Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  We went back home, lay on a hill of Earth and admired the stars.

  “I wonder what those double rings are?” she said.

  I thought she was kidding, so I ignored the question. “Do you think it’s true rings open into those solar systems up there?” I said.

  “Everybody seems to think so.”

  “That doesn’t make it true.”

  “It’ll have to do for an explanation until something better comes along. Galaxies drift through one another and that suggests a lot of possibilities, especially if some are constructed of matter that isn’t quite like ours.”

  “Yeah, in a billion years the world won’t be the same,” I said.

  “The entire galaxy will be different because by then we’ll be passing through other star masses. What’s the use of worrying about it? Unless our brains develop we’ll never have all the answers. We need to be more intelligent.”

  “About everything. For instance, how do I get Kisko out of Dr…”

  “Anyone who gives you an answer to that will only be guessing. His realities aren’t normal because his mind is abnormal.”

  “I see a leg or paw in D-2 sometimes, but that’s all,” I said. “Once in a while his head appears, or his back, but there’s nothing attached to them but his cloud. I know it’s him because I can sense him all through it, but he’s either screaming or moaning so I don’t know if he’s aware I’m there.”

  Thinking about it made it seem worse so I tried not to but my mind kept slipping away from new subjects and returning to the old. How much of his memory had he retained, and did he know what the pipes and flowing oil were doing to the worlds? Some of the highest escarpments in Gothland were collapsing or sinking while in Waterworld floating mountains, rocks and collections of seaweed were on a fast journey nowhere. Maelstroms were being created everywhere so that there was no such thing as a calm swim. People complained to the government and were advised to stay home.

  “Ectri does nothing suspicious, by the way,” said Lamana.

  “We checked all the places he works in or out of, we put a one-week watch on his home, and all we learned is that he’s quiet and keeps his trail clean.”

  “Nothing works out of me,” I said. “My enemies act like angels while my friends give me a big stall.”

  “I’m telling you what I know. Solvo wants you to confer with his medical acquaintances.”

  “I can’t go running around making everybody nervous if I’m locked in a hospital room?”

  “You’re in a good mood,” she said. “I might as well make it worse. Olger told me Bandit won’t stay out of the rings. He’s flying all over the universe.”

  “He’s an idiotl” I said and left her there while I went away to brood alone. I had no family, there was no one I could fully trust and now my horse had given up waiting for me and was entertaining himself by doing exactly what I had forbidden him to do.

  It didn’t take me long to reach the decision to turn myself over to Solvo and his medics. After all, what was there for me to do as long as Erma was free to pop in on me whenever she felt the notion? That she hadn’t come after me yet was enough to make me worry. At least for a few days I wouldn’t have that on my mind.

  The hospital Solvo put me in was staffed by Indians who got a big kick out of never allowing any human emotion to enter their expressions. “You don’t fool me,” I said to the tiny mite who was in charge of seeing that I didn’t remain out of her view for so much as a minute. About a hundred years old, she watched me so intently that I found myself doing the same thing to her. “You plan to scalp me when I’m asleep,” I said.

  Her name was Chameleon and she was incredible. “I have the idea you don’t speak English, Spanish, Redskin or anything human,” I said. “If you want my opinion, you sneaked out of a wrinkled, gray ring. Anytime you like, you can go back through it.”

  She spent her time scurrying across the room to peer from the twentieth-story window after which she darted to my bed to secure the blanket around my shoulders and then she looked in the bathroom to see if any strangers had appeared there since her last search.

  “You’re nuts,” I said. “Sit down. Don’t move. Stay still for twenty seconds.” Doctor Oregon came in and I said, “Why do I have to stay in bed when I’m not sick?”

  He was an old stoneface from way back. “This is a hospital, isn’t it? Where else would you be but in a bed?”

  I accused my ancient overseer of being kin to a lizard. Once I grabbed her hands as she fussed with my bedding and was surprised to find she had strong muscles beneath her thin skin. “You like me, don’t you?” I said, but she only looked at me with her blackberry eyes and showed me some of her capped teeth that were so white and even they made me think of a shark.

  The room was large with just the one bed and a great deal of electronic equipment in a comer. According to Doctor Oregon, the machines prevented my signals from going any farther than the building. No matter how tough Chameleon thought she was, I had no intention of staying in bed, so I got up one evening to look out the window. Right away she didn’t like it and complained without saying a word when I made motions for her to bring me a chair. She was good at humming, moaning, whistling, grunting, even growling and by then I had learned that the only time she was totally quiet was when I was in bed with my eyes closed.

  They used a strange kind of machine on me that reminded me of Gorwyn’s crown of wires in that it made me dizzy, but there the similarity ended. I stood in metal shoes in front of what looked like two tall sheets of glass, one of which bore a red diagram of my body. A sonarlike signal came from the diagram, penetrated a part of me and reproduced what it found onto the second sheet of glass. When the two didn’t match, the reproduction was in purple. It wasn’t a slow process. The figure representing me on the blank pane grew from appendages to pelvis to torso and head in a matter of minutes, and all the time I stood in the metal shoes and tried to overcome my vertigo.

  “The diagram on the left is of a normal person of your size and body weight,” said the doctor. “The one on the right shows us divergences from that norm. As you can see, there are a couple of irregularities.”

  He told me later that the duplicator was a handy thing to use in diagnosing injury and disease since it pin-pointed problem areas. As for me, I had a series of electronic instruments inside me that couldn’t be excised because they were in the form of a tape a centimeter long and extremely narrow. He said they had probably been introduced into my bloodstream by injection where they traveled for a while before lodging in the wall of the left ventricle of my heart. They weren’t hurting anything and they were already in a state of decay which meant they would eventually be inactive and harmless. As for my head, I had a little extra bit of matter in an untouchable spot and it wasn’t mechanical or the result of trauma. It belonged there, was something I had been born with.

  “It’s nothing to be concerned about,” said Doctor Oregon. “This sort of thing crops up once in a while. It’s nature’s way of trying out something new, like when people first started seeing rings. We’re sure it’s the reason you transmutate into such unusual shapes. Probably it’s a survival mechanism.”

  The surprises kept coming all the while I was in the clinic, but the one that startled me the most was when their leading psychiatrist tried to break my memory block. She turned out to be the little bit of wrinkled leather who daily kept the eagle eye on me.

  When I laughed as she approached me in the comfortable chair they had provided for me, Chameleon turned her berry eyes full on me and showed me how she could change their color from black to crystal. Maybe she enjoyed stunning people to distraction, maybe not, but I sat still after that first attempt at levity and didn’t crack another smile. I might have gaped somewhat but I considered the situation dead serious. Never in my life had I ever seen anyone change the color of their eyes. Later I thought about how impossible it seemed and decided she must have hypnotized me. I never did find out.

  Ch
ameleon’s touch was feather light on my face, fond and possessive, as if she had a stake in the thinking property behind it “I’m not going to remember,” I said.

  Staring at me, she hummed a tune of mockery and derision. Again and again she stroked my forehead and gradually I relaxed and let her play witch doctor to her heart’s content I could tell by her humming how she felt, first impertinent and then solemn, dedicated, disbelieving, annoyed, persistent and at last resigned to failure. Her crystal-colored eyes worked like twin diamond drills that pressed against my psyche and tried to break through.

  It would have been agreeable with me had she succeeded. I wasn’t holding out or resisting but there was that hard wall somewhere between the back of my head and my eyes and it wasn’t going down that day nor was it willing to be penetrated. It was present, it was strong and Chameleon couldn’t champion it although somewhere through the session I sensed a slight shifting. I knew it when she realized and accepted her defeat, watched as her incredible eyes darkened and became as of old, was aware of her mood though not a flicker of expression touched her face. She was sad and the final caress she gave me was full of regret.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I get along fine, really ”

  I was grateful to them for not trying to keep me there once they found out what they wanted to know about me. After inviting me to return sometime for further tests in regard to my special talent, they literally showed me the front door, sans advice, and I took to the path eagerly and anxiously.

  “Want to go catch a slok and drag it into home D to see what it really is?” I said to Lamana who had probably never blanched in her life and didn’t then. “I don’t suppose you can explain to me why it’s possible to haul something dead from D and revive it?” I said as we went down the road. I knew already that if she didn’t know the answer to the question she could at least make an intelligent guess. Like Deider’s children, she had a whopping mind.

  “As far as yellow rings are concerned, the carcasses are all part of each other and are changed to their original forms, the same as usual. Don’t ask me why something dead or blind in One can’t go through any ring at all. I have an idea, though, that it’s because One is a truer dimension for us. I think if you found a native in Two or Three, brought them here, killed them and shoved them back into D, they’d resurrect. Of course I’ve never met any natives of D.”

  Thinking of shell worms, I said, “How come?”

  “Chance. I’ve muted to maybe six or seven different worlds but that’s a drop in the bucket I could travel to a million without finding an inhabited one. There are so many.”

  “But we’re closer to Two and Three which is why the majority of rings here are a certain shade of green and blue,” I said.

  We walked, talked and watched the sky for planes while we prepared ourselves for the hunt. Like Daniel Boone who had nothing better to do, we were off to do battle with a grizzly.

  16

  He was a big specimen who was obviously annoyed by our intrusion into his territory and broadcast his displeasure in a blasting screech that could be heard throughout the labyrinth. As I anticipated, Lamana was immobilized by the sight and sound of our target so I quickly climbed some high rocks piled along the tunnel’s side, thereby gaining the slok’s full attention.

  He had been filing his teeth on a broken stalagmite directly across from the stones I climbed and now we were both above Lamana. Casually I took to a narrow tunnel leading upward into the mountain, planning to whip about and attack if the slok decided to go for my smaller companion, but he had probably received orders regarding the giant goth and promptly took to my trail.

  As soon as I was assured that he was after me, I lengthened my stride to get him away from Lamana who fell in well behind us. At the end of the tunnel was a six meter drop into a frothing pool. Above and to the left and right were sloping paths leading around to the right to an amphitheater one or two meters above the level of dark froth.

  It took me several minutes to get through the tunnel after which I exited at top speed along the path to the left. The slok followed me while Lamana chose the path to the right and headed down into the amphitheater. In the meantime I slowed long enough for the chattering monster to draw close behind me. When it felt just right, I came to an abrupt halt and gave him both rear feet in the mouth. He bounced against the side of the mountain and dropped into the pool. Somewhat slowly he attempted to climb out into the amphitheater where Lamana waited to kick him back in. By the time he was ready to try to get out again, I was there at the pool’s edge. My companion and I used him for a football until he was so exhausted he was barely conscious.

  The normal thing to do when a ring happened along that one didn’t wish to enter was to blink, demur and close one’s eyes until it went by. After Lamana and I hauled the slok out of the labyrinths and up to the surface, we found the air so full of rings we had to pause while a group of them passed us. We selected a big yellow one with enough pigment in it to satisfy us that it would exit somewhere decent on Earth and just as we were preparing to go through with our prisoner, an earthquake or a maelstrom struck. The yellow sphere bobbed upward and away while the ground beneath us opened wide. Lamana cried out at exactly the same moment that I saw the other ring. There was no avoiding it, at least not as far as she and I were concerned. The slok fell into the abyss where it disappeared into a harmless river of bubbling lava but my companion and I pitched headlong through the forbidden gray circle.

  The first thing I noticed was that I had wings. My second flash of inspiration was a desire to go home. My body was much the same except that it was approximately one-tenth its original mass, meaning I weighed twenty-two kilos and was four centimeters long. I was more like an insect than a human. So was Lamana, and so were all the fliers in the green valley below us. That fact alone should have been enough to occupy my mind but it was shunted into obscurity when I saw the gigantic, toady creature squatting in the center of the action like a stone Buddha.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Lamana as we collided in the air.

  “I can’t fly,” she said, her eyes wide. “I don’t even like heights. What am I doing up here?”

  Whatever we might have decided to do had we been left alone remained a matter for speculation because a businesslike pair of winged citizens left the valley floor and came up to see us.

  “Get back on the job,” one of them said. He was a young male dressed in gossamer shorts, boots and a wrap that went around his ribs. “Why are you naked?” he asked, frowning. “What do you think you’re doing?” A miniature man, he was handsome and fierce of expression with wings growing from his shoulder blades. They were skin colored and webbed with ligaments. Like flags rippling in the wind, they spread and held him aloft.

  “They were tom from us in our work,” I said, wondering if that would do.

  “Come with me,” said the female. “Til see that you’re issued new ones.”

  I didn’t want to go anywhere near the toad and I noticed that our escort stayed well to its rear as we flew to what she called the supply depot. It was a mound of what looked like hollow green glass. Either the fliers spoke my language or my brain had been altered so that I could speak theirs. A few other things seemed familiar to me. For instance, when our escort brought us clothing from the green mound, I knew that boots always went on first and then the rib wrap followed by the shorts. That was the way miters were supposed to dress.

  “You both look strange,” said the woman, staring at us. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a person with yellow hair. And what country does this companion of yours come from? She has outlandish bone structure.”

  “That’s because we’re from the outlands,” said Lamana. “Wild country. Unusual.”

  “Why do you stand gawking about? Go back to miting.”

  I still wasn’t certain she wasn’t speaking something very close to English. I supposed we all looked like normal women as we stood the
re with our wings folded and out of sight. They were so thin and flexible that, when in repose, they formed only slight bulges on the back. But the woman with us was like none bom of Earth. Her ancestry simply wasn’t mine and Lamana’s. Her ears didn’t stick out enough, her nose was too long and narrow, her teeth were too small, her eyes were too round. Hair, long, dark and wavy, hung down across her chest. No wonder she stared at us. As we stood there, a blue scarab climbed out of the soil and waved its feelers at us. Big enough to relieve us of our toes with its pincers, it scattered into a dozen parts as the alien hauled a weapon from her waistband and let loose with three rounds of fast flame.

  Plainly almost anything that crawled might be a problem to the fliers. Around the depot dozens of gardeners pushed little mowers that demolished the high grass and anything skulking in it. In the distance a big, green, glittering lump reared into the sky. It was the city. It was home.

  Since Lamana and I seemed to have a disinclination to move, the supply officer called a flier to accompany us to our work area. Though the tips of my wings seemed to stir first, the initial movement was made right at my shoulder blades so that the pair of webbed appendages unfolded like accordions. Up as high as I could I stretched them, followed by a couple of vigorous flaps and then I rose with grace and no enthusiasm.

  The distant city, the supply depot and the valley were beneath me now and all were dwarfed by Dinglo the glot who was the biggest thing on the planet. Rank and loathsome, his was a pacific species and the fliers were fortunate to have him except when they accidentally flew in front of him. Hundreds of winged people labored over his exterior to keep him healthy. Lamana and I took our places on an empty scaffold at the back of his neck, a perilous position but not so much so as those on his face and head.

  The ropes supporting our scaffold hung from bumps on knobby protrusions dotting the glot’s hide. The knobs were big as boulders and provided us with plenty of smaller warts from which to hang our quivers. We also used them for climbing or we could cling to them between shots. Bags of antiseptic and wound packing hung within reach.