The Universe Twister (54 page)

1

The wind shrieked past Lafayette's face, buffeted his body. Instinctively, he spread his arms as if to slow his headlong fall. The streaming air tugged tentatively, then with a powerful surge that made the bones creak in his shoulders. In automatic response, he stroked, angling his hands to cup the air. He felt the tug of gravity, the answering lift of giant pinions, sensed the sure, clean speed with which he soared over darkness.

"Good lord!" he burst out. "I'm flying!"

2

The moon came out, revealing a forested landscape far below. For an instant, Lafayette felt a frantic impulse to grab for support; but the instincts he had acquired along with the wings checked his convulsive motion with no more than a sudden, heart-stopping dip in his glide.

"Keep calm," a semi-hysterical voice screamed silently at him from the back of his head. "As long as you keep calm, you'll be all right."

"Fine—but how do I land?"

"Worry about that later."

A lone bird—an owl, Lafayette thought—sailed close, looked him over with cold avian eyes, drifted off on owl business.

"Maybe I can stretch my glide," he thought. "If I can make it back to the capital and reach Daphne . . ." He scanned the horizon in vain for the city lights. Cautiously, he tried to turn, executed a graceful orbit to the left. The dark land below spread to the horizon, unrelieved by so much as a glimmer.

"I'm lost," O'Leary muttered. "Nobody has ever been as lost as this!"

He tried a tentative stroke of his arms, instantly stalled, fell off in a flat spin. He fought for balance, gradually spiraled out into straight and level gliding.

"It's trickier than it looks," he gasped, feeing his heart hammering at high speed under his sternum—or was it just the rush of air? It was hard to tell. Hard to tell anything, drifting around up here in darkness.
Have to get down, get my feet on the ground . . .

He angled his wings; the horizon slowly rose; the note of the wind in his ears rose to a higher pitch; the buffeting of the air increased.

"So far, so good," he congratulated himself. "I'll just hold my course until I've built up speed, then pull out and . . ." The horizon, he noted, had risen still higher. In fact, he had to bend his neck to see it—and even as he rolled his eyes upward, it receded still further.

"Ye gods, I'm in a vertical dive!" he pressed with his outspread fingers—but it was like thrusting a hand into Niagara Falls.

"There was nothing in
How to Solo Solo
about this," he mumbled, gritting his teeth with the effort. "Why in the world didn't I sprout inherently stable wings while I was at it—"

A tree-covered ridge was rushing toward him with unbelievable swiftness; Lafayette put all his strength in a last-ditch effort. His overstrained wings creaked and fluttered. A dark mass of foliage reared up before him—

With a shattering crash, he plunged into a wall of leaves, felt branches snapping—or were they bones?

Something struck him a booming blow on the head, tumbled him down into a bottomless silence.

How lovely
, Lafayette thought dreamily,
to be lying in a snow bank, dreaming you're in a big, soft bed, warm and cozy, with an aroma of ham and eggs and coffee drifting in from the middle distance . . .

He paused for a moment in these pleasant reflections to wonder why it all seemed so familiar. Something was nagging at the corner of his mind: a vague feeling that he'd been through all this before—

Oh, no, you don't
, he cut the train of thought short.
I know when I'm well off. This is a swell hallucination, and I'm not giving it up without a struggle . . .

"You've had that thought before, too," the flat voice of experience told him. "It didn't work last time, and it won't work now. You've got problems, O'Leary. Wake up and get started solving them."

Well, there's one consolation
, he countered.
Whatever my problems are, they're not as silly as what I was dreaming. Wings, already. And a gang of Wayfarers on my trail. And a mummy that came to life, and—

"Don't look now, O'Leary . . . but you've got a shock coming."

Lafayette pried an eye open. He was looking out through a screen of oversized leaves at a vista of treetops—treetops the size of circus tents, spreading on and on—

He clutched convulsively for support as his eye fell on the curving expanses of rough-textured chocolate-brown bark on which he lay.

"Oh, no," he said. "You've got to be kidding. I didn't
really
crash-land in a treetop after turning into a birdman . . ."

He started to scramble to his feet, felt a stab of pain that started at least ten feet beyond his fingertip and shot like a hot wire all the way up to his neck. Turning his head, he saw a great, sorrel-feathered pinion spread along the wide bough on which he lay, its feathers bedraggled and in disarray. He twitched his shoulder blades tentatively, saw a corresponding twitch of the unfamiliar members, accompanied by another sharp jab of pain—reminiscent of that occasioned by biting down on a bone-chip with a sensitive tooth.

"It's real," he said wonderingly. He sat up carefully, leaned over, looked down through level after level of foot-wide leaves. The ground was down there, somewhere.

"And I'm up here. With a broken wing, Zorp only knows how high in the air. Which means I have to get down the hard way." He studied the two-yard-wide branch under him, saw how it led back among leafy caverns to the shadow-obscured pillar of the trunk.

"It must be fifty feet in diameter. And that's impossible. There are no trees that big in Artesia—or anywhere else, for that matter, especially with leaves like an overgrown sycamore."

"Right," he replied promptly. "Nicely reasoned. The tree's impossible, your wings are impossible, the whole thing's impossible. So what do we do now?"

"Start climbing."

"Dragging a broken wing?"

"Unless you have a better idea."

"Take your choice, O'Leary," he muttered. "Try it, and fall to your death, or stay here and die in comparative comfort."

"Correction," he reminded himself. "You can't afford to be dead—not while the Red Bull is itching to sell Goruble's hoard to any unsavory character with the price of a chicken dinner."

"Besides which," he agreed, "I have a few chicken dinners to eat yet myself."

"That's the spirit. Up and at 'em.
I saye and I doe
."

Painfully, Lafayette got to his feet, favoring the injured member. The wings, he saw by craning his neck, sprouted from his back between his normal shoulders and the base of his neck. His chest was puffed out like that of a pigeon; hard muscle, he found, prodding himself with the long, lean fingers he now possessed. His face—insofar as he could determine by feeling it over—was narrow, high cheek-boned, with small, close-set eyes and a widow's peak of bushy hair. Somehow, without a mirror, he knew that it was glossy black, that his eyes were a lambent green, his teeth snowy white in a sun-dark face.

"Good-bye, Zorro," he muttered. "It was a mixed pleasure being you. I wonder who I am now? Or what?"

There was a flutter among the leaves, a sharp
kwee, kwee!
A small white bird swooped on him. Lafayette batted at it in surprise, almost lost his balance, yelped aloud at the stab from his wing as he grabbed for support. The bird hovered,
kwee!
ing in a puzzled way. A moment later two more joined in. Lafayette put his back to a branch, fended off their repeated attempts to dart in close.

"Get away, blast you!" he yelped. "Don't I have enough trouble without being pecked by meat-eating cockatoos?"

More birds arrived; squawking indignantly, they circled Lafayette's head. He backed along the branch; they followed. He reached the giant bole. A dozen or more of the birds fluttered around him now.

"At least wait till I'm dead!" he yelled.

There was a sudden, shrill whistle from near at hand.

Abruptly, the birds flew up, scattering. The branch trembled minutely under Lafayette's feet. Leaves stirred; a small, slender figure stepped into view, swathed in a cloak of feathers—

No, not a cloak, O'Leary corrected his first startled impression.

Wings.

It was another flying man who stood facing him from ten feet away.

3

The man was narrow-shouldered, narrow-faced, with a long, pointed nose, tight lips, peaked eyebrows above pale, glistening eyes. He was dressed in close-fitting green trousers, a loose tunic of scarlet decorated with gold loops at the cuffs. His feet were bare; his long, slim toes clutched the rough bark.

"
It ik ikik;riz izit tiz tizzik ik?
" the newcomer said in a musical voice.

"Sorry," Lafayette said, and felt the awkwardness of the word on his lips. "I don't, uh, savvy your lingo . . ."

"
Thib, it ik ikik;riz izit tiz tizzik ik, izyik!
" The flying man's tone was impatient—but Lafayette hardly noticed that. With one part of his mind he had registered only a series of whistling, staccato sounds—but with another, he had heard words:

"I said, what's the matter? Been eating snik berries?"

"No," Lafayette said, and felt his mouth shape the sound: "
Nif
."

"I thought maybe the zik-zik's had spotted a zazz-worm," the message came clearly through the buzzing and clicking.

"I thought they were trying to eat me alive," O'Leary said—and heard himself mouthing the same twittering sounds.

"Do you feel all right, Haz?" The flying man came forward, moving quickly, with a precise, mincing gait. "You sound as if you had a mouthful of mush."

"As a matter of fact," O'Leary said, "I don't feel too well. I'm afraid heights make me dizzy. Could you, ah, show me the quickest way down?"

"Over the side, what else?" The flying man stared curiously at Lafayette; his eyes strayed to O'Leary's wing, which he had propped against the bole for support.

"Hey—it looks like—good night, fella, why didn't you say so? That's a broken freeble-bone, or I'm a landlubber!"

"I guess," Lafayette said, hearing his voice echo from far away. "I guess . . . it is . . . at that . . ."

He was only dimly aware of hands that caught him, voices that shirped and whistled around him, of being assisted along the rough-textured path, of being lifted, pulled, of twinges from his injury, faint and far away; and then of a moment of pressure—pressure inside his bones, inside his mind, an instant of a curious vertigo, of the world turned inside out . . .

Then he was in cool darkness and an odor of camphor, sinking down on a soft couch amid murmurings that faded into a soft green sleep.

4

"That's three times," he was saying as he awoke. "My skull can't take much more of it."

"Of what, Tazlo darling?" a soft, sweet voice whispered.

"Of being hit with a blunt instrument," O'Leary said. He forced his eyes open, gazed up at a piquant feminine face that looked down at him with an expression of tender concern.

"Poor Tazlo. How did it happen? You were always such a skillful flier . . ."

"Are you really here?" Lafayette asked. "Or are you part of the dream?"

"I am here, my Tazlo." A soft, slim-fingered hand touched Lafayette's cheek gently. "Are you in much pain?"

"A reasonable amount, considering what I've been through. Strange. I go along for months at a time—even years—without so much as a mild concussion—and then bam—slam—bash! They start using my head for a practice dummy. That's how I can tell I'm having an adventure. But I really can't take much more of it."

"But you're safe now, Tazlo dear."

"Ummmnn." He smiled lazily up at the girl. "That's one of the compensations of an active life; these delightful fantasies I have while I'm waking up."

He looked around the room: it was circular, with vertical-grained wood-paneled walls, a dark, polished floor; a lofty ceiling, lost in shadows, through which a single shaft of sunlight struck. The bed on which he lay had a carved footboard, a downy mattress, comfortable as a cloud.

"I suppose in a minute I'll discover I'm impaled on a sharp branch a hundred yards over a gorge filled with cacti or crocodiles," he said resignedly, "but at the moment, I have no complaints whatever."

"Tazlo—please . . ." There was a stifled sob in her voice. "Speak sensibly; tell me you know me—your own little Sisli Pim."

"Are you a Sisli Pim, my dear?"

"I'm Sisli Pim, your Intended! You don't remember me!" The elfin face puckered tearfully; but with an effort, she checked the flood, managed a small smile. "But you can't help that, I know. It's the bump on your head that makes you so strange."

"Me, strange?" Lafayette smiled indulgently. "I'm the only normal thing in this whole silly dream—not that you're silly, er, Sisli. You're quite adorable—"

"Do you really think so?" She smiled enchantingly. In the dim light Lafayette thought her hair looked like feathery plumes, pale violet, around her heart-shaped face.

"I certainly do. But everything else is typical of these fantasies I have when I'm waking up. Like this alleged language I'm speaking: it's just something my subconscious made up, to fit in with the surroundings—just gibberish, but at the moment it seems to make perfectly good sense. Too bad I can't get a tape recording of it. It would be interesting to know if it's actually a self-consistent system, or just a bunch of random sounds."

"Tazlo—please don't! You frighten me! You . . . you don't even sound like yourself!"

"Actually, I'm not," O'Leary said. "I'm actually a fellow named Lafayette O'Leary. But don't be frightened, I'm harmless."

"Tazlo—you mustn't!" Sisli whispered. "What if Wizner Hiz hears you?"

"Who's he?"

"Tazlo—Wizner Hiz is the Visioner of Thallathlone! He might not understand that you're just raving because of a blow on the head! He might take this talk of being someone else seriously! Remember what happened to Fufli Hun!"

"I'm afraid it's slipped my mind. What did happen to poor old Fufli?"

"They . . . Sang him Out."