In Other Worlds

Holding the lynk, Carl's purpose flushed stronger in him. He snapped the lynk back onto the lance's hilt and walked off the roof through a firedoor and down the stairs to the street. At a nearby clothier's, he used some of his cash to purchase underwear, an expensive gray suit, tan shoes, a silk shirt and tie, and gray aviator sunglasses.

He neatly folded his finsuit top, strider pants, and sandals into a leather and wood attache case. He also bought a black umbrella and in the secrecy of the dressing room fitted his lance into it, using gentle welding bursts to secure it to the umbrella's metal ribs.

Then he used a pay phone first to call the bank he had hired to handle his affairs and then to order a limousine from a local taxi service. While waiting for his car, he had lunch at the best restaurant he could find in the small town.

Carl had no real appetite. In fact, the armor, which was a unit small as a dime and impacted at the base of his skull and which projected, the iridescent field of force around him when he commanded it, also sustained his biologic processes. Food was unnecessary as long as he activated his armor regularly. But the taste and texture of the meal comforted him with the animal recognition of eating, and he ate a large meal while he pondered his situation.

He resolved, between a course of split-pea soup and broiled trout, to do what he had been sent to accomplish, but to do it with as little reliance on his armor as possible. The musical program in the background faded, and a news bulletin announced .the bizarre raygun deaths of three people in Ridgefield, Indiana; earlier that day.

Carl's interest in food faded in midbite, and he paid his bill and went outside to wait for his limo. The long black car pulled up to the restaurant ten minutes later, and he had the driver take him to the address that the bank had given him.

The ride cruised out of town, wound through the surrounding braes and hills, and eventually hissed up a newly graveled road to a long warehouse luminous with fresh paint.

A chocolate-brown Mercedes was already parked in the lot in front of the warehouse's giant sliding doors. He dismissed his driver with two hundreddollar bills and walked over to the warehouse.

Silverhaired Mr. Powells, the man Carl had hired to oversee his enterprise, was inside the air-cooled, dimly lit building with two of his assistants, examining the three huge mounds of pig manure heaped on the concrete floor. The stink kicked like a mule.

"Mr. Omega," Mr. Powells acknowledged Carl, offering his hand and a generous smile.

"Al, please." Carl shook his hand and nodded to the others. They met his stare deferentially, obviously surprised by his elegant and conservative appearance, having expected to see him again in his Foke attire. "Three point five tonnes?"

"Accurate to within a few pounds on the heavy

side, Al," Mr. Powells assured him. "It's raw, untreated pig manure. The largest pile in the county."

"Good." Carl motioned everyone outside. "Let's get some breathable air."

He walked to the Mercedes, and faced Powells there. "You have the papers?"

Mr-Polvells handed him the contract the bank had drawn up to his specification, and . Carl examined it. The papers simply bound Powells and the others to secrecy in return for which they would receive substantial sums each month. After he signed it, Carl accepted the warehouse keys.

"Would you like me to arrange for a distributor?" Mr.

Powells asked. "I assume all this crap is going to be processed into fertilizer:"

"No-1 mean, yes-but I'll take care of that;." Carl answered.

"You'd better do it fast," one of the assistants said.

"You'll want to recycle that stuff before it really festers. Even in this cool weather it won't be long before it gets very ugly"

Carl just smiled. He waved as they left. Once they had pulled out of sight, he turned on his armor and went back into the warehouse.

He waded into the dung, using his lance to clear his way.

As near to the center as he could estimate, he placed the small, rectangular lynk. Nothing happened, but he knew in his special way that the lynk had already begun converting the inertia of the tonnage.

He locked up the warehouse and launched himself into the sky. The armor urged him southward toward the polar wastes, but his will forced against those inner promptings, bending the impulse of his flight, and he flew west toward a new freedom.

Zeke sat facing the rose garden through the cross-hatch of the -gate that confined him to his small room. He stroked his lion-grained beard, and his black eyes were empty as an open grave.

Where was Alfred Omega?

Dr. Blau's green stare silently asked him that at every encounter, in a mocking way that hoped to break his "insanity."

And Chad, who had won big enough at Aqueduct to quit his job, still came by every week to see how he was doing and to ask with his mundane stories his unspoken query: Where was Alfred Omega?

Thoughts like brambles tangled Zeke's emotions with hurt and doubt. Maybe he was wrong-wrong about everything. Maybe nothing he had found in his surges was right. Maybe the mirror that never forgot Carl's last image was faithful to a different meaning than the one the science of his imagination had revealed.

He was trapped, deep in the labyrinth of events that were heavy with madness. But the events were real: Carl had become pure light. The surges from far in his solitude had provided clews of ideas that had led him on---and on-but not yet out of the labyrinth.

Shaking with doubt, fearful of his own suffering, he had to admit he was wrong about Alfred Omega. Why had he ever thought Carl would come back? The thought was simply imaginary, something he had dreamed up after his novel and then taken seriously because the subtle thread of his extrapolations had led him that way through the labyrinth. And now he realized the thread had woven a trap. He'd made a fool of himself. Worse he'd convinced everyone he was mad.

He quaked for several more minutes, then shrugged off his self-pity. So he had guessed wrong about Alfred Omega. He wasn't Christ. He was just a scientist. He didn't do miracles. They did him.

The Field was real.

And the power of the Field was real. He was living on it. The rest was just guesswork, mere hypotheses.

Zeke cradled his heavy head in his hands, and the pain of his doubt cut his wonderings back to the split of mind and being where everything is given.

The ominous drone of the wind rivering over the Rockies blanked Carl's mind, and he stood gleaming in his armor on a ledge among the sharktooth crags of the Sawatch Range. Rushets of cloud shredded through a blood-colored sky, and the mountain range loomed below him in the gold mist of a set sun.

Carl was budging himself into no-time, but the troubling thoughts that he wanted to escape dangled with him in the lustrous spaces of his armor.

Three people had died to readmit him to earth.

And this wasn't even his earth. What was earthtwo? These mountains had the same secret design as the mountains on earth-one. The same eagled cliffs, the same uplifted slants of ancient seabottoms, and the same stars tapping on in the dizzy peak of the sky.

How many earths were there-really? Infinity was not real.

,Unless it fathered another Evoe. In an infinite continuum, he could possibly find her again. But the only way to know was to finish his work here on earthtwo and lynk back to the Werld and the eld skyle.

Two months to go.

No-time was not the same. Images of the three he had killed pastiched his hemiconsciousness with his memory of firing a gravity wave into the zotl's lynk to Galgul. The anxiety of his solitude made the rutilous embrace of the light lancer armor feel like a sealed bottle. The dismal birr of the mountain-cut wind help-pd to still his mind, and he bobbed miserably in and out of trance. He persisted like this for days before acknowl

edging that he had-lost access to no-time. Maybe forever.

It was night when he decided to go east, to Manhattan. What few friends he had were there. He had to see if they were the same people he had known. And if they were, if they could grace him with any sense of the familiar, he was determined to use his imp card for them. Though the eld skyle had warned him to stay away from those who knew him, the anger` of his stress strengthened his defiance, and he went with the wind, soaring through the darkness.

Dawn was sliding into the harbor when he arrived in New York. The famous skyline was turning. below him, and the dark sky around him was glittering with insect-distant jet planes. He imagined the Blue Apple and let the armor fly him in low over the East River, up Lafayette Street to Broadway, and then across Twentysecond Street to Seventh Avenue. Dozens of people saw him, but only for splintered instants, for he flew along the rooftops, a golden blur shooting among the watertanks and chimneys. The sound of his flight broke across the traffic noise, and no one heard him.

He landed in the cluttered courtyard behind the building that housed the restaurant. The ivy-clawed walls had shed their red leaves, and the birdbath, hibachi, patio table, and chairs were littered with the season's refuse. His armor shut down, and the nearby leaves dervished away from him.

Familiarity trilled about him like a birdsong, and he spun about slowly to fit everything against the template of his memory.

The basil troughs had gone to seed, and most of the leaves were a crisped brown. He stooped over one of the troughs and found the thumbprint he had left when he had touched the wood with his paint-smudged hand. The print fit his thumb precisely.

Carl picked up a pebble and flung it at the window

above the back door. He tossed several more gravel stones before the window swung open and the gray sleep-tousled head of Caitlin Sweeney poked out.

"Get away from here, youl" she called down and waved her hand at him like 'a brown sock. "This house is still mine, and I won't have you driving me out until my proper time is up."

"Your time isn't up .yet, Caitlin Sweeney," Carl called back.

"Come down here and let me in."

Caitlin leaned farther out the window and stared down at him. "Who are you?" she asked, almost in a growl.

"Don't you recognize me, Caity? Has my voice changed, too?"

"You sound like-" she began, then looked more closely. "You couldn't be."

"Take another look," Carl said, removing his sunglasses.

"Caity, it's me, Carl."

Caitlin's scream knotted in her throat, and her aghast expression collapsed to a wondering stare. "Carl?"

She rubbed her whole face and looked intently at him. "Carl-can this be? Jesus-"

"It is me, Caity," Carl said. "Come on-let me in."

"Sweet, sweet Jesus," she mumbled and disappeared.

Moments later the back door flung open and she stood timebent in the doorway, staring at him in pale disbelief.

"I've got more hair and muscle," Carl admitted. "And my face is a little stronger-looking, I think. But it's me. Remember that morning I spilled hot coffee in my lap while I was counting the strands on my head, and you said I had to work on my image? Hah!

Remember?"

"It is yowl" Caitlin screamed and rushed into his arms. She pulled back enough for her rheumy eyes to study the small details of his face. This pugnacious, blond face was Carl's, slimmed down and tautened. And finally recognizing him, she grabbed his thick shoulders and dropped her whole weight into his embrace. "Carl( I must be dead. I can't believe you are really here. You're more solid and real than ever."

"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 wanted 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.

"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

sIs 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."

"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.

"Sergeant let'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 shaved 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 between 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

- love has claimed him rather than the archon of power. I'm sure that's the doing of the urg. It wants Carl back. The inertial displacement between them must be immense, and every' cell in Carl's body must be craving to return to the Werld. No wonder dominance of this faraway planet seems puny.

But I have no inertial homecalling to dampen my imagination or quell my will to power. Carl has seen me looking at the lance in reverie. It is not the power itself I crave:

The power is a shadow of the metaconscious.

The lance is merely a symbol of what I want.

"A balmy wind spills off the Hudson," Zeke wrote, watching a breeze unpleat the drapes of his window and fill the bedroom with the smell of the river. "I've nightmared Nam again. Like everything of this temporary earth that tries for something greater, my mind strains to understand why I am living in two different worlds, one of peace and one of pain. The answer I sense through my inspelling is almost unbearable: Contrastive thinking is an elaborate hallucination.

Worse, it is the viper I have mistaken for a rope."

Zeke turned off the light, and in the shuttered darkness, a hypnagogic spun before him. It was a retinal mandala, a rosemaling of torn limbs and glutinous napalm-melted flesh, all blurring together in the surfglow of his closed eyes. Before shutting his journal, he wrote in it by feel: "The hand is not different from what it writes down."

Galgul was a cloud of rubble. Two black spheres and three cracked egg shapes were the only traces of order in an amorphous sprawl of floating debris. Blasttwisted shards of metal and coils of black dust looped with the fallpaths.

Anything organic had been seared to ash by the firestorm that had gulfed the exploded, structures. Inert, jagged forms hovered like a black aura around the ruins of Galgul.

Five of the twelve clustered city-spheres had been destroyed. Their three-kilometer-wide plasteel shells had been shattered into junk by a gravity wave that had bounded out of a lynk in one of the spheres. The lynk had connected with a four-space, positively curved stellar zone one hundred and thirty billion light-years

away. Three zotl needlecraft had established the lynk after following a Foke-shaped gravity echo into the Rim. The conclusion was obvious. A Rimstalker had armored a Foke, had sent him to a Foke-fertile planet where the food lure to the zotl would be irresistible, and had used the lure to attack the zotl through their own lynk. The plan had been a cunning and devastatingly effective one.

Like two spider gods, the remaining city-spheres of Galgul hung in a web of broken metal, misty against the whorl of the Cloudriver. The broken hulks of the ruined spheres dangled like torn roots among clots of fused metal. Needlecraft sparkled among the rocksmoke and the avalanches of destroyed shapes.

Camouflaged by the tumult of devastation were jumpships, black boomerangs with laser cannon, waiting in ambush for any Foke or Rimstalker aggression.

Zotl and Rimstalkers had warred since the zotl first arrived in the Werld, seventy-two cycles ago. Though the two species occupied the two distant poles, a Werld apart, they were both four-space creatures, and they conflicted in the tesseract range that contained the Werld. Their battles were timeflux distortions in superspace, and they fought over which species would occupy the narrow tetrad vector field that connected the Werld with the multiverse.

The Rimstalkers had dominated this gateway to infinity for the three hundred cycles of their time in the Werld before the zotl arrived. Rimstalker technology was by far the most advanced, but zotl four-space awareness was innately more adroit. After forty cycles of zotl incursions into the disputed tetrad vector. field, the spider people established a beachhead and, by dint of their elusive four-space awareness, were able to evade Rimstalker timeflux distortions and develop a lynk technology of their own. In another two or three

cycles, .they would have begun establishing a multiversal empire.

The zotl had been taken by surprise when the Rimstalkers abandoned their superspace forays to attack Galgul with a three-space gravity wave. Within moments, the zotl capital had been reduced to ruins. Only two city-spheres were left intact. Three were crippled, and the rest utterly demolished. And now, Foke-zotl food-were using the rubble-clogged fallpaths to penetrate zotl defenses and sabotage the cleanup and repair work.

This was the darkest time the zotl had known in the Werld, and their keening warbled across the tesseract range to Rataros, where the Rimstalkers were equally shocked. They had issued the, armor to Carl Schirmer as a favor to an eld skyle that had opened a channel to the tetrad vector 'field when the Rimstalkers were in need. Unlike the zotl, the Rimstalkers did not rely on organic sustenance. Their nourishment came directly from the hyperphotons of the tetrad vector field, and when the zotl began to expropriate vast swaths of the tetrad field for their own expansionist strategies, Rimstalkers starved.

Eld skyles, as five-space beings, were in a position to direct the four-space vector field to some degree.

One eld skyle had been able to channel enough hyperphotons to save the lives of over a thousand Rimstalkers.

In return, the Rimstalkers had armored Carl and sent him to fetch the three-space substance that the eld skyle needed for its own survival. ''

. The Rimstalkers had never guessed that the zotl would detect the fraction-of-a-second echo in the tetrad field, let alone follow it to its destination. That the armor had demonstrated the wit and initiative to wait for, the zotl to set up a lynk and then use the zotl lynk to assault Calgul was not as surprising. The armor, after all, had its own artificial intelligence loyal to its creators, and it was only slightly hampered by the emotional organ the creature it occupied called a brain.

But now the Rimstalkers had a problem.

If the Rimstalkers had planned this offensive, they would have used a light lance with the power to destroy all of Galgul.

Instead, the zotl had been badly hurt but not eliminated. The Foke harassing them could not hope to overcome them. So, in a cycle or two, the zotl would be back in the tetrad vector field and more aggressive than ever.

Some of the Rimstalkers wanted to armor more Foke and direct an assault against the remnants of Galgul. But that idea was dismissed at once in the face of the realization that the zotl, if pressed to the wall, could use their budding lynk technology to disrupt the gravity matrix that gave the Werld its shape and collapse the entire Werld into, the black hole that held them all.

The Rimstalkers understood: A three-space war against the zotl was. out of the question. They had to capitulate.

In return for a zbtl agreement to stay out of the tetrad vector field for five cycles and then only to occupy regions designated by the Rimstalkers, the Rimstalkers acknowledged that the gravity wave that had blasted Galgul was an accident, not the prelude to a three-space war. As a token of retribution, the Rimstalkers gave the zotl a light lance and armor of their own.

The appeasement was tiny. The armor and lance were designed to implode if their interiors were tampered with, so the zotl could learn nothing from them. Also, they were useless anywhere near Rataros, so they were no good against the Rimstalkers. The only immediate use for the armored lance was as an instrument of revenge. The Foke who had fired the gravity wave into

Galgul would be destroyed, and the Foke-fertile planet that had served as a lure would become the first conquest of the zotl's multiversal empire.

To celebrate this new determination, the best of the suspended Foke were revived and milked.

The choice stock of Foke delicacies was located in one of the mangled spheres. There, behind fumestained glastic panels, were several thousand human bodies asleep in no-time. The myriads of Foke were individually encapsulated and stacked upright to facilitate -their gravity-pumped life support.

Among the stock was a slender woman with a quiet face and strawberry flecks in her drowsy gray eyes.

"Evoe is alive," Zeke told Carl. Zeke's eyes were blurry with drowsiness. His bear-sized frame leaned in the doorway to his bedroom, his baggy black silk pajamas scarred with sleep creases.

Carl had already shaved and dressed, though dawn was still a dark hour away. He wore a beige pair of trousers, sneakers, and a purple pullover sweater. He was sitting in the living room practicing touch control with his lance by changing channels on the TV from across the room. When he heard Zeke, his hand twitched, and the TV flew off its stand and smashed into the wall. Sparks and glass spurted, and Carl leaped up from the cushioned chair where he was slouched. "tire you sure?"

Zeke stepped over the shattered corpse of the TV and stretched out on the sofa. "I saw her in Galgul," he replied in a sleepwrung voice. "The place is a bigger mess than that TV You really rocked it, buddy. Ewe's okay, though. I saw her in a kind of suspended animation. The zotl are saving her for a special dinnercommemorating the conquest of the earth."

"You sure this is a real lynkdream?" Carl asked, his head effervescent with euphoria. He wanted to believe him, but Zeke had been in a loose frame of mind since Carl had gotten him out of Cornelius. His attention had been wavery as a candleflame, and he had slept as much as he had been awake. Carl had purchased a spacious apartment on Claremont Avenue near Columbia University, and they had holed up there while Zeke suffered through the withdrawal from the chemistry set Dr. Blau had hooked into him over the past year. Today was the first day that Zeke had woken with a clear face, unscowled with confusion or pain.

The last month had been tedious for Carl. Manhattantwo was a quieter place than the New York he was used to. The hum of the electric trafc was not audible from their top-floor suite, and the serenity was driving him mad: He had used his armor to visit all the round corners of the earth while Zeke slept or Caitlin and Sheelagh were watching him. The quiescence of the cities, the geometric order of the farmlands, and the harmony of the people wherever he went spooked him. The world was closing in on utopia, and with his perpetual anxiety about Evoe and the zotl he felt out of place and even dangerous to the world. He had already decided then if Evoe was dead he didn't want to live. It sounded stupid, but it felt right. So when Zeke told him she was alive, his blood shimmered.

The flesh of Zeke's face looked tired, yet the wakefulness in his stare was strong as black coffee. "The hallucinations are over," he announced. "The lynkdreams have begun again-only now I know they're lynkdreams."

"What about your nightmares?"

"I was in Nam again last night. Before Galgul. Still can't figure out how. Some kind of inertial-"

"--resonance," Carl said with him. "I know. What'd you see in Galgul?"

"Ruins. The fallpaths are so clogged with fired

debris you can walk on them. In one of the half-gutted spheres there's a stock vault, ripped open to external view. I saw-tiers of bodies stacked in transparent shells. They're all alive but sleeping, waiting to be milked of their pain. Evoe was there. I recognized her at oncefauny hair, flecked eyes, and those cheeks, hollow as a cat's."

Carl looked up to the ceiling and howled, arms outflung.

"Don't get too excited," Zeke warned, when Carl was done and his face, red and polished with joy, was looking at him. "We've got some time left before we can lynk to the Werld."

"ZeeZee, you've just put meaning back into my life!"

Zeke watched him somberly. "Well, you'd better hear the rest of what's going on." He told him about the Rimstalkers giving the zotl light lancer armor. "And you know it's you the spider people are going to hit with that armor."

.Carl's heart became a paperweight. "Maybe well get out of here before they show up."

His hopefulness cowed before Zeke's stare. With his head and face shaved, Zeke had. the sober demeanor of a monk.

"You can't avoid them, Squirm," he said with certainty. "But you don't have to fear them. You didn't destroy more than half of Galgul. Your armor did. Let it' protect you."

Carl spun about and ran both hands through his hair.

That gesture usually reassured him, reminding him that he had been remade, that life was new. But now he felt closed in, and he went to the tall sliding window gazing west over the Hudson and opened it. The winter air cleared his sinuses.

The dark sky seemed empty: in the direction his armor told him to look. The lynk of his lance to the Werld manifested in the space of his immediate vicinity and in a larger probability zone a mile above his head, tilted twenty-six degrees toward the north magnetic pole. The lynk space around him was big enough only for human-sized transits like blood beetles, which his lance could easily disperse as they appeared.

The jumpships and needlecraft would come in above him where they could scatter quickly and avoid his lance fire-until their own light lancer armor came through. His armor did not know if it could match the zotl armor. .

The wind turned, and the air smelled of burning leaves. A new feeling glided in under his fear and elation, elusive as an unwritten poem. It was -awe. "Geezus, Zeke," Carl said in a slow voice. "It's strange."

"It's always been strange," Zeke confirmed, "only now it's gotten weird enough for you to notice." He sat up. One hand tugged at the ghost of his white beard before finding his chin, and he gazed at Carl, ruminative as Moses. "Carl, I've got to talk with you."

Carl turned from his window reverie. Zeke had never appeared as composed as this before, and the poise in his stare drew Carl closer. "What more can you possibly have to say?" he asked, sitting in the plush chair beside the sofa.

"Ever hear of Egil Skaldagrimson?" Zeke asked.

'An uncle of yours?"

"He was ancient Iceland's most original poet," Zeke said.

"But in his own day he was better known as a ferocious manslaughterer called a berserkir. One day late in his life after earning the fierce respect of his people as a warrior, a poet, and an autocrat, he was out for a stroll. As he passed one of his men who was bending over, adjusting a sandal, Egil swiftly drew his sword and--zockl-cut the man's head off. The reason

he gave for doing it is famous: 'He posed so conveniently for a blow."'

Carl looked at his friend more closely to see if he was launching into one of his ."surges." The strong face was as sensible as the Buddha's. "Okay. So what about it?"

"You're like Egil's soldier," Zeke replied. "You're picking your toes. You carry a sword, but you've lost the spirit of the sword."

°` I'm not sure I follow you, old buddy," Carl confessed in a piqued tone. "If you're worried about the zotl's surprising me, dolt. My imp has a warning tone."

"The enemy I'm worried about is you. You're in some kind of trance."

"Me?" Carl was surprised. "This is the first day since I got here that I've seen both of your eyes working together."

"Sure, I've been chemically pummeled. But you've been adamized. You're supposed to be perfect."

"I'm nowhere near it."

"That's for sure. But to the urg, you're perfect. A perfect gofer. It's got you locked into its strategy, friend. You have the power, but your will has been castrated so that it won't interfere."

"Aw, cut it out, Zee." Carl sank back in the chair. "Caitlin's been trying to save my soul. Sheelagh wants to make love to me. And you think I'm a will-less zombie."

"Not a zombie, just a sleepwalker." Zeke's bushy white eyebrows, lifted. "And why don't you make love to Sheelagh?"

Carl sat back as if slapped. "I'm in love, Zeebo.

Remember that feeling? It's a little ways north of lust."

"Love has blinded you."

"Blinded me to what?"

"To power." Zeke's hand flashed out, and he picked up the lance -from where Carl had placed it on the coffee table.

"This is powerl" He waved it under Carl's nose: "When are you going to use it?"

"When I have to," Carl answered softly.

"If you don't use the power you have, the will weakens,"

Zeke said, returning the lance.

"Hey, keep in mind whose weak will uncanned you last month."

"I'll never forget it." Zeke smiled briefly. "But that was last month. What've you done since?"

"What's to do? I mean, the eld skyle didn't send me after the Golden Fleece or the Grail. We're just waiting for the lynk to convert some pig stool and then we're gone. Unless the zotl stop us."

"Forget the zotl." Zeke's gaze pressed into him. "If you're just waiting for the lynk, why'd you come back for me? And why'd you spill the beans to Caitlin and Sheelagh?"

"What the hell are you driving at?"

"Don't get excited." Zeke was glad to see that Carl could get excited.

"Just what are you trying to tell me? That I'm loose-tipped?"

"That you're talking in your sleep. The urg has put you in a trance, and you're not seeing things clearly. If you're loose-tipped it's because there's some of your old self left that wonders what's going on. That's why you sought out your old friends, to connect with your past and the old meaning of your life. You've lost that, and now you don't know what's-up or down."

"And you do?"

"I know only one thing for sure." He leaned closer.

"We're made out of light. And light is action."

"Huh?"

"Light is action." Zeke looked amazed. "Come on, Squirm, you remember quantum theory: Light is trans

mitted in whole units. Those units are called quanta of action. They're photons: Don 7t get me started on this subject. The point I'm trying to make is this: All creation acts. Continuously. There is no stillness. Even the void between galaxies buzzes with Field particles.

Action is reality. For a human, that reality is choice.

You have to act positively, and by that I mean your choices have to be creative, not historical."

"All right, already ZeeZee. I get the idea. You think I'm lazy"

"Well, when's the last time you worked out?"

"I don't believe this."

"The urg gave you an adamized body, but how do you expect to keep it strong without using it?"

Carl was on his feet. "Riding a fallpath is a workout and a half, believe me." He strode back to the window and slammed it shut.

"The only fallpath here is down."

Carl shrugged. "My heart isn't here, Zeke. Working out's too much of a pain. I'd just as soon wait till I get home."

"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 mixup, 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."

"Yeah,' Zeke concurred in a breath of awe that went flat.

"For now"

Carl glanced up at the blue silence of the sky. "For now"

That night while Zeke slept in one of the mobile homes parked at the site, Carl stood outside and used his lance to magnetically stroke the sleep channels in his friend's brain.

When he was sure that Zeke was slumbering deeply, he entered the trailer and went directly to Zeke's notebook. He opened it to the latest entry and by the scalloped light from his lance, he read:

"Carl called today, from central Iowa. I've flown out of my past and am interfacing the future here in Ames. The old horror is over: My mind is clear again. But a new horror-threatens. Carl carries the urg's spore. The whole planet is endangered by his presence. He is a

living nightmare and also the gateway to forever. I feel as if I were in a B-movie: Should I kill or worship him? If he bleeds on me, I'd be adamized. Do I want. that? In an infinite cosmos all directions are strange."

Carl returned the notebook to where he'd found it and left quietly. The next day Zeke did not wake up. Nor-the day after that. The armor, through the magnetic caress of the lance, had stroked him into a psychic trance. Zeke floated in a region fringing four-space. Carl called this egoless, dimensionful area the Zone. It was the emptiness where he dumped all undesirable thoughts. For Zeke, this new, dreamwide state was the pivot of the Moment, the needle's eye through which he could thread his attention into any space at all.

Zeke found himself circling like smoke through a room of bronzed light. Sheelagh sat in a reclining chair, her scalp and fingers wired to a console where three technicians sat. The elderly, snake-eyed woman interrogating her wore an officer's lapel pin identifying her as Commander Leonard. She was obviously having a hard time believing Sheelagh's story, even though the technicians were confirming her testimony.

That scene unwalled to a vista of stars. The blue cloud-gained sphere of the earth lifted into view, and Zeke realized he was flying with Carl. He could feel Carl's thoughts, slow-bursting like flowers, as he pondered his life. He had just come from Sheelagh's apartment, but she was not there. The moon stared from the dark side of the earth. '

A sudden lassitude pollarded Zeke's sensations, and when he came to he was in his bed in the mobile home. He felt gigantic with understanding. Everything in the last two years finally made sense. The inspelling he had used to write Shards of Time and the telepathic surges that had followed in the asylum were the result of Carl's armor. Zeke had been in union with it long

before Carl even arrived on earth. Rimstalkers were four-space beings. To them, Carl and Zeke, as lifelong companions, were one worldline. The armor's inspiriting was Zeke's inspelling.

The Rimstalkers had been in four-space communion with Zeke all his life--and at last he recognized the phantasmal daydreams of those dreary afternoons at St. Tim's as the armor's tesseratic presence. And the intuition that had rolled him to his feet that night in Nam on earth-one when the enemy were swarming toward him-the sixth sense that had gums him through the bamboo to the riverbank rathive where he had holed up till an ARVN patrol found him the next morning-that luck was his lifelong bond to the armor. He and the armor had been interfused all along; at a level deeper than time. The contact was purposeless, merely the overspill of knowing Carl, who was the true contact with the Rimstalkers.

If Zeke hadn't felt sorry for that spindly, doe-eyed twerp the other kids liked to head-dunk in the toilet bowls and forcefeed cockroaches, he would never have found the vantage from where the world is transparent.

The strong sunlight diffusing through the glass roof of the warehouse reminded Carl of the blue brightness of the Welkyn. He sat in a hammock-chair and surveyed the expansive interior. The living area had a waxed wooden floor, round, cushiony chairs, tapestries and bookshelves to hide the support ribbing, and a wallsized TV screen with an imaging, computer hookup and an enormous video library. When he lay back in the hammock and rocked among the hanging plants under the liana arbor, a peaceful ambience saturated him.

The butcherblock kitchen had a seawater aquarium -built inta the counters. Zeke was sitting on a barstool with a frosty bottle of Lone Star in his hand, watching the. fish. Since Carl had told him about the spore and

Zeke had informed Carl of his bond with the light lancer armor, they had become closer. Their secrets had bonded them.

And their time together once more had the relaxed spontaneity of their early friendship.

Zeke looked through the aquarium and. with a waterbent smile said: "A toast to the Continuum."

Carl picked up his lukewarm bottle from the soil bed of the hydrangea beside him. "if there is a Continuum." He swigged the flat beer. "And if there's not." He drank again.

"You still think the universe is finite? After all your misadventures?" Zeke looked disappointed. "What's the objection this time?"

Over the last few days as they put the finishing touches on the warehouse, Zeke had explained the cosmology he intuited from their bond with the armor. The expansion of the universe was the result of the repellent force of radiation inertia, the pressure of light pushing the galaxies apart. The weakness of radiation thrust required enormities of time to cause a response, and so the Continuum never reached static equilibrium. The -slow-motion seething activity of the galaxies pendulumed eternally with internal expansions and contractions in a dynamic balance.

"What about Olber's Paradox?" Carl asked. "I read once that-"

"That if the universe were-infinite and crowded uniformly with stars, how come the night sky isn't blazing with their light?" Zeke finished for him. `"That should be obvious-unless you're predisposed to think and perceive finitely. The more we amplify the weak optical resolution of the human eyes through lenses and photon receptors, the more crowded with stars the black spaces between the visible stars get. All photonsensitive plates react with a limit, and so we can't see everything that is there. It's the biological fallibility of the human mind that keeps us from accepting the infinity of the Continuum."

Carl was only half listening. He had grown accustomed to Zeke's prattle, and his inner attention went through the kitchen to the back of the converted warehouse. There, under slick black tarpaulins, were three point five tonnes of pig manure. Nothing but the tarps covered the stuff, yet not a whisper of manure tainted the air. And when Carl had examined the mound, he had found that the-dung looked as fresh as the day it was dropped. The lynk field had permeated it. Soon, the lynk would be strong enough to carry them and the whole mound of feces across the universe.

"Another beer?" Zeke asked.

Carl shook his head. "With the wild ideas you-have for company," he said, rising to his feet, "you shouldn't be drinking." He walked to the kitchen and put his empty beer bottle in the trash. "This is a comfortable waiting room for the next world."

"I still wish you'd rethink going back to New York."

"I've got to face them. You know that. If what the armor showed you about Sheelagh is true, I'd better show myself soon or they may decide to visit us in a less friendly fashion."

"They don't know we're-here."

"For all the precautions I've taken, I'still have this anxiety that they'll find us, Zeebo. "

"Let them. Let the future come to you. You're too dangerous for the world." They had had this conversation before, and when Zeke recognized the unlistening patience in his friend's stare, he stopped and took another slug of beer.

"Just remember," he added. "You're the master of the precipitate. You're not thoughts or bones. You're freedom itself. You're light."

"Sure." Carl avoided his buddy's gaze and watched the flakes of life skittering through the kelp shadows.

For all Zeke's mumbo jumbo about .light and infinity he was as intensely in this world as a mineral shard, and Carl felt unreal as a ghost. Nothing, seemed as real as his memories of his lost life. The armor had him wholly in its grip.

"Look, I'm going to be on my way," Carl said.

"Okay, then." Zeke led him to the sliding door. They stood together for a while in the chilled and loamy air. of the churned earth. The dark land furrowed away on all sides.

"Be easy with Sheelagh," Zeke advised. "And be ready for the unexpected. Okay?"

"You have any prescient dreams you've been holding out?"

"No, but I can feel the uneasiness of the armor. Four-space is murky up ahead. Keep alert."

Carl nodded, slapped Zeke on the shoulder. "If there's any trouble, stay close to the lynk. The lance has cued your molecules to pass through the field membrane. No one can reach you there."

Carl walked out into the field. His armor lightningflashed, and he was gone.

t

That evening, after eating microwaved lasagna and watching a Lakers game on the giant TV, Zeke lay down on the waterbed under a skylight meshed with stars. In moments, he was asleep, flying across the dizzy space of a dream.

He saw the silverblue scimitar of the earth cutting the night, and the beryl sparks of Steel Wheel I and II, the cislunar factories, glinting in the span of emptiness between the earth and the lopsided moon.

The dreamflight pitched steeply, and all at once Zeke's awareness was mizzling in a sparse, modern apartment.

Sheelagh and Carl were there before a window glittering with the constellations of the Man

hattan skyline. He Couldn't hear what they were saying at first, but he didn't need to. Sheelagh was undressing, her valentine-face mirthful as a mask. Her hair looked teased and her lispy mouth nervous. If she was hiding something, Carl didn't seem to notice. He was asking his armor if there were any threatening psyches nearby.

The armor detected none.

Then sound swarmed over Zeke's ghost presence: "You loved me once," Sheelagh was saying in a voice like an empty seashell. She opened her wrinkled blouse and slinked off a sleeve.

"That was before Evoe," Carl answered, dryly. Sheelagh was fragrant as warm rain, but he was not going to be tempted. "Come off it, Sheelagh. I'm here because I know you blabbed on me."

Her features went slick with surprise. "I didn't."

"It's all right. I'm not angry."

"You're not?" Her lipsticked mouth looked petulant again.

"Why should I be?" Carl smacked the lance against his palm like a nightstick. "I'm leaving this rock as soon as the lynk can carry me, and nobody can stop me. I want you to tell them that. Make them understand=-so no one tries to stop me."

"There's still time." Her face was moony with love in a halo of static-frizzed hair. "Stay with me. And talk with them. yourself. Let them hear what they can before you go." , "No, Sheelagh. I came back to see you, not them. I have to explain why I behaved so wildly with you the other night."

"Sit down and tell me." She put her hands on him to guide him toward a Morris chair, and two blue sparks snapped from her fingertips.

Carl's eyes went fish-round. He looked again at her hair and the wrinkled blouse clinging to her pale flesh.

"I wasn't thinking clearly," he said in a voice crispy with apprehension. "The zotl had me freaked. And I just felt I had to be with you. I needed sympathy"

"Tell me about it." She steered him to the upholstered chair, and the smell of her was fresh as the browse of a summer shower.

"Here, sit down."

"I got selfish," he continued through the static of his nervousness. "And, well, to get to the point -I think I exposed you to the same spore that first turned me into light. The spore's in my blood, and-"

"You what?" Her romantic mask curdled to a scowl.

""The euphoria you're feeling-the sparks..." His hands opened futilely before him. "They're all symptoms, Sheelagh! But you don't have to be afraid-"

"You infected me?" Anger and fear pulsed in her eyes. "I'm going to be taken to that other world?" Her breath spit with her shock. In a gesture made strong with her sudden loathing, she shoved Carl, and he dropped backward into the plump chair.

The springloaded hypodermic hidden in the cushion punched him squarely in the upper right quadrant of his buttocks, and his face buckled with shock. Zeke felt Carl's outrage as he realized he had been duped. He raised the lance at Sheelagh, and she gasped, the angry flush of her face draining to the color of metal. But the drug was a nervelock, and one second later, Carl was paralyzed.

Another second, and he was unconscious.

Time collaged, and Zeke witnessed the arrival of the police and the siren-whirling transport of Carl's body to a surgery room in Sloan Kettering. The images shrank and went colorless, wrinkling up like a mushroom, collapsing into the dark duff of sleep.

Carl woke to a searing headache. His brain felt sunburned.

When he opened his eyes, the blisters inside his skull winced with the weight of the light. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were so much cooked squid. The brash light sat on his-chest, and his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that he was in a white-tiled observation chamber. An overhead camera silently watched him. His hands fluttered over his body, and he felt wires taped to his nakedness.

"Carl Schirmer," a woman's voice spoke. "I am Commander Leonard. You are in my charge now, and I've placed you under maximum security watch-for obvious reasons. Are you willing to cooperate with me?"

Carl squinted up at a whitehaired old lady with cheeks brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Her iguana eyes regarded him dispassionately.

"What've you done to me?" Carl groaned. He was hollowed out, and the gonging emptiness terrified him.

- "Your weapons have been removed, Carl." The clack of a lock resounded in the chamber, and a hatch opened at the far end. A muscular fellow in a scarlet jumpsuit waited there.

"Can you sit up?" Commander Leonard asked.

"I don't think so."

"Let's try". She lifted his head and put an arm under his shoulders. With an unexpected strength, she sat him up, and his head pounded like a diesel. His within life was vaporous. The hymn-presence of the armor was gone. Only the sinuosities of his body, shivering with alarm, were real.

"Now I want you to stand up," she informed him.

He looked at her as though she had asked him to kill himself.

She pulled off the wires taped to his body, and he leaned his face into the shoulder of her white jacket. The purple odor there reminded him of the kindly

matrons that came to St. Tim's on holidays to play with the children.

"We've taken the armoring chip out of your skull," she said, helping him to stand. "We couldn't take the chance of leaving it in.

And even with it out, we've kept you unconscious just to be sure.

You've been out for three days now, and in that time we've examined you and your artifacts thoroughly."

Carl wobbled, and the scarlet-suited bouncer who had stepped into the chamber steadied him. Commander Leonard unfolded a green hospital gown. While she dressed him, she spoke: "You have the chromosomes of a newborn--no chipping on any of the alleles, and the supercoiling of your genomes is tight as it gets. You're genetically perfect. And that means you're somehow artificial.

You're not really human."

The pain in his head was dimming, and psychic space rippled like wind-bright curtains.

"The painkiller should be coming on about now," Commander Leonard said, fastening the gown's ties behind his back. "I think you can walk. Please, try."

He swayed forward, and the guard guided him. At the hatch, his escort put a hand on his head to keep him from braining himself as he went through. The outside of the chamber was darker and cooler. The guard led him down a melon-pale corridor past doorless ofce stalls. To one side was a burnedout cavity that had once been an office. The black, tar-droopy shapes of a desk and chairs were discernible in the ash-slush.

"That's where Sheelagh caught light," Commander Leonard's grandmotherly voice said. "No one really believed her story until that happened. Fortunately, the agent interviewing her fled when he saw green fire crawling over her."

"Sheelagh-" Carl's voice cracked. "I infected her."

"Yes, and two others in the apartment building you bought her have also caught light in the last two days."

Carl wanted to speak, to explain himself, but his mind was tenanted with grief. "I didn't want this to happen-" he managed lamely. The guard nudged him beyond the cindered room, and anguish turned in Carl like a sense. "I'm sorry-believe me."

"We believe everything now," the commander said. "'Mat's why we've gotten you up."

They came to an open elevator. It closed behind them and with a barely perceptible hug silently carried them up. "Your actions have threatened all life on earth," Leonard spoke. "You're a selfish, thoughtless man, Carl, and you should be punished for what you've done. But for now, we need you. And maybe bur need is punishment enough."

Terror bristled in him. "The zotl."

The commander's lizard eyes nodded. "The lance has been calling for you. It started at midnight. Listen."

Carl heard it: a rumbling, inchoate as thunder.

The elevator stopped, the doors parted, and the thunder became a bellowing that forced hands over ears. The guard pushed Carl into the withering roar. The cacophony stopped instantly.

Carl looked around. He was in an amphitheater ringed with computer panels and viewscreens. The floor of the chamber was a maze of consoles. People in uniforms and lab suits were coming out of the soundproofed siderooms where they had been waiting. At the center of the electronic labyrinth was a gray velvet pedestal on which lay the gold lance and the electricitycolored armoring chip. A technician .in a green smock picked them up in surgery-gloved hands and began working his way through the maze to them.

The viewscreens came on, revealing a milky dawn

sky. Pins of cold light flashed on the monitor screen with the glinting swiftness of rapiers.

"Needlecraft," Carl clattered more than said.

"If you can't stop them," Commander Leonard said stiffly, "the spore you infected us with won't have its chance to kidnap us."

One of the screens displayed an array of missiles with makeshift warheads. Their exhaust fires redshadowed the sky as they crossed the space where the needlecraft had been moments before. "Radar-where are they?"the commander queried.

"They're not showing up on radar," the reply came.

The technician with the lance and the chip stood before them.

Commander Leonard looked into Carl sternly. "You're the criminal who caused all this evil. None of us wants you to have your power back. But you're the only hope of stopping this invasion. Do you want to help us?"

"Yes-I'll do anything to make up for what's happened." He bustled with sincerity.

"Turn around, Carl," the commander ordered. "Let's hope this works."

Carl' couldn't believe it. They were giving his armor back to him. But could they? They, weren't Rimstalkers. They were just desperate. Carl prayed with all his vital fibers and the hollowness they held, praying for connection. Please, God-give it back to me.

1 won't trip up this time. Please!

The gloved technician peeled off the thick bandage at the back of Carl's head and inserted the chip in the plastic-prised incision there.

Dazzling pain kicked Carl forward, and the guard holding him staggered. A red-blue spark jumped from the incision like a viper, and everyone stepped back.

Carl's headache wisped away. Colors seemed to go brighter.

Space became translucent with energy. Some thing like a steel, spring coiled tightly inside him, and the inspiriting began. The fires of his body gusted with the internal force of the armor, and when he turned about and faced the commander, he had the visage of a chieftain.

"Where are we?" the armor asked through him.

"At a missile-firing range on the tip of Long Island,"

Commander Leonard responded. She took the lance from the technicians and handed it to him. "We're a thousand feet underground. The elevator will take you out."

The touch of the lance quickened him with bright force, intoning the urgency of his mission with the drive to move. He strode into the elevator and jabbed the top button.

On the ride up, he caught himself in the gap between his feeble humanity and the armor's power. He felt like the muddy center of the universe. How had he come to this? He was Carl Schirmer, the avatar of ennui, the eternal ephebe, always more eager for ambience than destiny. He had never expected, much less asked, for his fate, least of all the ravishments of Evoe. It was losing her that had driven him mad. He was a false hero, a fool at the limits of reality. But his love for her was real. And he was thinking of her when the elevator stopped and the door opened.

Dawn gashed the sky. Carl settled into the embrace of his ribs, leaned back against his spine, and stepped out of the bunker onto the wide, saltgrass-tufted field. His armor came on, and like a piece of the sun, he lifted into the blue sky.

Needlecraft flitted in every direction, and the armor spun him, punching out with laserlight. The sky erupted with blue and green roses as each of the zotl craft was hit. The rumble of their destruction zeroed in

all directions. Carl circled about, waiting for more craft to come through the lynk.

The atmosphere above him limbed with a startling luminance,and a bulbous, spidery shape of gluey blue fire appeared overhead.

Carl wanted to fly off, but instead the armor lowered him to the rock-strewn range. The sandy ground was flat to a horizon rimmed with sand bluffs. The silverblue spider landed in a torrent of dusty light. And just looking at it, Carl knew. the lance would be useless. This was Rimstalker armor fitted to a zotl.

With grim resoluteness, Carl's armor stalked toward the fang-grinning abstraction, and Carl went brainless with fear.

The zotl snapped forward. At the instant of contact, the two light lancer armors flashed with molten sparks. The armors grappled, and their tormented shapes . flexed larger than life, quaked brightly, and disappeared.

Carl's bare feet stunned onto the rocky terrain, and the salt air gripped him. His rusty hair and the loose material of his hospital gown jumped with the clap of wind that followed the armor's shutdown. A stink of soured flesh slicked by, and he reeled backward at the sight of the unarmored zotl that appeared before him. The male and female zotl were not together. The bulging sac of the female was an arm's length away, the orange slug-mawed crown drooling its vomit stench as it gilled the planet's thin air.

Carl looked swiftly about for the male. It was hovering just behind him, and as he turned, it slashed forward. Its blade-curved beak gouged his scalp, and the hook-spurred legs dug into his face and neck. Carl beat the spidershape with his lance, and it sprang loose and jumped over him. He dodged instinctively, and the.

creature's sharp beak hacked the air just above his ear, its jabbering mouthparts flaying his scalp and chewing mad sounds in his ear. He batted it away and swung toward the barrelshaped female.

The male dove at Carl in a frenzied attack, cutting the flesh on his right hand and making him drop the lance. The jointed legs dexterously retrieved the .lance and flung it away.

Carl-tackled the female, pulling the thing over by the shocks of its ape-thick hide. It took him down with it, and the male's legs ripped into his, shoulder while its feedtube desperately lanced at his throat, seeking the carotid. His right arm was pinned under the female's bulk and his left hand cramped with pain as it reached up and lay hold of the frantic sticklybacked thing.

The hot blood spilling over his face blinded him, and he squeezed shut his eyes and contorted the length of his body to avoid the spider's scissoring jaws and razored feedtube. With terror's adamant strength, he tore the zotl from his flesh. He held the mad, writhing shape in his gory grip, away from his face, as he heaved the female over and freed his right arm. Its cries throbbed in the air.

Carl clenched a handy rock, the earth's first weapon, and pounded it into the spiderbeing. Spurts of black blood slapped him, and a haggard wail bawled from the female. It was rolling and twisting, spewing putrid ichor in long convulsive arcs. Carl picked up a flat, two-handed rock and used it to crush the zotl.

The work was ugly. The inside of his face was scalded with the sick smell, and the gash wounds on his body screamed with pain. The rock slab beat down hard on the. split chiton and jumping viscera of the monster until his armor snapped on with a crack of lightning.

He recovered the lance and bathed himself with anesthetizing pulses. The armor directed the lance, and the wounds were sonically cleansed and cauterized. Miraculously, no tendons or major bloodways had been

cut. Then with the sun spread out on the horizon like a red river, the armor lifted him and ricocheted him off the sky.

Ames, Iowa, was untouched. A few of the townspeople had seen needlecraft arrowing through the sky that night, but none had landed and none had been seen since. Carl's armor detected no zotl activity any-, where. He was glad for the miles of unsullied land that surrounded Ames. He was sick from the zotl killing and was grateful that no humans had been killed, including himself.

The sight of the lynk warehouse was a relief. Carl was sure it would have been a target, but the zotl in the short time before his armor was returned had obviously never found it.

He touched down before the partly open sliding door. His wounds were glossy, lacquered with the first sheen of scabs.

"Zeebo!" he called out as he entered. Beer-colored klieg lights gushed from the arched ceiling over the expansive interior. The living quarters looked lived-in: The giant TV was on, glowing with coverage of the worldwide UFO sightings.

He turned the screen off. "Zee-where are you?"

Carl roamed through the kitchen and sleeping quarters to the back of the warehouse. The lynk field tingled over him as he approached the hill of tarpcovered pig dung. He rounded the far end of the mound and was frozen by what he saw.

A bloated human figure was bent over a zotl female, face forward in its ooze-bubbling mouth. The male was clasping the back of the bruise-stained head. The body jerked upward and pivoted about. Through the blue-puffed features and the gangrenously swollen body, Carl recognized his friend. It was Zeke. The

agonized eyes nailed him, and the-turgid body careened forward.

Carl glimpsed a hip-high parabola of glassy metal--a lynkre he dodged Zeke. A silvergreen light streamed through the parabola; which he could just see beyond the stout shape of the zotl female. He fired an inertial pulse at it, and the barrel shape burst apart.

Before he could fire again, Zeke grabbed him. They struggled across the floor of the warehouse to the back wall.

Zeke had Carl in a headlock, and Carl was hooking back with his legs, trying to trip him. He beat the lance against Zeke's sides, not wanting to fire on him. Their locked forms smashed against the back door of the building, and it burst open under the impact. They fell through, and Carl twisted out of the powerful grip and rolled to his feet.

Zeke was on his hands and knees, cumbersomely rising.

Carl fired a carefully aimed pulse to the back of Zeke's head, and the zotl spider fell away, its feedtube sliding out of the skull slick with blood chime.

Carl rolled Zeke over. The blue thick face was crazed, the eyes yellowed, unfocused. The lance magnetically soothed the brain and sheathed the body in a flux of vitalizing energy.

Soon Zeke's gaze was focusing and his voice mouthing toward sound.

'16d--lynk," Zeke rasped.

"I know," Carl reassured him. "I saw it. I'll go back in and destroy it."

Zeke clasped a black-fingernaded hand on his arm, .his bruise-quilted face gasping to speak. Before be could, the air shocked to an icy brilliance. The warehouse was filled with an enormous light. The radiance seeped through the cracks of the walls and streamed in great beams out of the windows and the back door. Then darkness.

The armor filled Carl with understanding: The

zotl lynk had inadvertently provided the necessary inertia to lynk the pig manure with the Werld-two weeks early. The armor also inspirited the news that unless he got himself into the warehouse within the next few minutes, while the lynk echoes were still strong, he would be unable to lynk at all. He would be permanently stranded on earthtwo.

He peered down at Zeke, whose tormented face was relaxing toward the semblance of a smile. "Go-" he husked. -He wanted to tell Carl so much-about the. marvels of pain the zotl had revealed-about the supernatural calm inside the emptiness of the spirit where only pain can go-but his mouth barely worked. "Youcan't do-anything for me." His lips hooked toward a smile. "Go-"

Carl used the lance to radio for help. He made Zeke as comfortable as he could, laying him in paineasing currents from. the lance. If only he could take Zeke with him-but his friend's inertia belonged to earthtwo, not the Werld. Carl's insides were jumping with the eagerness to go, but he still had to force himself to turn away from his friend. At the back door, he looked around and waved. Zeke's finger twitched. Carl walked into the warehouse.

A moment later, the door and windows flashed with a majestic fulgor. The darkness that settled back was salty with tiny lights for a long time afterward.

Carl appeared for a few seconds in Rataros. The black flames were frozen, still as megaliths, and in this pitch dark, the animal in him was close. He felt fear like a wetness inside him, cold and electrical. He was alone with that fear within the vacuum of himself. The armor had been taken away again.

Suddenly, horizons of red clouds appeared. Great strides of clouds! He tumbled into a gulf of skyles and cloudlanes, falling from lynk to lynk on his lightsecond-long journey to the eld skyle. The lance was still in his hand, and he clutched the weapon close to his body. He noticed then that he was garbed in a leather finsuit and strider sandals.

He was numb with the horror of losing Zeke, yet by the time the sky had brightened to the beaten bluegold luster of the Welkyn and the eld skyle's giant moss-veined walls were turning below him, awe had softened his feelings. The black waters of the eld skyle's lake gleamed deeply as opal. He slid over a fallpath to the wall of the lake. Thornwings were everywhere, cruising low over the water and dropping in dark bales. As he climbed down the wall, he saw the mound of pig manure on the'beach below him. Thornwings were gathering the dung and dispersing it on the waters.- Among the slopes of dung were scattered articles from the .warehouse: a chair, a houseplant, pots and pans, and Zeke's black-and-white-speckled notebook. He picked up the notebook and looked out over the lake, waiting for the eld skyle to speak.

Nothing happened. He waded into the lake and even immersed himself in the thick water. Still nothing. On shore, while he waited, he flipped through Zeke's journal. He read: "Emptiness. Carl is gone. I'm alone. Really. alone. The connection with the armor has vanished. For the first time in over two years, I am just myself again. No inspelling. No surges. Strangely enough, that doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I'm glad. I guess I've finally learned: A man must love his own to stay a man."

The gravel clacked behind Carl, and he jumped about with a shout. He saw a brown tangle of vines and vetch with a green scar glowing behind a fist-sized

birdhead. The thornwing's stately walk stopped a pace away;, and its tendriled arms lifted and opened.

""You've come for me, my old friend," Carl acknowledged.

"Okay-we'll go." He looked out over the eld skyle's lake one more time. The other thornwings were still splashing bales of manure into the lake. Somewhere in its depths Sheelagh's strangeness was being digested. And others, too. Someday he might meet them. If he hadn't killed the eld skyle by overloading. it. A pang of guilt cramped through him.

"Don't worry about me," he heard the eld skyle's voice, far, far within himself. He startled. When he strained to hear, it was gone. Then: "The spores you released were limited. Only eighty thousand or so people will catch light before the number of spores is exhausted. Their strangeness feeds me well. It pulls me away from you."

The eld skyle thinned o$: Feebly, the voice returned, inside the ringing of his earbones: "But listen. Though the Rimstalkers have taken back their armor, they've left you the lance."

"Great," Carl grumped. "A sword and no shield."

"More than a sword," the shadow-thin voice said. "It is a bomb. When you pull o$' the hilt, it will trigger a starfire geyser that will cut off any approach--a wall of impenetrable energy.

Use it to save your Evoe. The thornwing knows where to take you. That is all I can do for you-all that is left in me of you.

Goodbye, Carl Schirmer. And glad fortune to you."

Silence hissed.

Carl smiled sadly and proudly. He saluted the eld skyle with his lance and stepped backward into the bristly embrace of the thornwing.

The thornwing carried him through several natural lynks, rolling down a fallpath in the intense, bluegold light of the Welkyn. The pure white and languorous clouds poured through the skyles on their endless spiral climb toward the shear winds of the Eld. Their gray velvet interiors blanked his thoughts, and he burned in the sliding silence with the power of his return. Zeke's notebook tucked into the back of his finsuit and the wounds from his zotl fight were the emblems of his striving. And Evoe was at the end of this journey. The lance in his firm grip was cold. Its alien works clicked and purred. In the open spaces, Carl took shots at rock spires and treetips, remembering the use of the lance. It was difficult without the armor to help him select the lance function and to aim. Then they dove through the Cloudriver for a long time, and there was nothing to see. The emptiness jammed him toward sleep.

When the clouds burst apart, they were within sight of Galgul. The roots of Carl's blood flinched at the dark sight of the City of Pain. Cindered debris plumed the sky casting a gravelly black pall over the remaining zotl spheres. And though this was the Welkyn, the light was dim and redlong.

The thornwing hauled Carl through one of the dusty flightlanes that unfurled in carbon-black arcs about the broken city. Galgul was bound in a knot of clogged sky cut by fallpaths. But in the interim since the gravity wave had ruptured these spheres, the fine dust had settled with the heavier mangled shards into. ribboning bands outside the free lanes of the moving fallpaths, and the thornwing could skim over the charred litter toward the core of Galgul.

Needlecraft cruised among the plasteel debris, but they were no threat. The lance alerted `him with tones to the approach of the zotl, and the thornwing was able to move with the streams of detritus closer to the cracked-open sphere.

As the shattered spheres neared, Carl glimpsed

through the cumbering fields of shrapnel one sphere that gleamed. His eyes strained, and his heart pounded with the effort to discern what was ahead, but the rubble had become too dense. The fallpath ahead grinded with orbiting gravel. The thornwing's flight faltered and stopped. It could carry Carl no farther.

Carl thought of clearing a path with the lance, but nixed the idea when he realized the next moment that it would draw the zotl to him. He would have to go on alone.

He reached out and took hold of a scorched boulder. The thornwing let him go, and he was left hanging on the edge of the fallpath with the other debris. His weight nudged the housesized boulder, and in the diminished gravity they began a slow rotation. The tumbleweed that was the thornwing rolled toward the clear flightlanes with a farewell squawk and banked out of sight.

Movement in the distant direction it flew caught Carl's eye.

He scrambled against the spin of the big rock and climbed to the turning edge where he could see human figures galumphing over the choked edge of the fallpath. Black dust swarmed about them like a haze of flies. By their silhouettes against the ,luminous blue shadow of the Welkyn, he saw that they were Foke and that they wore the black strider tunics of a suicide squad.

They were approaching, and Carl bent down and walked in synchrony with the rock's movement, staying in one place, .

ready to drop out of sight. The group bounded through the smoky air close enough for him to see their faces. They were strained with flight, eager to cover distance.

Carl's focus locked on the blackbearded, gangstergrim face of the chief: It was Allinl The thornwing had .carried Carl to Allin--by its own design or the eld skyle's, Carl had no time to guess. Allin rushed by meters away.

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 crystalfaced 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 purged 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- .

Caity-What goes up is

futileunless it goes

out.

-Z