In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  "That's a negative choice. Soon you'll be as flabby as you ever were. You've got to stop avoiding pain, and you've got to stop seeking your pleasure in some faraway future."

  "Why?"

  "It's been done to death, billions of times already. Those are the historical choices. After all that's happened to you, you can't just react. You've got to be creative."

  "But why?"

  "Because you've got the power, man." Zeke was standing up. As he spoke, he wended his way around the coffee table and over the gutted TV to Carl. "What's happened to you is now. It's a mandate to be original, despite the pain. You've got to use your body till it hurts. Use your brain till it's exhausted. Don't seek

  pleasure for its own sake. That's the game that trips up almost everybody. Let the pleasure come to you on its own-and when it comes, take it. And when it's gone, keep it a memory, not a hope.

  Don't look for it. Keep your focus on what you can give to others from the hurtfully alive center of yourself."

  "Spare me your philosophy," Carl asked in cold exasperation.

  Zeke looked down into him. "I would if there were any other way to live without 'regrets."

  Carl ignored Zeke and turned his face toward the dark window. He couldn't take his old friend seriously, because for one thing, the man wasn't behaving at all like the ZeeZee he'd known all his life. Carl figured that was the result of the huge difference in earthtwo's history: The Zeke he loved had come from a harder world where he had killed and seen friends killed in war, where death was meted out with the indifference of financial transactions-a world where the spiritual beliefs that this Zeke espoused could not be taken seriously. ZeeZee had given up all fantasies - of dominance in Nam-and yet here was this look-alike ranting about power. The inconsistency left Carl with a filthy feeling. as if the memories, the life, the very flesh he was made of were not real. The eld skyle had told him that he was shaped out of sludge. And this world? Was it any different? It was made from star dung. The crap of spent galaxies. Reality was shit. The horror, for him, was crazy Zeke's belief that the cosmos was infinite. The Zee he knew, the world he had known, believed the universe with all its brutal ironies was doomed like the rest of them, as finite as everything smaller than itself.

  The serrated aroma of fried onions and garlic accompanied the chatter of hot oil from the kitchen, where Zeke had gone to prepare a meal. Carl's ponderings

  smoked away, and he stepped back. from the dark window.

  The sun's blot was behind him and below the horizon, -but charred-looking clouds glowed in the east like a dragon's smoke-belch.

  The pleats of cooking odors were. a pale tease of memory, hinting at the pungencies and savor of the Foke meals he had known. For the thirty-seventh time in as many days, he craved a braised slamsteak and stream-chilled owlroots. His stomach growled like a rockcrusher, but he was too wrought to eat. He had to clear his head.

  He told Zeke he was going out for a walk and took the stairs fifteen floors down to the street. He was flushed when he got there and satisfied. He wasn't lazy about using his body, as Zeke believed.

  He was afraid to use it. If he gashed himself or if he even got a nosebleed, he would probably be killed. The light lancer armor was set to implode if his spore-carrying blood was spilled. .

  Carl had told no one about this, and Zeke for all his apparent prescience had not found out.

  He walked down the steep hill of 116th Street and entered Riverside Park. The dark blue of night was standing in the tree clumps, and the plangent fragrance of the river drifted up the terraced slopes. Why had he come back, really? Was he seeking something from his past? Of course. Yet how could he tell this Zeke about his fear of the armor? Not just the. anxiety of bleeding and being collapsed smaller than an atom, but the cruelty of hosting the armor's mind inside his ownthat terrified him. He had wanted to talk about it, and so he had sought out his .old friends. They were all stranger than he remembered them, though. Or was it the armor mechanicking him that made them seem strange?

  The moon looked like a Quaalude over the Pali-sades. The silvered clouds around it rhymed in his memory with the griffons of cloud that strode through the open spaces of Midwerld.

  Carl sat at an empty park bench, and in the long light remembered Evoe. A youth went by, shouldering a radio big as an air conditioner, and the music blaring through it was her song.

  Sheelagh was still asleep when Carl entered her apartment.

  Several weeks ago, in a schoolgirlish rush of love and gratitude, she had given him the key to her apartment on Sutton Place. Her mother had railed against her, but Sheelagh didn't care. Caitlin had her own apartment on a different floor. The old woman disapproved of fey Carl, but she didn't eschew his booty. She was fond of having her friends come by and being able to give them enormously generous gifts from the seemingly inexhaustible bank accounts Carl had set up for her.

  Sheelagh was not as happy with her money. She wanted Carl.

  The first few weeks, she had made a fool of herself over him. She had shown up at his apartment on the West Side, ostensibly to help with spaced-out Zeke, and instead had sat in Carl's bedroom when he was out and smelled his clothes. His odor to her was meadow-green, hummocky, and lustful as a satyr. She was uninterested in being around anyone else, and her friends began avoiding her. Her old boyfriend disgusted her with his unlikeness to Carl, and she was happy when he stopped calling and she heard he 'was with someone else.

  Not having to .work anymore, being able to go anywhere and do anything, meant startlingly little without the man she loved. She didn't know that Carl's alpha androstenol, which the Ad skyle had fitted for Evoe, approximated the sex-cueing hormonal receptors deep in her own limbic brain. And she wouldn't have

  felt otherwise if she had known. Carl's mountain-valley scent had led her to the heart's edge, high above reason. There she lived for him, working out daily in the building's spa to keep toned, reading everything she could find in the libraries about black holes, and waiting.

  She had not seen Carl in over a week the dawn he came to her bedroom. He was relieved she was not with someone else. He had been oblivious to her when she last came by Claremont Avenue to see him. He hadn't known Evoe was still alive then, and he was in a deathful mood. Afterward, he was sure he'd never see her again.

  Zeke had grunted about the idiocy of hurting someone who knew as much as she did, but he didn't care. He had the lancer armor and the lynk, and he'd fend off the whole planet for the next twenty-two days if he had to. That arrogance was the numb callus of his soul. It shielded him from the pain of a life without Evoe.

  Now that he knew his mate was alive, he had become vulnerable again. He had someone to live for-and dying became frightening again.

  Carl did not go to Sheelagh for sex, though the anxiety in his thews was erotic. The zotl were coming to kill him, and Evoe was waiting for him not to fail. The tension of terror and hope trilled in him with the same voltaic resonance as lust. The energy had floated him down Riverside, across Seventy-second Street, through Central Park, and east along Fifty-seventh Street to Sutton Place.

  Zeke's speech had replayed in him several times, running on the charge from his tension, and he had decided to take what comfort he could in Sheelagh.

  Sheelagh roused from sleep gently, cooed awake by subtle magnetic pulses from the lance tucked up the sleeve of Carl's sweater. The fragrance of sunridden grass rushed her awake, and she sat up surprised to find Carl beside her. "Carl!" Her red-blond hair was tangled in sleep curls, and when she lifted her arm to unsnaggle it, the bedsheet dropped enough for Carl to see the pale, ample curves of her breasts. "What are you doing here at this hour?"

  "I've got to talk to somebody." Carl slid the lance out from his sleeve and held it in both hands across his lap. "I'm sorry to sneak in here like this. I should have waited in the TV room till you woke up. But the craziness of all this is zooming in. Its all too weird. I had to be with someone I trust. Zeke is just coming out of his chemical m
ixup, and your mom thinks I'm Satan's protege. You're the only one I can turn to."

  "Wait a minute." She hopped out of bed and capered naked to the bathroom.

  Carl sprawled across the bed. He felt mischievous with desire-the first conscious lust he'd felt since losing Evoe.. The Foke were not monogamous, and he knew Evoe would encourage him to be socially sexual while they were apart. The Werld, after all, had no venereal disease. The thought of her warmed his desire. At least she was alive. Only the zotl and one hundred and thirty billion light years separated them, obstacles which seemed small beside the infinite abyss of death.

  He moved to place the lance on the nightstand and noticed a book on gravity waves and cosmology. Sheelagh cared enough about him to want to learn about the universe that had changed him, and that insight sundered the desire in him. Why had he implicated this girl in his grotesque fate? Why had he come here this morning except to use her to counter his anxiety? He felt ashamed of his selfishness, and he was at the bedroom door, on the way out, when Sheelagh stepped back in from the bathroom.

  "Please--don't go." In the chalky dawnlight, her nakedness glowed. e

  Carl paused in the doorway, awed by her lovesick body. His shame was slipping away like sleep. Her milkwhite breasts swayed with her advance, and he let his eyes drop to the garnet-yellow hair between her thighs. He closed the door, and they sat down on the bed together. She took the lance from him and laid it on the floor.

  The words he wanted to speak went breathless in him as she pulled off his sweater and unbuckled his pants.

  He felt the hungriness of a cloud of mosquitoes in his loins, and as the last shred of restraint frayed, the light lancer armor inspirited a thought. Carl suppressed the chilly sensation of the other inside him. He had gotten good at ignoring the armor since he had found something like a no-time within himself. The Zone, as he called it, was a recess in his psyche where all the sounds, sights, odors, and textures of the day went within his head. With a little concentration, he could drop the armor's psychic intrusions there, too. All he wanted to know from the armor was when the zotl had arrived for dinner. The white noise of the Zone smothered the armor's inspiriting, and Carl turned away from his farflung hopes and fears for the lubricious moment.

  Sex was a lens of exhilaration, amplifying parts, like the shifting rococo of her hair on the pillow and her eyes like decorated glass, chromed with tears of joy as his hand fetched the lily of her genitals. His touch floated like a piece of light, and they twined together like music. He timed his deft massage to the green pulse of a vein in her throat and the rhythms of her breasts. Her song steepened and then frenzied as an orgasm bloomed through her. She clawed at the hand welded to her bluehot center and cried.

  A scream cracked the tempo of her pleasure, and she was rudely shoved aside as Carl bounded to his feet: "Hee-yipes!" he howled, clutching his hand. His face-was skullwhite as he examined the hand and saw two thin wires of blood glinting from his knuckles to his wrist.

  "What's the matter?" Sheelagh asked in a hurt voice. "It's just a scratch."

  . He faced her with a stare like an ax. "Oh, cod," his huge face whispered. His wild eyes searched the room and fixed on the doily under the nightlamp. He ripped the doily from under it with such force that the lamp was dashed to smithereens. He clamped the cloth against his cut hand.

  Sheelagh curled up with fright. "Carl, what's wrong? It's just a scratch."

  He picked up his lance and aimed it at her. "Put out your hand. Hurry."

  She balked, cringing with fear, and he grabbed her hand and irradiated it with UV But the lance shut down before it would damage her.

  Carl dropped the lance, bolted to the bathroom, banged around there, and burst into the laundry closet. When he lurched back into the bedroom, he was uncapping a jug of bleach. "Give me your hand," he ordered.

  Sheelagh crawled into the corner. "What are you doing?"

  "Just give me your hand, goddammit!" He was splashing bleach all over the bed, and when she hesitated, he seized her wrist and doused her whole arm in bleach. While she wept, he soaked her fingernails. Sweat beaded like mercury across his brow, and his face trembled.

  "I'm sorry-I'm sorry," he mantrumed while he finished immersing her fingertips in palm-cupped bleach. Then he clambered into his clothes. "Stop crying

  please! It's not you. It has nothing to do with you. Do you understand?"

  "No!" she blubbered.

  "I have to get out of here." He backed toward the door.

  "Don't go."

  "I'll come back," he lied.

  "You're lying. You're leaving for good. I'll never see you again. I know it."

  "No. Don't talk like that," he said from the doorway.

  "But I've got to go now. Please-forgive me."

  Sheelagh sat hunched over her tears in fearful confusion, and when Carl galloped out of the apartment and the door banged behind him, she collapsed under an avalanche of sobs.

  Carl phoned Zeke from Ames, Iowa, and had him take the next flight out. The trip was Zeke's first time out in the world by himself in a long time. He dressed inconspicuously in loafers, gay slacks, blue shirt, bowtie, and tweed blazer. He was apprehensive about being recognized, and a fugitive anxiety accompanied him even in the privacy of the cab to the airport.

  His mind was clear, however, and he was pleased with how easily he flowed back into the stream of things.

  A limo picked him up at the Des Moines airport and drove him through the long fluent miles of resinous land to a lonely warehouse big and empty as a ship's hull. Workers toiled with electric saws, hammers, and welders, fitting living quarters into a corner of the warehouse.

  Carl met him-at a scaffolded loading dock cluttered with lumber, fixtures, and pipes. They sauntered toward the warehouse under streamers of construction noise, and Carl told him about the spore.

  Zeke went moth-white and fluttery. His eyes were glazed brown fruits when they saw the bandage strapping Carts hand. Carl explained about Sheelagh and him, and Zeke sat down on a stack of cinderblocks.

  "You've known about this all along?" he asked in a shadowy voice. "Why did you come back?" The answer returned to him with the shock of a revelation: Carl had never left. His bodymind had journeyed among universes but his soul was everyone around him-all complicit with his betrayal of life on earth. A-shudder twitched through him.

  All Zeke could think to say was: "I can't believe you've had the balls to shave each morning."

  Carl's contrite face brightened. " I don't. I use this." He lifted his left arm, and the red lens of the lance glinted from under his cuff.

  Zeke experienced a warm flush on his cheeks and chin, and he looked down to see a fine dust of whiskers' powdering his shirtfront. "You're, the crazy one," he said, challenging Carl with the boldness of his stare.

  "You're surprised at that?" Carl responded. "After all I've lost, you expect me to be sane?"

  "Lost?" The veins in Zeke's temples drummed. He thought of slugging Carl, but knowledge of the spore dissuaded him. "You've got a perfect body, an armor with godful powers, and a lance that gives a great shave. What've you lost? Earthone, a savage greedconfounded toxic dump?

  Evoe? Does she love you with more passion and more surrender than Sheelagh? Is she more beautiful?"

  "It's not that."

  "Damn right. What have you lost?"

  "The ordinary." He dragged out a sigh. "It's strange now. I can barely remember when life was ordinary enough to be boring. I miss that. "

  "So you've endangered a whole world to recapture

  a feeling?" Zeke thwacked-his notebook across his knee and looked away.

  "You're the one that believes the universe is infinite. What are you worried about? There are plenty of other earths, right?

  And besides, you're the one who told me to take my pleasure when I found it."

  "Mat was before I knew you had parasites." Zeke stood up and looked about at the hustling workcrews. "What the hell is all this about?"


  "It's a place for you to stay while the lynk converts you for.

  the jump. We go in three weeks, but now it's too dangerous to stay in New York. So we're going to have to stay with the lynk."

  "But the lynk is with the pigshit in Barlow"

  "I'm moving it. Now that I've so handily charmed Sheelagh, I've got to cover our tracks. The dung and the lynk will arrive here tomorrow at the end of a trail of redtape that completely buries any tie between this place and Alfred Omega.

  I started the process weeks ago, after you told Dr. Blau who I was."

  "That's the smartest thing you've done yet," Zeke muttered as a foreman approached Carl and presented an order sheet for his signature.

  When they were alone again, Carl confessed: "It was the armor's idea."

  "I should have known." Zeke's heart was erupting with feeling. The shock of what Carl had revealed mingled hotly with the gleeful expectation of the journey ahead. He felt gargoyled. "Perhaps Sheelagh won't go to the authorities. Maybe the spore wasn't released.

  It is just a scratch, right? And the armor hasn't implod-ed you." "Sheelagh may be all right," Carl agreed. "But if I were her"

  "You mean, if, the armor were her-"

  "Yeah, it's the armor's belief that Sheelagh is going to turn us in. It's her only way of keeping me here."

  "The armor's right. I asked Sheelagh once if she'd come with us. Her look would have poached an egg. She wants you, and she wants you here."

  "But we're so close to getting away, Zeebo. I'm going to see if I can talk her out of interfering."

  Zeke's face bobbed forward. "You're what?"

  "I'm going to talk with her."

  "You're not going back?"

  "I want to see for myself if the authorities are on to us."

  Zeke slapped his forehead as if suddenly comprehending.

  "Of coursel And if they are?"

  "Confront them." Carl pointed his left arm at a screwdriver on a workbench and it propellered into the air and stabbed ,a wind-gusting paper scrap to the plank wall of the storage shed. "I'll make a deal. We still have the trump cards."