Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  With my head feeling as if it were full of crashing cymbals, I said, “If I didn’t know better I’d ask you if your name is Appy, but I1 ve already met Appy and he’s eighty years old and locked in an institution.”

  Quiet, eccentric Gorwyn had a fit. One of the raging, screaming, head banging kind. I couldn’t see it but I heard it all.

  He was in better form the next morning, seemed almost rational as he tried to pump me. Did I know anything about a pair of glasses? What kind? Very special ones. In fact they were more important than the oil which was merely a source of revenue. Not that money didn’t come in handy.

  The thing about Gorwyn was that he didn’t care enough to be stingy with information. Erma had once called me a stinking flea. I wasn’t even that significant to Gorwyn. As far as he was concerned I was a means to an end. That I also happened to be flesh and blood was just one of those things.

  “We always took second jobs under false names,” he said to me during one of our strange conversations. He was referring to his profession in legitimate ring research. ‘It was like a game, you understand. We ground away at our regular jobs until we couldn’t stand it anymore and then we either loafed for a while in some hideaway or took a relaxing or amusing assignment where no one could find us. Gorwyn was my grandfather’s name and I’ve used it once or twice before. I deliberately applied for work at Mutat in hopes of getting to you, and lo and behold, you dropped right into my lap. Oh, yes, I’m well acquainted with Orfia Kint. When I find her and her associates they’ll regret having run off with the glasses. They were a group project and no one person was supposed to take charge of them or take credit for having developed them. Now the situation has changed. As soon as I locate the glasses they’ll be my personal property and the others will be put out of the picture forcibly and permanently. It’s the only way to live, really. I went along for years doing everything like a good little altruistic boy and where did it get me? Out, that’s where. Since I’ve changed my philosophy I’ve probably become the richest man in the world. What do I care if the pipes are forcing those rings to stay still and are causing all those earthquakes? I’m a genius. What do I care if everything goes? Think of it. Many people have affected countries, nations, even the world, but whoever touched the universe?”

  He was mad and mixed lies and truth like a chef. Sometimes he forgot to feed me. His manservant was no longer with him, having defected to his old dreg town, and there were many chores to do just to keep the house functioning. The government was so tight with energy that Gorwyn didn’t have enough generators to power his machines twenty-four hours a day. The D-snatcher in particular needed much electricity so there was a large shield of solar cells on the roof to spark the machine during the times when the generators were too weak to power it. Gorwyn said he hoped this bit of information didn’t give me any ideas about running because the D-snatcher in the oil camp in Pennsylvania would grab me if I tried to mute.

  Whenever he made remarks like that, I looked about my cell and wondered how he expected me to do anything, let alone escape. If any rings ever penetrated into these dungeons, I had yet to see one or a part of one.

  “It wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience if you went back to the oil camp,” he said. “I intended having you transferred here once I finished my preparations. I imagine you’re curious. Relax. The crown of wires will eventually jog your memory block loose and in the meantime I’ll use the old-fashioned method of simply shoving you through double green rings until you find my friends. I know that’s where they are because I saw them go, but they had just knocked me in the head and my vision was so blurred I couldn’t make out the exact color. So I’m forced to fish for them with you. Were you present during the scene I just described? Yes, you know everything. Why do you think I’ve kept you more or less within my sights ever since you showed up at Mutat? All I have to do is get your mind clear and the whole shebang will be mine. Funny, I never knew you existed until those last few days and now look how important you are.”

  “You told me you couldn’t mute.”

  That amused him. “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Sometimes he fed Lamana and Tedwar. My Indian friend had been kept captive because he checked her background and found she was a policeman’s daughter and an active agent for the government and also because she had been suspicious of him right from the start. Just as obviously, her father and the people at the clinic had lied to me when they said they knew where she was.

  “She’s more sensitive than you,” said Gorwyn. “And no doubt more intelligent. You’re full of stupidities.”

  He didn’t like talking about Tedwar and said only that the boy had known of the whereabouts of this house, had walked away from the hospital and had come here.

  About the glasses, what did they do? Unlocked hidden resources in the mind. The wearer could see other doors to the worlds; there was no necessity for muting; just a step through one of those hitherto unseen rings allowed a traveler to visit another planet without changing his or her physical makeup, and they weren’t affected by what they found. They could go and observe, and they could—oh, what difference did my knowing make since I wasn’t going to live to tell the tale? But never mind the glasses, I knew all of it already and when my subconscious mind was ready to let it out, Gorwyn would be there to leam by it.

  “They took turns with you,” he said. “Before they turned you loose each one reinforced the other’s hypnotic suggestions. How clever they were! I’m the one person they told you not to be afraid of. They thought that would be your best protection, and in a way I suppose it was.”

  My dungeon smelled of dust and mold, the floor was earthen and unbelievably cold. I didn’t know when Gorwyn intended to take me out and try some experimenting but I almost wished he would do it right away. He behaved even more foolishly than before, as if his hold on reality was growing weaker. What would I do if he cracked and forgot I was down here?

  As for Lamana and Tedwar, they knew I was here but so much distance separated us that although we could hear one another call, we couldn’t make out words. Their voices came to me from different directions so I knew they weren’t locked together, for which fact I was grateful, and so must Lamana have been since not too many days passed before Tedwar began raving. Gorwyn hadn’t supplied him with medicine.

  For two full days the three of us went without food or water. I lay listening to Tedwar shriek, wondering how a human voice box could create such sounds and remain so untiring. Some of the noise must have penetrated to the upper reaches of the mansion because Gorwyn finally came down and took him away. I called out as the two of them went by my cell but only Tedwar looked at me with a grimace so full of malice I turned away.

  To my surprise he was calm when he came down to me late that night, or at least I thought it must be night. He had a flashlight and a handful of keys with which he experimented until he found the one that let me out.

  “Lamana,” I said as I stepped into the dim corridor.

  “Forget her!”

  “No, I can’t go without her”

  He argued for a few minutes while I persevered and waited for him to slip back into insanity, but he held on, finally relented and the both of us hurried down the hall to my friend.

  He couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted me to kill his father or wreck the lab. He said he had taken Gorwyn’s tranquilizers and flushed them away.

  “You’ve never seen him without his drugs?” he said to me. “Then you haven’t lived.” Later he said, “Once he’s asleep you can play war in his bedroom and never wake him up. Luckily for me he’s getting worse, locked me in a room as if he believed that would hold me. He ought to have known better.”

  After we promised to help him he went on the hunt for some heavy furniture with which to barricade Gorwyn’s bedroom door. He had decided not to commit the murder just yet. While he labored, Lamana and I backed off and did some plotting of our own.

  “How did you get mixed up with such people
?” she said to me from the side of her mouth.

  “I had to work at it.”

  “Let’s scram.”

  “You can go,” I said. “I can t.”

  “What do you mean?” Her tone was grieved and bordering on anger.

  “Unless Tm prepared to walk to civilization I have to stay. Any muting I do will land me right back here or at the oil camp where Erma’s waiting to get her hands on me.” There was another possibility. The D-snatcher at the oil camp would shut down at about eleven in the morning. According to what Gorwyn had told me, the machine in his lab ought to shut off about twenty-five minutes later which meant that for approximately five minutes neither would be operating. If I was lucky enough to hit the right time period, I could mute in eight hours.

  When I finished explaining to Lamana, she nodded her head at Tedwar and said, “You want to hang around here for eight hours?”

  She was right. Tedwar was functioning at the moment because he had helped himself to Gorwyn’s pills but by his own admission they were now all gone. No more medicine was available for either of them.

  Had I been able to get into the lab I might have wrecked Gorwyn’s D-snatcher but Tedwar had changed his mind and wouldn’t give me the key.

  “Why should you have access to anything of my father’s?” he shouted. “I’m his heir and all his property belongs to me. Shut up and stay away from me or I’ll lock you in that cell again. I can’t imagine why I let you out in the first place.”

  Believing he would eventually try to make good on his threat, I waited until his attention was focused elsewhere and then I motioned to Lamana. Together we slipped away, located a back door and let ourselves out into the night.

  22

  It was pitch black outside Gorwyn’s house with no stars showing. “There isn’t a ring anywhere,” said Lamana. “What kind of place is this?”

  “He couldn’t conduct experiments with me without a ring channel,” I said. “Let’s find it so you can get out of here.”

  We couldn’t locate it. Though we stumbled all around the mansion there were no rings to be seen which meant that the channel had to be inside.

  “How old do you think this building is?” I said.

  “A hundred and fifty years?”

  “Gorwyn must have spent a lot of time and money getting it. It’s built right around a channel. We were in the dungeon and didn’t see any rings so the flow must be upstairs. Maybe in one of the rear bedrooms.”

  “I don’t want to go back in there,” she said.

  “Nor do I. I can’t mute anyway. The D-snatcher in the oil camp will get me.”

  “Maybe if we muted holding onto each other?”

  “We already were caught together once. No, that won’t work.”

  “Then let’s start walking.”

  Toward dawn Tedwar caught up with us. “You said you’d help me!” he screamed at me. The rugged terrain had worn him out. His clothes were ripped at the elbows and knees, he had cuts and bruises and his eyes could only be described as wild. Still, he tried to hold on. “I couldn’t stay back there alone,” he said. “I hate him! I knew when he woke up and found you gone he’d be enraged.”

  “You know he doesn’t want my company because he likes me,” I said.

  “Who cares about that? I don’t any more. But you said you’d help me.”

  “How can I? You know very well you belong in the hospital.”

  “No! Gorwyn said you could help me. Once, when he was making fun of me, he said what I needed was a trip into D.”

  “What makes you think that has anything to do with me?”

  “Because you’re all he ever thinks about! You’re the key to his success!”

  He wasn’t making sense, but then he seldom had. No matter how frustrated he felt, he didn’t try to attack us, probably because he knew we would have tossed him into the nearest ditch and gone on without him. I imagined he was regretting that he hadn’t brought one of Gorwyn’s fancy weapons from the arsenal.

  “Where are we going?” he said, sitting on a rock and blinking up at the sun.

  Around us stretched as barren a patch of desert as I’d seen or imagined, with not a tree growing anywhere and with not even a mountain to mar the horizon.

  “It looks like Death Valley,” he said.

  “All deserts look the same,” said Lamana. “Just don’t expect me to sniff out a water hole when you get thirsty.”

  “I already ami” he said.

  “Notice how the ground slopes in the direction in which we’re traveling?” I said. “It seemed only natural to come this way, didn’t it?”

  “For me it did,” said Tedwar. “I wanted to find you and this was the easiest and most logical way to run.”

  “Gorwyn will think so too when he wakes up.”

  “He always gets up at the crack of dawn.” Tedwar stood up and looked back the way we had come. “I know I’m crazy but he makes me look good. When he gets quiet and absent-minded, that’s the time to stay out of his way.”

  “He was very quiet and absent-minded the last time I saw him,” said Lamana.

  We ran until we couldn’t run any more after which we walked. The desert remained sterile and inhospitable but at least we were leaving the dead area where no rings abided. I saw some in the sky a good distance away and we stopped for a few minutes to discuss our strategy. By then the sun was high and suffocating.

  I wanted Lamana and Tedwar to head for the rings while I veered in another direction.

  “If Gorwyn’s after us, what makes you think he’ll travel toward the rings?” said Lamana. “He knows you won’t mute.”

  “He can’t be sure. He might think I panicked.”

  “How stupid,” said Tedwar. “Have you forgotten he always knows where you are out of D? He told me he has a direction finder that follows a signal inside you. Some woman who works for him injected it into you. He said there isn’t anywhere on Earth you can go that he doesn’t know it.”

  Would that instrument in me never deteriorate? “What’ll we do, what’ll we do?” I said, and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than we heard the loud buzzing of a buggy coming at us. “It’s still a long way off but it won’t take him more than fifteen or twenty minutes to catch up with us,” I said. “Is there any intelligent point in your being with me when he does?”

  “How can I go away and leave you?” said Lamana, angry. “I’m responsible for you!”

  “Says who? Besides, do you think you might be of more help to me free than locked in a cell beside me?”

  Tedwar didn’t say a word and hadn’t since we first heard the buggy. Now he stared across the desert as if a ghost and not a man was out there in the machine. We still couldn’t see it but the noise of its motor grew louder. Suddenly he broke away from us and began running toward the rings. Reluctantly Lamana backed away from me and headed in the same direction.

  “I’ll bring my father!” she said. “I’ll bring them all!” She raced after Tedwar.

  I hurried toward uneven ground, hoping to lose myself in the low slopes and rocky dunes. Gorwyn had to see me before he could catch me, not that I expected it to be all that much of a task for him but I saw no reason to march up to him and deliver myself into his hands.

  The ground turned more to my liking, rippled like a washboard that served me better than it did the man in the buggy. I could hear it laboring behind me as it plowed up a ridge and plunged down the other side only to meet another hill, and I heard Gorwyn curse in a slow, steady monotone. He was thrown out once and had to clamber back into the machine as it climbed at a bad angle and threatened to tip over. Meanwhile I forgot how tired and thirsty I was and ran for my life. I knew if he ever got me into that crown of wires again, I’d be as crazy has he when I came out of it.

  No doubt he was complimenting himself about the signal in my body and no doubt he wasn’t thinking about the receiver Padarenka and Mikala had forfeited to Lamana and Solvo. He probably didn’t even know what had h
appened to it and, in fact, I had forgotten about it, too, which was just as well since I wasn’t listening for the sound of planes, consequently didn’t hear them and didn’t spend several anxious minutes wondering what Gorwyn’s reaction to them was going to be. If he could follow me anywhere in the world, so could Solvo, when he had a mind to.

  Maybe Gorwyn was like a weasel and always kept a lookout over his shoulder. At any rate, he evidently heard the drone of the aircraft above the roar of the buggy. I was stumbling along a shallow ditch when the motor shut off. Hoping the machine had overturned, I climbed onto a ridge and looked back, and it was then that I heard the other engine in the sky.

  I didn’t know whose plane it was but since Gorwyn wasn’t being totally indifferent, they probably didn’t belong to friends of his, which meant the only way we would find out who piloted them was to wait and see. It was a proposition that could be more expensive and dangerous for him than for me.

  He seemed to be thinking the same thing for he got the buggy moving again and plowed hurriedly away in the direction he had come.

  It turned out that my signalling the plane wasn’t necessary. All I had to do was walk to the nearest flat area, wait for it to convert to a copter and watch it land.

  “My daughter?” said Solvo. Naturally he didn’t look worried but maintained his dignity and remote expression.

  “She muted. I expect she’s home by now. And you lied to me about knowing where she was.”

  “Of course, it was the first time anybody ever did that” Wonder of all wonders, he smiled.

  I was flabbergasted when the copter took me to a nearby city of bulging roofs and ultra polite, brown citizens. It seemed I was in Cairo. The real one, not a mockup.

  It seemed that the electronic tape inside me was losing its effectiveness after all, and Solvo had spent the last few days pinpointing the source of the weakening signal.