In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  "You can't go through there," she called after him.

  "Those doors are locked.

  The lance tucked up his sleeve hummed. A spark snapped in the lock, and the doors swung open at his touch.

  The corridor led through chromed examining chambers, which were empty, to a diagnostic room appointed with fluorescent X-ray reviewers on the wall, anatomical charts, a model of the brain, and a green chalkboard. On the board this was written in a strong, clarified hand: "`First find where the darkness lies. Opposite that stands a great light."

  Beyond the chalkboard were three adjacent doors. Carl sensed with certitude which of the three led toward Zeke.

  "Can I help you?" A short, whitehaired man with the seamed face of a shrunken apple and alert green eyes stood behind Carl. An orderly with a hulking frame accompanied him. "I am Dr. Blau, the chief of staff"

  "Please,, do." Carl faced him and presented the white card.

  "What's this?" His wrinkled mouth turned down, puzzled. `t1 white card?"

  Carl obviously didn't need him either, so he turned about and headed for the door that-led to Zeke.

  "Wait, please," Dr. Blau said, and signaled the muscled orderly to stop Carl.

  Carl proceeded without hesitation, and the orderly grabbed his left arm to stop him. The shout of electricity was louder than the orderly's yelp as the invisible force about Carl heaved the man away.

  Dr. Blau crouched over the fallen man and saw that -he was stunned senseless but his vital functions were stable.

  Carl approached the locked and bolted door that opened to the rose garden and the detention cubicles. The lock sparked open and the bolt clacked aside.

  "Please, stop." Dr. Blau's voice was conciliatory. "What are you doing?"

  Carl responded to the concern in the doctor's voice. "I'm looking for my friend," Carl answered. "My best friend. Zeke Zhdarnov. He's here, I know it."

  "Who are you?" the doctor asked with a compressed whine.

  "Me?" Carl smiled coldly. In his three-piece suit, with the stiff white collar standing up to the belligerent thrust of his jaw, he had the appearance of an underworld muscleman. "I'm just a friend of his."

  Dr. Blau followed Carl in a hurried shuffle. Carl walked under the rose arbor, directly to the gate of Zeke's cubicle.

  "ZeeZee, are you in there?" Carl called. "Get out here, sucker. It's checkout time."

  Zeke was inspelled, sitting out of sight on his cot. An ocean of light surged against him like breakers against a jetty. He had been tranced since dawn. He had woken from a nightmare of a giant trilobite devouring a screaming woman, and the fright that shocked him awake vibrated with the relief of waking into the pelagic rhythms of the Field.

  For three hours he had shot through the silvered surges like a surfer. His body and its senses were merely the coast of his being, the landfall of choice, where the freedom of the light in him found will. But he was far away from that beach when Carl called to him.

  The sound of his childhood name rose like an immense wave and skimmed him directly to shore.

  Zeke's eyes splashed open. He was hugely awake.

  A generative energy coursed in the fibers of his meat, and his bones felt weightless.

  "Zeebo, if you don't come out of there now," Carl spoke loudly, "I'm coming in."

  Zeke unwound from his crosslegged position, stood up, and got around the corner in time to see the mesh of the steel door flash with diamond-hard light and clang o$' its stone-rooted-hinges.

  The glare hazed away, and he saw the stocky silhouette of a well-dressed man and behind him the skinny shade of Dr. Blau.

  Colors swarmed into focus, and he was facing a man whose cinderblock shape, with much imagination; contained the formerly shapeless body of Carl Schirmer.

  "You!" Zeke's breath jumped, though just an inch behind his startlement, he was emptiness itself. The prophecy had come true: Harsh reality was a dream. He played his part: "I had given up hope." '

  "I guess that's why I'm here," Carl replied. .He was stunned by Zeke's appearance. The man before him was a Blake etching come to life: job-bearded, the gelid light -in his broad stare holy as health.

  "Let's get out of here. This place is creepy."

  "No," Dr. Blau said flatly, his hair friseured by the ionization of the blast, his face pale as a fishbelly. "You can't go yet. I must speak with you. Who are you?"

  "I told you," Carl said. "I'm his friend."

  "I'm his friend, too," the doctor said. "You must tell me what is going on. How did you do this?" He gestured at the broken, metal-twisted hinges and the fallen gate.

  "Don't you recognize him?" Zeke said in a voice like dust.

  "It's Alfred Omega."

  Carl shot him a surprised stare. Alfred Omega had not appeared in Shards of Tine, and Carl was uneasy about his identity being revealed. There was the warehouse in Barlow to protect.

  "Let's go, ZeeZee." Carl took Zeke's arm and guided him out of the cell.

  ``Wait a sec." Zeke freed his arm. "I have to get something." He skipped back into the cell, and while he was gone, Dr. Blau approached Carl.

  "Alfred Omega," the doctor said, his voice fugal with fear and awe. "That's the name Zeke began using in his delusions after he arrived here. Have you been in contact with him? Is this some ploy?"

  Carl looked at him, bored.

  "How did you blast open this gate?" The doctor looked again at the hinges, which were not blasted so much as ripped.

  "Who are you?"

  "Doc," Carl said gently, "the world is stranger than you'll ever guess."

  Zeke reappeared with a black-and-white school composition notebook under his arm. "The journal of my madness," he said with a smile bright as a joke. "It's all real, isn't it? Timesend? The urg?"

  "More real than this place, buddy." Carl took his arm again. "Let's skip."

  Zeke allowed himself to be led. Outside, where the morning sunlight drifted like sawdust over the garden, he saw the other patients standing at their gates, watching with mute wonder.

  The diagnostic room was crowded with attendants, but no one moved to stop Carl and Zeke until they reached the examining room. There, the largest of them jumped out from behind a portable partition and locked Carl's arms in a bearhug.

  Two others grabbed Zeke.

  A whipcrack of voltage hissed very loudly, and the bearhugger was cast backward like an unstrung marionette. His stupefied bulk slammed into the pursuing

  Dr. Blau and knocked him onto the floor so hard he plunged into unconsciousness. The two men holding Zeke let him go.

  The limousine drove them back into Manhattan. On the return trip, in the privacy of the soundproofed interior, Carl and Zeke faced each other in luminous silence for a long time.

  Carl spoke first: "You've changed, ZeeZee."

  "I've changed?" They laughed helplessly.

  "How did you know?" Carl asked when he found his breath. "Shards of Time tells what happened to me better than I can."

  "I wrote it, yeah. But only after I witnessed it. I don't really know how. I think it's some kind of inertial resonance between you and me. I was unconscious for a long time. Then my ego was killed, and I began having what I call inspelling. I think everybody has that power, but ordinary consciousness has filters that dampen the inspells to moods which most people, in the blustery course of their lives never even notice.

  There are so many more important things going on-like getting published and tenured, like making a success of a ratty Irish pub. Madness heals that misdirection, man. We're running one path, and only the dying and the mad know it: Yeah, well, I found that out when I couldn't get anyone to believe me."

  Zeke informed Carl of his image captured in the bathroom mirror. "Everyone thought it yeas a fake. No one believed his senses. And the few that did said, 'So what? A man turned to light. What can we do, think, or feel about it?

  It's an epiphenomenon. A once-only event. Forgot it.' I couldn't buy that. I know you, buster. I knew you weren't a
bodhisattva or a Christ="

  "Thanks."

  "I just mean-what happened to you wasn't supernatural.

  There had to be reasons. And I looked for them. But I didn't find anything certain until my quest had tortured me free of any hope. Hope that I would be understood. By then I was in Cornelius, and they were hitting me with drugs. The inspelling turned to surges, heavy hallucinations. I'm still streaming, man."

  "I can tell. You sound like a flashback to the Sixties. But you wrote Shards of Tinie before the shrinks got you, right?"

  "Yeah. My imagination was the gateway to the truth. I know it's true now, but then it was a fantasy. A lot's happened to my awareness since that time. And your -showing up is the most enormous miracle of all. But enough of my blathering-look at you! Squirm, you're a frigging bulldog now. I want to hear you tell the story"

  'Carl told it, and Zeke listened with a face bright as noon.

  His eyes bugged when Carl showed him the light lance. He handled it with the reverence of a priest. "Nothing like this was in your book," Carl said. "In your story, Eve and Ken live happily ever after in Timesend. But in my life she was taken by the zotl. And now here I am warehousing pig manure; three people dead, and maybe even Evoe. It's crazy" .

  "It's crazier even than that," Zeke told him after a respectful pause.

  The emotions that his retelling had churned went still in Carl. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, the urg-the eld skyle, whatever you want to call it-it didn't tell you the truth:"

  "About what?"

  "The eld skyle told you that the Werld was inside the cosmic black hole. The final black hole. There's no such thing."

  "Why would it lie?"

  "It. was easier," Zeke replied, smiling thinly as a

  philosopher. "You see, there no end to the universe. It's forever."

  "Yeah, the multiverse. I've heard of that. But our own universe is-just a bubble, expanding now but eventually collapsing in on itself and maybe starting over again."

  "That's the contemporary myth, and that's why the eld skyle told you that. It knew you would believe it. If you'd been a medieval European, it would have told you you'd made it to the empyrean. To a Babylonian the urg would call itself Utnapishtim and welcome you to Aralu. "

  ..'Why?..

  "I told you. It's easier. The truth is too strange."

  "Well-don't keep me hanging. What do you know, and how do you know it?"

  "I don't know it, Carl. I feel it, when the surges come on me. I've seen that the universe is eternal. It's an infinite continuum, Squirm. There's no final collapse. And there's no Big Bang."

  "Come off it, Zee." He looked at his friend with eyes still slippery from laughing. "What about the cosmic temperature the radio telescopes found?"

  "The background radiation of space is not the relict temperature of the Big Bang. It's the heat of the Field, the inertial unity of the continuum. A black hole is not a permanent grave, either. A black hole grows. The energy it swallows is locked into it by its gargantuan gravity, right? Well, inside the almost absolute zero cold shell of its event horizon, it's the hottest object in the cosmos. Eventually, its heat gets so unbelievably intense that even gravity breaks down--and the black hole blows up! It's not an immense explosion. Nothing like a supernova. The enormous gravitational and magnetic fields muffle the blast, and the star plasma and synchrotron radiation are channeled by lines of force to both poles, where they jet into space. Over time, the material is recycled into new stars, and the press begins again."

  "So where is the Werld if there is no final black hole?"

  "It probably. is a gravity vacuole in a colossal black hole one hundred and thirty billion years from now, nearing the time of its own explosion. But where is now? I'd bet this earth isn't the earth you knew before the urg caught you."

  "You're right. Where I come from, there was a second world war, we've only gone to the moon twice, twenty million people starve to death each year, and we've been teetering on the brink of nuclear war for decades."

  "Sounds like a real shitpot. You must be glad you got out."

  "I'd be happier with Evoe, where I belong."

  Zeke took Carl's arm in a grip like rage. "Take me with you when you go back!"

  Carl shrugged indifference. "It's a bizarre place, ZeeZee."

  "I've got to see it. I'll sit with pigshit for a couple of months and contribute my inertia to the lynk."

  "There may be no way back once we get there."

  "There's nothing here for me to come back to. I'm a lunatic in this world."

  "Well, we're not through with this place just yet. It'll be two months before the lynk is ready to go. Caity and Sheelagh know about me. I got a little overgenerous with them, and last night one of the. Werld's less docile beasts-a blood beetle-dropped through the lynk corridor to the apartment where we're staying. I was just lucky it wasn't zotl or a gumper hog. I had to explain."

  "No kidding. Do they accept what you've told them?"

  "I think so. My light lance put them into a trance, and I left them sleeping."

  The conversation shifted to their shared past, and Carl learned that earthtwo had a St. Tim's where a muscular Zeke Zhdarnov once protected a wimpy Squirm from the abuses of the older kids.

  But Zee's parents hadn't died in Poland after shipping him to an aunt in Newark who died before he got to her. His parents were killed in a Hoboken house fire. And instead of Nam, ZeeZee had served three years in the World Guard and with the Corps of Workers, quelling riots in Jakarta and Singapore and harvesting rice in Laos. The parallels with earth-one were approximate but consistent.

  Back at the Sutton Place apartment, they found Caitlin and Sheelagh awake in the living room before the wide windows, watching the East River slide to the sea. They both had drinks in their hands.

  "I got Zeke out, girls," Carl said in a rhythm of friendly banter.

  They watched him with the feral solemnity of witches. "So now it's a fugitive we have to contend with," Caitlin said darkly.

  "Excuse me, Zeke." Her face melted to a sisterly warmth, troubled with regret, and she went over and kissed him on the cheek, though he looked like a wild mountain man. Her face darkened again as she faced Carl. "You have to stop now, Carl, and examine your soul before you damage-or destroyany more lives."

  Carl stood squat and mute as a bureau. Sheelagh looked on from nearby, wanting to go to him, but held back by Zeke's mad presence.

  "Nothing's wrong with my soul, Caity," he said. "I've lived a new life. And I'm going back to it, as soon as my work is done here.

  But while I'm -here I wanted to see you again and share my blessings, strange as they are."

  "Carl, I'm glad you've come back to us," Caitlin said, though her voice had a shiver of uncertainty in it. "And there may be hope for you, though you've got the mark of the invisibles on you.

  They've made you beautiful in this world. They've eaten your old, face. Even so, you still have your soul. But you have to give up any thought of going back."

  Carl's slack face hardened. "Caitlin, what are you saying? I have to go back."

  "No, you don t." Pins of light gleamed in her hard stare. "You can renounce this whole thing while you still have. a breath of life.

  Don't you see? You've been entranced. You're dealing with the invisibles-the faery folk! You can't take Anything of theirs and hope to keep your own freedom.

  "it's not that way," Carl answered with a disappointed sigh.

  "The eld skyle is a being like us. Zpke can tell, you. It's an organism in five dimensions. It lives, thinks, and dies just as we do, only it's not human."

  "And not God-minded, either," the old woman stated. "It wants a demon offering. It wants pig dung. Don't you know about the Pig?"

  Carl shook his head sadly.

  "The Pig is the old god of the first Druids," Caitlin went on.

  "It's a god-pig. Not swine but the power of swine in all of us. The Kingdom of God is within. And

  s
Is the hunger and the demonic cunning of the Pig. It o s is the malevolence of the old kingdoms, the beast-time, before the sacraments: The invisibles get their power from our animal selves, our oldest ancestors. You mustn't let them ally with the Pig in you."

  "Caity." Carl took her hands in his and held her milky gaze with his leveled stare. "These are not spirits 'I'm talking about. They're not faeries. They're aliens."

  "Aliens. Spirits. Faeries. What does it matter what we call them?" Her grip of his hands was cold. "You say

  you' want to share your blessings with us, but you've only frightened us, Carl. And that beast that followed you here from hell could have killed us. What was that, if not a demon? it would have been better if you'd kept your money and left us alone. Look at yourself. You've got their mark on you. And unless you give up their way, you're doomed. For eternity"

  Carl's eyebrows shrugged, and he let her hands go. "I guess I'm doomed, then." He sat down, dispirited. "I've brought nothing but trouble with me', all for some pig crap. Amazing. I think I'll just go back to the mountains until it's time for me to leave."

  "You can't leave, Carl," Caitlin grumbled. "You'll lose your soul."

  "Worse than that," Sheelagh spoke up. Her face was boisterous with emotion. "The world will lose you. We need you here. You have powers no one else does. There's so much you could accomplish."

  "Listen to her, Carl," Caitlin said. "You belong here." She turned to Zeke. "What do you think, Zeke? Are we wrong?"

  Zeke looked up at her from the sofa A where he had plopped down. "You want the opinion of a madman?" He was still humming with the light from his last surge at Cornelius. The polychrome faces looking at him were friendly but stiff as masks.

  "I don' t believe you're really mad," Caitlin answered. "You're cursed with Carl. I don't know how the Lord lost you two boys.

  That book you wrote is a devilwork. How could you know what was happening to Carl at the end of time unless you were possessed by demonic powers?"

  "What makes you think the power is demonic?" Zeke asked, his arms crossed behind his head.

  "What good has it done?" Caitlin riposted. "So far you're just a freak."