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."