Split Infinity

Air? This was pure oxygen?

Stile closed his lips about it, squeezed, inhaled. He had to guide his reflexes, reminding himself that this was not liquid. Oxygen—exactly what he needed! No law against this; he was entitled to any refreshment he wanted, liquid or solid—or gaseous. So long as it was not a proscribed drug.

“Thank you, Sheen!” he gasped, and ran on. He still felt dizzy, but now he knew he could make it.

Soon the oxygen gave out; there could not be much in a squeeze bottle. He wondered how that worked; perhaps the squeeze opened a pressure valve. He tossed it in a disposal hopper and ran on. He had been re-charged; he could make it to breathable territory now.

He did. The next field intersection marked the end of the malfunction. Ah, glorious reprieve!

But he had been weakened by his deprivation of oxygen, and had lost a lot of ground. Hulk must have taken oxygen too—that was it! That strange bottle he had nursed! Oxygen, hoarded for the rough run ahead!  Clever, clever man! Hulk had done nothing illegal or even unethical; he had used his brains and done his homework to outmaneuver Stile, and thereby had nearly won his race right there. Now Stile would have to catch up—and that would not be easy. Hulk was not yet two kilometers ahead, for Stile had received no notification of forfeit; but he might be close to it. Hulk was surely using up his last reserves of strength to get that lead, in case Stile made it through the malfunction.

But if Hulk did not get the necessary lead, and Stile gained on him, he still had to catch and pass him.  There were about thirty kilometers to go. Could he endure? He had been seriously weakened.

He had to endure! He picked up speed, forcing his body to perform. He had a headache, and his legs felt heavy, and his chest hurt. But he was moving.

The track continued through the domes, scenic, varied—but Stile had no energy now to spare for appreciation. His sodden brain had to concentrate on forcing messages to his legs: lift-drop, lift-drop . . .  drop . . . drop. Every beat shook his body; the impacts felt like sledgehammer blows along his spinal column.  Those beats threatened to overwhelm his consciousness.  They were booming through his entire being. He oriented on them, hearing a melody rising behind those shocks. It was like the drumming of Neysa’s hooves as she trotted, and the music of her harmonica-horn came up around the discomfort, faint and lovely. Excruciatingly lovely, to his present awareness. His pain became a lonely kind of joy.

Beat—beat—beat. He found himself forming words to that rhythm and tune. Friendship, friendship, friend- ship, friendship. Friendship for ever, for ever, for ever, for ever. Friendship for ever, uniting, uniting, uniting.  Friendship forever uniting us both, both, both. Neysa was his friend. He started singing the improvised tune mostly in his head, for he was panting too hard to sing in reality. It was like a line of verse Fanapestic tetra-meter, or four metric feet, each foot consisting of three syllables, accented on the third. But not perfect, for the first foot was incomplete. But pattern scansion tended to be too artificial; then the pattern conflicted with what was natural. True poetry insisted on the natural.  The best verse, to his way of thinking, was accent verse, whose only rhythmic requirement was an established number of accents to each line. Stile had, in his own poetic endeavors, dispensed with the artificiality of rhyme; meter and meaning were the crucial elements of his efforts. But in the fantasy frame of Fhaze his magic was accomplished by rhyme. His friendship for the unicorn—

An abrupt wash of clarity passed through him as his brain resumed proper functioning. Neysa? What about Sheen? He was in Sheen’s world now! Sheen had sent the oxygen!

Again he experienced his hopeless frustration. A tiny man had to take what he could get, even if that were only robots and animals. In lieu of true women.

And a surge of self-directed anger: what was wrong with robots and animals? Sheen and Neysa were the finest females he had known! Who cared about the ultimate nature of their flesh? He had made love to both, but that was not the appeal; they stood by him in his most desperate hours. He loved them both.

Yet he could not marry them both, or either one.  Because he was a true man, and they were not true women. This was not a matter of law, but of his own private nature: he could be friends with anything, but he could marry only a completely human woman. And so he could not marry, because no woman worth having would have a dwarf.

And there was the ineradicable root again, as always: his size. No matter how hard he tried to prove his superiority, no matter how high on whatever ladder he rose, he remained what he was, inadequate. Because he was too small. To hell with logic and polite euphe-isms; this was real.