Alternate Realities (7 page)

“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
is
this 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.

G
started 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
Maid
was 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
C
and 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
Maid
shifted 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
G
that 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
Maid
was 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
Maid
won’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
us
might 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.