In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  "Zeke the freak." He laughed gustily. "Sheelagh and Caitlin are right, Squirm. We've been too selfish."

  "Selfish?" Carl rose up in his leather chair, amazed.

  "You've been in an insane asylum until an hour ago."

  "Because I was selfish," Zeke explained, sitting up from the sofa. His eyes buzzed, and he spoke like a machine gun: "I had incredible knowledge there-the hyperaware vantage of my surges-but I never used that knowledge. I wanted the knowledge to act on me-to save me. Just as you've surrendered to your armor and let it think and even act for you. We've been slaves to ourselves. We have to free the restraints of our fate and act creatively"

  "What are you saying?" Sheelagh asked.

  "That we should combine our resources and apply them toward a noble goal," he responded in a burning. voice.

  "That's comic-book philosophy, buddy," Carl interjected.

  "Besides, I already have my goal. I'm going back to the Werld and freeing Evoe."

  "And what about us?" Sheelagh cried, the mica of tears flashing in her eyes. "You can't deprive the whole world of the wonders you've been given just for one woman."

  "I'm going back," Carl said strongly. "I only looked you up to share my fortune for a time. Don't make me sorry I know you."

  "Hey, look," Zeke interceded. "We all have to compromise a little to get some good out of this unexpected life. Sheelagh, Caitlin-we can't ask him to stay here with us forever. This isn't even his earth. But, Carl, while you're here, you must use the power you have to make a positive difference in the world."

  "I'm not a , crusader, ZeeZee. " Carl was feeling harried. He had expected gratitude from his friends, not demands.

  "We're not asking you to quell our riots for us," Zeke clarified. "But with your imp card, you could defuse the riots at their source. You could fill in the economic gaps that have frustrated millions."

  "Yeah, and I'll probably wind up destabilizing the whole world market," Carl added.

  "Don't play God, Carl," Caitlin warned. "You're right to know that no good can come of that."

  "Let the scientists see your lance and your card, Sheelagh suggested. "They could learn about stuff they never thought existed."

  "Nah," Zeke objected. ":Too many cooks and we'll lose our soup. We have to work secretly."

  "Satan works in secrecy," Caitlin admonished.

  Carl got up and went to the window to stare across at the riverlit cliffs: His friends continued their debate behind his back.

  Their voices sloshed around him abstractly, for he was listening to them the way a Foke would, hearing English voices as boiling sounds, meaningless. Outdoors, the burning zero of the sun hung over the boxes where people lived in this world. The narrowness of those boxes and the sharp heat from the blinding pan of light in the sky choked him with strangeness.

  He wanted to go home.

  The Decomposition

  Notebook

  A great battle raged against the twilight. Above a stand of palms, the bluebright strokes of tracer bullets lanced the darkness, sparking from the hulks of two hovering Hueys. A 2.5 rocket streaked from one of the helicopters and exploded in the bamboo.

  The red flash eeried the landscape, revealing the long body of a river.

  By the fireflash, the enemy could be seen splashing through the milky water, driving a herd of water buffalo before them. The cattle bellowed with terror as the 20mm fire from the helicopters pounded into them. White phosphorus grenades glared with hurting brilliance among the advancing buffalo, and instantly the battle was cut into diamond clarity.

  PFC Zeke Zhdarnov hunched deeper into the slick mud beneath the riverbank's root-tangle. The M-16 he clutched wobbled with his fear as he witnessed the immensity of the assault. Beyond the onrush of the

  black herd, a battalion of NVA crowded the streambed. Dozens of them were climbing the glacis, scrambling up the side of the hills, clutching their SKS carbines with bayonets fixed. Zeke turned a frantic glance to the RTO sitting above him in the root-tangle.

  'They're outflanking us! Let's get out of here."

  But the radio operator sat unmoving.

  Zeke twisted about on the mudbank and, pulled himself upward by the loops of vine and root. The PRC-25 on the operator's back was smashed, and by the echolight of the phosphorus, he saw death in the man's face. From somewhere above, a familiar voice was shouting: "Get the cows!"

  Two bullets sucked past Zeke's head and made the RTO's body jump with their impact.

  "Medic! Medic!"-the cries arose out of the dark, and Zeke lurched over the rootweave toward them. -The air was blue with bullets. Buffalo cried, and men screamed. The roar of the choppers narrowed closer.

  Zeke bellycrawled into a foxhole. "RT's dead and there's a whole battalion coming down the river," he chattered to the field officer there.

  "Get hold, soldier," the sergeant barked into his face, seizing Zeke's trembling shoulders. "The choppers will break the assault."

  He spun Zeke about: "Now get up and fire."

  The rattle of a .50 machine gun sluiced from close by but Zeke forced himself into a standing position and opened up with his M-16, firing into the blackness of the river.

  At the far end of the stream, sunset illuminated the water with blood colors. Earlier that day, Zeke had helped to shovel a ton of rice from a captured VC cache into the river. Now, that rice had swollen and dammed the waterflow. In the glare of mortars, he could see the corpses of cows and soldiers bobbing in the swollen stream. Fifty black-clad figures were rushing along the bank where the command post had been.

  "CF's down!" Zeke cried to the sergeant behind him.

  "Charlie's all over it."

  "1 know that, son. We're alone up here."

  "Christi" The word was brittle with the shakes from his ,gun. The enemy were mounting the rootweave where he had just been. In moments, he would be overrun.

  Then, the sky shook. Both Hueys made a run over the bamboo, the M-79 grenade launchers in their noses blasting a hundred rounds into the mudbanks.

  "Sergeantlet's go!" Zeke bawled against the thunder of the explosions.

  The sergeant shook his head. "They'll chew us up in the bambool Stay low. Wait for the choppers."

  Zeke fired a stream of bullets into the nightshadows before his rifle clip was empty. His cartridge belt was also exhausted, and he unholstered his .38 revolver.

  The night curdled bright and hot, and the men looked up to see that one of the Hueys had been hit by a rocket. Its tail burst into an orange fireball, and the body of the ship careened wildly into the, dark bamboo field. A wall of flame erupted, and its ghastly glow silhouetted the advancing enemy.

  The second Huey pulled upward, veered away, and barreled into the night.

  The sergeant cursed. "We're on our own, soldier.

  Scramble." He heaved out of the foxhole, and Zeke hustled right behind him. Bullets buzzed in the air. They dashed ten feet, and a volley splattered the sergeant's head into gravel.

  Zeke dropped to his belly and writhed hard and fast toward the tall grass, the earth kicking up all around him.

  When he rolled into a cane brake, he wiped the sergeant's blood off his face. Terror made his

  breathing ache. He was going to die. He thought of Eleanor, the woman he had left behind in New York. Her gray eyes watched him sadly. NVA shadows flickered over the foxhole he had deserted and loomed closer.

  Zeke convulsed awake. He trembled with the cold current of the nightmare and stared about the dark room for something familiar. He saw the light-flaked skyline of Manhattan, and he remembered that this was the apartment Carl had purchased on the Upper West Side. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the colorless hulks of furniture and the smeared light from the windows facing the Hudson.

  He sat up and rubbed the tension out of his face. The war nightmares had begun after Carl had gotten him out of the asylum. Carl said they were Zeke's memories from his duty tour of Southeast Asia on war-hunted earth-one. Zeke had sh
aved his beard and clipped back his long white hair to the close lines of a Marine cut, hoping to ground those night terrors in the peaceful earthtwo of his awake world.

  Zeke's personal memories of Vietnam were serene. He, like most able-bodied world citizens, had served with the COW, the Corps of Workers that had begun upgrading global living conditions seventy years before and was going strong under World Union leadership. He had been stationed in Jakarta and had been transferred to the Mekong Delta to help with flood relief during the monsoons. He recalled a land of mosquitoes, stone lanterns, and an industrious, sylvan-thin people. They had appreciated his help, and they had shared their traditions with him. So why did he dream of spraying liquid fire on them and counting their charred bodies?

  Carl had tried to explain earth-one to him-a war-world fragmented by battlelines called borders, a world of fantastic death machines and immense plunder where corporations amassed billions of dollars in profits by exploiting undeveloped nations and natural resources while in less organized regions millions of people starved to death continually. Carl had tried to explain capitalist economy and the motivations of self-interest as well as the tyrannical failure of socialist societies, but that made little sense to Zeke's earthtwo mind. Economy to him and in his world was based on human interest, not personal or social interest. Capitalism and communism were both wrong.

  Human dignity was the only political force that made sense after the Great War, *and human dignity was not possible when a few, any few, had power and authority over the many. To govern, on earthtwo, meant personal sacrifice. Sacrifice and devotion were synonyms for all earthtwo leaders. Those who chose to be leaders had to surrender their personal lives and serve the good, not of a ,faction or a race, but of the whole planet. It was an ideal that had become real after earthtwo had almost extinguished itself.

  Earthone would have to go the same path, Zeke realized, and until it did, it was no better than a monument to Death, a planet of atrocities.

  Despite his elaborate rationalisms, the nightmares came anyway. Zeke suppressed the urge to wake Carl and talk it out with him. The man was helpful and a good friend but not the friend Zeke remembered. The urg had changed him. The restlessly jovial idealistic neurotic that was Squirm had become an insouciant watcher, waiting for his chance to return to the Werld. Zeke had been out of the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel for-five weeks now, and he still was not adjusted to the great change in his friend.

  Zeke sighed and flicked on the tensor lamp on his nightstand.

  He opened his journal and reviewed the entries from the last few weeks. Above each entry, he

  had penciled in the countdown to the day Carl had taken him out of the asylum:

  Five weeks before Alfred Omega

  I've been pondering the chemical truth of who I am. The conspectus is this:

  My madness is caused by an irreversible inhibition of, the monamine oxidase (MAO) in my brain. This happened initially as a result of the inspelling that put me in the asylum seven months ago. Dr. Blau mistook my inspelling for depression. ;How else could he have diagnosed me? He didn't have the imagination to suspect that within the listless shell of my disconnected personality I was surging with life power, surfing the spatiotemporal wavefront of Being itself, where time breaks into Mind.

  Anyway, I must have looked sunken, for the good doctor pumped me with iproniazid, an antidepressant that inhibits MAO. MAO regulates the synthesis and utilization of neurotransmitters like serotonin, and it muffles the effect of the methylated tryptamines the doctor is administering to wake me up. With my MAO

  knocked out, the neurotransmitters proliferate in my brain, amplifying my inner experiences--weirdly.

  The surges I am experiencing are waves r of these backed-up methylated tryptamines converting into the substrates for enzymes like N-methyl transferase and hydroxy-indole Omethyl transferase. Those enzymes not only stimulate the production of more methylated tryptamines, they're also psychotomimetic--they're hallucinogens!

  The great space of stillness that I had found in my inspelling and from which I had written Shards of Time is suddenly wild with bizarre images and pulsations. During a surge, my heart hums like a grenade; ready to blast me to nothing. My blood caulks with fear, and furious thoughts of escape cross my brain like clawtracks. `

  That's the demon-world the Bardo masters warn about. The tryptamines have put me in touch with the tortured soul of the world, the wounded dream we call the unconscious. Actually, there is nothing un-about it. It should be called the metaconscious and our feeble, biology-limited awareness the unconscious. It is alive with gods and demons. The demons are psychoids, dismembered terrors and hungers hacked free of the physical world and existing solely in psychic space. They are the terrible forces that go ahead of our hope and muddle our best intents. In my life, the worst have been anger for fear's sake, lust-riddled attention; and, of course, the balloon-man with his grand, self-inflating delusions.

  There, also, is God-the Archon-the metapsychic organizing power: the formless shaper of form. Its presence electrocutes me with feeling, shocking me free of rationality, time, even center.

  Three weeks before Alfred Omega

  I'm grateful for this time of horror. In the asylum of the State, with my bodily reeds attended, my mind is free to be the horror.

  Where Nature would have killed me, the State preserves me that I may know the horror and speak.

  am the Horror. The skulled mind. The weight of a scream on the tongue. The cold in the lungs as the bloodfires go out.

  Two weeks before Alfred Omega

  The demon psychoids and the Archon are still here, insidious and strong as they ever were, but now I recognize them in their subtlest shades. I see how they think me. I realize that my personal mind is an illusion.

  The clear windows of our perceptions are actually the glimmerings from the Archon's luminous selves on the inside shell of the monad that is each of us.

  I find myself sitting exactly 'at the center of an opaque, colorless bubble big as the universe. Reality happens around me, and I reach out and radiate my energies into the immensity, wanting to be a star.

  One week before Alfred Omega

  Chemical "madness" has collapsed me into the center of my monad. I'm becoming a black hole, locking into myself through the immense gravity of the metaconscious.

  The illusion of individuality is almost gone. My pen is a rivering of Change, my hand is the story it writes, and I am

  One week before Alfred Omega (twelve hours later) the pivot of stillness before a falcon dives.

  Alfred Omega

  Squirms return: The black hole has exploded!

  Twenty-eight days after Alfred Omega Withdrawal was explosive. Deprived of iproniazid and the other drugs, the Archon vanished, and the black hole of my hallucination exploded into the thin colors of skulllocked ordinary reality.

  Only, reality ain't ordinary no more. Carl has come back from Timesend as Alfred Omega! I feel that I've burst into another universe where my madness is reality. What I thought I was imagining is real( These very words are quashed by the weight of their meaning, so it must read as if I'm insane. If the iproniazid and the rest of those mind chemicals hadn't been stopped, the irreality would have broken my mind. We need our brains to protect us .from reality.

  It's taken me a month to get up the nerve to write again. I know I should at least outline what's happened in the last twenty-eight days, but I'm still gonging with implications. I must understand who I am. How is it possible that I could write Shards of Time and describe exactly what was happening to Carl? I wasn't drugged, except by my adrenals from the anxiety of those exiled days. My writing, somehow, was telepathic-but what is telepathy?

  Lord knows, I can't do it at will, anymore.

  I at least have some idea how I may have known things I could not have known while I was in Cornelius. Chad would be amused

  just long enough to ask me for another winner. I think my body acted something like a cross betwe
en an antenna and a hologram.

  The tryptamine soaking my brain had an affinity for synaptic DNA and replaced the serotonin that usually bonds with the RNA receptor sites in the synapse. The tryptamine inserted itself in the RNA by pi-cloud stacking across the hydrogen bonds linking the two bases. The result was a charge-transfer, that is, an electron passed from the RNA to an empty energy band on the tryptamine. The swift bonding twisted the helix, and because this was happening in the electric field of my synapses, an electromagnetic signal was generated. The wave was instantly absorbed by low-energy electrons in the tryptamine, saturating their energy bands. That canceled the polarization of the base pairs, and the RNA rung rejoined, priming itself for the next charge-transfer.

  This oscillation broadcast its own signal in harmonic resonance with all the RNA-bonded tryptamine in all the synapses of my body, setting up a three-dimensional standing waveform inside my skull and turning my brain into a radio-cybernetic matrix.

  Information flooded into me from

  hyperdimensional realms. I experienced telepathy, conscious projection outside my body, and a spooky ability to predict events. f was turned on.

  Thirty-two days after Alfred Omega

  Carl has no idea who he is. He thinks he's a man. I've tried to tell him: There are no men, and there are no women. There are only fields of force.

  Our bodies are starships. The Archon has spent four billion years building them. The equipment is all there, inside us, as our neurology, but the demons keep the Lord from using us. Ile demon psychoids of the unconscious have possessed all ten billion of the, humans that have ever lived. Only a few of us have sensed the Archon. And of them, only a handful have consciously learned how to activate that power in our own bodies.

  Thirty-six days after Alfred Omega

  Aeschylus expressed -it well when he had Prometheus say:

  I caused men to no longer foresee their death. I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.

  Carl has stolen fire from the Archon. The lance makes him a god among us. Yet he remains enraptured by his momories of Eves. Perhaps I should be thankful the archon of