of the Field, it doesn't normally sense it."

  "Go on."

  "That's all I'll be telling you about the Field, Doc."

  Dr. Blau shrugged. He signed to two beefy whitesmocked guards that had been watching their conversation from the other side of the rose garden, and they approached to escort Zeke back to his cubicle. "I'm sure in a few days you'll be happy for the company," Dr. Blau said, turning to go. "We can talk then."

  "I won't be here."

  Dr. Blau stopped. "Oh, really?"

  Zeke walked back into his room and gently closed the mesh gate after him. "Sometime in the next few days, my dear doctor, Alfred Omega will be coming for me."

  "In the flesh?" Dr. Blau asked with raised eyebrows.

  "Decidedly."

  Dr. Blau's gray, wirestrand eyebrows lowered slowly as he mulled this over. "I'll be looking forward to meeting him at last," he said with his usual spry humor, though concern clouded him. This was the first time that his patient had expressed a deadline for his delusion. The inevitable disappointment would be a blow that could finally collapse the whole delusional system-. Excitement competed with anxiety in the psychiatrist, for a collapse could be the turning point of a cure.

  Dr. Blau smiled his sad, open smile and patted the mesh gate.

  "When Alfred Omega gets here, we'll all have a good chat."

  The dark hills of the Ozarks bowed below Carl Schirmer like the bent backs of migrant workers. The sun was high, and his armor flashed bluegold as it guided him down the sky to Barlow, Arkansas. His heart was heavy as metal, and when -he alighted on a rooftop in the downtown district, he sat on the edge of a skylight and wept.

  Evoe was probably dead-killed by the vindictive strategy of his armor. His armor? He had not planned to fire a gravity wave into the zotl lynk, nor had he intended to kill human beings even if they were possessed by zotl. He had trusted the light lancer armor, and it had used him for its grim purposes.

  Rimstalker strategy, he thought, remembering chillfully the black devil-flames of Rataros. His armor was the master-and he was the weapon.

  His tears drained his grief and left him dulled. He

  looked closely at the lance in his right hand. The gold metal returned a bellied reflection hatched with the black branchings of circuit lines. His face looked belligerent and stronger than he imagined himself.

  At the muzzle end of the lance, an amber lens grinned a rainbow. Opposite that, at the hilt, a black rectangle pulled off in his strong grip. It was his lynk. It looked nothing like the cumbersome metal arch the zotl had built in Ridgefield. This was just a black square he could hide, in his hand, yet the inspiriting of knowledge that had come with the armor assured him that this dense, apparently inert object could transport tons of earth mass to the far end of time.

  Holding the lynk, Carl's purpose flushed stronger in him. He snapped the lynk back onto the lance's hilt and walked off the roof through a firedoor and down the stairs to the street. At a nearby clothier's, he used some of his cash to purchase underwear, an expensive gray suit, tan shoes, a silk shirt and tie, and gray aviator sunglasses.

  He neatly folded his finsuit top, strider pants, and sandals into a leather and wood attache case. He also bought a black umbrella and in the secrecy of the dressing room fitted his lance into it, using gentle welding bursts to secure it to the umbrella's metal ribs.

  Then he used a pay phone first to call the bank he had hired to handle his affairs and then to order a limousine from a local taxi service. While waiting for his car, he had lunch at the best restaurant he could find in the small town.

  Carl had no real appetite. In fact, the armor, which was a unit small as a dime and impacted at the base of his skull and which projected, the iridescent field of force around him when he commanded it, also sustained his biologic processes. Food was unnecessary as long as he activated his armor regularly. But the taste and texture of the meal comforted him with the animal recognition of eating, and he ate a large meal while he pondered his situation.

  He resolved, between a course of split-pea soup and broiled trout, to do what he had bee
n sent to accomplish, but to do it with as little reliance on his armor as possible. The musical program in the background faded, and a news bulletin announced .the bizarre raygun deaths of three people in Ridgefield, Indiana; earlier that day.

  Carl's interest in food faded in midbite, and he paid his bill and went outside to wait for his limo. The long black car pulled up to the restaurant ten minutes later, and he had the driver take him to the address that the bank had given him.

  The ride cruised out of town, wound through the surrounding braes and hills, and eventually hissed up a newly graveled road to a long warehouse luminous with fresh paint.

  A chocolate-brown Mercedes was already parked in the lot in front of the warehouse's giant sliding doors. He dismissed his driver with two hundreddollar bills and walked over to the warehouse.

  Silverhaired Mr. Powells, the man Carl had hired to oversee his enterprise, was inside the air-cooled, dimly lit building with two of his assistants, examining the three huge mounds of pig manure heaped on the concrete floor. The stink kicked like a mule.

  "Mr. Omega," Mr. Powells acknowledged Carl, offering his hand and a generous smile.

  "Al, please." Carl shook his hand and nodded to the others. They met his stare deferentially, obviously surprised by his elegant and conservative appearance, having expected to see him again in his Foke attire. "Three point five tonnes?"

  "Accurate to within a few pounds on the heavy

  side, Al," Mr. Powells assured him. "It's raw, untreated pig manure. The largest pile in the county."

  "Good." Carl motioned everyone outside. "Let's get some breathable air."

  He walked to the Mercedes, and faced Powells there. "You have the papers?"

  Mr-Polvells handed him the contract the bank had drawn up to his specification, and . Carl examined it. The papers simply bound Powells and the others to secrecy in return for which they would receive substantial sums each month. After he signed it, Carl accepted the warehouse keys.

  "Would you like me to arrange for a distributor?" Mr.

  Powells asked. "I assume all this crap is going to be processed into fertilizer:"

  "No-1 mean, yes-but I'll take care of that;." Carl answered.

  "You'd better do it fast," one of the assistants said.

  "You'll want to recycle that stuff before it really festers. Even in this cool weather it won't be long before it gets very ugly"

  Carl just smiled. He waved as they left. Once they had pulled out of sight, he turned on his armor and went back into the warehouse.

  He waded into the dung, using his lance to clear his way.

  As near to the center as he could estimate, he placed the small, rectangular lynk. Nothing happened, but he knew in his special way that the lynk had already begun converting the inertia of the tonnage.

  He locked up the warehouse and launched himself into the sky. The armor urged him southward toward the polar wastes, but his will forced against those inner promptings, bending the impulse of his flight, and he flew west toward a new freedom.

  Zeke sat facing the rose garden through the cross-hatch of the -gate that confined him to his small room. He stroked his lion-grained beard, and his black eyes were empty as an open grave.

  Where was Alfred Omega?

  Dr. Blau's green stare silently asked him that at every encounter, in a mocking way that hoped to break his "insanity."

  And Chad, who had won big enough at Aqueduct to quit his job, still came by every week to see how he was doing and to ask with his mundane stories his unspoken query: Where was Alfred Omega?

  Thoughts like brambles tangled Zeke's emotions with hurt and doubt. Maybe he was wrong-wrong about everything. Maybe nothing he had found in his surges was right. Maybe the mirror that never forgot Carl's last image was faithful to a different meaning than the one the science of his imagination had revealed.

  He was trapped, deep in the labyrinth of events that were heavy with madness. But the events were real: Carl had become pure light. The surges from far in his solitude had provided clews of ideas that had led him on---and on-but not yet out of the labyrinth.

  Shaking with doubt, fearful of his own suffering, he had to admit he was wrong about Alfred Omega. Why had he ever thought Carl would come back? The thought was simply imaginary, something he had dreamed up after his novel and then taken seriously because the subtle thread of his extrapolations had led him that way through the labyrinth. And now he realized the thread had woven a trap. He'd made a fool of himself. Worse he'd convinced everyone he was mad.

  He quaked for several more minutes, then shrugged off his self-pity. So he had guessed wrong about Alfred Omega. He wasn't Christ. He was just a scientist. He didn't do miracles. They did him.

  The Field was real.

  And the power of the Field was real. He was living on it. The rest was just guesswork, mere hypotheses.

  Zeke cradled his heavy head in his hands, and the pain of his doubt cut his wonderings back to the split of mind and being where everything is given.

  The ominous drone of the wind rivering over the Rockies blanked Carl's mind, and he stood gleaming in his armor on a ledge among the sharktooth crags of the Sawatch Range. Rushets of cloud shredded through a blood-colored sky, and the mountain range loomed below him in the gold mist of a set sun.

  Carl was budging himself into no-time, but the troubling thoughts that he wanted to escape dangled with him in the lustrous spaces of his armor.

  Three people had died to readmit him to earth.

  And this wasn't even his earth. What was earthtwo? These mountains had the same secret design as the mountains on earth-one. The same eagled cliffs, the same uplifted slants of ancient seabottoms, and the same stars tapping on in the dizzy peak of the sky.

  How many earths were there-really? Infinity was not real.

  ,Unless it fathered another Evoe. In an infinite continuum, he could possibly find her again. But the only way to know was to finish his work here on earthtwo and lynk back to the Werld and the eld skyle.

  Two months to go.

  No-time was not the same. Images of the three he had killed pastiched his hemiconsciousness with his memory of firing a gravity wave into the zotl's lynk to Galgul. The anxiety of his solitude made the rutilous embrace of the light lancer armor feel like a sealed bottle. The dismal birr of the mountain-cut wind help-pd to still his mind, and he bobbed miserably in and out of trance. He persisted like this for days before acknowl

  edging that he had-lost access to no-time. Maybe forever.

  It was night when he decided to go east, to Manhattan. What few friends he had were there. He had to see if they were the same people he had known. And if they were, if they could grace him with any sense of the familiar, he was determined to use his imp card for them. Though the eld skyle had warned him to stay away from those who knew him, the anger` of his stress strengthened his defiance, and he went with the wind, soaring through the darkness.

  Dawn was sliding into the harbor when he arrived in New York. The famous skyline was turning. below him, and the dark sky around him was glittering with insect-distant jet planes. He imagined the Blue Apple and let the armor fly him in low over the East River, up Lafayette Street to Broadway, and then across Twentysecond Street to Seventh Avenue. Dozens of people saw him, but only for splintered instants, for he flew along the rooftops, a golden blur shooting among the watertanks and chimneys. The sound of his flight broke across the traffic noise, and no one heard him.

  He landed in the cluttered courtyard behind the building that housed the restaurant. The ivy-clawed walls had shed their red leaves, and the birdbath, hibachi, patio table, and chairs were littered with the season's refuse. His armor shut down, and the nearby leaves dervished away from him.

  Familiarity trilled about him like a birdsong, and he spun about slowly to fit everything against the template of his memory.

  The basil troughs had gone to seed, and most of the leaves were a crisped brown. He stooped over one of the troughs and found the
thumbprint he had left when he had touched the wood with his paint-smudged hand. The print fit his thumb precisely.

  Carl picked up a pebble and flung it at the window

  above the back door. He tossed several more gravel stones before the window swung open and the gray sleep-tousled head of Caitlin Sweeney poked out.

  "Get away from here, youl" she called down and waved her hand at him like 'a brown sock. "This house is still mine, and I won't have you driving me out until my proper time is up."

  "Your time isn't up .yet, Caitlin Sweeney," Carl called back.

  "Come down here and let me in."

  Caitlin leaned farther out the window and stared down at him. "Who are you?" she asked, almost in a growl.

  "Don't you recognize me, Caity? Has my voice changed, too?"

  "You sound like-" she began, then looked more closely. "You couldn't be."

  "Take another look," Carl said, removing his sunglasses.

  "Caity, it's me, Carl."

  Caitlin's scream knotted in her throat, and her aghast expression collapsed to a wondering stare. "Carl?"

  She rubbed her whole face and looked intently at him. "Carl-can this be? Jesus-"

  "It is me, Caity," Carl said. "Come on-let me in."

  "Sweet, sweet Jesus," she mumbled and disappeared.

  Moments later the back door flung open and she stood timebent in the doorway, staring at him in pale disbelief.

  "I've got more hair and muscle," Carl admitted. "And my face is a little stronger-looking, I think. But it's me. Remember that morning I spilled hot coffee in my lap while I was counting the strands on my head, and you said I had to work on my image? Hah!

  Remember?"

  "It is yowl" Caitlin screamed and rushed into his arms. She pulled back enough for her rheumy eyes to study the small details of his face. This pugnacious, blond face was Carl's, slimmed down and tautened. And finally recognizing him, she grabbed his thick shoulders and dropped her whole weight into his embrace. "Carl( I must be dead. I can't believe you are really here. You're more solid and real than ever."