Spaceling

Book 319: Gateway Essentials

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth's atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape. Spaceling is the story of Daryl's desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation. But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 235

Sample

IT WASN’T THE THRILL of the chase that caused me to step out ambitiously but the fact that Gorwyn had sent his two best runners after me. Had I been blessed with the time in which to do it, I would have paused to marvel over that one. I, a common and ordinary—well, not so ordinary at that—brat, pursued by Pat and Mike who were the terrors of the school.

Down a grassy knoll I sped, full of confidence that the dum dums couldn’t catch a long legged fourteen-year-old who didn’t tire easily and who had a cunning and crafty soul. I ran with the wind in my ears and my heart a quickening drum in my throat. The world was good to look at; I was a healthy human female, though slightly insane, and there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do or anyone I couldn’t outfox. Plus I didn’t want to be taken back just then to listen to more of Gorwyn’s lectures. Perhaps I would return next week or next year.

Pat managed to circle ahead of me to the left while Mike did the same thing on my right. Obviously they would converge and catch me before I arrived at the patch of woods for which I had been aiming. Angry and disgusted because they had gotten ahead of me, I took the only course open at the moment, raced up a sandy hill and stopped just short of the crest so they couldn’t see me while I looked about for a ring. I hadn’t planned to go into D-2, hadn’t even wanted to because it would be like taking advantage of little children, but the dum dums were such good runners that I was forced to choose between Gorwyn’s deadly-dull lectures and cheating a little.

A blue ring with a thin corona broke from a low lying cloud and drifted toward my hill. It came quite close to me, a vividly colored object brighter than the sky with a diameter about half a meter and with a center consisting of heavy fog. Pat and Mike didn’t say a word or call out as they came at me from the other side of the incline but I heard the pounding of their feet. In fact, as I dived through the ring, one of them managed to touch my heel and tried to get a good hold on it.

I went on in safely, knowing they couldn’t follow me because they were too big to fit through the ring. For a muter, which I happened to be, D-2 was habitable. Made up of treacherous ground, poison atmosphere and boiling sky, this was a world fit only for monsters or creatures called goths. Upon entering D-2, people transmutated into goths, exchanged their human forms for bodies that looked like nothing on earth. Their size and weight in either dimension was approximately the same. For some reason that rule of physics had never applied to me. As soon as I came out on the other side of that strange blue circle I hit the hot ground with four paws the size of basketballs. Attached to them was a goth that would have tipped the scales at two hundred kilos.

Perhaps it was my cunning and crafty nature that made me different from other people, or possibly it was my insanity. No matter, in D-2 I was, figuratively, a moose, and it was my intention that if Pat and Mike managed to find a suitable ring and come in after me they would regret it. A couple of swipes of a paw on my part or a little minor nipping with my fangs would help them to see the flaws in their reasoning.

They didn’t come, at least not just then, so I relaxed and enjoyed my environment. D-2 was a vacation spot only for beings like me or the other odd organisms living in the rocks and labyrinths that made up this portion of reality. The world was like the belly of an active volcano, seething, murderously angry, sinister. Had I been human just then, I would have lasted about thirty seconds but as a goth I fit neatly into the landscape. Black and glistening, I had a long tail, two attractive red eyes, a blunt snout and a double row of healthy teeth.

Some goths ate in D-2. Some people did anything. I seldom stayed in the dimension long enough to work up a strong hunger, but there were a few places where I stored food just in case the necessity arose. Beyond a thick patch of fog was a valley with some deep crevices partially filled with ice. In frozen pockets I had placed the carcasses of dead animals I found. I hadn’t killed them. It wasn’t my idea of entertainment to invade a dimension on a whim and then slaughter something to satisfy my alien appetite, but things already dead were acceptable, to my way of thinking, and I doubted if anything could have made a goth sick.

If there was a sun in D-2 I never saw it. However, I believed it to be quite close since the world was so hot and fierce, except for occasional ice pockets, but the low cloud banks hid the sky. Looking up, I saw gray fog, black sleet, red mist and purple vapor all swirling and blowing in one big stew. It was all right with me. In my ebon and sinewy shape, I liked the way things were.

Loping from one hot hillcrest to another, lingering in glowing depressions in the rocks, I kept a weather eye peeled on one particular yellow ring overhead that dipped, bobbed and hovered but didn’t really go anywhere. Blue on its other side, it was the circle through which I had dived to get to this dimension. Pat and Mike would have to enter it or one comparable to it in color if they expected to ground in this section of Gothland.

There were several yellow and green rings in the area and I could see them with no strain, which was why I was a muter. Or vice versa. The fact that I could see them was the reason I was able to travel through them and have my molecules rearranged.

I browsed through my universe and even took a short nap on a fiery stone. It wasn’t that I hadn’t soft animal flesh with good blood in it, but a goth’s metabolism was alien and required ridiculously high temperatures for it to be comfortable. As a matter of fact, my blood was now blue while my internal cooling system prevented the rock from scorching me. It distributed the warmth in such a way that what I didn’t need was discarded into the atmosphere. Most of the time I walked around with steam coming out of me.

D-2 was not a quiet world. There were underground explosions, loud hissing as water met hot rock, rumblings and grumblings in the sky. Now and then the rocks under me trembled and my human reflexes caused me to leap to another resting place. The inner core of the planet had deep and winding labyrinths everywhere in it, some hollow, some filled with lava or gas.

If there was such a thing as a native goth, I had never met one. Of course I was ignorant of too many facts, never having been educated about any world but D-1, or Earth, so there might have been goths indigenous to the place, but all I ever saw were transmutated people and furry little animals that looked like groundhogs.

For thirty minutes I ran at top speed through a deep labyrinth without coming across a single obstacle or impediment. To make that tunnel, a white-hot bore might have gone careening through the mountain without leaving a single chuckhole anywhere on the smooth walls. So many meters beneath the surface, it could have been black as pitch for all I knew, and it probably was, but my unique red eyes found plenty of light. In fact, the deeper I went, the better became my vision, somewhat as it usually was for me in Waterworld.

Loping, loping, a fantastic exercise in a fantastic body, and I knew all the time just how human I was inside yet it was so easy to appreciate the form given me by the ring or the dimension itself, or whatever. Being a goth was second nature to me in more ways than one.

The caves were enormous, their stalagmites looking like stony tree trunks, the stalactites resembling white waves. I ran a race with a stream of molten lava, bathed in a hot spring that spewed me out of a labyrinth and deposited me in a room that reminded me of an amphitheater. The ceiling was so high I could scarcely stretch my neck far enough around to gaze up at the breathtaking sight, the rocky growths erupting from the walls were seats awaiting monsters to fill them.

There was pure water that burst in torrents from holes in mountains, crashing in foam, exploding in falls, furiously attacking the planet’s facade, sweet to the taste.

For hours I played, and then because I was restless I went back to the area where I first entered the dimension. The rings that had been there had drifted away to be replaced by others, some large enough to accommodate adult humans, and Pat and Mike had come through with vines and natural nets made of roots.

Roaring in derision, I sped away to the amphitheater, settled down in one of the huge stony seats and waited for my would-be captors to arrive. It wasn’t easy to sit. My spine wasn’t rigid enough. My upper body sagged and put too much weight on my pelvis. Snarling my displeasure, I leaped thirty feet straight up to a horizontal beam that grew between two stalactites and there I lounged, waiting.

Even now Pat and Mike looked startlingly alike, small goths weighing approximately fifty-five kilos apiece. Where they got the vines and nets I didn’t know. Likely they had stored them in the ice. As far as transmutation and rings were concerned, Gorwyn was a genius. Without a doubt, he had known exactly what to shove into a blue circle to get a length of vine or a net; perhaps he had used a leaf, carrot or a redwood seed.

They would have gotten me if I hadn’t been so big and if the root nets hadn’t been of poor quality. Pat and Mike methodically began climbing up after me and when I jumped down and entered the big winding labyrinth they followed. They behaved rather casually, as if nothing I was doing was any surprise to them, which made me nervous and inspired me to run even faster into their trap.

They had nets everywhere in the tunnel. When I rounded a corner and hurtled against one stretched taut across my path, another fell into place behind me and barred the way. They were held fast by hooks jammed into the rock. Back and forth against them I went, howling in anger and using all my weight as a battering ram. Feeling a weakness in the net behind me, I concentrated on it and literally tore my way through it. Pat and Mike were probably so stunned and alarmed that they forgot to use the anesthesia guns strapped to their chests. A little pressure with their tongues on the triggers and a pair of missiles would have buried themselves in my hide. Most likely the tunnel seemed to grow smaller from their viewpoint as I bore down on them at my best speed. For all they knew, I had turned raving mad during the changeover from human to goth and planned to rip their heads off as I went past.

It appeared that they also had cunning minds, had gone so far as to bury a net in my favorite pool and, when I rode down a hot waterfall and bobbed to the surface with the thing wrapped around me several times, I became so enraged I leaped back up the falls and kept climbing in high bounds until I was well out of the area. At my leisure I chewed the net to shreds only to realize a short while later that they had secreted pods of anesthesia in it. Locating a deceptively small crevice, I managed to squeeze into it and promptly went to sleep. They didn’t find me and I had a long nap of several hours.

As luck would have it they were still searching when I finally awakened and staggered from my hidey hole. I had hoped they would think I drowned. It soon became obvious that their intent was to keep me away from rings of all kinds but more particularly the green ones. That created no special hardship for me. I would go into whichever dimension I pleased whenever I pleased and there was no way they could stop me. Unless of course they succeeded in capturing me.

I had investigated only a small portion of this planet, if indeed it could be called that. I assumed it had a sky though there was never any sign of stellar phenomena, no matter the time of day or night. As far as I knew, the dimension was made up of labyrinths and caves and not much of anything else. Now Pat and Mike tried to hem me in by stringing nets across all the tunnel entrances in my vicinity. Climbing up above a cave, I surprised one of them driving a hook into the rock with her bare teeth. She let out a howl as I used my hind feet to give her a horse kick that sent her tumbling down into a frothy pool.

The reason I was so anxious to get away from them at that point was my growling stomach. Not relishing the idea of a meal in this dimension, I nevertheless wasted no time loping in a roundabout manner to the ice pockets where I had stashed a few meals. Strange how hunger could alter one’s philosophy in a hurry. The dree tasted just fine after being dipped in a nest of hot coals. Since it had been dead long before I dunked it, its cooling system didn’t protect it from the flames and I popped it, sizzling and dripping, down my aching throat. Seven or eight more satisfied my appetite after which I took the time to kick a black goth into a yawning pit because she was climbing too close to me and preparing to lay her tongue on the trigger of the weapon strapped across her chest.

One place I had never gone was the valley of black sleet but I went there now with Gorwyn’s runners at my back. The first thing the three of us did after entering a wall of flying pitch was to plunge to our shoulders in a swift tide. At least that’s how deep I went. Pat and Mike probably went all the way under, being so short, but as they were swept away I didn’t worry about anything dire happening to them since I had never seen anything die in D-2 from so mild an experience.

The driving sleet hadn’t exactly blinded me, since my vision was fine in practically any kind of condition, but it threw me off course so that I waded out of it into unfamiliar territory. From where I stood in the valley, all the surrounding knolls looked alike. I began a series of experiments, leaping up to a hilltop and checking for some friendly bit of landscape before returning to the valley floor and then checking another possible exit point.

There were plenty of rings in the air but all of them were pale in color which warned me off. Light yellows usually exited in places such as eighty kilometers due south of the moon, ten meters from the bottom of the Mindanao Deep, the top of Annapurna, and the like. Besides, I wasn’t ready to go back to D-1.

After waiting long enough to be reasonably sure Pat and Mike weren’t going to be following me from the valley, I chose a hill at random, leaped to the top of it and sped through the yawning mouth of a tunnel. Completing a healthful and invigorating run, I washed in a pool, settled down beside a bubbling pit and went to sleep. For the next several days I intended to do nothing but loaf.

It was exactly seven Earth days later that I came across a ragged old man hiding in a deep labyrinth beneath a series of waterfalls. Any noise he made would have been muffled by the interminable pounding overhead, but I sensed him first and then caught a glimpse of him before he faded back into his hidey hole. Naturally he was in his goth shape but I had the distinct impression that an unkempt old recluse skulked around in his psyche. It wasn’t anything I saw, just a feeling, or perhaps I picked up the strong aura surrounding him. At any rate, I guessed he lived in D-2 because he liked having a body that didn’t creak and groan every time he moved.

He seemed to hate the sight of me, crawled out of his hole when he realized I had spotted him, and away he went in a hurry. He wasn’t large or fast and I could have caught him with no trouble but I hung back on his trail and soon gave up. He whined like a hurt pup and I finally got tired of listening to him and took off in another direction. I had plenty of things to do and it was all right with me if he didn’t want my company. I didn’t want his either.

I did what I had been thinking about doing for a long time, made myself a fort and stocked it with provisions. The escape exit was a hole opening upon a corridor with half a dozen tunnels in it, not primary labyrinths which might have attracted attention but narrow bores barely wide enough to accommodate me. Emptying into widely divergent areas of the planet, they weren’t likely to lure curious goths, such as a couple of runners sent by Gorwyn.

My cave, or fort, was roomy and relatively quiet, though occasionally something rumbled far underground, but there were no waterfalls or volcanoes close by. A corner served as the refrigerator, a deep crevice packed with ice and covered over with cool rocks. In order to fill it with food, I went to a dree graveyard.

Whenever a dree felt death approaching, he went to a high cliff and jumped off. I didn’t know what the signal was that told them they were growing old. Possibly they simply felt exhaustion or began suffering from cold. A few of their corpses could be found at the bottom of almost any mountain so that all I had to do was scoop up the freshly killed ones.

One day I came across something puzzling and unsettling. Instead of dree corpses at the bottom of a long drop, there were chunks of fur lying about plus what seemed to be an enormous amount of blue blood. I knew drees couldn’t have accounted for it since their blood was pale pink. A goth had died here, had done so in a peculiar manner and hadn’t left any part of its skeleton or musculature to tell me what had happened. It seemed fairly obvious. Something had killed a goth and eaten it.

By nature a goth was slothful, accomplishing little besides satisfying herself with running, eating, exploring and just poking about. I think I subconsciously hoped to find a friend during my aimless wanderings for I remained essentially human with my former needs and desires constantly surfacing to plague me. I didn’t do anything important, only loafed, dreamed and pretended I was out to conquer some vast kingdom.

While I was foraging one day, someone sneaked into my fort and carved an incredible message on the wall: LEAVE HERE, YOU ARE IN DANGER! So much for that. Being my own special kind of independent orphan, I didn’t want to take the words seriously and even chuckled over them.

It irritated me when my food began disappearing. Naturally it had to be the old hermit who robbed me. While angry, I secretly marveled that he could sneak in and out of my fort without being seen. He was plainly a clever thief, possibly nearly as crafty as I, but only nearly.

I stored a few rotten carcasses to see how hungry he was. Either he ate them or threw them away because they were always missing from the refrigerator. This didn’t happen occasionally but daily. I decided to remain in the cave, lie in wait for him and catch him in the act.

The warning carved on the wall must have reached me after all. At night I slept, but not soundly, and though I relaxed it wasn’t a total surrender of consciousness because when the slok entered my fort one morning a part of my brain was aware of it and shrieked an alarm.

The creature got a piece of my tail but that was all. Still it caused me excruciating agony and sent blood flying all over the walls of my home. Soon I was fleeing for my life down one of the narrow corridors in the back exit and wishing it was wider so I could run faster.

The slok was an unusual specimen made up of springy body and teeth like kitchen knives. I didn’t think he had any legs but I couldn’t be sure. Our meeting in the cave had gone by in such a blur. I simply opened my eyes in the fort and saw him coming at me like some hideous kind of gigantic caterpillar.

As a matter of fact he had no legs but it was all I could do to stay barely ahead of him, and now and then I cast a glance over my shoulder to see what he was doing. He seemed to be both dedicated and mindless, sworn to catch and cut me to ribbons while he behaved as if he already had me in his grasp. He never closed his mouth while chasing me but continued clicking his teeth, snatching at me, trying to slice me into sections, grabbing at the air as if he didn’t know the difference between emptiness and my substance. Full of eagerness and hunger, he pursued me.

The realization came to me that very shortly I was going to have to stop and make a stand. Somewhere ahead was one of the hollow caves that looked like an amphitheater and I knew I wouldn’t have time to cross through it and climb one of the high walls. The thing behind me would make confetti of me before I got halfway up the nearest stalagmite. That he could jump I already knew. Like a maniac he zoomed up and down the tunnel sidings, seemingly defying the laws of gravity, leaping, bounding, like nothing I had ever imagined, and all the while he clicked his teeth as if he were already devouring me.

My only chance was to be more savage than he, so as we both roared into the amphitheater, I did a low backward flip and came down to bite at his rear. He whirled with unbelievable speed and slashed my right thigh. His jaws clashed with mine for a brief instant and, luckily, I had a big enough mouth so that instead of getting anything tender and vulnerable, he managed to chip off a bit of fang.

He sounded as if he were chattering in some alien language as he made biting motions, click, click, snick, snick, and in a fit of rage I used a paw to knock him across the amphitheater.

His body consisted of several slender, steel-strong sections each with a hidden spring of its own and covered with dark green, pebbled hide. His head was way out of proportion, being large and round with rows of enormous teeth and small dark eyes. He stank of rot and evil. I guessed that he weighed one hundred and fifty kilos and, when stretched to full length, he probably measured three meters.

Instead of running back across the floor, he zoomed up a stalagmite and hurtled through the air at me. I kicked him ten meters straight up and didn’t wait for him to fall but leaped and swiped at him with my teeth as we passed. He sprang while still far off the ground, seemed to brace himself against his back segments and buried his jaws in my left flank. I felt a searing pain and then we both hit the ground, hard. For a moment he was shaken loose of me and I began kicking him with first one hind foot and then the other and sometimes with both. No matter how he came at me, he was kicked.

The stalagmites in the room were spattered with blue and green blood, as was the floor. My breath was ragged in my throat, my chest burned, my head was a seething cauldron of pain and anger. For a little while I stopped being human and became pure goth, which might have been what saved me. By sheer instinct I managed to remain one gesture, one action, ahead of my dangerous foe, kicked before he could slash, ripped before he could tear at me, leaped at all the right times to counter his attacks, and at every opportunity I bit deeply into the back of his head. My teeth felt grisly and I could feel the bare bones of his neck.

Finally I was too exhausted to fight anymore. All I could manage to do was keep my fangs buried in that one spot on him. The rest of my body was utterly limp. In the meantime, the slok worried at my shoulder. With my teeth clamped the way they were, he couldn’t really get into prime position, besides which I was heavier and lay on top of him. He didn’t appear to be tired, which seemed incredible to me, but I could tell that my persistent gnawing was having an effect upon him.

Panic stirred within me. Soon I was going to fall unconscious, and in fact I could already feel it beginning to happen. When it did, the slok would tear me to pieces and then eat me. Summoning the last of my strength, I began closing my jaws, slowly and inexorably. The slok resisted, tore at me with increased savagery and then suddenly screamed as the bones in his neck gave way.

Reality seemed blurred after that. The amphitheater was dark around me and I had a vague awareness of being wrapped in a net and dragged somewhere, by whom I had no idea, nor did I care.

“You weigh a ton, little slok killer,” somebody said in a very strange voice. “You saved my bacon and I won’t forget it. I owe you plenty, sweetheart.”

It was the old hermit, crooning to me in a bizarre fashion as he tried to make me comfortable in his cave. I didn’t remember how we had gotten there.

“You’re a mess, all torn up that way, but you’re truly a beautiful sight to me,” he said. “Here, now, move that leg a bit and I’ll try and splint it with these flat stones and this net.”

Once in a while I bit him. I longed to ki. . .