'And not introduce you to Evoe? Risk your staying on earth and leaving me here alone, sick and dying? No, I had to be sure you would return.' `
-In the gust of the moment, all emotion cooled in Carl. He went calm as a storm-eye. Maybe the eld skyle had shifted his blood chemistry, he thought.
'Blood physics,' the eld skyle corrected. 'Chemistry is molecule-size physics. Biology is human-size physics. Astronomy is galaxy-size physics.'
'Okay-okay. Are you jerking me around or not?'
'If I were not modulating your blood physics you'd be hollowed out with horror now'
'Try me.'
'Don't tempt me.'
A kelpy feeling wavered in Carl's stomach, hurry ing toward nausea. 'Stop it,' Carl cried. 'You've made your point.'
The axle of calm returned, and the' queasiness passed.
Unhampered by emotion, Carl's fatefulness looked geometric. 'What do you want me to do?' he asked.
'Listen to me very carefully,' the voice responded darkly.
'You will be endowed with powers more subtle and direct than anything your kind have known. Consider this: Where has everything come from? The calcium in your bones, the oxygen in your brain? All the nuclei of your body more complex than hydrogen were forged in the thermonuclear furnaces of stars that twinkled ten to the ninth years before you were born. And the hydrogen of those ancient stars and all the subnuclear particles that exist everywhere in the universe-where are they from?'
''Me Hamptons. What do I know?'
'They are remnants of the most violent event of all--the gravitational collapse at the beginning of time. The radiation universe, to which your body and' mine belong is the shed skin of a living process bigger than universes. What you know as inertia is the most direct physical link you have with this metareality.'
'And I thought I was an orphan.'
'Have you ever thought about inertia? Few humans have, and then only briefly. There isn't much for a human of your time to think. The best minds of your history had only begun to suspect that inertia reflects the profound unity of the cosmos. What keeps matter at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless some external force acts on it?
When you take a hairpin turn, what is the force that pulls you to the side? Your scientists believed it was all the distant matter in the universe constraining movement: The Ail acting on the Part.'
'What has this got to do with Evoe or pig manure?' 'As a scientist of your time, Niels Bohr,' said: A great, truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.' The Part can act on the All. Here in the Werld there are beings, far from human, who have mastered inertial principles much as your species controlled electromagnetic laws. They are Rimstalkers, and, as their name implies, they dwell in the Werld's dark zone, Rataros, near the Rim. They are the ones, as my allies, who will provide the technology for our venture.'
'Okay, already. Give me the details.'
'They will give you a portable lynk that you will use to transport the manure here, to me. The thornwings will help me distribute it. The lynk they will give you is nine centimeters long, five wide, and two thick. Very easy to hide. Bury it in the mounds of manure. It will take ten weeks to inertially convert three point five tonnes of manure, and during that time you must protect it. The lynk won't be vulnerable to your fellow humans. It has a field projector in it that will make it impenetrable to all human devices. But the zotl have a radiation technology sophisticated enough to disrupt the field and destroy the lynk.' .
'There are no zotl on earth,' Carl told the eld skyle.
'There will be while you're there. The inertial displacement of your lynk will almost certainly be detected by the zotl scanner in Galgul. Your lynk, for the ten weeks that it is operating, will be an open corridor between the Werld and earth. Not just zotl can follow it to earth but any of the creatures here in the Werld who might accidentally pass through the Werld's lynk maze.'
'Isn't that a bit risky for earth and the four billion like me there? I mean, the zotl have needlecraft and laser cannon-and they eat us. Isn't there some othersafer-way to get your pig manure?'
'The, danger is greater even than the zotl,' the eld skyle said gloomily. 'Your body carries the spore that brought you here. If enough of your blood is spilled, you could contaminate the entire world. You'd also probably destroy me. I couldn't stop the spore from collapsing millions of -people to light. Millions of collapsed lives inertially trained on me! Their light would smother me. I gag just thinking about it.'
'This whole thing sounds unwise to me. I could cut -myself shaving and infect a continent.'
'Don't shave. Nicks are dangerous. The lynk is designed to control only trace quantities of spore, like the cubic centimeter of blood normally lost in a bowel movement. Any more is dangerous.
But you can be careful. And remember, you are adamized. Your hemorrhoids are gone, the capillaries in your nose are stronger, and the occlusion of your teeth is so clean you'll never bite yourself again.'
'That's not enough. It's too risky.'
'I have no other foreseeable chance of surviving my sickness,'
the eld skyle admitted in a woeful tone. 'I need this inclusion. And you're my only way to get it. You must help me, Carl.'
'And expose the earth to maneating zotl and your deadly spore? No way.'
'You'll be armored, and the armor will be fitted with a device that will activate only if you are mortally wounded. Then, in less than a millionth of a second, you will be collapsed to a point smaller than an electron.'
'And that's supposed to make me feel okay about going back?' A clutchful of emotion squeezed Carl, and he
