Spaceling Read online

  I did what I had been thinking about doing for a long time, made myself a fort and stocked it with provisions. The escape exit was a hole opening upon a corridor with half a dozen tunnels in it, not primary labyrinths which might have attracted attention but narrow bores barely wide enough to accommodate me. Emptying into widely divergent areas of the planet, they weren’t likely to lure curious goths, such as a couple of runners sent by Gorwyn.

  My cave, or fort, was roomy and relatively quiet, though occasionally something rumbled far underground, but there were no waterfalls or volcanoes close by. A comer served as the refrigerator, a deep crevice packed with ice and covered over with cool rocks. In order to fill it with food, I went to a dree graveyard.

  Whenever a dree felt death approaching, he went to a high cliff and jumped off. I didn’t know what the signal was that told them they were growing old. Possibly they simply felt exhaustion or began suffering from cold. A few of their corpses could be found at the bottom of almost any mountain so that all I had to do was scoop up the freshly killed ones.

  One day I came across something puzzling and unsettling. Instead of dree corpses at the bottom of a long drop, there were chunks of fur lying about plus what seemed to be an enormous amount of blue blood. I knew drees couldn’t have accounted for it since their blood was pale pink. A goth had died here, had done so in a peculiar manner and hadn’t left any part of its skeleton or musculature to tell me what had happened. It seemed fairly obvious. Something had killed a goth and eaten it.

  By nature a goth was slothful, accomplishing little besides satisfying herself with running, eating, exploring and just poking about. I think I subconsciously hoped to find a friend during my aimless wanderings for I remained essentially human with my former needs and desires constantly surfacing to plague me. I didn’t do anything important, only loafed, dreamed and pretended I was out to conquer some vast kingdom.

  While I was foraging one day, someone sneaked into my fort and carved an incredible message on the wall: LEAVE HERE, YOU ARE IN DANGER! So much for that. Being my own special land of independent orphan, I didn’t want to take the words seriously and even chuckled over them.

  It irritated me when my food began disappearing. Naturally it had to be the old hermit who robbed me. While angry, I secretly marveled that he could sneak in and out of my fort without being seen. He was plainly a clever thief, possibly nearly as crafty as I, but only nearly.

  I stored a few rotten carcasses to see how hungry he was. Either he ate them or threw them away because they were always missing from the refrigerator. This didn’t happen occasionally but daily. I decided to remain in the cave, lie in wait for him and catch him in the act.

  The warning carved on the wall must have reached me after all. At night I slept, but not soundly, and though I relaxed it wasn’t a total surrender of consciousness because when the slok entered my fort one morning a part of my brain was aware of it and shrieked an alarm.

  The creature got a piece of my tail but that was all. Still it caused me excruciating agony and sent blood flying all over the walls of my home. Soon I was fleeing for my life down one of the narrow corridors in the back exit and wishing it was wider so I could run faster.

  The slok was an unusual specimen made up of springy body and teeth like kitchen knives. I didn’t think he had any legs but I couldn’t be sure. Our meeting in the cave had gone by in such a blur. I simply opened my eyes in the fort and saw him coming at me like some hideous kind of gigantic caterpillar.

  As a matter of fact he had no legs but it was all I could do to stay barely ahead of him, and now and then I cast a glance over my shoulder to see what he was doing. He seemed to be both dedicated and mindless, sworn to catch and cut me to ribbons while he behaved as if he already had me in his grasp. He never closed his mouth while chasing me but continued clicking his teeth, snatching at me, trying to slice me into sections, grabbing at the air as if he didn’t know the difference between emptiness and my substance. Full of eagerness and hunger, he pursued me.

  The realization came to me that very shortly I was going to have to stop and make a stand. Somewhere ahead was one of the hollow caves that looked like an amphitheater and I knew I wouldn’t have time to cross through it and climb one of the high walls. The thing behind me would make confetti of me before I got halfway up the nearest stalagmite. That he could jump I already knew. Like a maniac he zoomed up and down the tunnel sidings, seemingly defying the laws of gravity, leaping, bounding, writhing like nothing I had ever imagined, and all the while he clicked his teeth as if he were already devouring me.

  My only chance was to be more savage than he, so as we both roared into the amphitheater, I did a low backward flip and came down to bite at his rear. He whirled with unbelievable speed and slashed my right thigh. His jaws clashed with mine for a brief instant and, luckily, I had a big enough mouth so that instead of getting anything tender and vulnerable, he managed to chip off a bit of fang.

  He sounded as if he were chattering in some alien language as he made biting motions, click, click, snick, snick, and in a fit of rage I used a paw to knock him across the amphitheater.

  His body consisted of several slender, steel-strong sections each with a hidden spring of its own and covered with dark green, pebbled hide. His head was way out of proportion, being large and round with rows of enormous teeth and small dark eyes. He stank of rot and evil. I guessed that he weighed one hundred and fifty kilos and, when stretched to full length, he probably measured three meters.

  Instead of running back across the floor, he zoomed up a stalagmite and hurtled through the air at me. I kicked him ten meters straight up and didn’t wait for him to fall but leaped and swiped at him with my teeth as we passed. He sprang while still far off the ground, seemed to brace himself against his back segments and buried his jaws in my left flank. I felt a searing pain and then we both hit the ground, hard. For a moment he was shaken loose of me and I began kicking him with first one hind foot and then the other and sometimes with both. No matter how he came at me, he was kicked.

  The stalagmites in the room were spattered with blue and green blood, as was the floor. My breath was ragged in my throat, my chest burned, my head was a seething cauldron of pain and anger. For a little while I stopped being human and became pure goth, which might have been what saved me. By sheer instinct I managed to remain one gesture, one action, ahead of my dangerous foe, kicked before he could slash, ripped before he could tear at me, leaped at all the right times to counter his attacks, and at every opportunity I bit deeply into the back of his head. My teeth felt grisly and I could feel the bare bones of his neck.

  Finally I was too exhausted to fight anymore. All I could manage to do was keep my fangs buried in that one spot on him. The rest of my body was utterly limp. In the meantime, the slok worried at my shoulder. With my teeth clamped the way they were, he couldn’t really get into prime position, besides which I was heavier and lay on top of him. He didn’t appear to be tired, which seemed incredible to me, but I could tell that my persistent gnawing was having an effect upon him.

  Panic stirred within me. Soon I was going to fall unconscious, and in fact I could already feel it beginning to happen. When it did, the slok would tear me to pieces and then eat me. Summoning the last of my strength, I began closing my jaws, slowly and inexorably. The slok resisted, tore at me with increased savagery and then suddenly screamed as the bones in his neck gave way.

  Reality seemed blurred after that. The amphitheater was dark around me and I had a vague awareness of being wrapped in a net and dragged somewhere, by whom I had no idea, nor did I care.

  “You weigh a ton, little slok killer,” somebody said in a very strange voice. “You saved my bacon and I won’t forget it. I owe you plenty, sweetheart.”

  It was the old hermit, crooning to me in a bizarre fashion as he tried to make me comfortable in his cave. I didn’t remember how we had gotten there.

  “You’re a mess, all tom up that way, but you’r
e truly a beautiful sight to me,” he said. “Here, now, move that leg a bit and I’ll try and splint it with these flat stones and this net.”

  Once in a while I bit him. I longed to kick him but my legs were in a bad way and wouldn’t do what I told them.

  “Don’t be cranky, kid, you’re in too lousy a shape for it. At least I don’t have to worry about that filthy slok anymore, and it’ll take them a good while to leam it’s been blasted to kingdom come. He had me pinned down good. Here’s a nice drink of water for you. I can’t figure out why you’re so big. If I had the chance, I’d run a brain scan on you.”

  Even though the words came hoarsely and awkwardly from his throat, accompanied by hisses and snarls, I had no trouble understanding him. He was more dexterous with his paws than any goth I’d ever seen, could lift hollow rocks filled with water to my mouth, could clean my cuts.

  Whatever work he had done before abandoning civilization and D-i, that old man understood his medicine. He knew he couldn’t heal me and I wasn’t fooled into thinking he could, but he held me together for a while. For three days he straightened bones and treated gashes to stop the flow of blood.

  “If you’re wondering how I can talk, well, if you lived in this dimension as much as I, you’d leam to split yourself and share personalities,” he said. “I can talk as plainly as any human. Why don’t you get well and I’ll teach you how?”

  I wasn’t sure if that part of my delirium was real, his talking I mean. When my rotten condition took a turn for the worse, I somehow managed to make him understand that he was to take me onto the planet’s surface. He objected in what sounded like a hoarse, human voice. I kept at him until he screamed at me and said he would do anything I asked because he owed me.

  Draping me in a net, he took a part of it in his teeth and hauled me away, pausing whenever I yelled in pain, hovering anxiously and then swearing when I snarled at him. “I can’t help the bumpy ride,” he said. “In fact, I’m surprised I can even move you, big as you are.” What seemed hours and much agony later, I lay under a sky of brimstone and swirling gas.

  “Let me take you back down,” said my companion, making as if to pull on the net He noticed me looking at the sky. “Don’t you think I already checked to see if there were any rings handy? I wish I could shove you through one and have you go out the other side whole and well, only there aren’t any herel”

  I snarled softly. A yellow ring danced in the distance. It was a long way off and I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a figment of my fever. Again I snarled and it started drifting my way.

  The hermit said, “Am I seeing this for real? Are you making that thing come to you?”

  He never spoke another word, just squatted on his haunches beside me while the bright circle swam through the bruised air to pause near my head. He cleared the net off me and shoved with his paws and his rear until I was more or less standing on my splints, after which he crawled beneath me and used all his strength to raise me a bit. Then he rocked back and forth until we finally made the big effort in unison. He raised and shoved while I pushed with my sore legs. A cry burst from my throat as I left D-2 behind and tumbled onto the ground of my favorite Earth.

  It might have been a bellow of anger. In my turmoil I hadn’t paid much attention to the color of the ring as it came down to me. It turned out to be too much like the one I had used to travel to Gothland in the first place. Now I sprawled on the green grass of the school campus and there were Pat and Mike looking down at me with big grins on their faces.

  2

  Daryl was my name and amnesia was one of my problems. Gorwyn had already had me analyzed six ways from Sunday but I couldn’t remember anything that happened to me before the car wreck in Detroit. It seemed there was either a clot inside my brain or a permanent scar. The doctors couldn’t be sure which it was without going in to see, and they didn’t want to do that. If it was a clot it might disperse without killing me and my memory could come back. I was wearing an ankle bracelet when they found me. It had my name engraved on it, or at least everyone assumed it was mine.

  I studied photographs of the driver in that wreck until my eyes watered but he didn’t mean a thing to me. He was buried now but just about everything pertinent to his physical existence was on record. They had brain scans, fingerprints, tissue, blood and hair samples and complete photographs but none of it helped to match him with somebody who had once lived. There was nothing on him in F.B.I. records or any other records, which was slightly unusual since vital statistics and most local data were available in national or international computer systems.

  The man was a stranger to me but he had died in the same modern, electrically powered auto that had thrown me onto a floor display in a department store. They said I must have been in the back seat and the earthquake hurled the fast-moving car through the plate glass window. That part wasn’t so unusual since quakes were becoming an ordinary part of our lives.

  Anyhow, the dead man and I had been together during his last moments but he remained a total stranger to me. Except for the chain on my ankle, neither of us had an iota of I.D. on us. As for the car, it was traced to a rental agency in Pennsylvania where the dead man, using the name Jno Jonz, had leased it for a week. No, the agency hadn’t seen a girl with Jonz and no, they hadn’t required fingerprints or anything else.

  That was it. So much for my past. After I was taken to the hospital I talked a good deal about rings and dimensions while they were trying to bring me to consciousness, so they rightly assumed I was a muter which was why they shipped me southeast to Gorwyn.

  The school was a tall skyscraper and the students weren’t allowed below the third floor. Not just nobodies like me stayed at Mutat. There were also the children of the wealthy, not that our numbers were all that great. Gorwyn told me there were approximately two million muters in the world. That made me rare and valuable in at least one aspect, otherwise they would have kicked me out the door, or perhaps out one of the thirtieth-floor windows.

  “I’m not staying,” I told Gorwyn. “And don’t tell me again I’m a ward of the state. For all you know I’m eighteen or nineteen.”

  “You don’t even look fourteen which was the age the doctors listed for you. I can’t imagine why you don’t like it here, since you’ve no place else to go. Consider Mutat your home for a while.”

  “Consider yourself in error,” I said. “I’m not staying.”

  I was walked about the grounds like a dog. On one end of the leash was Pat or Mike, or both, while on the other end I strained and pulled against the leatherwork strapped around my upper body. They only took me out because the doctors said I had to have plenty of green grass, fresh air and sunshine.

  “Kid, I think maybe you’re unique,” said Pat or Mike. They were identical twins and I had never taken the trouble to try and distinguish between them. “If we did this to one of the other brats, treated them like slush, I mean, they’d be blubbering all over the place.”

  “Oh, I’m reacting,” I said. Tm biding my time. Another day Til catch you in D-2 and then we’ll see who puts whom on a leash”

  “We aren’t trying to be nosy or anything, but now that you’ve brought up the subject, tell us why you turn into a moose every time you hit a blue ring.”

  “Tell Gorwyn that’s none of his business.”

  They laughed. They always did everything alike. Sometimes I didn’t think they were two women at all but one very large one divided somehow into walking, talking halves. Tall, blonde and straight of feature, they were no doubt considered attractive by everyone but me.

  “We don’t think you really know how you do it, since you remember nothing about yourself, but we’d be interested in hearing your opinion,” one of them said.

  “Tell Gorwyn—”

  “What makes you think we only do things for him?”

  “Because that’s what you are. Gorwyn-jumpers. You know. He whistles or grunts and you jump.”

  They grew agitated and wouldn’t let me st
op and pick daisies down by the brook. Yelling and straining against the leash, I called them names and kicked dirt at them. I wasn’t supposed to get excited so they dragged me back into the building.

  The elevators weren’t guarded with the exception of the one on the third floor where four hefty women stood watch twenty-four hours a day. They liked to knock kids across the corridor.

  “Why do you tell such lies?” said Gorwyn. “You know very well you got that black eye when you fell in the gym.”

  “They only hit me because I’m an orphan. They don’t have to worry about getting sued.”

  “You really must develop a philosophy based on honesty, otherwise you’ll reap nothing but trouble all your life. Come, it’s time for the four o’clock lecture.”

  Transmutators had been showing up for the last hundred years or so. They could be anybody, just as long as their cells possessed an extra chromosome that showed up clearly on a slide as an irregular little donut. The secret, or talent, partially lay in the vision. If an individual could see the rings, he or she could travel into them.

  Having a portion of the populace able to disappear into other worlds or dimensions created problems for the government. Rules and regulations were written, but they did no good as long as restraints weren’t imposed on muters. One such step was to have them identified at birth and kept track of, though the extra chromosome wasn’t always easy to detect in infants. Obviously one or two slipped by in the maternity wards. For instance, there were no records for me.

  “There aren’t going to be any for you, either,” said Pat or Mike, when I brought up the subject. “Gorwyn’s going to keep you for observation. Maybe forever. Who would care? You’re such a worthless little freak.”