replied in a sleepwrung voice. 'The place is a bigger mess than that TV You really rocked it, buddy. Ewe's okay, though. I saw her in a kind of suspended animation. The zotl are saving her for a special dinnercommemorating the conquest of the earth.'
'You sure this is a real lynkdream?' Carl asked, his head effervescent with euphoria. He wanted to believe him, but Zeke had been in a loose frame of mind since Carl had gotten him out of Cornelius. His attention had been wavery as a candleflame, and he had slept as much as he had been awake. Carl had purchased a spacious apartment on Claremont Avenue near Columbia University, and they had holed up there while Zeke suffered through the withdrawal from the chemistry set Dr. Blau had hooked into him over the past year. Today was the first day that Zeke had woken with a clear face, unscowled with confusion or pain.
The last month had been tedious for Carl. Manhattantwo was a quieter place than the New York he was used to. The hum of the electric trafc was not audible from their top-floor suite, and the serenity was driving him mad: He had used his armor to visit all the round corners of the earth while Zeke slept or Caitlin and Sheelagh were watching him. The quiescence of the cities, the geometric order of the farmlands, and the harmony of the people wherever he went spooked him. The world was closing in on utopia, and with his perpetual anxiety about Evoe and the zotl he felt out of place and even dangerous to the world. He had already decided then if Evoe was dead he didn't want to live. It sounded stupid, but it felt right. So when Zeke told him she was alive, his blood shimmered.
The flesh of Zeke's face looked tired, yet the wakefulness in his stare was strong as black coffee. 'The hallucinations are over,' he announced. 'The lynkdreams have begun again-only now I know they're lynkdreams.'
'What about your nightmares?'
'I was in Nam again last night. Before Galgul. Still can't figure out how. Some kind of inertial-'
'--resonance,' Carl said with him. 'I know. What'd you see in Galgul?'
'Ruins. The fallpaths are so clogged with fired
debris you can walk on them. In one of the half-gutted spheres there's a stock vault, ripped open to external view. I saw-tiers of bodies stacked in transparent shells. They're all alive but sleeping, waiting to be milked of their pain. Evoe was there. I recognized her at oncefauny hair, flecked eyes, and those cheeks, hollow as a cat's.'
Carl looked up to the ceiling and howled, arms outflung.
'Don't get too excited,' Zeke warned, when Carl was done and his face, red and polished with joy, was looking at him. 'We've got some time left before we can lynk to the Werld.'
'ZeeZee, you've just put meaning back into my life!'
Zeke watched him somberly. 'Well, you'd better hear the rest of what's going on.' He told him about the Rimstalkers giving the zotl light lancer armor. 'And you know it's you the spider people are going to hit with that armor.'
.Carl's heart became a paperweight. 'Maybe well get out of here before they show up.'
His hopefulness cowed before Zeke's stare. With his head and face shaved, Zeke had. the sober demeanor of a monk.
'You can't avoid them, Squirm,' he said with certainty. 'But you don't have to fear them. You didn't destroy more than half of Galgul. Your armor did. Let it' protect you.'
Carl spun about and ran both hands through his hair.
That gesture usually reassured him, reminding him that he had been remade, that life was new. But now he felt closed in, and he went to the tall sliding window gazing west over the Hudson and opened it. The winter air cleared his sinuses.
The dark sky seemed empty: in the direction his armor told him to look. The lynk of his lance to the Werld manifested in the space of his immediate vicinity and in a larger probability zone a mile above his head, tilted twenty-six degrees toward the north magnetic pole. The lynk space around him was big enough only for human- sized transits like blood beetles, which his lance could easily disperse as they appeared.
The jumpships and needlecraft would come in above him where they could scatter quickly and avoid his lance fire-until their own light lancer armor came through. His armor did not know if it could match the zotl armor. .
The wind turned, and the air smelled of burning leaves. A new feeling glided in under his fear and elation, elusive as an unwritten poem. It was -awe. 'Geezus, Zeke,' Carl said in a slow voice. 'It's strange.'
'It's always been strange,' Zeke confirmed, 'only now it's gotten weird enough for you to notice.' He sat up. One hand tugged at the ghost of his white beard before finding his chin, and he gazed at Carl, ruminative as Moses. 'Carl, I've got to talk with you.'
Carl turned from his window reverie. Zeke had never appeared as composed as this before, and the poise in his stare drew Carl closer. 'What more can you possibly have to say?' he asked, sitting in the plush chair beside the sofa.
'Ever hear of Egil Skaldagrimson?' Zeke asked.
'An uncle of yours?'
'He was ancient Iceland's most original poet,' Zeke said.
'But in his own day he was better known as a ferocious manslaughterer called a berserkir. One day late in his life after earning the fierce respect of his people as a warrior, a poet, and an autocrat, he was out for a stroll. As he passed one of his men who was bending over, adjusting a sandal, Egil swiftly drew his sword and--zockl-cut the man's head off. The reason
he gave for doing it is famous: 'He posed so conveniently for a blow.''
Carl looked at his friend more closely to see if he was launching into one of his .'surges.' The strong face was as sensible as the Buddha's. 'Okay. So what about it?'
'You're like Egil's soldier,' Zeke replied. 'You're picking your toes. You carry a sword, but you've lost the spirit of the sword.'
