In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  Carl moved to join them, and that instant the sky convulsed with the compression of a big explosion. A trollish cry gulfed hearing, and Carl threw himself flat. A tiny sun ignited from where the Poke had come, lashing the space around it with hot flechettes of slag. A needlecraft had tripped the Foke's plastique bomb. The jumpship it had been escorting veered sharply to avoid colliding with the fireball. The needlecraft trailing the jumpship spotted the fleeing Foke and broke off to run them down. Laserfire twinkled from the attack ships and thumped the rocks around the Foke to fiery bullets

  Carl took aim with his lance and fired. A beam of soothing infrared streamed from the muzzle. He cursed and twisted the calibrated hilt until it clicked to -the setting that he had learned was gravity-sheathed laser bursts. He aimed again, and the first two bursts caromed off floating debris. The third hit the lead needlecraft by accident when it rolled into an evasive run, and it billowed into green fire and black smoke. The other needlecraft pulled away.

  Carl turned the lance's wavelength cylinder to its longest extreme--gravity waves--and set the lance to fire a tightly compacted charge. He aimed at the black shining nacelle of the jumpship in the pinpointed distance and fired. He missed by a thousand meters, but it didn't matter. The immense shockwave of the blast flipped the jumpship out of the clearing and into a steel-strewn fallpath. The shock of its eruption ignited the needlecraft that had swung back to protect the ship, and the gray sky flared.

  Recoil from the shot pushed Carl backward off the boulder, and he sailed into sight of the Foke. They were cowering behind whatever protection they could find, expecting the bowshock of such a strong blast to sweep

  over them. Carl knew from experience that the lance's gravity bursts were shaped to scatter perpendicular to the line of fire. He curled to slow his recoil and used his fins to set him down on a chunk of blistered plasteel overlooking the Foke.

  "Why are you wearing-a black tunic, Allin, if you're going to hide?" he called down to them.

  "It's the dropping!" one of the band identified him.

  Allin was too astonished to speak. He looked for the shockfront and saw far off the fire lickings where the jumpship and the needlecraft had been. He looked back at Carl agog.

  "You came here to die," Carl spoke to the band. 'And you'd be little more than seared meatballs now if I hadn't come along." He held up the lance and manipulated the hilt so that the muzzle flashed once with starpointed radiance. "The eld skyle and the Rimstalkers have given me this-a light lance. I want to use it to free the imprisoned Foke." He pointed the whitesmoldering lance at the distant zotl sphere. "Will you give me your lives?"

  The Foke had floated out from their coveys, and they stared at Carl in his leather finsuit and scarred face with wonder-loud eyes.

  Allin pulled himself up beside Carl. The Foke's dark-coiled bangles were pulled back from a face fierce as a Comanche's. He looked at the lance and into Carl's broad stare.

  "You've just paid me for the lives you lost," he said in his gritful voice. "I will attack Galgul with you. But not for you. I go to this death for our Foke."

  He started to take off his holster, symbol of the band's leadership, and Carl stopped him. "You'll lead the squad," he told the Foke chief. "I'll keep the zotl off us."

  Allin agreed, and he put a hand on Carl's shoulder. "We'll die together."

  "Who said anything about dying? I just want a hit-and-run rescue." Carl looked down into the squad's ferine faces.

  "Nobody is going to get killed. Right?" They stared back with the clarified power of animals. He looked back to Allin: "You sure know how to pick them."

  They flew a fallpath close to the floating heaps of cinders and jumped a ride on boulders big as streetcars to keep-out of sight. When the boulders' gliding orbit about Galgul came within sight of the ruptured sphere, they slipped of and tacked across the fallpath.

  The city-sphere filled space like a murky grotto. Diamond grains sparkled in its depths. Allin's spyglass revealed them to be tiers of glastic-encapsuled Foke. Somewhere in there was Evoe. The lance was already buzzing Carl's fingertips with her proximity; and by aiming it at the cavernous sphere, he could tactilely feel the level where she was located.

  Allin pointed to a scattered flock of jumpships in the umber aura of the sphere. Their range of fire swept every approach to the structure. And inside the cordon, the flightlanes twitched with needlecraft.

  Carl nodded, visualizing his attack. He signed the Foke to lie low and adjusted the lance for rapid-fire gravity bursts. But the setting wouldn't hold. The lance didn't have that capacity.

  He would have to single-five the bursts, which meant that if he rhythmed the attack wrong, if even one jumpship escaped his barrage, they'd be frittered by laserfire.

  Allin hung beside Carl in the cloud of clacking rubble that circled Galgul, and he saw the problem. There was no cover this close to the flightlanes. Plastique and handguns were useless. The only thing to do was to scatter and wait for Carl to attack.

  Carl looked overhead to see that the space for his recoil was clear; then he sighted the lance on the

  swarming needlecraft below and fired. The force of the discharge flung him outward, and he spun with the bore of his flight and fired three more bursts in the vicinity of the hovering jumpships.

  The pounding roar of the first shot resounded from inside the cracked-open sphere, and the nigrescent space thudded with the rutilant explosions of needlecraft. The three other pulses hit in quick succession. One of them banged into the horizon of the sphere and gored a hole in it, clouting nearby jumpships with molten fragments. One hit a jumpship broadside and blasted it and the four around it into blazing dust. The last missed entirely and boomed a long way off among the circling scrag.

  Two nearby jumpships were left unscathed and they swiveled in the direction of the firing, scanning for targets.

  To draw .their attention away from Carl, Allin signaled his band to advance, and they dropped from their balled-up coverts and slid along the fallpaths curving down into Galgul.

  Carl was a whip of arms and legs, still whirling from the ungrounded' recoils. Allin, swooped over to him and grappled him in a steadying bearhug.

  One of the jumpships had spotted the band, and the blue light of its laser cannon trembled along the grinning seam of its prow. With Allin stabilizing him, Carl aimed and fired again. The direct hit inflamed the dust-shadowed sky.

  Allin whooped with excitement.

  An orange, searing bolt of laser light cut the air a meter away, and he cried out again, in alarm. The stormy smell of burned air billowed over them, and Allin swung Carl about to face the jumpship that was diving toward them. The craft was too close for a gravity burst. Carl snapped the lance into laser, mode, hot

  enough to cut open atoms, and fired a steady stream of white starfire. The beam hit the black metal hull in a wincing flare of vaporizing plasteel, and the jumpship screamed and swooped toward them. Carl didn't flinch, and Allin held him tighter. The chief's eyes were big with alertness as he watched the black skin - of the jumpship peel away like burning wallpaper.

  The wail of laser-slashed metal bowled them backward the instant before the jumpship's tormented hulk freight-trained by them, almost within reach. The drag of the plummeting craft whipped Allin and Carl after .it, and they toppled behind.

  Squealing with sparks and smoke, the jumpship plunged toward Galgul and splattered into a firestrewn smear across the curve of the metal horizon.

  Carl flapped for balance, and Allin gripped him by the collar and, straining every instinct from a lifetime on. the fallpath, tumbled, rolled, and sledded with Carl through the stinging smoke into the grotto of the fractured sphere.

  The squad was watching them from the torn edge of the massive stock chamber. A honeycomb of capsuled Foke dangled toward the interior of the sphere. Allin jumped with Carl, and they tumbled onto the buckled plasteel ledge. Carl swayed to his feet with the help of several Foke and glanced around at the crystalfac
ed shelves of inanimate figures. The weapon whined with the release-signal the Rimstalkers had programmed into it.

  Warming lights came on, lighting up the grotto, and all the capsules opened with a collective sigh.

  "Allin!" Carl pulled the chief away from his amazement at the sight of thousands of stirring Foke. "We have to move quickly and get the Foke to the Cloudgate. The zotl's whole army must be on the way by now. I won't be able to hold them off for long. Take them out

  that way" He pointed through the glowering embers of. the shattered jumpship cordon. "That'll keep this sphere between us and the rest of Galgul."

  . "But that'll leave us wide open out there," Allin complained.

  "We should travel along the edge of the fallpaths."

  "That'll take too long," Carl said. "You have to go straight across the clearing. That's the fastest way to the Gate. Don't worry about the zotl. Leave them to me. just get the Foke moving."

  Carl turned away from Allin and let the lance's slow humming guide him in the direction of Eva& She was downward from where he was, and he scampered over the warped surface of the ledge to the sinuous, metal-coil scaffolding the zotl used as catwalks. On the way down, he looked across the bowl of opened sleepunits and saw scattered skirmishes where zotl guards with lasers in their pincer grips were attempting to herd the Foke. But the humans outnumbered the guards. From the upper ledges, Allin and his group were lighting naphthal flares to guide the crowds toward the nearest jump points for the fallpaths.

  The hum in Carl's lance led him onto a level packed with Foke bustling to get out. He shouldered his way in the direction the hum pointed until the bobbing heads and unfamiliar faces suddenly hazed out of focus around a coraline-stitched black robe hooding a cat-angled face with wide graygreen eyes. Carl's blood turned to electricity.

  The next instant, Evoe saw Carl. Moments ago she had been dreaming that she was old. In that dream, she didn't know what was happening to her. She thought she was sick; she had never felt such impuissance. The desire for rest seethed in her. Then Carl's face appeared, sweet as bread. They made love in a jasmine-fusky grove.

  And when they were done, she was herself again, lavish with energy. The dream had burst into the grim waking reality of Galgul. At first she thought the zotl had come for her. But the chamber ceiling had been blown away, and she could see the nests of fire and coils of smoke from the battle.

  She emerged from her sleep capsule with a shivering heart and was shocked to see everyone moving. She moved with them, toward, the torn-open wall of the sphere where Foke were waving flares. At the sight of Carl, her whole body pulsed. They shoved through the crowd toward each other and collided into an embrace that locked out the Werld.

  "Carl," the spice of her breath whispered along his cheek.

  "I had the most wonderful dream of you. I knew you would come back for me."

  Carl soaked up the ferny fragrance of her. This was the pearled moment he had lived for. The feel of Evoe against him was lustrous, and his heart warbled with jubilation. Everything that was driven in him yielded. He stopped. It was not even necessary to go on living, repeating the farewell. This was the tip of being. From here he reached out with his soul and felt the empty spirit, the vacant poise of everything. He could die here.

  Tears welled in them to the very brink of their eyes. "Evoe" He searched for some scrap of language to dress his naked feelings.

  Screams and the scuffle of a fight pulled. his attention from her. A zotl guard was flying over the crowd, shooting its laser wildly. Carl fired from the hip and smashed the thing to a fireclot.

  He took Evoe's arm, and they moved with the crowd toward the naphthal flares. Needlecraft slashed overhead, and he unloosed another gravity pulse, dropping this one deep into the sky so that the implosion would pull the needlecraft away from the sphere. The

  earnumbing thunder of the pulse roared hearing to a muffed, bulging silence, and the encroaching needlecraft went off like flashbulbs.

  The peristalsis of the crowd squeezed them up a wobbly rampway to the melted-lookirfg edge of the sphere. The jump point was before them, but Carl held back. He had to get everyone out to complete the symmetry of his joy. While Evoe used the naphthal flare to direct the crowds, Carl watched the ash-choked sky. The flightlanes lifting away from Galgul toward the Cloudgate beyond the rubble were crowded with Foke. Needlecraft occasionally darted in from over the horizon of the sphere to strafe the exodus, but Carl stabbed at them with laser bolts and brought some of them down.

  After a while, the air attacks stopped. Allin had come down from the crest of the stock chamber, his body sparking with sweat. "We're all out," he announced.

  Some dim explosions sounded from within the building.

  "Those are the plastique traps we set on the access ports. The zotl are coming in from the back of this chamber. They'll have lasers."

  Carl hugged Evoe. "Go with him," he told her. "I'll be right behind you."

  "No." Her eyes were certain as a staring angel's. "I'm not leaving you again."

  At the far end of the chamber, sparks flurried, and the wall crumbled like incandescent cheese. The opening writhed with the arachnid shapes of the zotl, and spurs of crimson laserfire flicked across the chamber at them. One bright bolt scorched the ground nearby and skipped vaporing plasteel between Allin's legs. He stood firm, but his whole body grimaced, anticipating the fleshmelting impact of a laser bolt.

  Carl gripped the hilt of the lance and twisted it through a tight series of clicks until it snapped off. A foam of purplesilver light frothed from the muzzle end of the lance, and Carl quickly placed the weapon on the ground.

  He grabbed Evoe, and with Allin they fled from the zotl attack and the jumping clots of sightcramping radiance.

  In an eyeblink, the onrushing zotl and the sharp, crisscrossing tracery of their laserfire vanished in a sheeting flow of white incineration that nothinged everything before it.

  Allin led the jump to the fallpath. Evoe and Carl leaped after him, hand in hand. They fell through a wind=flapping drop before the fallpath lifted them like a song above the char and the billows of killing smoke. Behind them,, the lance squandered matter to light, and the zotl sphere blustered with white fire. Ahead, the Foke rose out of the ruins on slants of light.

  Carl and Evoe clamped their bodies together and sweeled away from Galgul, riding the steep current of a fallpath outward toward flamboyant cloud gorges iridescent with rain.

  Epilog

  Caitlin, with her grizzled hair hanging over her small shoulders, hooding the ruddy woodgrain of her face, stood at the glass-paned door. She was staring across the patio at the gazebo where Zeke sat motionless in a rocker, watching pillars of rain move across the wide lawns. Stormlight shone slantwise through the aspen, illuminating tall hedgerows powdered with mist. Several months ago, she and Zeke had been brought to this estate on Long Island by the government. There were seventy-two of them then, people with the highest chance of catching light. There were twenty-six now.

  At the first letup in the rain, Caitlin opened the door and walked across the glossy flagstones and the sequined grass to the gazebo. Zeke didn't budge his stare from the sky, where the clouds were hitting a cold front and shredding like galactic vapors. His beard and hair had grown back in white goat tufts, and his former

  bulls had thinned to a skeletal frame. The zotl clawmarks on his face and neck had faded to smoky bruises in his pale flesh like striations floating in marble.

  "Two people in Maryland and one in Vermont have caught light," she reported, sitting herself in the rocker beside him. "The spores can't be contained."

  Since their internment, Caitlin had been coming to Zeke, hoping to get from him some hope for her daughter. Instead, she had found peace, the humbling of life to memory and perception when all hope is lost.

  "Gentleness and love will survive," Zeke spoke, his voice swollen with silence. He didn't care about the world's plight. The remorseless agony of his zotl possession had pur
ged him of all caring. Pain and pleasure had become for him two ends of the same board, the flimsy plank of his body; floating on a sea of electrons, riding the long currents of time to wherever. .He felt more clarity than any man alive.

  "What are you thinking?" Caitlin asked. The storm had frenzied again; and needles of rain prickled her skin.

  "Why do people think heaven is up?" he replied. "I mean, look at it. The sky is tearing itself apart. I wouldn't want to go up right now"

  Caitlin grinned at that -thought and turned her attention to the wheeling sky. She hadn't had a drink since, she was brought here, yet at that moment power was flushing through her like a shot of whiskey. The drugs that controlled her tremors usually left her dense with torpor. Now, watching the storm clouds stampeding like white bison, she was exhilarated: Something was going to happen.

  "I'm leaving soon myself," Zeke said at last, and when his thin black eyes touched hers, she saw the happiness in his harrowed face. His short hair was bristly, and the blue regulation fatigues they both wore

  looked wrinkled and ill-fitting. She reached out to touch his mottled hand, and a spark cracked between them. A gasp hissed through her lips.

  "You want it?" he asked.

  "Yes," the old woman answered.

  Zeke peeled o$' a splinter from the arm of his rocker and lanced his left thumb. He offered her his hand and its gem of blood.

  Caitlin's forefinger smeared the blood when a spark jumped to it from his thumb. She brought her finger to her mouth, and the taste of iron chilled her.

  That evening, one of the residents complained that Zeke was glowing. Guards in bright-orange jumpsuits, hooded goggles, and gasmasks found Zeke in the gazebo grinning with muscular ecstasy.

  They took him to a protective chamber monitored only by cameras.

  He wrote a note to Caitlin, and fifteen minutes later, he caught light and vanished.

  Caitlin received the note the next morning at breakfast. Even among the sinuous fragrances of coffee and toast, she could still smell the blue scent of a windshaken mountaintop on the paper. It read- .