Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  “That’s preposterous,” Gorwyn said to me later. “What nonsense. One thing I happen to have is an active conscience. I’ve made records for you, most certainly, and they’re in Washington where they belong. Personally I wouldn’t mind dropping you out of a thirtieth floor window but I keep telling myself you’re an affliction that time will cure. Incidentally, why did you bloody Tedwar’s nose?”

  “Can’t you have somebody else guard me besides Pat and Mike? They get on my nerves.”

  “Their names are Padarenka and Mikala and they’re doing what they get paid for. To tell you the truth, they get on my nerves too, but nothing is perfect in this world.”

  Most muters became chemists and physicists because their governments encouraged them to do so. If substances could be changed into other substances simply by switching them to another dimension, why shouldn’t the process be made to be profitable? Why not find something useless in D-2 or D-3 that muted into something valuable when shoved into D-i?

  “The secret is in gold and diamonds,” Pat or Mike said to me one day as they dragged me through the flower beds on campus. It was spring and I would have felt fine if it weren’t for my leather halter.

  “That’s dumb,” I said, kicking dirt at them. “That’s all anybody talks about. Who cares for gold or diamonds? Gorwyn has the right idea. I once saw him get a radish seed out of a hunk of D-2 junk.”

  I had a room of my own on the thirtieth floor but someone was always snooping in it and tearing it up. Frequently I came in to discover that my bureau had been searched, or my closet had been ransacked, or my bed had been stripped.

  “Don’t hit me and I’ll tell you who did it!” said Tedwar, feeling his bruised lip and eyeing me with hatred. He was bigger and heavier than I but not half as earnest.

  “Are you trying to tell me you didn’t mess it up?”

  “Pat and Mike did it. They’re always in there. Don’t hit me! Tm not lying! The last time I went through your things, they paid me a dollar to do it.”

  “What were you supposed to be looking for?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I don’t know. They just said to see if you had anything unusual.”

  I spoke to the elevator guards on the third floor. “You don’t have to use your fists on me, you know. I’m not one of those people who are always trying to sneak away.”

  “We use our fists every chance we get,” said one of them. “The fact is, we hate lads.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to that slush,” said another. “We have feelings the same as anyone. We also have bills we have to pay with our wages, and if any of you gets through this elevator without permission we get fired. Say, what’s it like in D-2? What’s it like in D-3?”

  The law dictated that an American muter had to be educated at Mutat. Children with parents were allowed to go home on weekends. At the age of eighteen, a Mutat graduate could take employment with a company, or he or she could loaf for the rest of their lives. There was always money to be earned on the lecture-tour route, traveling around the country telling the sightless how elegant an experience it was to take a vacation from harsh reality. By the time the liars finished their work, the public thought D-2 and D-3 were Heaven with streets of gold and perfume for air.

  Weekends were best for me because nearly everyone went home and I had the place practically to myself. I could have left for good anytime I pleased but the fact was, I knew if I didn’t get educated I’d grow up to be an ignorant adult and, since I didn’t want that to happen, my only alternative was to remain.

  But not on weekends and holidays. Often on Friday evenings I went into D-2 or D-3, returning on Saturday or Sunday.

  “I’ve used every kind of truth serum on you,” said Gorwyn. “How do you account for the fact that I’m not getting any information out of you?”

  “Does it ever occur to you that I’m telling the truth in just plain conversation?” I said.

  “No, it doesn’t. Somehow you’re getting out of the building. Except for the channel, and I don’t think you have access to that, the area is relatively free of rings, which is why the school was built here in the first place. You can’t climb down to the ground with shoelaces or sheets any more because we moved all the extra supplies below the third floor. Could be you’ve bribed a guard, though I can’t imagine with what. I suppose I should be grateful that you return of your own accord. Saves me the expense of sending Pat and Mike—I mean, Padarenka and Mikala— after you. However, the significant point is that truth serum doesn’t make you spill the beans. Is it possible that blood clot in your brain has done something awful to you?”

  My memory of the outside world was sketchy. Towns, cities and country roads drifted through my mind like scenes viewed from a train window. They weren’t really mine because they weren’t accompanied by introductions or farewells. In other words, I had no recollection of having approached or left them. My real memories were of a chaotic economy, corruption and hostile minorities. Detroit meant nothing to me. I didn’t remember why I and the dead stranger had driven there.

  “A break in your routine,” Gorwyn said to me one morning after Algebra class. “A very important person is coming to see you today. He read my report to Washington regarding your immunity to truth serum, says you may be harboring a rare antibody, though I assured him you hadn’t a blamed thing anybody could call rare. Except, that is, for your deep-rooted and neurotic hostility toward the elevator guards, Tedwar and every other human being who tries to help you. His professional name is Ectri. See that you’re appropriately respectful to him.”

  My first glimpse of the stranger was from the end of a long corridor. A few days had gone by; I received the call and started walking to the main lounge. There was Gorwyn in the distance, his spare shape easily discernible in the shadows and then I saw another tall, broad figure, whereupon a stirring immediately began somewhere in my stomach. I sensed something about this tall, threatening individual. Thoughts flashed through my mind, startling me. Ectri, Ectri, the name seemed to mean nothing. I had no recollection of ever having met him, yet the farther I went down the hall, the more intense grew the foreboding that crept over me. Ectri was waiting for me where the shadows bunched. Like a slok he crouched and writhed in anticipation, and once I got near enough to him, he would step forward and take my throat in his big white hands. He would squeeze the life out of me.

  Without missing a pace, I turned and casually entered the nearest doorway. It was a reading room, empty and full of windows. It also contained another doorway that exited into an intersection of several corridors. Swiftly I opened one of the windows by pressing a button on the sill. It was raining outside, a chill and bleak day that matched my new mood.

  A bright green ring hovered in the sky a long way off and I ordered it, over and over again, to come to me. The thing was slow to obey because of its remoteness and because my mind wasn’t sharp and focused. Footsteps and voices sounded in the hallway behind me. In another moment or two, Ectri would walk into the room and claim me.

  I didn’t wait for the ring to drift all the way up to me. It was directly below now, laid out flat like the rim of a swimming pool. Just as I dived out of the window, I pressed the button so that the pane would slide shut. At about the same instant, or so it seemed, I plunged through the ring seven or eight meters above the ground.

  Waterworld, or D-3, was made of liquid. The only land in it consisted of floating mountains. A swimmer in Waterworld felt like a microscopic organism in a large fish bowl. There were decorative chunks of coral, rocks with caves in them, shells and clumps of sea flora all drifting independently in pale green fluid that seemed to have no boundaries. The planet was warm and quiet and full of mystery because it seemed to defy the laws of logic and physics.

  I was a water-breathing, scaly-skinned swimmer forty-five centimeters long and weighing approximately four kilos. My legs were slender, my feet were little silken members. Since I loved Waterworld more than anywhere, I didn’t come here as often as I went t
o Gothland. Here the silence was music, the currents were massage and balm while sporting in coral was a way of life.

  When I woke up in that hospital in Detroit, I hadn’t forgotten the different dimensions nor had I lost recollection of the fact that I was a muter with a difference. Amnesia cut all the people I had known out of my mind, plus addresses, scenes and activities and if there was anyone in the world who cared for me, I was unaware of it. At the moment I was also unaware of why I hadn’t transmutated into a swimmer comparable to my human size. Instead of doing things like an ordinary person, I seemed to be way off the track, but I knew it was right for me to be tiny now. The ring hadn’t done it. Something in my head caused me to turn out this way.

  No matter where I swam, there were rings to be seen. Yellows, blues and other colored donuts hurtled or lazily floated through the water, their passage occasionally creating maelstroms that I deliberately avoided because they could suck me down into black pools where it was cold and full of loud noises that hurt my ears. It occurred to me that somewhere in the same universe occupied by Earth a planet of water orbited, glistening in the sunlight, rotating and growing warm. Then I wondered if my beautiful D-3 was Earth billions of years ago when she was nothing but placid fluid and gentle motion. I couldn’t satisfy my own curiosity. Phenomena like Waterworld and rings kept all kinds of theorists engrossed.

  A clear piece of coral afforded me a look at myself. My head and torso hadn’t changed at all, except for their size and the skin condition. I had the same close-cropped, curly blond hair, the same blue eyes. All the other things were there, in a way improved upon. Especially I liked my scaled thighs and legs which were so slender and flexible that they could send me flashing through liquid space like an arrow.

  I was still holding onto the piece of coral and admiring myself in its glittering surface when the world rocked. It wasn’t a new experience and I didn’t think it had ever particularly bothered me before, but it did now. I didn’t like it at all. Feeling everything shift around me unleashed in me a keen sense of foreboding, as if I knew what it was all about and knew it was dangerous. Scientists said the dimension periodically passed through phases of reality and that the rocking sensation was created by the space between phases, similar to a person going from one bus and through a windy alley into another bus.

  After all, it wasn’t important. Nothing could make me pessimistic for long in my favorite world. Things soon settled down and I swam for hours, ate nuts and berries from floating shrubbery, played hide and seek in the holes and caverns in a rock, after which I curled up in a big piece of seaweed and went to sleep. I was never able to sleep in free float, probably a carryover from my human condition or perhaps I unconsciously feared floating away into nothingness or off the edge of reality, though I had never discovered anything but water when awake. It might have been the old human fear of falling; if I fell asleep without support, I might just drop out of everything. Anyway, the seaweed made a comfortable bed and hid me from prying eyes. Of course, I wasn’t large enough to be easily seen and, furthermore, there was no one to see me. I and Waterworld existed quietly and happily while the dimension from which I had escaped consumed itself with its own inconstancy. .

  Avoiding each and every maelstrom that came along was nearly impossible, particularly since it didn’t have to be a very strong one to take hold of me and toss me about. One day I ate too many sea nuts, was lying on a slab of coral groaning and moaning, when the slab took a fast flip under me and dumped me into a king-size eddy. Making like a bit of flotsam on its way down a sink drain, I reached out for any kind of support and banged my head on something big and solid. It was too massive for me to encircle it with my arms but there were pits in it deep and irregular enough for me to grab hold of. While black water churned all around me, I shivered from the sudden cold and hung on. Knowing my strength would soon fail, I felt around for more pits and cracks in the object, began crawling straight down into the churning water. At least it seemed down to me. I continued slipping until I came out of the black into green home.

  My first act was to check the object I had descended. After hours of investigation, I knew no more than I had before. It was a rod or a beam that seemingly had no end. On my side it was more or less smooth and if I hadn’t been so small I wouldn’t have been able to hold onto the scraped and peeled places. Likewise it was smooth on the right and left sides while on the far side it was indented. The whole structure appeared to be some kind of giant metal girder.

  Finding no end to it in what I considered to be a southern direction, I went north, fighting my way through several minor maelstroms that knocked me about until I realized it would be safer and easier to travel inside the indented portion. The walls on three sides protected me and my passage was considerably smoother. I must have swam a quarter-mile before venturing outside the indentation just in time to see a large net being hauled up from the depths.

  The net continued moving upward and finally stopped. Whoever was doing the hauling must have thought the prisoners needed some calm water for a while, though they weren’t taking their captivity badly. There were four swimmers in the net, a man, a boy and two women. They sat with their arms and legs sticking out through the holes in the mesh and their kicking wasn’t too panicked. Their backs were to me so they were unaware as I swam through one of the openings and investigated the top of the contraption. In no way would I be capable of loosening the great knots.

  Taking care that they didn’t see me, I sped away to hunt for a chunk of coral, my intention being to provide them with sharp objects to cut themselves free. I could chip some pieces of coral from a floating reef, hide at the top of the net so the prisoners couldn’t see me and drop the pieces down to them.

  I suppose it was as good a plan as any and probably would have worked but the net wasn’t there when I returned. I swam north and south along the beam but couldn’t find it. It must have been taken east or west, or possibly I missed it in one of the many maelstroms.

  Eventually one of those whirlpools grabbed me, sucked me down into a cold, black pit that was draining into a swift-moving current and dumped me into a warm ocean full of seaweed and floating mountains. I tried to find my way back to the metal girder. It was gone, hidden somewhere in the vast and unmarked space of Waterworld. Still, I searched for it for hours before giving up.

  Feeling uneducated and not too confident at that point, I decided to return to Mutat. I didn’t think the man named Ectri would still be there and now, when I thought about him, I couldn’t see why I had been so afraid of him.

  I had a photographic memory where color was concerned and I went on the hunt for a ring of the same shade as the one I had entered. It was a habit with me, checking the color of a ring after I left D-i. All around me in the water were dark yellows, ambers and pastels, and then there were sunny circles with subtle differences between them. After only a few seconds of study and concentration, I made my choice, swam forward and tumbled out onto the quaint old cobblestones of the quaint old town twenty kilometers from Mutat.

  Feeling tired and out of sorts, I solicited a ride back to the school, got out of the womans little electric car at the far end of the campus and began dawdling in the gardens.

  I didn’t pay much attention when Pat and Mike sneaked from behind two trees and crept up on me. They were always doing that and I figured they might as well get the credit for apprehending me. Like two golden bandits, they leaped on me and carried me away, but not to the school building as I anticipated. They had their own car secreted in a bam on the grounds, not the vehicle they used for normal business but a decrepit old gasoline burner with Venetian blinds on the windows. In it we went back to town and then to a private airport where I was put on a plane.

  I had been sold. It seemed that Padarenka and Mikala weren’t satisfied with the wages Gorwyn paid them and earned extra by doing odd jobs such as kidnaping orphan muters and selling them to agents who represented corporations or individuals.

  As I s
at tied in a seat with a strip of tape across my mouth, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked the twins how much I brought them on the open market.

  3

  The sweet smell of contention permeated the log cabin much like the fragrance of pine needles, mountain air, wood smoke and my breakfast cooking on the electric range.

  “Wont do you any good to cry,” said Wheaty, eyeing me with a suspicious expression. He was probably wondering why I seemed so cheerful. For days he seemed to have been trying to make up his mind whether I was to be laughed at or avoided. “We eat a kid a day around here,” he said. “Don’t let anybody fool you, there are animals in this world.”

  I particularly appreciated the way he kept flicking glances at the ring alarm on the wall. There was one in every room in the cabin, one on the front and back porch and three down by the corral.

  “I wonder what would happen if I rode a horse into D-2?” I said, noting his sudden pallor. I suspected that ever since the first moment we met, this man’s blood pressure had been up, his pulse was rapid and his adrenals were miniscule geysers. “I think maybe I’ll try it with Bandit,” I said. “First I’ll hogtie you to the saddle in front of me good and tight and then we’ll travel at a dead gallop through a good old blue donut. You know, one of the house-size types. I heard, though, that the bigger they are the farther you have to fall on the other side.”

  “Is that a fact?” Having already partaken of a breakfast of one soft boiled egg and a piece of dry toast, Wheaty contended with indigestion and indignation while I did away with scrambled eggs, sausages, buttered rolls, jelly, juice and milk.

  “Didn’t they feed you where you came from?” he said. Pain contorted his features as I drowned my eggs with blackberry jelly. “Where did you come from?”