The water was hot. It seared his eyeseams and earholes and stung his lips. He held his breath and curled into an upward stroke.
But he wasn't rising. The
water that he remembered as being firmly buoyant was pressing him down.
His held breath went stiff in his throat and skewered the back of his mouth. He retched with the impulse to breathe, his arms and legs flailing for the air. But down he went. And soon after the glaring pain in his eyesockets vapored into nervelight, the last of his breath spurted out of him and the hot fluid of the skyle pierced his body.
His horror squealed with pain. All sensation, every pinpoint cell of him, squeezed out its agony. And he went dead.
Nothing.
Then darkness healing to the darkest blue.
'Welcome back, Carl,' the solemn voice of the eld skyle sounded through him. Its familiarity struck him alert in the deaf-and-dumbness.
' I see you've changed a great deal within yourself,' it noted, and Carl gleamed with the affection he heard there.
'Eld skyle?' Carl thought with all the mental power he could focus through his dead-stillness.
'Not so loud.'
'Sorry' Carl responded reflexively. 'Eld skyle--am I glad to see you.'
'Because you think I can help you recover your beloved Evoe-is that right?'
'Can't you?'
'Of course. That's why I had you returned to me. I am, I told you, a five-space consciousness. I know your needs better than you do.'
Carl felt like a lab animal, floating in stillness, stripped to the flatness of his life. He glowed with relief. 'It's good to be back. But I can't stay long. Evoe's been taken away from me by the zotl. They could be pain-sowing her now'
'Not yet. But soon.'
'Eld skyle-please, help me.' Carl's desperation flared before the blankness of his' suspension quashed it.
'I need you, too, Carl.'
The absurdity of that thought dumbfounded Carl. 'For what?
You're a five-space consciousness.'
'But I can't move in three-space. You must move for me.'
Carl hung silent, becalmed with curiosity.
'I need your full and absolute cooperation in this venture.' Its voice went still as the hum of an electrical storm. 'You do indeed have free will, Carl Schirmer. And if you misuse it now, you could destroy a world. Your world.'
Carl missed two beats. 'Earth?'
'Then you do remember earth? It certainly remembers you.
ZeeZee thinks of you quite often. Your abrupt departure has had a profound effect on him. You recall, he was a scientist. Well, what spoor you left behind before coming here has forced him to some very cutting conclusions.'
'Zee-' Carl's soul squirmed. 'That's the past, eld skyle. I need your help now, with Evoe'
'You're also frequently in Caitlin Sweeney's thoughts,' the eld skyle continued, heedless of Carl. 'You were her friend, her one real friend, lost devilishly, taken in an ungodly way into the Unknown. Her drink has gotten the best of her now, and the Blue Apple is about to be closed. Sheelagh can't run it without you.'
Those names jolted Carl like blows. 'I don't want to go back to them. What are you talking about?'
'You are going back, Carl. I need something, and I want you to get it for me.'
'What is it?'
'Three point five tonnes of pig manure.'
A zest of levity sparkled through -Carl. 'Three point five tonnes of pig manure,' he echoed.
'Yes, Carl. That is the medicine I need to survive. My ecology is off. I've been toxifying for over a century now, and you're the first one to come through me with the chance of helping me. I need to introduce a certain kind of organism, a bacterium, that will redress my biokinesis and stop my body's degradation. That organism does not exist in the Werld. But it does on earthin pig manure.'
'And Evoe?'
'If 'you get me the pig manure, I'll help you get her back from the zotl.'
'There's not enough time.'
'No, Carl. You are wrong. Here in the Werld, there is all the time there ever was. I have the means to return you to earth for as long as is necessary, then bring you back here in only moments of Werld time.'
Carl's mind prickled with thoughts. 'Why are you telling me all this about pig manure now? Why didn't you just send me for it when I first arrived?'
