In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  "I have a lot to tell you," he said, unprying her lamprey hold.

  "Let's go inside. I have to tell all this to someone."

  Caitlin immediately called Sheelagh, who was now living in the dorms at CCNY. While they waited for her, Caitlin listened, and Carl lied. He told her about his riskful adventures gambling his small savings against stock index futures and then reinvesting in a dangerous but high-yield emerald-mining cartel in Bolivia.

  She bought the whole story, especially after Carl made a few phone calls and arranged to buy back the Blue Apple from the bank that was foreclosing on it.

  The startling change in his physical appearance he accounted for as cosmetic surgery and honest labor in a weight lifters' camp.

  Carl had been sorely tempted to tell the old woman the truth, but the subtle energy sluicing into him from his umbrella dissuaded him. And more than that: After the initial excitement wore o$; Caitlin became remote. Much more than Carl's appearance had 'changed. He smelled different. The tailoring by the eld skyle of his alpha androstenol did not appeal to Caitlin. Though she did not know why, she was uneasy about Carl, and only his generosity with his stupendous wealth kept her from saying so.

  The sight of the Blue Apple's interior, where he had worked so hard and .where his old dreams had thrived, charged him with a brilliant euphoria. This had been the center of the universe for him, and now, with all the bottles, chairs, and tables removed, it was the husk of his former life-and the power in him gleamed to be here and yet so very, very far away from all that this had been.

  Everything looked smaller and cheaper, to him now, including Sheelagh. She entered the Blue Apple in a fleecy sweater, tight jeans, and boots. While her mother relayed Carl's storyful lie; Sheelagh walked her amazement around Carl. "It really is you, isn't it?" she said several times, her eyes threaded with a wondering light.

  "We thought you died in your apartment fire."

  "I heard about that fire," Carl said, looking at Sheelagh's blond-downed features, slender and attractive, yet petulant, shallow with the youth of her life. And he wondered how he could have loved this woman so madly. She had none of the clarified power that auraed Evoe, none of the sexual poise that haunted his memories of his woman one hundred and thirty billion years away.

  "Yeah," Carl continued, "I even heard that I 'died' in that fire.

  But the delicate deal I was muscling through in La Paz didn't allow me to acknowledge my real identity. I had to let it go. And now that the deal's gone through, I'm back. I really want to make up for the anxiety I've caused you girls. We are going to celebrate."

  "Buying back the Apple was a good start," Caitlin said, hugging him again but holding her breath.

  "That's just the beginning, friends." Carl felt expansive staring into these two well=known faces, and he made no effort to disguise his shining feeling. "Tomorrow, we're going to buy you a couple of condos uptown and a car or two if you want. Clothes.

  Servants. Whatever you want."

  The two women stared at him with baffled excitement, hardly believing this was real.

  Sheelagh brushed her honey-toned hair back from her face, as though she needed more sir to keep from fainting. "This is so unreal." She touched the strong cast of his face. "You really have changed. I never

  would have thought it was possible." She put her hands inside the cool gray silk of his jacket and hugged him with a fervor she had never used with him before. The lavender fragrance clouding about him excited her as much as the new, rough cut of his features. "I'm so glad you're back, Carl. No one is going to believe this."

  "Let's hope not," Carl said, easing her away from him. "I want to keep as low a profile as possible. I've made a lot of money, and I want to share it with you, but I've also made a lot of enemies, and I need to stay out of sight."

  "Nobody makes real money. without making enemies," Caitlin said, her filmy eyes narrowing to better study him. "How much danger is there for us?"

  The question was an honest one that rang alarms in the mental spaces of his armor. Theoretically, zotl, or any other Werld creature, could appear in the immediate vicinity of his armor at any time. So far, only airborne bacteria had drifted through the lynk corridor that perpetually connected him with the Werld. Following the cues of his armor, he had occasionally purged the air about himself with ultraviolet light intense enough to kill the microorganisms. But it was unwise for him to spend too much time around anyone.

  "The danger is mine, not yours," he lied to Caitlin, and she looked as though she knew damn well he was lying.

  "Mom, please," Sheelagh said, taking Carl's arm. "This is Carl.

  He's come back to help us."

  Caitlin said nothing more critical that day. He was indeed Carl Schirmer; she could see that now that she had been watching him.

  And he did have money. Lots of it. He took them uptown to the fancy boutiques on the, East Side and spent thousands on clothes for the two of them. They ate at several swank restaurants,

  sampling the specialities of each place .and getting wildly drunk.

  Carl was happy, and his disguise faltered only once. At one of the cafes a tune came over the radio that brittled the laughter in his mouth and turned his eyes to December roads. The music was a synthesized pop version of the song he had composed for Evoe.

  Sheelagh took his hand when she saw him distancing -away, and he snapped out of his spell..

  Later that day, he installed his friends in a twofloor condominium in a luxury tower on Sutton Place. The cost was phenomenal, setting up an opulent arrangement literally on the spot, but Carl seemed not one whit drained. Caitlin's anxiety slackened, especially since now her drunken fits did not have to be melancholy.

  Her daughter's future had instantly gone from bleak to posh, and that more than anything eased her. If only Carl didn't smell so strange.

  At night, exhausted from Jheir busy day Carl, Sheelagh, and Caitlin were sitting in the penthouse sprawl of the two-story apartment, watching the sprinkle of lights on the East River. They were sipping fine Irish whiskey, and Caitlin's eyes had cleared to a shining glow. "What I don't understand, Carl, is the mirror."

  "What mirror?" The whiskey had made him feel limber, and the company of his two friends over the last couple of days had unshackled him from his concerns about Evoe and the zotl.. He had to wait out the two months before he could leave, and this was a lot more comfortable than a polar aerie.

  "Zeke, the friend of yours who found your burnedout apartment, also found an image of you in the bathroom mirror,"

  Caitlin said.

  "He used a computer to make it clearer," Sheelagh added, "and it looks like you-that is, like you used to look."

  "Zeke." The sound of his old friend's name felt unfamiliar in his mouth. What had the eld skyle said about Zeke? Carl couldn't recall. "What is the image?"

  "It's a picture of you," Sheelagh said. "Somehow the fire captured it."

  "But you say you were in Bolivia," Caitlin put in, her voice dark with doubt. "I don't see how. You worked in the Blue Apple that night."

  They waited for Carl to answer, but he had sunk backward into himself, remembering that night a soul ago. He had been stepping out of the shower when he caught fire. His last memory of earth-one came back-.

  the black kicking him into an orgasmic blackout. The ice rattled in his drink.

  "What really happened that night?" Caitlin wanted to know. "The police never figured it out."

  "I couldn't possibly tell you about that night," he replied softly. "The fire..." He stalled.

  - "The bathroom was a burnedout hole," the old lady said. "Not even the fire department could make sense of it."

  "It's something I can't explain now" Carl stared up at the ceiling, fighting the impulse to tell them everything. The armor's inspiriting reminded him of the three that had died in Ridgefield, and the urge to explain himself dissipated. "The night was a strange one. It began a new life for me. You're my past. My dear and treasured past. I want
ed to share the bounty of my fortune with you before I burdened you with the pain of it all."

  "That sounds understandable to me," Sheelagh said.

  "It sounds satanic to me," Caitlin flared. "LookI've talked with the police and the fire officials.. They're baffled. I've seen the mirror-held image of you. And it is you. Or it was." She sipped her drink. "Zeke, at first,

  thought you had combusted by yourself. Then he started getting these ideas about ghost holes. Either way, he says that for part of a second, your bathroom was hotter than the skin of the sun. That's supernatural.". "Mom." Sheelagh glared at her mother.

  "Don't look at me like that," she said to her daughter; then to Carl: "An unexplainable fire, a locked mirror, a long absence, and then you return with fabulous wealth and the looks to rival Dorian Gray. Carl, tell us the truth. Have you made some kind of satanic pact?"

  "Mother!" Sheelagh was at the edge of her crushed-leather chair.

  "There's nothing supernatural about this," Carl said, affecting an amused smile. "What's happened to me is mysterious but not occult. It'll all make sense someday when I can talk about it. But now, I want to know about Zeke. How is he?"

  Caitlin's response was sharp as a whip: "He went mad."

  Carl shifted in his seat, alarmed by the old woman's antagonism: The eld skyle had known Zeke had suffered. The confirmation of it burned. "Where is he?"

  "At the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel. It's an asylum on Long Island," Sheelagh told him. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. The solid muscle banding his wrist amazed her. "He's pretty bad now. But for a while, just before his breakdown, he went through a brief creative spell. Painting, plasticine models. He even wrote a novel."

  "You have a copy?" he asked.

  "Somewhere. It'd be easier to get one at a book-store. I see it around. It's called Shards of Time. It's science fiction."

  Carl uncoiled from his seat. "Want to come with me?" he asked.

  "It's eleven oclock, " Sheelagh answered, getting up anyway. "All the stores are closed."

  "We'll break in. Come on." He motioned for Caitlin to join them, but she just stared at him across her drink, cold with suspicion.

  Carl got a copy that night by paying a ludicrous sum to a night watchman at Brentano's. He and Sheelagh went back to the Sutton Place suite. Caitlin was asleep where they had left her. Sheelagh put her to bed, and when she came back, Carl was immersed in the book, his face stony and pale. She waited around to see if he might show some interest in her, and when he didn't, she went to bed.

  A rage of disbelief mounted in him the more he read. The monotonous fear that had inhabited him since Evoe had been taken away blew off in a cold blast of horror. The book he was reading was an account of his life in the Werld!

  The names were different: The eld skyle was called an urg, skyles were skylands, the Foke were the People, zotl were spider people, and the Werld was Timesend. It was a story in the bold, often bloated style of science fiction:

  The flyer landed on a skyland cliff among spires of fir. The,pod went black.

  "We'll send the flyer back," Eve's alto voice said in the darkness. "`They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do we'll be long gone."

  The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in. I rolled out of the flyer, and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. My eyes must have looked like raisins, for Eve sang with laughter.

  At dawn, he was reading the book through for the second time, terrified by the parallel reality of its words. Only the ending was different, for it depicted Eve and Ken, the narrator, going off together blissfully into Timesend.

  His eyes were red, tear-torn, and his whole body hollowed, a bubble of silence. He dropped the book and shuffled out of the apartment, needing air. He walked down Fifty-seventh Street to Central Park.

  Madness is lonely, he thought at the edge of the pond, dawn spreading on the water like a tree of light.

  The city of his mind was frenzied with the commerce of implications and ideas. "How could Zeke have known?"

  was the question that enjambed "What is .real, anyway?" This was earthtwo. This was a place as alien as the Werld. Nothing was real. Everything was possible.

  Not even Evoe's song was his in this place.

  Madnesses mingled in him, and he may very well have lost all perspective then and there, but the wild shout that was gathering sound in him was interrupted by the slice of a sharply pitched whistle. It was the furious sound of his mind cracking. Until he recognized whaf it must be: The whistle was coiling from his left breast pocket.

  He reached into his chamois jacket and withdrew the imp card in a hand that went cold with realization.

  The sound was the warning tone, announcing that something sizable had come through his lynk to the Werld. He looked about him-but, of course, there was nothing Werldlike here: In his amazed stupor he had left his lance back at the apartment!

  He sprinted across Fifty-ninth, caroming off brak-ing cars and bounding around pedestrians. Whatever it VMS, it was back at the suite.

  Sheelagh was asleep, but the sound from where Carl had dropped his gear woke her. It was not a recognizable noise. It sounded like oil sizzling in a pan, only louder and with a crackle that was almost electrical.

  Sheelagh had left her door open in case Carl wanted to be with her, and she could see Caitlin asleep in her open room. She got out of bed, and the noise crisped sharper. She didn't bother putting a robe over her negligee but went directly to Carl's room.

  The hot noise was definitely fuming from there. She knocked, and the weird sound went on heedlessly.

  "Carl?" The door was unlocked. She nudged it open and saw nothing through the crack. She opened the door wide and only then saw what was making the racket.

  The wall above Carl's empty bed was brown with the thick shape of a giant bug. The huge trilobite shimmered with the vibrations of its complex mouthparts and antennae.

  Sheelagh screamed, and the thing scuttled off thewall and onto the bed. Its broad, flat body covered the whole quilt, its many thorn-spurred legs quivering with the insanity of its gnarled perceptions.

  Sheelagh's scream woke Caitlin, and she popped out of her room in time to see the insectile head emerge from Carl's room.

  Sheelagh had backed into the living room on nightmare-vague legs and was trying to scream again, but her breath refused to work.

  The monster crawled out of the bedroom, its hissing cry sirening louder.

  In her desperation to get away, Sheelagh tumbled over an ottoman, and the thing hulked toward her. Caitlin mastered her terror and heaved a glass ashtray at it. The ashtray bounced off the calcareous plate of the creature's back, and it reared.

  Sheelagh scrambled away from the beast and was clawing at the drapes to pull herself upright,. the gro

  tesque eyestalks of the startled beast brushing her back, when Carl banged into the apartment.

  He shouldered past Caitlin and rushed into his bedroom. The next moment, he came out with a gold rod in his hand. A sight-searing bolt of lightning lashed out of the rod and struck the knot of the monster's head. The beast's death-thrash was lost in the retinal glare.

  Moments later, when Sheelagh could see again, she found herself spraddled beside the stiff upended body of the thing.

  Firecrackers were bursting in her muscles, and her mind jumped in and. out of herself in a tantrum of horror.

  Carl touched her with the lance, and she calmed instantly.

  "What's going on here?" she asked, her amazement expanding in her like light through the void. Her calm seemed permanent as the heavens, and she examined the dead thing without fear.

  "Devil son of Lucifer!" Caitlin shouted.

  Sheelagh got to her feet in time to keep her mother from clawing at Carl.

  Carl swung his lance around and touched the old woman.

  Caitlin's scowl unlocked, and she seemed to shrink as she settled back on her weight. "What have you done to me?"
she puzzled. The flare of her animosity was like an evening color, an apricot dusk shriveling into the horizon.

  "Wait for me in another room," he said to them. "I have to dispose of this thing, and I don't want you exposed to the radiation."

  The two women retreated, his armor came on, and he used an inertial pulse to scatter the corpse's atoms. In a fraction of visible time, half of it vanished; the rest jumped with the impact, and the. next pulse finished it. No trace remained.

  Carl found Caitlin and Sheelagh in the kitchen. Sheelagh was making tea, and her mother was sitting in the breakfast nook. They regarded him charily when he entered.

  The lance hummed inaudibly in his hand. "So I lied." He sat on a stool and laid his lance on the counter beside him. He told them most everything.

  They listened quietly, sipping their tea, accepting what he said. When he was done twenty minutes later, their eyes were bruised with sleep. The lance was drowsing them. They went back to their beds without responding to him.

  He showered, letting his anxiety drain away, dressed in a three-piece dark-blue pinstripe suit, took his lance, and left the apartment.

  Carl arrived at the bucolic Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel in a limousine. The lance inside his left sleeve was cool, almost cold, against the flesh between his wrist and elbow. He put his gray aviator glasses on and adjusted his tie by the reflection from the glass partition that separated him from the driver.

  The car waited for him under the ivied porte cochere while he went in.

  The day receptionist was just setting up in the wake of the nightshift, and she didn't look up at him.

  "I'm here to see Zeke Zhdarnov."

  "Visiting hours begin at ten," the husky woman said, not taking her spectacled eyes off her work. "You're two hours early"

  "Perhaps this will explain," Carl said, showing her the imp card.

  She glanced at it wearily. "What's a blank card supposed to explain?"

  Carl's smug look evaporated. He tucked the card back in his breast pocket, tossed his eyebrows in a

  carefree expression, and walked past the receptionist toward the wide double doors with the wire-mesh-glass windows. If she didn't see anything on the card, he figured it was because she didn't have to.