Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  “Prognosis?”

  “Sorry, but I haven’t an optimistic thing to tell you. He has the idea we’re going to transfer him to an orphanage but it’s only a dream in his own mind. He isn’t fit to be anywhere but here. But I expect he’ll be let out when he’s grown since that’s the way society does things.”

  “He lies a lot, doesn’t he?”

  “All the time.”

  From there I went to see Croffs niece. He had dabbled in antiques, left a fortune’s worth besides which he also dealt in coins, stamps, fossils and odds and ends that were all worth money. His niece spoke kindly of him and hovered near while I looked through the objects in the room. It was jammed with CrofFs leftovers.

  “I stored it in here because there are some other nieces and nephews I’m trying to locate,” said the woman. She was Croffs blood relative but looked nothing like him, being short and tough with a steel smile and gentle eyes. “I guess we’ll divide the spoils,” she continued. “My uncle had a good reputation among us.” She fell silent and gave me a curious stare.

  “I was in trouble once and he helped me out,” I said.

  She didn’t object so I wandered through the room, picked up one or two things, frankly snooped. What did she care? I was just a kid. I even emptied a carton, took everything out and put it all back in a piece at a time. Why someone in Vermont would want to mail such stuff to Croff was a mystery, but the postal mark showed it had been delivered just a day or two before he came to Mutat to see me. There was a bottle of eyewash, a frayed paperback, a roll of tape, a pair of motorcycle goggles, a scarf, a cup, a tieclasp and some safety pins. A small parcel of worthless junk.

  “He was very generous,” said the woman behind me. “I didn’t know him very well but he was reputedly kind. All these valuable things really surprised me because I assumed he spent his money on ring research.

  “The government paid for that.”

  “I expect so. Isn’t it foolish how the world runs after those silly circles, investing all that money and energy?”

  I guessed she couldn’t see the silly things. “Yes, it’s foolish.”

  “I’m sorry you think there was something even worse about my uncle’s death,” she said as she showed me outside. “I mean, I can tell you don’t think it was a burglary and killing by strangers.”

  “No cryptic messages with my name on them, nothing in his will, no scrap of paper?”

  “No.”

  I said good-bye and went away. I could always find Erma, kidnap her, beat the daylights out of her and make her tell me who and where Appy was. Also, I could fly to the moon and declare my genealogy for twenty generations.

  18

  Bud Jupiter. He was just a crazy old man, like thousands of other crazy old men wandering around institutions, but there was something alarmingly familiar about him, alarming because it was so wrong and out of place and impossible. As I stared down at his shrunken face, I was relieved that my memory failed me. He reminded me of somebody but I didn’t know who and for some reason I was glad of it.

  Solvo had put me onto him, responded to my written request by sending a letter of his own. He didn’t mention Lamana and didn’t seem to be interested in what I might be doing.

  Bud Jupiter must have been close to ninety, weighed about two hundred and eighty kilos, talked to himself and, according to the nurse with us, wandered away from the place and went downtown every chance he got.

  “He’s bad,” she said. “Always was. Been here thirty years and can’t be relied on for anything. Isn’t that right, Bud?”

  “Shut your mouth.” Jupiter had no teeth. He was skinny, not because they didn’t feed him but because he couldn’t stay still. He was like a racehorse in a stall. A dozen times he went to the window and looked out. Sometimes he stopped behind another tenant to peer over his shoulder at the drawing table. “That stinks,” he said once and the man placed his hands over his work and closed his eyes until the critic moved away. “Everyone in this place is trying to kill me,” Jupiter said to me. “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” I said, but he had already forgotten his question.

  “You can’t talk to him,” said the nurse. “He’s so senile it’s pitiful. If I didn’t spoon feed him he’d starve.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “That’s no secret. He’s university educated and made a big name for himself in transmutating. He was the first person to come up with logical explanations for how it worked. I guess you could call him a pioneer. Any library has all kinds of information on him, except he lost his mind in his fifties and that was the end of his usefulness. Went downhill ever since.”

  Wondering why I had wasted my time going there, I left the institution and went to chase down other leads to my mystery. Ectri, for instance.

  He wasn’t in Jersey, Boston or Washington. From a memo on his secretary’s desk in Boston I gained the information that he was at a Veterinarians’ convention in Tulsa. From there he went to a small experimental clinic in Trenton. I knew because I followed him.

  He, another man and a woman were doing work on immunology and had cage after cage filled with mice, rats, hamsters and guinea pigs. At least that was the kind of work the signs outside the clinic claimed they were doing. I scouted the area for rings, saw none and settled down in a patch of woods to watch the place. Once in a while I sneaked across the grass to look in a window. The thick shrubs and trees growing all around the building prevented them from seeing me while I had the advantage of spying at leisure.

  The disadvantage was that they didn’t do anything with rings, didn’t even come out to look at the sky. There was absolutely nothing interesting going on and I was about to give up in disgust when Ectri came out in the middle of the afternoon and headed straight toward my hiding place in the woods. He was carrying twin suitcases. Making like a certain Indian acquaintance, I tiptoed away and hid in a pile of leaves, making so much noise it was a marvel he didn’t hear me.

  There was a ring channel in a clearing in the woods. Ectri stopped short of it and waited patiently, and before I knew it the woods were full of human derelicts. They must have come from drunk tanks, gutters, abandoned buildings, charity houses, old folks’ homes, etcetera. All were middle aged or past. Some were ancient and tottered between trees as if they were on their last legs. From a shed hidden in a grove, they brought out folding chairs and then everybody sat down and waited for their turn with Ectri. He played the opthalmology bit, retrieved instruments from his suitcases and examined their eyes, occasionally applied drops, said things by way of encouragement and comfort. He wasn’t sinister enough to suit me.

  I was close enough to hear him and he was asking them if they saw the rings. Any rings. His fifth patient, an old man, croaked that he could see something blue from the comer of his eye. Ectri gave him another drop or two from a bottle and the old man said he could see the ring more plainly than before. It was big and round, he said, wide enough for a man to walk through. He shrank in his chair when Ectri invited him to do just that “Behind me,” said Ectri. “Come on, follow me.”

  The crowd gaped and gasped as the two seemingly vanished into thin air. No one talked or got up and left though Ectri and his companion were gone a good twenty minutes.

  “That’s a danged sight better body I had in there!” said the old man to the seated spectators upon his return. “I tell you, I was powerful and I felt young. I think I had maybe a couple or three gray hairs is all. I want to go back.”

  A woman dispatched herself from the group, stepped up to him and laid a hand on his arm. “I’ll teach you but you have to mind me, otherwise you’ll do something dumb and maybe get yourself lost or killed.”

  “I expect I can get just as expert at muting as you.”

  “But not all at once,” she said. “You need to leam colors. Tell me right now if you’re a good listener, or just sit down and don’t waste my time.”

  “I’ll listen!”

  She led him to another
blue ring and the crowd enjoyed the spectacle of seeing them march off into nothing at all.

  “I see shadows but nothing solid,” said Ectri’s new patient, a tall, middle aged woman.

  “It’s necessary for you to see the colors.”

  “Gray won’t do?”

  “Not a bit. They’re either green or blue. Take your seat with the others and concentrate. Focus on one shadow at a time and see if they don’t clear up into something.”

  Practically everyone could pick out some part of a ring before the session was over. Some saw shadows like the tall woman while others saw bits, pieces, streaks, momentary flashes, and all seemed to improve after eyedrops and concentration. It was my guess that before long they would all be independent travelers.

  For these people, seeing rings was like making visual contact with something totally outside their comprehension. Crammed with mind blocks of self defeatism, their blindness might be curable with logic and eyewash.

  Would a human body saturated with alcohol or drugs or both mutate into a slok once it went through a ring? I didn’t know but I tried to find out. The majority of the rings in the channel were of four or five shades of blue and green which meant that Ectri’s students were muting to the same four or five places in Gothland and Waterworld. Circling through the woods, I moved to where the channel flowed out of sight, chose a blue ring that was infinitesimally darker than most and stepped through. The difference in color was slight yet I landed several kilometers from my desired destination.

  I found one of the right spots by simply running a zigzag course on the hot surface of the planet. Eventually I came to an escarpment overlooking flat ground where three whimpering goths crawled about and watched while their leader showed them what to do. Obviously these people hadn’t been saturated with much of anything but determination before they came through. There wasn’t a slok in sight. For a while I lay on the cliff and observed as the teacher showed her students the lava pits, tar pools, brimstone rain and finally the labyrinths.

  By the time I got back to the woods outside Trenton, Ectri was gone. Most of his audience were now in other dimensions. The chairs had been put back in the shed which was then locked after which the stragglers walked through the trees to a crumbling road leading to a crumbling city. They were the dregs, the outcasts, the drop outs who didn’t work, pay taxes or vote. Their homes were as hopeless as they, gutted rooms in dead buildings, damp cellars beneath ancient wooden frames, mausoleums musty with the smell of long forgotten dead. Anything with a roof and a floor would do; a place to sleep, a cubbyhole in which to hide from the occasional marauder whose burned out brain sent him or her on a rampage through the derelict city.

  There were food dispensers on two or three comers offering cheap, unsaleable items such as boiled cabbage, beans, bread, fruit. The machines required energy but the government said it was worth it to keep the dregs of the world alive. The food dispensers were everywhere in the country. All over the country rotting cabbage, beans, bread and fruit lay in the streets.

  I followed Ectri’s dregs, or one in particular, into the city past the first broken signs, walks, streets and buildings. She slipped between some split concrete and disappeared. I followed, found the route leading down a clay tunnel into an old water pipe that ended in an earthen cave. Hastily I backed out and went to find someone else to follow. Anyone who lived in a wet cave couldn’t be all sane and though I didn’t demand much from dregs I wanted a minimum of logic.

  No sooner had I stuck my head up out of the hole than an arm encircled it and hauled me on up into the dusky light.

  “What you doing here?” rasped a voice. “Don’t you know us dregs don’t allow no brats in our fancy town?”

  “Do you have to be dirty and stinking to be a dreg?” I managed to choke.

  “No brats,” said the voice but the arm loosened. This one was no embittered and disillusioned college professor or some other refugee from the elite of the world. Probably he had been a dreg long before he actually joined the ranks. Casually he picked my pockets of about ten dollars and change and then he booted my rear and set me on the road headed out.

  It wasn’t exactly a tent meeting a group of others were having in a concrete lot some distance away but it looked like one to me as I crept over and between blocks of stone to get closer. They built a fire in the center and sat around it while a member stood up to talk about the disadvantages of muting. One: they couldn’t do any drinking or doping. Two: they couldn’t remain dregs if they did anything so respectable. Three: muting was just another form of escape and bottles, pills and needles provided that.

  Someone else got up and contended that ring travel wasn’t anything like drugs, that it was a talent and everyone knew what you did with a talent; you at least tried it out.

  The first speaker stood again and said Ectri probably worked for the government, that the whole bit was just another ploy to get them detoxed and into charity wards.

  People began talking out of turn and by and by they were all talking at once. Then they were shouting. Before the brawl began in earnest I sneaked back the way I had come, located a ring zipping through the sky and used it to go to Waterworld.

  I must have landed in Kisko’s favorite territory or perhaps he was just feeling energetic but around me formed a surging maelstrom that alternated between being black and white, violent and mild, noisy and quiet Sometimes when I tried to break through the wall of tumbling water into the calm I was sucked into black whirlpools and left to spin. Whether all the maelstroms or the dark shadows were Kisko’s calling cards I couldn’t be sure but I heard him raging and shrieking in the distance, still mad and lost and swinging in and out of dimensional doorways like a child in a playground. But he wasn’t playing. By then I didn’t know what he was doing, whether he had gained or lost ground in his attempts to save himself, whether he was aware of any part of reality.

  There were many clues that made me believe he recognized me. His shadow followed me, he changed my environment in some way, such as maelstroms in Waterworld or dark, moving patches in Gothland. Even now he pursued me in the ocean and prevented me from having a peaceful swim. I climbed into an empty shell to see if the churning water might expel it, and it did. I drifted into a tranquil scene of floating mountains and seaweed for the span of five whole minutes before the aquatic storm located me again and began tossing me about.

  Having had enough exercise, I found a blue ring and went to Gothland. On the broad face of the most obvious escarpment I could find I scratched a message: THAT WASN’T FUNNY!

  An irritation with Gorwyn occupied my mind all the rest of that day. Lamana hadn’t showed up and I could imagine how the experimenter might keep her prisoner for a while to explain to her how unthoughtful it had been of her to cross him up.

  Disliking inactivity, I jumped on Bandit’s back and went away with him and Komo to her natural habitat. It was such an astounding place that I climbed off my horse and stood on practically the only flat and substantial piece of ground anywhere around. I didn’t change at all while my mount became a sleek, winged beauty. Komo muted into a lovely, long necked, gazelle-type creature with wings and tiny feet that just fit onto the sharp ridges and rocky spires that made up the planet. One after another the thin shards of turf ran for kilometers like endless racks beneath the pale sky. Whether there was flat ground somewhere I never found out. Several kilometers below the tips of the ridges was a heavy blue fog that didn’t blow away or move, not that Komo or Bandit seemed to mind as they flitted through the sky or gracefully settled down on a narrow strip to graze, for all the world like great insects in an insane world.

  It wasn’t a place for people though I felt comfortable enough sitting beside the ring we had entered. Giving Bandit a last glance I went back home. He would follow whenever he felt like it.

  Olger told me I had received a phone call from the Prospect Detective Agency. I called them back. After all this time they had an address for me. In a hovel in a dregtown in
Memphis I could find Wheaty.

  It was with mixed feelings that I went after him. It seemed paradoxical to me that traitors could remain human on the outside, like healthy looking gourds with nothing in them. Never having been to Memphis, I took a blue ring into Gothland and exited through a yellow one I knew would land me in southern Kentucky and then, with my best eye in operation, I chose another ring in Gothland that was slightly darker than the first. It put me in Columbus, away from my intended destination, so I knew the color I wanted lay in the lighter zones. A few minutes later I stepped onto a street forty miles from Memphis. Sick of rings by then, I caught a bus.

  Wheaty had gone down in the world. With his hangdog eyes and his sagging cheeks, his hurt mouth and his wounded psyche that ran around in his skull like a cornered rat, he seemed surprised but glad to see me. “I should have given up the job before I cracked,” he said. “But that’s what cracking is. You do things you never stop paying for.”

  “Maybe you did some paying, but the man you owe hasn’t collected,” I said.

  “What man? What are you talking about? Never mind, the world is on its way into oblivion. Don’t you understand? Dark Ages, baloney, it’s the living end. No lights or heat now and no food next. Kids going to the dogs. Crime everywhere. We should all refuse to get out of our beds in the morning.”

  “As usual you aren’t making a lot of sense.”

  “You’re not jaded yet. Just wait.” A flicker of his old self showed in his direct look. “How did you manage to stay alive? How are the others? How come you haven’t been crushed under the treadmill?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “You already know.”

  “Outside?” he asked. “I never go there anymore. I can’t take the threat. Everytime I see an outsider in clean clothes I get paranoid. He’s about to kill me, or he’s planning how to take something I value, or he’s figuring out how to make my life unbearable.”