it is iridium-coated and ejected through a waterspout high into the atmosphere. There its glide-shape catches the powerful axial winds of the Werld, and it is propelled into the fibrous, filament-wide tunnels that connect the fringes of the gravity bubble with the superspace in the open center of the singularity.'
'All this for a meal?' Carl was giddy with the weirdness of his predicament. 'You're a five=space being and you haven't even invented fast food yet? Come on.'
'This does sound complex from a three-space view, I grant you. But let me go on. It takes my spore years to reach the hole in the singularity, but the instant it gets there, it vanishes into the multiverse and just as instantly appears somewhere in the infinite elsewhere. Of course, most of the spores are lost. Even with their iridium armor, the heat of the stars and the far greater endlessness of space defeat them. Only the tiniest fraction of the trillions of spores ejected by an eld skyle ever find their way to a useful environment.'
'Well, you're obviously doing something right.'
'Yes, indeed. Entirely by chance, one spore reached the planet earth eighty-four million years before you were born. It hovered in the reservoir of ionic detritus of the upper atmosphere for a hundred thousand years or so before sifting down into the biosphere. A fish ate it first, and the molecular lock of the spore's surface bonded it to the nerve tissue of the creature. The spore passed along from animal to animal as food for millions of years. For a long while it lapsed, into the limbo of silt before being taken up by a plant, eaten, and carried once again by the life frenzy. Thirty-two thousand .years ago, the spore was ,eaten in a piece of badger meat by a
lake-dweller in neolithic Switzerland. That was one of your ancestors.'
,
'No wonder I'm a vegetarian.'
'The frequency of her neurology was complex enough to activate the spore, which immediately sited itself in her genetic material. Fifteen hundred generations later, the spore received a subquantal signal from me, the eld skyle that began its journey, one hundred and thirty billion years in the future. That signal is the key to this whole cycle. It is an inertial wave signal and propagates through superspace instantly. My need is felt everywhere that my spores are, for the spores are inertially identical to me. My five-space mind selects an activated spore from somewhere in creation by sensing and evaluating. the complexity of the spores' hosts, and at my discretion, the chosen spore begins its delivery.'
'So-bingo-here I am.'
'Would you like to, hear more about the mechanism of your journey?'
'Why not?'
'As soon as I selected you, the spore's master program went to work on two fronts-your body's neuromolecular field and your universe's inertial field.'
'You've already lost me.'
'Bear with me. The spore flooded your body with a complexly designed substance modeled on your body's natural neurotransmitters. It mimed your own nerve chemicals so that it could penetrate the RNA in the synapses of your nerves.
Within forty-eight hours, every RNA molecule in your body's synapses was fitted with the spore's neurochemical. The spore chemical modulated your nerve impulses, ' triggering a neural feedback pattern in your sensory ganglia, brain stem, and limbic area that you experienced as intense, inexplicable euphoria. But that was a mere side efect.'
'I'm beginning to feel that I'm just a side effect,' Carl despaired.
'In a manner of speaking, you are. You're a projection of your body. The main thrust of the spore saturation was to generate a waveform hologram of your body, inside out, atom by atom. Once that waveform came on, the electric resonance of your nervous system began harmonizing with the magnetic field of the earth. The harmonic buzz charged you with the billion-volt potential difference between the ionosphere and the earth. You were walking lightning.'
'That explains why I was sparking all day.'
'Yes, that took the better part of a day. But what happened next happened swiftly. The wave resonance of you and the planet began to pick up the overtonal harmonics of the sun's field, the local stars, even the galaxy. By that time, you were hypercharged, and the water in your shower was sustaining such a strong transfer charge that it was flying away from your body. Your waveform was in resonance with the charge of the universe itself. A few moments later you reached concrescence, the point where the resonation of you and the universe was precise enough to supply the energy for a local collapse. In a sliver of a second, the immense energy transfer from the universe shrank your light pattern into a space smaller than ten to the minus forty-third centimeter, smaller than the grain of spacetime. Your collapsed waveform fell into a hypertubule, a wormhole entrance into the multiverse smaller than a quark. The inertial imprint of the spore guided you here. And so the circle joins.'
The voice vanished again, and Carl's body tightened with the silence. Ahead of him, space wrinkled, and a warp of sunlight spalled the blue distance.
'You're surfacing now,' the eld skyle spoke. 'You're
rising out of my watery depths. You've listened patiently, and finally it's time for you to confront your new life.
'Hey, not yet,' Carl called out. 'You haven't told me anything about this place.'
Tremulous, sudden brilliance stunned Carl. He felt the rising rush of his body. His back arched, and just as he realized that he was indeed in water, he split the surface like a man collapsing. The air gulped him, and his hungry lungs ached with the cold. As he splashed to his back, lurching and flapping to find his balance, his senses swooped in on him.
Haws of birdnoise burst on all sides,- and a flock of snakeheaded blue egrets swarmed off the water and into the air.
The sky was a radiant purple, sunless yet gleaming. Its brightness heaved off the water and hurt his eyes.
Jesus Flippin' Christ,' he gasped, the words cold in his mouth.
The snaky egrets were flapping toward a boulderstubbled shore. He swam after them even though he did not
