"Sure, I've been chemically pummeled. But you've been adamized. You're supposed to be perfect."
"I'm nowhere near it."
"That's for sure. But to the urg, you're perfect. A perfect gofer. It's got you locked into its strategy, friend. You have the power, but your will has been castrated so that it won't interfere."
"Aw, cut it out, Zee." Carl sank back in the chair. "Caitlin's been trying to save my soul. Sheelagh wants to make love to me. And you think I'm a will-less zombie."
"Not a zombie, just a sleepwalker." Zeke's bushy white eyebrows, lifted. "And why don't you make love to Sheelagh?"
Carl sat back as if slapped. "I'm in love, Zeebo.
Remember that feeling? It's a little ways north of lust."
"Love has blinded you."
"Blinded me to what?"
"To power." Zeke's hand flashed out, and he picked up the lance -from where Carl had placed it on the coffee table.
"This is powerl" He waved it under Carl's nose: "When are you going to use it?"
"When I have to," Carl answered softly.
"If you don't use the power you have, the will weakens,"
Zeke said, returning the lance.
"Hey, keep in mind whose weak will uncanned you last month."
"I'll never forget it." Zeke smiled briefly. "But that was last month. What've you done since?"
"What's to do? I mean, the eld skyle didn't send me after the Golden Fleece or the Grail. We're just waiting for the lynk to convert some pig stool and then we're gone. Unless the zotl stop us."
"Forget the zotl." Zeke's gaze pressed into him. "If you're just waiting for the lynk, why'd you come back for me? And why'd you spill the beans to Caitlin and Sheelagh?"
"What the hell are you driving at?"
"Don't get excited." Zeke was glad to see that Carl could get excited.
"Just what are you trying to tell me? That I'm loose-tipped?"
"That you're talking in your sleep. The urg has put you in a trance, and you're not seeing things clearly. If you're loose-tipped it's because there's some of your old self left that wonders what's going on. That's why you sought out your old friends, to connect with your past and the old meaning of your life. You've lost that, and now you don't know what's-up or down."
"And you do?"
"I know only one thing for sure." He leaned closer.
"We're made out of light. And light is action."
"Huh?"
"Light is action." Zeke looked amazed. "Come on, Squirm, you remember quantum theory: Light is trans
mitted in whole units. Those units are called quanta of action. They're photons: Don 7t get me started on this subject. The point I'm trying to make is this: All creation acts. Continuously. There is no stillness. Even the void between galaxies buzzes with Field particles.
Action is reality. For a human, that reality is choice.
You have to act positively, and by that I mean your choices have to be creative, not historical."
"All right, already ZeeZee. I get the idea. You think I'm lazy"
"Well, when's the last time you worked out?"
"I don't believe this."
"The urg gave you an adamized body, but how do you expect to keep it strong without using it?"
Carl was on his feet. "Riding a fallpath is a workout and a half, believe me." He strode back to the window and slammed it shut.
"The only fallpath here is down."
Carl shrugged. "My heart isn't here, Zeke. Working out's too much of a pain. I'd just as soon wait till I get home."
"That's a negative choice. Soon you'll be as flabby as you ever were. You've got to stop avoiding pain, and you've got to stop seeking your pleasure in some faraway future."
"Why?"
"It's been done to death, billions of times already. Those are the historical choices. After all that's happened to you, you can't just react. You've got to be creative."
"But why?"
"Because you've got the power, man." Zeke was standing up. As he spoke, he wended his way around the coffee table and over the gutted TV to Carl. "What's happened to you is now. It's a mandate to be original, despite the pain. You've got to use your body till it hurts. Use your brain till it's exhausted. Don't seek
pleasure for its own sake. That's the game that trips up almost everybody. Let the pleasure come to you on its own-and when it comes, take it. And when it's gone, keep it a memory, not a hope.
Don't look for it. Keep your focus on what you can give to others from the hurtfully alive center of yourself."
"Spare me your philosophy," Carl asked in cold exasperation.
Zeke looked down into him. "I would if there were any other way to live without 'regrets."
Carl ignored Zeke and turned his face toward the dark window. He couldn't take his old friend seriously, because for one thing, the man wasn't behaving at all like the ZeeZee he'd known all his life. Carl figured that was the result of the huge difference in earthtwo's history: The Zeke he loved had come from a harder world where he had killed and seen friends killed in war, where death was meted out with the indifference of financial transactions-a world where the spiritual beliefs that this Zeke espoused could not be taken seriously. ZeeZee had given up all fantasies - of dominance in Nam-and yet here was this look-alike ranting about power. The inconsistency left Carl with a filthy feeling. as if the memories, the life, the very flesh he was made of were not real. The eld skyle had told him that he was shaped out of sludge. And this world? Was it any different? It was made from star dung. The crap of spent galaxies. Reality was shit. The horror, for him, was crazy Zeke's belief that the cosmos was infinite. The Zee he knew, the world he had known, believed the universe with all its brutal ironies was doomed like the rest of them, as finite as everything smaller than itself.
The serrated aroma of fried onions and garlic accompanied the chatter of hot oil from the kitchen, where Zeke had gone to prepare a meal. Carl's ponderings
smoked away, and he stepped back. from the dark window.
The sun's blot was behind him and below the horizon, -but charred-looking clouds glowed in the east like a dragon's smoke-belch.
The pleats of cooking odors were. a pale tease of memory, hinting at the pungencies and savor of the Foke meals he had known. For the thirty-seventh time in as many days, he craved a braised slamsteak and stream-chilled owlroots. His stomach growled like a rockcrusher, but he was too wrought to eat. He had to clear his head.
He told Zeke he was going out for a walk and took the stairs fifteen floors down to the street. He was flushed when he got there and satisfied. He wasn't lazy about using his body, as Zeke believed.
He was afraid to use it. If he gashed himself or if he even got a nosebleed, he would probably be killed. The light lancer armor was set to implode if his spore-carrying blood was spilled. .
Carl had told no one about this, and Zeke for all his apparent prescience had not found out.
He walked down the steep hill of 116th Street and entered Riverside Park. The dark blue of night was standing in the tree clumps, and the plangent fragrance of the river drifted up the terraced slopes. Why had he come back, really? Was he seeking something from his past? Of course. Yet how could he tell this Zeke about his fear of the armor? Not just the. anxiety of bleeding and being collapsed smaller than an atom, but the cruelty of hosting the armor's mind inside his ownthat terrified him. He had wanted to talk about it, and so he had sought out his .old friends. They were all stranger than he remembered them, though. Or was it the armor mechanicking him that made them seem strange?
The moon looked like a Quaalude over the Pali-sades. The silvered clouds around it rhymed in his memory with the griffons of cloud that strode through the open spaces of Midwerld.
Carl sat at an empty park bench, and in the long light remembered Evoe. A youth went by, shouldering a radio big as an air conditioner, and the music blaring through it was her song.
Sheelagh was still asleep when Carl entered her apartment.