"So where is the Werld if there is no final black hole?"
"It probably. is a gravity vacuole in a colossal black hole one hundred and thirty billion years from now, nearing the time of its own explosion. But where is now? I'd bet this earth isn't the earth you knew before the urg caught you."
"You're right. Where I come from, there was a second world war, we've only gone to the moon twice, twenty million people starve to death each year, and we've been teetering on the brink of nuclear war for decades."
"Sounds like a real shitpot. You must be glad you got out."
"I'd be happier with Evoe, where I belong."
Zeke took Carl's arm in a grip like rage. "Take me with you when you go back!"
Carl shrugged indifference. "It's a bizarre place, ZeeZee."
"I've got to see it. I'll sit with pigshit for a couple of months and contribute my inertia to the lynk."
"There may be no way back once we get there."
"There's nothing here for me to come back to. I'm a lunatic in this world."
"Well, we're not through with this place just yet. It'll be two months before the lynk is ready to go. Caity and Sheelagh know about me. I got a little overgenerous with them, and last night one of the. Werld's less docile beasts-a blood beetle-dropped through the lynk corridor to the apartment where we're staying. I was just lucky it wasn't zotl or a gumper hog. I had to explain."
"No kidding. Do they accept what you've told them?"
"I think so. My light lance put them into a trance, and I left them sleeping."
The conversation shifted to their shared past, and Carl learned that earthtwo had a St. Tim's where a muscular Zeke Zhdarnov once protected a wimpy Squirm from the abuses of the older kids.
But Zee's parents hadn't died in Poland after shipping him to an aunt in Newark who died before he got to her. His parents were killed in a Hoboken house fire. And instead of Nam, ZeeZee had served three years in the World Guard and with the Corps of Workers, quelling riots in Jakarta and Singapore and harvesting rice in Laos. The parallels with earth-one were approximate but consistent.
Back at the Sutton Place apartment, they found Caitlin and Sheelagh awake in the living room before the wide windows, watching the East River slide to the sea. They both had drinks in their hands.
"I got Zeke out, girls," Carl said in a rhythm of friendly banter.
They watched him with the feral solemnity of witches. "So now it's a fugitive we have to contend with," Caitlin said darkly.
"Excuse me, Zeke." Her face melted to a sisterly warmth, troubled with regret, and she went over and kissed him on the cheek, though he looked like a wild mountain man. Her face darkened again as she faced Carl. "You have to stop now, Carl, and examine your soul before you damage-or destroyany more lives."
Carl stood squat and mute as a bureau. Sheelagh looked on from nearby, wanting to go to him, but held back by Zeke's mad presence.
"Nothing's wrong with my soul, Caity," he said. "I've lived a new life. And I'm going back to it, as soon as my work is done here.
But while I'm -here I wanted to see you again and share my blessings, strange as they are."
"Carl, I'm glad you've come back to us," Caitlin said, though her voice had a shiver of uncertainty in it. "And there may be hope for you, though you've got the mark of the invisibles on you.
They've made you beautiful in this world. They've eaten your old, face. Even so, you still have your soul. But you have to give up any thought of going back."
Carl's slack face hardened. "Caitlin, what are you saying? I have to go back."
"No, you don t." Pins of light gleamed in her hard stare. "You can renounce this whole thing while you still have. a breath of life.
Don't you see? You've been entranced. You're dealing with the invisibles-the faery folk! You can't take Anything of theirs and hope to keep your own freedom.
"it's not that way," Carl answered with a disappointed sigh.
"The eld skyle is a being like us. Zpke can tell, you. It's an organism in five dimensions. It lives, thinks, and dies just as we do, only it's not human."
"And not God-minded, either," the old woman stated. "It wants a demon offering. It wants pig dung. Don't you know about the Pig?"
Carl shook his head sadly.
"The Pig is the old god of the first Druids," Caitlin went on.
"It's a god-pig. Not swine but the power of swine in all of us. The Kingdom of God is within. And
sIs the hunger and the demonic cunning of the Pig. It o s is the malevolence of the old kingdoms, the beast-time, before the sacraments: The invisibles get their power from our animal selves, our oldest ancestors. You mustn't let them ally with the Pig in you."
"Caity." Carl took her hands in his and held her milky gaze with his leveled stare. "These are not spirits 'I'm talking about. They're not faeries. They're aliens."
"Aliens. Spirits. Faeries. What does it matter what we call them?" Her grip of his hands was cold. "You say
you' want to share your blessings with us, but you've only frightened us, Carl. And that beast that followed you here from hell could have killed us. What was that, if not a demon? it would have been better if you'd kept your money and left us alone. Look at yourself. You've got their mark on you. And unless you give up their way, you're doomed. For eternity"
Carl's eyebrows shrugged, and he let her hands go. "I guess I'm doomed, then." He sat down, dispirited. "I've brought nothing but trouble with me', all for some pig crap. Amazing. I think I'll just go back to the mountains until it's time for me to leave."
"You can't leave, Carl," Caitlin grumbled. "You'll lose your soul."
"Worse than that," Sheelagh spoke up. Her face was boisterous with emotion. "The world will lose you. We need you here. You have powers no one else does. There's so much you could accomplish."
"Listen to her, Carl," Caitlin said. "You belong here." She turned to Zeke. "What do you think, Zeke? Are we wrong?"
Zeke looked up at her from the sofa A where he had plopped down. "You want the opinion of a madman?" He was still humming with the light from his last surge at Cornelius. The polychrome faces looking at him were friendly but stiff as masks.
"I don' t believe you're really mad," Caitlin answered. "You're cursed with Carl. I don't know how the Lord lost you two boys.
That book you wrote is a devilwork. How could you know what was happening to Carl at the end of time unless you were possessed by demonic powers?"
"What makes you think the power is demonic?" Zeke asked, his arms crossed behind his head.
"What good has it done?" Caitlin riposted. "So far you're just a freak."
"Zeke the freak." He laughed gustily. "Sheelagh and Caitlin are right, Squirm. We've been too selfish."
"Selfish?" Carl rose up in his leather chair, amazed.
"You've been in an insane asylum until an hour ago."
"Because I was selfish," Zeke explained, sitting up from the sofa. His eyes buzzed, and he spoke like a machine gun: "I had incredible knowledge there-the hyperaware vantage of my surges-but I never used that knowledge. I wanted the knowledge to act on me-to save me. Just as you've surrendered to your armor and let it think and even act for you. We've been slaves to ourselves. We have to free the restraints of our fate and act creatively"
"What are you saying?" Sheelagh asked.
"That we should combine our resources and apply them toward a noble goal," he responded in a burning. voice.
"That's comic-book philosophy, buddy," Carl interjected.
"Besides, I already have my goal. I'm going back to the Werld and freeing Evoe."
"And what about us?" Sheelagh cried, the mica of tears flashing in her eyes. "You can't deprive the whole world of the wonders you've been given just for one woman."
"I'm going back," Carl said strongly. "I only looked you up to share my fortune for a time. Don't make me sorry I know you."
"Hey, look," Zeke interceded. "We all have to compromise a little to get some good out of this unexpected life. Sheelagh, Caitlin-we can't ask him to stay here with us forever. This isn't even his earth. But, Carl, while you're here, you must use the power you have to make a positive difference in the world."