Текст книги "Alternate Realities (Port Eternity; Wave without a Shore; Voyager in Night)"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

“We don’t seem to be moving rapidly in relation to it,” came one of Modred’s calm reports, in the aching long time that passed.

“We are in Hell,” my lady said after yet another long time, speaking in a hoarse, distant voice. This frightened me on the instant, because I had heard about Hell in the books, and it meant somewhere after dying. “It’s all something we’re dreaming while we fall, that’s what it is.”

I thought about it: it flatly terrified me.

“A jump accident,” Griffin said. “We are somewhere. It’s not the between. Our instruments are off, that’s all. We should fix on some star and go to it. We can’t have lost ourselves that far.”

There were no stars in the instruments I had seen on the bridge. I swallowed, recalling that, not daring to say it.

“We have died,” my lady said primly, calmly, evidently having made up her mind to that effect, and perhaps after the shock and the wine she was numb. “We’re all dead from the moment of the accident. Brains perhaps function wildly when one dies ... like a long dream, that takes in everything in a lifetime and stretches a few seconds into forever ... Or this is Hell and we’re in it.”

I shivered where I sat. There were a lot of things that tapes had not told me, and one of them was how to cope with thoughts like that. My lady was terrifying in her fantasies.

“We’re alive,” Lance said, unasked. “And we’re more comfortable than we were.”

“Who asked you?” Dela snapped, and Lance bowed his head. We don’t talk uninvited, not in company, and Griffin was company. Griffin seemed to be intensely bothered, and got up and paced the floor.

It did not help. It did not hasten the time, which crept past at a deadly slow pace, and finally Griffin spun about and strode out the door.

“Griffin?” my lady Dela quavered.

I stood up; Dela had; and Lance. “He mustn’t give orders,” I said, thinking at least where I would be going if I were Griffin, and we heard the door to the outside corridor open, not that to his own rooms. “Lady Dela, he’s going to the bridge. He mustn’t give them orders.”

My lady stared at me and I think if she had been close enough she might have hit me. But then her face grew afraid. “They wouldn’t pay any attention to him. They wouldn’t.”

“No, lady Dela, but he’s strong and quick and I’m not sure they could stop him.”

Dela stirred herself then and made some haste. Lance and I seized up Viv and drew her along in Dela’s wake, out into the corridors and down them to the bridge. It was all, all too late if Griffin had had something definite in mind; but it was still peaceful when we arrived, Griffin standing there in the center of the bridge and the crew with their backs to him and working at their posts. Griffin was ominous looking where he was, in the center of things, hands on hips. None of the crew was particularly big ... only Lance was that, the two of them like mirrors, dark and gold, the lady’s taste running remarkably similar in this instance. And Lance made a casual move that took himself between Griffin and Gawain and Lynn at main controls, just standing there, in case.

“Well?” Dela asked.

“We don’t have contact,” Percivale said, beside Modred. “We keep sending, but the object doesn’t respond. We were asked about range: we don’t know that either. Everything has failed.”

“Where isthis thing we’re talking about?” Dela asked, and Modred reached and punched a button. It came up on the big screen, a kind of a cloud on the scope, all gridded and false, just patches of something solid the computer was trying to show us.

“I think we’re getting vid,” Percivale said, and that image went off, replaced with another, in all the flare of strange colors and shapes that drifted where there ought to be stars, in between blackness measled with red spots like dapples that might be stars or just the cameras trying to pick up something that made no sense. And against that backdrop was something that might be a misshapen world in silhouette, or a big rock irregularly shaped, or something far vaster than we wanted to think, no knowing. It was flattened at its poles and it bristled with strange shapes in prickly complexity.

“We’ve been getting nearer steadily,” Modred said. “It could be our size or star-sized. We don’t know.”

“You’ve got the scan on it,” Griffin snapped at him. “You’ve got that readout for timing.”

“Time is a questionable constant here,” Modred said without turning about, keeping at his work. “I refrained from making unjustified assumptions. This is new input on the main screen. I am getting a size estimate.—Take impact precautions. Now.”

Near ... we were coming at it. It was getting closer and closer on the screen. My lady caught at Griffin, evidently having given up her theory of being dead. “Use the engines,” Griffin yelled at Gawain and Lynn, furious. “If we’re coming up against some mass they may react off that ... use the engines!”

“We are,” Gawain said calmly.

We grabbed at both Dela and Griffin, Lance and I, and pulled them to the cushioned corner and got the bar down and the straps round them, then dragged Vivien, who was paralyzed and nearly blanked, with us to the remaining pad. The crew was putting the safety bars in place too, all very cool. That we couldn’t feel the engines ... no feel to them at all ... when normally they should have been kicking us hard in some direction....

Screens broke up. We were just too close to it. It had filled all our forward view and the last detail we got was huge. Something interfered with the pickup. I wrapped the restraints about myself while Lance did his, and all the while expected the impact, to be flung like some toy across a breached compartment on a puff of crystalizing air.... I didn’t know what was out there, but the most horrible fate of all seemed to me to be blown out of here, to be set adrift naked in that, whatever that stuff was out there. This little ship that held our lives also held whatever sanity we had been able to trick our eyes into seeing, and what was out there—I wondered how long it took to die in that stuff. Or whether one ever did.

The last buckle jammed. I refitted it, in sudden tape-taught calm. I was with the ship and my lady. I had my referents. My back was to the wall and my most favorite comrades were with me. I didn’t want to end, but there was comfort in company—far better, I conned myself, than what waited for us by our natures, to be taken separately by the law and coldly done away. This was like born-men, this was—

“Repulse is working,” Gawain said, about the instant my stomach felt the slam of the engines. “Stop rotation.”

Don’t!I thought irrationally, because I trusted nothing to start working again once it had been shut down in this mad place, and if rotation stopped working the way it did when we would go into a dock at station, we would end up null G in this stuff, subject to its laws. We were not, for mercy’s sake, coming in at a safe dock with crews waiting to assist, and there was no place to put the Maid’s delicate noseprobe, all exposed out there.

Gstarted going away. We were locking into station-docking position, the crew going through their motions with heart-breaking calm, doing all the right things in this terrible place; and the poor unsecured Maidwas going to be chaos in her station-topside decks.

A touch came at my fingers. It was Lancelot’s hand seeking mine. I closed on it, and reached beside me for Vivien’s, which was very cold.

She had, Lance had said it, planned to live, and everything was wrong for her. No hope for Vivien, whose accounts and knowledge were useless now. I understood suddenly, that Vivien’s function was simply gone for her; and she had already begun to die, in a way as terrible as being dumped out in the chaos-stuff.

“The lady will need you,” I hissed at Viv, gripping her nerveless hand till I ground the bones together. “She needs us all.”

That might have helped. There was a little jerk from Viv’s hand, a little resistance; and I winced, for Lance closed down hard on mine. My lady and Griffin screamed—we hit, ground with a sound like someone was shredding the Maid’s metal body, and our soft bodies hit the restraints as the ship’s mass stopped a little before that of our poor flesh. I blanked half an instant, came out of it realizing pain, and that somehow we had not been going as fast as I feared a ship might in this place (which estimate ranged past Cand posed interesting physics for collision) or what we had hit was going the same general direction as we were, at an angle. Mass, I thought, if that had any meaning in this place/time ... a monstrous mass, to have pulled us into it, if that was what it had done. Our motion had not stopped in collision. The noise had not. We grated, hit, hung, grated, a shock that seemed to tear my heart and stomach loose.

“We’re up against it,” Modred’s cool voice came to me. “We’d better grapple or we’ll go on with this instability.”

Instability.A groaning and scraping, and a horrifying series of jolts, as if we were being dragged across something. The Maidshifted again, her dragging force of engines like a hand pushing us.

Clang and thump. I heard the grapples lock and felt the whole ship steady, a slow suspicion of stable Gthat crawled through the clothes I wore and settled my hair down and caressed my abused joints and stomach and said that there was indeed up and down again. It was a kilo or so light, but we had G. Whatever we were fixed to had spin and we had gotten our right orientation to it.

The crew was still exchanging quiet information, doing a shutdown, no cheers, no exuberance in their manner. That huge main screen cleared again, to show us ruby-spotted blackness and our own battered nose with the grapples locked onto something. Strong floods were playing from our hull onto the surface we faced, a green, pitted surface which was flaring with colors into the violets and dotted with little instabilities like black stars. It made me sick to look at it; but it was indeed our nose probe, badly abraded and with stuff coming out of it like trailing cable or black snakes, and there was our grapple locked into something that looked like metal wreckage. The lights swung further and it was wreckage, all right, some other ship all dark and scarred and crumpled. The lights and camera kept traveling and there was still another ship, of some delicate kind I had never imagined. It was dark too, like spiderweb in silhouette, twisted wreckage at its heart with its filament guts hanging out into the red measled void.

My lady Dela swore and wept, a throaty, loud sound in the stillness about us now. She freed herself of the restraints and crossed the deck to Gawain and Lynn, and Griffin came at her heels. I loosed myself, and Lance did, while Dela leaned there on the back of Gawain’s chair, looking up at the screen in terror. Griffin set his big hands on her shoulders. “Keep trying,” Griffin asked of the crew, who kept the beam and the cameras moving, turning up more sights as desolate. Aft, through the silhouette of the Maid’s raking vanes, there was far perspective, chaos-stuff with violet tints into the red. More wreckage then. The cameras stopped. “There,” Modred said. “There.”

It was a curve, lit in the queasy flarings, a vast sweep, a symmetry in the wreckage, as if the thing we were fixed to were some vast ring. Ship bodies were gathered to it like parasites, like fungus growth, with red and black beyond, and the wrecks themselves all spotted with holes as if they were eaten up with acid light illusion of the chaos-stuff, or something showing through their metal wounds, like glowing blood.

“Whatever we’ve hit,” Percy said quietly, “a lot have gone before us. It’s some large mass, maybe a station, maybe a huge ship—once. Old ... old. Others might fall through the pile into us the same way we’ve hit them.”

“Then get us out of here,” my lady said. “Get us out!”

Gawain and Lynette stirred in their seats. Wayne powered his about to look up at her. “My lady Dela, it’s not possible.” He spoke with the stillest patience. “We can wallow about the surface, batter ourselves into junk against it. If we loose those grapples we’ll do that.”

I thought she would hit him. She lifted her hand. It fell. “Well, what are you going to do?”

Gawain had no answer. Griffin set his hands on my lady’s arms, just stood there. I looked at Lance and he was white; I looked at Vivien and she plainly blanked, standing vacant-eyed in her restraints. I undid them, patted her face hard until I got a flicker in her eyes, put my arms about her and held her. She wrapped her arms about me and held on.

“The hull is sound,” Modred said. “Our only breach is G-34. I’ve sealed that compartment.”

“Get us out of here,” Dela said. “Fix what’s wrong with us and get us out of here, you hear that? You find out how to move in this stuff and get us away.”

The crew slowly stopped their operations, confronted with an impossibility. I held to Viv, and Lance just stood there, his hand clenched on one of the safety holds. I felt a profound cold, as if it were our shared fault, this disaster. We had failed and the Maidwas damaged—more than damaged. All the crew’s skill, that had stopped our falling, that had docked us here neatly as if it was Brahmani Station ... in this terrible, terrible place....

“We’re fixed here,” Lynette said. “There’s no way. There’s no repair that can make the engines work against this. The Maidwon’t move again. Can’t.”

There was stark silence, from us, from Dela, no sound at all over the ship but the fans and the necessary machinery.

“How long will we survive?” Griffin asked. He kept his steadying hold on my lady. His handsome face was less arrogant than I had ever seen it; and he came up with the only sensible question. “What’s a reasonable estimate?”

“No immediate difficulty,” Gawain said. He unfastened his restraints and stood up, jerking his head so that his long hair fell behind his shoulders. “Modred?”

“The ship is virtually intact,” Modred said. “We’re not faced with shutdown. The lifesupport and recycling will go on operating. Our food is sufficient for several years. And for the percentage of inefficiency in the recycling, there are emergency supplies, frozen cultures, hydroponics. It should be indefinite.”

“You’re talking about living here,” Dela said in a faint voice.

“Yes, my lady.”

“In this?”

Modred turned back to his boards, without answer.

Dela stood there a moment, slowly brought her hands up in front of her lips. “Well,” she said in a tremulous voice, with a sudden pivot and look at Griffin, at all of us. “Well, so we do what we can, don’t we?” She looked at the crew. “Who knows anything about the hydroponics?”

“There’s a training tape,” Percy said, “in library. It’s a complicated operation. When the ship is secured—”

“I can do that.” Vivien stirred at my side, muscles tensing. “Lady Dela, I’ll do that.”

Dela looked at her, waved her hand. “See to it.” Viv shivered, with what joy Dela surely had no concept. Sniffed and straightened her back. Dela paced the deck, distracted, with that look in her eyes—panic. It was surely panic. She laughed a faint and brittle laugh and came back and laced her fingers into Griffin’s hand. “So we make the best of it,” she said, looking up at him. “You and I.”

He stood looking at the screens and the horror outside, while my lady Dela put her arms about him. Maybe she was building her fantasies back again, but it was a different look I saw on Griffin’s face, which was not resigned, which was set in a kind of desperation. My jaw still ached where he had hit me in his panic, and I was afraid of this man as I would have been afraid of one of my own kind who had had such a lapse—for which one of usmight have been put down. But born-men were entitled to stupidities, and to be forgiven for them.

What was outside our hull didn’t forgive. We were snugged by some attraction up against a huge mass. Even if the big generation vanes were to work in this vicinity as the repulse had—from what little I knew of jump, I knew we dared not try, not unless we wanted to string our components and bits of that mass into some kind of fluxing soup ... half to stay here and half to fly off elsewhere. That mass was going to serve to keep us here, one way or the other.

A wandering instability, a knot in time and space, a ripple in the between that came wandering through our safe solar system and sucked us up. And with who knew what other ships? I almost opened my mouth on that sudden thought—that perhaps we should try to see if we had company in this disaster, if others had been sucked through too; material things seemed to work here, and maybe the com would. And then I thought of some big passenger carrier, short of food and water in relation to its number of passengers, and what that might mean for us, if they did make contact.

No. Old—Percy had said it. Perhaps—the thought went shivering through my flesh while I stared at the screens—others had faced similar moments, had lived out their lives until they decayed, the light eating through them. From what we had seen of the mass, from the insane way in which the ships were fused, one upon the other, they must all be very old, if age meant anything at all here, and that was not the quick eating away of matter by the chaos-stuff.

“Go,” my lady said suddenly, waving her hands at us. “See what’s damaged. Start putting things in order. See to it. Are you going to stand like you’ve lost your wits?”

I looked desperately at Lance and Vivien, turned and went, a last backward look at the screens, and then I hurried out to check the halls and the compartments. My lady now talked as if she had given up her premise that we were dead, and I took some comfort in that while I walked the corridors back to her compartment—only mild damage there. The wine bottle had been mostly empty, the dew had been so generally distributed in null– Gthat there remained no visible trace of it except on the table-tops and the steel doors. The rest had soaked into the carpet and covered the woodwork, beyond helping. And the glasses were unbreakable, lying where returning Ghad dropped them. I wiped surfaces, straightened the bed, gathered up fallen towels in the bath. At least there had been no furniture out of its braces. Not so bad. I walked outside, confronted suddenly with the chill corridors, the light Gthat made my stomach queasy. It came back to me again what my lady had said about eternity being compassed in dying, about the brain spilling all it contained in random firings—but then, if that were so, then we should not be sharing the dream, unless all that I had touched, the ship, the lady, Lance, everyone—was illusion, and I had never seen or touched at all.

Perhaps I had built it all out of the chaos-stuff as I had built my hand when I willed to see it. Perhaps I had just gone too far in my building, and what the lady said about dying was my own brain talking to itself, trying to convince me by logic that the dream had to end and that I should be decently dead.

And I would not listen, but went on dreaming.

No, I thought, and shuddered, because there had just crept a touch of red into the shadows in the hall, the old way of looking at things coming back again, and if I could not stop it my eyes would begin to see the chaos-stuff through the walls.

They had experimented, so my lady’s pilfered tapes had told me, with living human senses; and the brain could be re-educated. Eyes could learn to see rightside up or upside down. Somewhere in the waves of energy that impinged the nerves, the brain constructed its own fantasies of matter and blue skies and green grass and solidity, screening out the irrational and random.

A reality existed within us too, tides of particles that were themselves nodes in chaos, all strung together to make this reality of ours. And in this place the structure of matter gaped wide and I could see it ... miniature tides like the tides of the moving galaxies in one rhythm with them, and us spread like a material veil between, midway of one reality and the other.

No, I thought again, and leaned against the veil/wall in my chosen viewpoint of what was, was, was ... don’t look down. One was advised not to look at such things and never to know that all of us were dreaming, dreaming even when we were sure we were alive, because what the brain always did was dream, and what difference whether it built its dreams from the energy affecting it from outside or whether it traced its own independent fancies, making its own patterns on the veil. Don’t lean too hard. Don’t look.

I slid down onto the corridor floor and heaved up my insides, which was my body’s way of telling me it had had enough nonsense. It wanted the old dream back, insisted to have it. I lay there dry-heaving until I dismissed my ideas of dreams and eternities, because I hurt inside and wanted to die, and if I could have waked and died at once I would have gladly done it.

So a pair of slippered feet came up to me; and my lady Dela, all tearful, cursed me for useless and kicked me besides, in my sore stomach. That helped, actually, because when my lady had gone on in and shut the door, I was angry, which was better than hurting. And before I had gotten up on my own, Percy came after me, saying she had sent him. Gentle Percy cleaned the hall up and cleaned me up and carried me to the crew quarters. There, when he had gone back to his duties, I took care of myself and changed and felt better, if somewhat hollow at the gut.

So much for fighting it. I moved meekly about the reality of the Maid, loving her poor battered self as I did my own body, and doing all I could to get her into order again. So did we all, I think with the same reason, that if the Maidhad been precious to us before, she was ten thousand times so now.