Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  The fact that I knew I was falling helped. At least I wasn’t drifting which meant I had left somewhere and was headed elsewhere, though the latter might turn out to be infinity. Examining myself helped pass away time as I moved through the dark dimension. I had no ears, or that was my impression. There didn’t seem to be anything on or in my head but a pair of enormous eyes and a sharp little snout. About a meter and a half long, I weighed in the neighborhood of fifty kilos, mostly blubber or soft, resilient flesh, much like a seal except that I wasn’t a water animal. Neither did I need air or any other gas to sustain me. What I seemed to thrive on was vacuum.

  The quivering pile onto which I had first landed must have been some kind of launch pad, doorway, first step or whatever for creatures entering the dimension. Initially they had the slag with which to contend and during this activity they became somewhat oriented to their new selves and environment. I didn’t believe I or the dimension was being manipulated but this was the way I explained things to myself. There was little else to do. For a while.

  If I hadn’t been afraid or if I hadn’t been human by nature I might have enjoyed being a space skimmer. Darkness was all right, likewise silence, and who missed oxygen or any of those other things? Just me, but I knew it was because deep inside my mind the spark of humanity was ignited and would remain so as long as my spirit survived.

  It wasn’t so bad drifting nowhere and doing nothing. It was even possible to do calisthenics, to cavort and twirl like a motorized feather or bit of fluff. All of space was about me and though other objects probably existed somewhere I needn’t worry about overcrowding. It seemed my new nature ran more toward the isolated state than the gregarious.

  All this went through my mind before I landed on the plank. What it really was I never found out but it was my guess that it and others like it jutted here and there in the black dimension and a space skimmer who happened to land on one had all her problems suddenly condensed into one big tough situation. Perhaps the planks served to make life in the black more interesting. A little conflict never hurt, not even when it lasted a thousand years. Fortunately my confinement didn’t last that long.

  Falling through vacuum and having done so for an hour or a day, I stopped moving as something was suddenly thrust under me, breaking my fall, not jarringly but so unexpectedly that it brought me new alarm. Right away I didn’t like it. Right away I knew bad luck had touched me with a random probe.

  Hunger or thirst weren’t problems to be reckoned with here for they simply never occurred. Possibly time was distorted or perhaps there was an invisible trough from which I unknowingly swilled. Stranger things had happened to me and it was true that a sense of unreality accompanied me every moment I was on the plank so I couldn’t give a positively accurate account of the things that occurred.

  Mostly nothing did. Boredom became a terrible enemy as I crawled ever forward looking for an end to the surface under me or at least something different. It was solid, smooth, impersonal with nothing to recommend it to a space skimmer. My mouth was capable of yawning and I did a great deal of that after a long while. Not so fearful as before, I cracked my jawbones with huge, spiritless gapings, blinked at the sky, whacked the floor with my fins and wondered which way it was to the egress.

  My prison without bars had some definite measurements, was approximately infinitely wide and infinite in length, which was too bad for me as I didn’t relish the idea of a stroll toward forever though I did in fact crawl in that exact direction for a time. Sometimes I went back the way I had come but it didn’t help. Time, effort and boredom squeezed my mind dry, made my jaws ache, rubbed my belly raw and threatened to drive me maniacal or catatonic. For what seemed hours I lay on my back soundlessly groaning. If only there had been a little squeak of noise, something, anything to disrupt the tedium.

  Having thought myself into a nearly incurable state of ennui, I began crawling again, gaining a centimeter or a meter, forward with the left front fin and then the left rear, right front next, etcetera, and I would have imagined that so much activity would get me somewhere.

  By accident I noticed the warm area on the otherwise indifferent surface, vaguely realized I had slithered across it before, not just once but many times and, yes, touching it with my fins, belly and snout told me they were familiar sensations. I couldn’t be wrong about such a significant item. I had been over and over this same route before.

  I had nothing with which to mark the spot, besides which it wasn’t all that noticeable, being merely a slight heated area on the plank, somewhat like a spot on a rug where a sunray landed. At least one thing was in my favor throughout the odd exercise. I seemed to have infallible aim and was capable of moving in straight lines, scarcely veering from my intended path.

  It took me hours or possibly days or weeks to figure it out and even then I couldn’t believe it. Crawling took on genuine purpose because it was the only way I could determine the dimensions of the plank or whatever it was, using the warm spot as my marker. At first my measurements made no sense. Until doomsday, though, I could have traversed that surface and gotten nowhere. The puzzle had to be solved with luck and logic. Traveling forward, I came across that warm spot, traveled two meters and came across another, found still another four meters ahead and then a fresh one two meters beyond that, and so on and on until I lay down in exhausted bewilderment.

  After resting I changed direction, traveled directly left and crawled six meters before finding another warm spot. Two meters ahead of it was another and six meters beyond that was yet another. I lay with my snout on the warmth and wondered what it was. Possibly a faraway star was sending me a feeble ray. The fact that I didn’t see the light made no difference because my eyes weren’t like those I used to have. Conceivably there was illumination all around me and sound everywhere although I didn’t believe there was. Still the warmth existed under my snout, easily discernible through my soft skin, and as a matter of fact I was sensitive enough to note that the heat wasn’t evenly distributed over the area, being more noticeable on the right end than the left.

  This new discovery inspired me to movement so that I crawled forward two meters to a new warm spot and examined it. How strange, but this one had more pronounced heat on its left side yet seemed to be similar in every other way to the first spot. On I went, six meters ahead, and found the spot with a warmer right side. Turning left, I went four meters and there was a spot with a wanner bottom side, went ahead two meters and the warm side of the spot was on top.

  If I hadn’t known better I would have finally sworn I was lying on a flat plank approximately three by four meters with a single warm spot near one corner, about a meter from both edges. There I was, and naturally my calculations had to be incorrect because if I was on a plank of that size it would be a simple process for me to find an edge and get off the thing.

  That last thought inspired me to sinister imaginings such as, it was a distorted world I was in and what if the plank kept swinging around beneath me each time I reached the edge, or what if I myself were turning without even realizing it?

  From the warm spot I went at a right angle one meter and stopped. If I were indeed on that plank which I had imagined, then I was now perched on the edge and should be able to leap, fall or roll off into the chasm which seemed to constitute most of this dimension.

  It didn’t matter. Roll, pitch or scramble as I might, all I did was move one meter forward to the old warm marker. I was on a plank I couldn’t get off because something had happened to its depth. My prison had length and width but that was all. As far as progress on it was concerned, it would either be nonexistent or imaginary. I couldn’t get off an edge because there wasn’t any. Every time I traversed the length or width of it I just kept going in the opposite direction without any other change ever having taken place.

  Mine seemed to be an environment where solutions didn’t happen. Only circumstance changed, if one were lucky. I believe to this day that planks like the one I was on jutted out al
l over that dark dimension, and I can conceive of all sorts of people in the shape of seals lying on those planks wondering if they’re ever going to get off them.

  Deliverance was such a simple thing which was why I don’t think many people ever managed it. After deciding I was on a two-dimensional enigma approximately three by four meters, and after deciding that crawling was a waste of time and I’d never escape the wretched object, I surrendered mentally, emotionally and physically and expressed my contempt for accident and coincidence by slamming the warm spot one last time. I hit it hard with a back fin after which I planned to lie down and die or do whatever else I had to do.

  It was like dumping a truck, unloading the marbles in a toy, unfooting the unwary. The warm spot was struck by me and immediately something flew through space and collided solidly with the plank. Perhaps it was another plank, come to straddle mine and form an attractive line I could have spent a lifetime investigating. Rather than do that or anything I let inertia take its course, rose off my flat jail like a bit of down and began plummeting at a decent rate of speed through vacuum.

  Having already done a foolish thing by leaping into a dangerous situation while trying to avoid another, I behaved stupidly again, spied a forbidden ring in the darkness, forced it to come to me and plunged through it. Anything to escape before another plank came along.

  It was an off-colored ring, pale yellow and therefore to be shunned but I was so demoralized that any circle would have looked inviting to me.

  One instant I was an odd little seal creature and in the next I was submerged in liquid and about to give a healthy snort of relief for having misjudged the ring’s color and landed in Waterworld. Instead I began choking. I was submerged in fluid but there wasn’t a single scale or gill attached to my body. Not a tiny swimmer, not any size swimmer, I was Daryl Nobody somewhere on Earth and in need of air.

  The thought flashed through my mind that I might be at the bottom of Loch Ness. Or the Atlantic. Or Old Faithful. In fact I was in Rock Lake, state of West Virginia, about to be snagged by a fisherwoman sitting on a dock thirty meters away. Her startled face grew more so as I surfaced but she was calm enough as she reeled me in, hauled me out and sat on my back. It seemed she had never heard of other methods of resuscitation. Her name was Deider and she wasn’t about to believe I was a ring traveler.

  “Scared me some, seeing you float up like that, but a good swimmer could make it underwater from the other side to where I pulled you out. It isn’t all that big a lake.”

  “Like a submarine?” I said.

  “Just eat and don’t try me with any tales. I’ve been here and there and it’s my opinion that people who say they see rings in the air are big liars.”

  I tried to imagine that her three-sided shack was something created by the staggering economy but she assured me folks in those parts had lived thusly for better than three hundred years.

  “We’re like the original settlers of the country while everyone else are foreigners,” she said. “Except that I’m Christian. It’s live and let live and don’t talk about anybody.”

  “Thanks for the food and saving my life.”

  “You’re welcome. Next time don’t fall in the lake with all your clothes on.”

  Deider, her six children and ailing husband weren’t suffering from the energy crisis because they had never had any energy to miss. They owned an outhouse, a clean well with a hand pump, open fireplaces and enough candles to last a decade. Three of the children had scholarships and attended the college fifty miles away while the other three brought home books from the library and tutored themselves. At age eighteen they would apply for high school diplomas and scholarships to the college. Deider assured me they would be successful. All her children had whopping minds. They just didn’t have any money.

  I stayed a few days. Woods so dense they could scarcely be walked through lured me. Chewing sassafras bark, I tramped for miles through the most beautiful country in the world. Sitting beside a slow-moving creek, I watched crawdads burrow in the soft mud, blues and reds that scurried and dug with frantic motions. Squirrels played tag just out of reach, birds held socials, thunder cracked over my head like war, rain broke like shattered diamonds, spiders skulked and watched, apples rotted to make strong perfume, pears dropped like heavy stones.

  To be a nonentity wasn’t exactly my goal but it seemed to work for me decently well those few days. I lived in the woods like an Indian and though I didn’t hunt game I did track down nuts and berries. Now and then I showed up at Deider’s shack or one of the children searched me out in the wilderness.

  “The best thing to do after you find something you enjoy is to stop and figure out why everything else is so bad,” she said to me.

  “Figuring out stuff like that can take a lifetime, and then what’s left to enjoy?”

  “Memory. That’s all that’s fun anyhow. Don’t you know it isn’t the doing that’s so great?”

  “I don’t want a life of just thinking and remembering,” I said. “What a funny thing for a little old hermit like you to be saying. You don’t do anything but think, alone the way you always are, not unless you have an invisible friend.”

  “I don’t know if he’s invisible or dead or what.”

  Mutat was waiting for me in the pale sunshine, a prison of bricks, steel and formalized minds, a halfway house where unwanted persons were fed and kept track of. If lads like me weren’t loose in the streets we weren’t getting into trouble which meant we weren’t bothering adults, so they stuffed us in buildings like Mutat where other adults bored us to death with their outpourings. WTio cared if somebody sailed around the world in a rotting ship? Had the man known how to ring travel? Had he ever seen a ring or had he once dreamed such a thing existed?

  Something that never failed to annoy me was having my things snooped through. Somebody had had fun while I was gone, managed to pick the lock on my door and then ransacked in a reckless and abandoned manner. Even my bed was tom apart and the mattress lay on the floor, gutted like an old dolL The strings of junk that had constituted sleep guns and harnesses in D-2 were gone from my closet. Looking around at the mess, I suddenly got so angry I wanted to dismember someone so I went stomping down the hall toward Tedwar’s room. His door was ajar which made it all the easier and quicker for me. The carpet muffled sound so I got as far as the door itself before coming to an abrupt halt Apparently nothing in the world could be expected to work in a normal fashion. I heard Tedwar crying big racking sobs that came from deep inside his soul. My wrath left me that quickly. I couldn’t hold onto it.

  I leaned against the wall and listened to my mortal enemy cry his heart out. What had ever made me think he was an unfeeling monster? How could I nurture hatred for someone who suffered even more than I?

  10

  Trying to track down Croffs old associates wasn’t as easy as I anticipated. Orfia was my first choice for investigating since she had been a particular thorn in Appy’s side, seemed to have gone out of her way to scorn him, had been his avowed target for revenge. So Croff had said. He didn’t know what caused the antipathy between the two. It had something to do with professional jealousy. The situation had gotten so that nobody could get along with Appy or pacify him once he went into one of his frequent rages but Orfia was special, especially toward the end before they were all taken captive by the hoodlum. Had Appy been captured along with the others? No, but that didn’t mean anything. There were a few people who hadn’t been picked up.

  Croff was only sure of Orfia’s address at Burgoyne, and he hadn’t known if she was using her professional, domestic or real name. People did so love their anonymity.

  After I finally got to see the university records, I found them scant and uninformative. In fact they had been hunted through and thinned out. There was nothing about Orfia that Croff hadn’t told me.

  I thought about the problem while I got Bandit into shape, rode his fat off, stuffed him with vitamins until faint dapples showed on his glowing co
at, filed his feet and rubbed his legs with liniment. Even Googs lost weight and seemed to feel better.

  Maverick had another litter of kittens which inspired Olger to lecture me on the evils of overpopulation so I told her to go ahead and get the spaying done after weaning time.

  Gorwyn seemed thoroughly disgusted with me, even went so far as to hint he might send the law after me if I didn’t call a halt to my truancy.

  “I admit I’m no genius but don’t I pass all my exams and hand in most of my assignments?” I said.

  “Irrelevant There are rules in every organization and things operate better where there is obedience.”

  “I’m not a thing. Besides, you sold Groppo so there’s nobody interesting around here anymore.”

  “The ape was raised for selling as are all my animals. How else do you think we manage to live so comfortably here? The government is very stingy these days. And please don’t refer to the beast as if he were a person.”

  “About the truancy, you don’t really care whether I’m here or not”

  “Indeed?” he said in his fussiest manner though he gave me a flickering, odd glance.

  “It’s just as well because Tm the restless type and can’t tolerate being tied down. I’m staying out of mischief so there’ll be no repercussions. You have nothing to worry about.”

  This time he snapped at me. “I’ll be the judge of that. Don’t ever let me catch you ring traveling inside my building or I’ll have you confined to your quarters.”

  I visited a little town in Maine where Croff said he believed Orfia had mentioned she lived as a child. Only an ancient schoolteacher who somehow managed to survive on her Social Security was able to tell me anything.

  Her name was Flava and she rocked in her wooden chair as if she knew both of them would soon stop for good. Also, I think that was the way she got her daily exercise. The way she sent the rocker all over the high porch made me pay attention. Dust from the road had settled on her so I wondered how long she had been sitting there.