"Yeah,' Zeke concurred in a breath of awe that went flat.
"For now"
Carl glanced up at the blue silence of the sky. "For now"
That night while Zeke slept in one of the mobile homes parked at the site, Carl stood outside and used his lance to magnetically stroke the sleep channels in his friend's brain.
When he was sure that Zeke was slumbering deeply, he entered the trailer and went directly to Zeke's notebook. He opened it to the latest entry and by the scalloped light from his lance, he read:
"Carl called today, from central Iowa. I've flown out of my past and am interfacing the future here in Ames. The old horror is over: My mind is clear again. But a new horror-threatens. Carl carries the urg's spore. The whole planet is endangered by his presence. He is a
living nightmare and also the gateway to forever. I feel as if I were in a B-movie: Should I kill or worship him? If he bleeds on me, I'd be adamized. Do I want. that? In an infinite cosmos all directions are strange."
Carl returned the notebook to where he'd found it and left quietly. The next day Zeke did not wake up. Nor-the day after that. The armor, through the magnetic caress of the lance, had stroked him into a psychic trance. Zeke floated in a region fringing four-space. Carl called this egoless, dimensionful area the Zone. It was the emptiness where he dumped all undesirable thoughts. For Zeke, this new, dreamwide state was the pivot of the Moment, the needle's eye through which he could thread his attention into any space at all.
Zeke found himself circling like smoke through a room of bronzed light. Sheelagh sat in a reclining chair, her scalp and fingers wired to a console where three technicians sat. The elderly, snake-eyed woman interrogating her wore an officer's lapel pin identifying her as Commander Leonard. She was obviously having a hard time believing Sheelagh's story, even though the technicians were confirming her testimony.
That scene unwalled to a vista of stars. The blue cloud-gained sphere of the earth lifted into view, and Zeke realized he was flying with Carl. He could feel Carl's thoughts, slow-bursting like flowers, as he pondered his life. He had just come from Sheelagh's apartment, but she was not there. The moon stared from the dark side of the earth. '
A sudden lassitude pollarded Zeke's sensations, and when he came to he was in his bed in the mobile home. He felt gigantic with understanding. Everything in the last two years finally made sense. The inspelling he had used to write Shards of Time and the telepathic surges that had followed in the asylum were the result of Carl's armor. Zeke had been in union with it long
before Carl even arrived on earth. Rimstalkers were four-space beings. To them, Carl and Zeke, as lifelong companions, were one worldline. The armor's inspiriting was Zeke's inspelling.
The Rimstalkers had been in four-space communion with Zeke all his life--and at last he recognized the phantasmal daydreams of those dreary afternoons at St. Tim's as the armor's tesseratic presence. And the intuition that had rolled him to his feet that night in Nam on earth-one when the enemy were swarming toward him-the sixth sense that had gums him through the bamboo to the riverbank rathive where he had holed up till an ARVN patrol found him the next morning-that luck was his lifelong bond to the armor. He and the armor had been interfused all along; at a level deeper than time. The contact was purposeless, merely the overspill of knowing Carl, who was the true contact with the Rimstalkers.
If Zeke hadn't felt sorry for that spindly, doe-eyed twerp the other kids liked to head-dunk in the toilet bowls and forcefeed cockroaches, he would never have found the vantage from where the world is transparent.
The strong sunlight diffusing through the glass roof of the warehouse reminded Carl of the blue brightness of the Welkyn. He sat in a hammock-chair and surveyed the expansive interior. The living area had a waxed wooden floor, round, cushiony chairs, tapestries and bookshelves to hide the support ribbing, and a wallsized TV screen with an imaging, computer hookup and an enormous video library. When he lay back in the hammock and rocked among the hanging plants under the liana arbor, a peaceful ambience saturated him.
The butcherblock kitchen had a seawater aquarium -built inta the counters. Zeke was sitting on a barstool with a frosty bottle of Lone Star in his hand, watching the. fish. Since Carl had told him about the spore and
Zeke had informed Carl of his bond with the light lancer armor, they had become closer. Their secrets had bonded them.
And their time together once more had the relaxed spontaneity of their early friendship.
Zeke looked through the aquarium and. with a waterbent smile said: "A toast to the Continuum."
Carl picked up his lukewarm bottle from the soil bed of the hydrangea beside him. "if there is a Continuum." He swigged the flat beer. "And if there's not." He drank again.
"You still think the universe is finite? After all your misadventures?" Zeke looked disappointed. "What's the objection this time?"
Over the last few days as they put the finishing touches on the warehouse, Zeke had explained the cosmology he intuited from their bond with the armor. The expansion of the universe was the result of the repellent force of radiation inertia, the pressure of light pushing the galaxies apart. The weakness of radiation thrust required enormities of time to cause a response, and so the Continuum never reached static equilibrium. The -slow-motion seething activity of the galaxies pendulumed eternally with internal expansions and contractions in a dynamic balance.
"What about Olber's Paradox?" Carl asked. "I read once that-"
"That if the universe were-infinite and crowded uniformly with stars, how come the night sky isn't blazing with their light?" Zeke finished for him. `"That should be obvious-unless you're predisposed to think and perceive finitely. The more we amplify the weak optical resolution of the human eyes through lenses and photon receptors, the more crowded with stars the black spaces between the visible stars get. All photonsensitive plates react with a limit, and so we can't see everything that is there. It's the biological fallibility of the human mind that keeps us from accepting the infinity of the Continuum."
Carl was only half listening. He had grown accustomed to Zeke's prattle, and his inner attention went through the kitchen to the back of the converted warehouse. There, under slick black tarpaulins, were three point five tonnes of pig manure. Nothing but the tarps covered the stuff, yet not a whisper of manure tainted the air. And when Carl had examined the mound, he had found that the-dung looked as fresh as the day it was dropped. The lynk field had permeated it. Soon, the lynk would be strong enough to carry them and the whole mound of feces across the universe.
"Another beer?" Zeke asked.
Carl shook his head. "With the wild ideas you-have for company," he said, rising to his feet, "you shouldn't be drinking." He walked to the kitchen and put his empty beer bottle in the trash. "This is a comfortable waiting room for the next world."
"I still wish you'd rethink going back to New York."
"I've got to face them. You know that. If what the armor showed you about Sheelagh is true, I'd better show myself soon or they may decide to visit us in a less friendly fashion."
"They don't know we're-here."
"For all the precautions I've taken, I'still have this anxiety that they'll find us, Zeebo. "
"Let them. Let the future come to you. You're too dangerous for the world." They had had this conversation before, and when Zeke recognized the unlistening patience in his friend's stare, he stopped and took another slug of beer.
"Just remember," he added. "You're the master of the precipitate. You're not thoughts or bones. You're freedom itself. You're light."
"Sure." Carl avoided his buddy's gaze and watched the flakes of life skittering through the kelp shadows.
For all Zeke's mumbo jumbo about .light and infinity he was as intensely in this world as a mineral shard, and Carl felt unreal as a ghost. Nothing, seemed as real as his memories of his lost life. The armor had him wholly in its grip.
"Look, I'm going to be on my way," Carl said.
"Okay, then." Zeke led him to the sliding door. They stood together for a while in the chilled and loamy air. of the churned earth. The dark land furrowed away on all sides.
"Be easy with Sheelagh," Zeke advised. "And be ready for the unexpected. Okay?"
"You have any prescient dreams you've been holding out?"
"No, but I can feel the uneasiness of the armor. Four-space is murky up ahead. Keep alert."
Carl nodded, slapped Zeke on the shoulder. "If there's any trouble, stay close to the lynk. The lance has cued your molecules to pass through the field membrane. No one can reach you there."
Carl walked out into the field. His armor lightningflashed, and he was gone.
t
That evening, after eating microwaved lasagna and watching a Lakers game on the giant TV, Zeke lay down on the waterbed under a skylight meshed with stars. In moments, he was asleep, flying across the dizzy space of a dream.
He saw the silverblue scimitar of the earth cutting the night, and the beryl sparks of Steel Wheel I and II, the cislunar factories, glinting in the span of emptiness between the earth and the lopsided moon.
The dreamflight pitched steeply, and all at once Zeke's awareness was mizzling in a sparse, modern apartment.
Sheelagh and Carl were there before a window glittering with the constellations of the Man
hattan skyline. He Couldn't hear what they were saying at first, but he didn't need to. Sheelagh was undressing, her valentine-face mirthful as a mask. Her hair looked teased and her lispy mouth nervous. If she was hiding something, Carl didn't seem to notice. He was asking his armor if there were any threatening psyches nearby.
The armor detected none.
Then sound swarmed over Zeke's ghost presence: "You loved me once," Sheelagh was saying in a voice like an empty seashell. She opened her wrinkled blouse and slinked off a sleeve.
"That was before Evoe," Carl answered, dryly. Sheelagh was fragrant as warm rain, but he was not going to be tempted. "Come off it, Sheelagh. I'm here because I know you blabbed on me."
Her features went slick with surprise. "I didn't."
"It's all right. I'm not angry."
"You're not?" Her lipsticked mouth looked petulant again.
"Why should I be?" Carl smacked the lance against his palm like a nightstick. "I'm leaving this rock as soon as the lynk can carry me, and nobody can stop me. I want you to tell them that. Make them understand=-so no one tries to stop me."
"There's still time." Her face was moony with love in a halo of static-frizzed hair. "Stay with me. And talk with them. yourself. Let them hear what they can before you go." , "No, Sheelagh. I came back to see you, not them. I have to explain why I behaved so wildly with you the other night."
"Sit down and tell me." She put her hands on him to guide him toward a Morris chair, and two blue sparks snapped from her fingertips.
Carl's eyes went fish-round. He looked again at her hair and the wrinkled blouse clinging to her pale flesh.
"I wasn't thinking clearly," he said in a voice crispy with apprehension. "The zotl had me freaked. And I just felt I had to be with you. I needed sympathy"
"Tell me about it." She steered him to the upholstered chair, and the smell of her was fresh as the browse of a summer shower.
"Here, sit down."
"I got selfish," he continued through the static of his nervousness. "And, well, to get to the point -I think I exposed you to the same spore that first turned me into light. The spore's in my blood, and-"
"You what?" Her romantic mask curdled to a scowl.
""The euphoria you're feeling-the sparks..." His hands opened futilely before him. "They're all symptoms, Sheelagh! But you don't have to be afraid-"
"You infected me?" Anger and fear pulsed in her eyes. "I'm going to be taken to that other world?" Her breath spit with her shock. In a gesture made strong with her sudden loathing, she shoved Carl, and he dropped backward into the plump chair.
The springloaded hypodermic hidden in the cushion punched him squarely in the upper right quadrant of his buttocks, and his face buckled with shock. Zeke felt Carl's outrage as he realized he had been duped. He raised the lance at Sheelagh, and she gasped, the angry flush of her face draining to the color of metal. But the drug was a nervelock, and one second later, Carl was paralyzed.
Another second, and he was unconscious.
Time collaged, and Zeke witnessed the arrival of the police and the siren-whirling transport of Carl's body to a surgery room in Sloan Kettering. The images shrank and went colorless, wrinkling up like a mushroom, collapsing into the dark duff of sleep.
Carl woke to a searing headache. His brain felt sunburned.
When he opened his eyes, the blisters inside his skull winced with the weight of the light. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were so much cooked squid. The brash light sat on his-chest, and his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that he was in a white-tiled observation chamber. An overhead camera silently watched him. His hands fluttered over his body, and he felt wires taped to his nakedness.
"Carl Schirmer," a woman's voice spoke. "I am Commander Leonard. You are in my charge now, and I've placed you under maximum security watch-for obvious reasons. Are you willing to cooperate with me?"
Carl squinted up at a whitehaired old lady with cheeks brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Her iguana eyes regarded him dispassionately.
"What've you done to me?" Carl groaned. He was hollowed out, and the gonging emptiness terrified him.
- "Your weapons have been removed, Carl." The clack of a lock resounded in the chamber, and a hatch opened at the far end. A muscular fellow in a scarlet jumpsuit waited there.
"Can you sit up?" Commander Leonard asked.
"I don't think so."
"Let's try". She lifted his head and put an arm under his shoulders. With an unexpected strength, she sat him up, and his head pounded like a diesel. His within life was vaporous. The hymn-presence of the armor was gone. Only the sinuosities of his body, shivering with alarm, were real.
"Now I want you to stand up," she informed him.
He looked at her as though she had asked him to kill himself.
She pulled off the wires taped to his body, and he leaned his face into the shoulder of her white jacket. The purple odor there reminded him of the kindly
matrons that came to St. Tim's on holidays to play with the children.
"We've taken the armoring chip out of your skull," she said, helping him to stand. "We couldn't take the chance of leaving it in.
And even with it out, we've kept you unconscious just to be sure.
You've been out for three days now, and in that time we've examined you and your artifacts thoroughly."
Carl wobbled, and the scarlet-suited bouncer who had stepped into the chamber steadied him. Commander Leonard unfolded a green hospital gown. While she dressed him, she spoke: "You have the chromosomes of a newborn--no chipping on any of the alleles, and the supercoiling of your genomes is tight as it gets. You're genetically perfect. And that means you're somehow artificial.
You're not really human."
The pain in his head was dimming, and psychic space rippled like wind-bright curtains.
"The painkiller should be coming on about now," Commander Leonard said, fastening the gown's ties behind his back. "I think you can walk. Please, try."
He swayed forward, and the guard guided him. At the hatch, his escort put a hand on his head to keep him from braining himself as he went through. The outside of the chamber was darker and cooler. The guard led him down a melon-pale corridor past doorless ofce stalls. To one side was a burnedout cavity that had once been an office. The black, tar-droopy shapes of a desk and chairs were discernible in the ash-slush.
"That's where Sheelagh caught light," Commander Leonard's grandmotherly voice said. "No one really believed her story until that happened. Fortunately, the agent interviewing her fled when he saw green fire crawling over her."
"Sheelagh-" Carl's voice crac
ked. "I infected her."
"Yes, and two others in the apartment building you bought her have also caught light in the last two days."
Carl wanted to speak, to explain himself, but his mind was tenanted with grief. "I didn't want this to happen-" he managed lamely. The guard nudged him beyond the cindered room, and anguish turned in Carl like a sense. "I'm sorry-believe me."
"We believe everything now," the commander said. "'Mat's why we've gotten you up."
They came to an open elevator. It closed behind them and with a barely perceptible hug silently carried them up. "Your actions have threatened all life on earth," Leonard spoke. "You're a selfish, thoughtless man, Carl, and you should be punished for what you've done. But for now, we need you. And maybe bur need is punishment enough."
Terror bristled in him. "The zotl."
The commander's lizard eyes nodded. "The lance has been calling for you. It started at midnight. Listen."
Carl heard it: a rumbling, inchoate as thunder.
The elevator stopped, the doors parted, and the thunder became a bellowing that forced hands over ears. The guard pushed Carl into the withering roar. The cacophony stopped instantly.
Carl looked around. He was in an amphitheater ringed with computer panels and viewscreens. The floor of the chamber was a maze of consoles. People in uniforms and lab suits were coming out of the soundproofed siderooms where they had been waiting. At the center of the electronic labyrinth was a gray velvet pedestal on which lay the gold lance and the electricitycolored armoring chip. A technician .in a green smock picked them up in surgery-gloved hands and began working his way through the maze to them.
The viewscreens came on, revealing a milky dawn
sky. Pins of cold light flashed on the monitor screen with the glinting swiftness of rapiers.
"Needlecraft," Carl clattered more than said.
"If you can't stop them," Commander Leonard said stiffly, "the spore you infected us with won't have its chance to kidnap us."
One of the screens displayed an array of missiles with makeshift warheads. Their exhaust fires redshadowed the sky as they crossed the space where the needlecraft had been moments before. "Radar-where are they?"the commander queried.
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