Alternate Realities (6 page)

H
our by hour, if that was really a word we could use any longer, the world grew clearer, and Vivien confessed she would live. Then came peevish orders from my lady, who complained she was deserted by the whole staff: she wanted Lance—which meant Griffin was better, I reckoned, since she sounded more angry than hysterical.

Lance went off in his pained despair, called up there to be near Griffin, which he hated, and with Dela, which was all he ever wanted. That left us with Vivien in the crew quarters then, in disfavor, I suspected. Vivien had drifted into quiet, exhausted, and we had given her a little sedative we had had ready for jump, belatedly, but it let Viv rest, not quite out, not really tracking on much either. And in a ship the walls of which were none too stable yet in my senses ... the lonely quiet seemed to put me all too far from everyone else. I was also conscious suddenly that my stomach was terribly empty. If time had gone as wrong as we thought it might have, then it might have been a long while that we had not wanted food or water, but now it hit me all of a sudden, so that I found my limbs shaking, as if all the demands of some long deprivation were coming due.

And sure enough about the same time came Lynette’s voice ordering one of us to get food up to the bridge as quickly as we could, claiming they felt faint. I was not sure that my lady Dela and particularly Griffin or Viv wanted to see food yet, but I staggered down to the lift and out on the lowermost level to the galley, and tried to put food for all of us together, out of the shambles our wild careering into jump had made of the place.

Then Vivien showed up in the doorway, a little frayed about the edges, it was true, muzzy with the drug, but moving along without touching the walls. She said nothing. Her face was set and determined with more fortitude than I had reckoned existed in Viv, and she had put most of the strands of her hair back into place so that she looked more herself. She was hungry, that was what: discomfort had gotten her moving again the same way it had sent her to bed, and without a by-your-leave she started into one of the trays. So had I, truth to tell. I had been stealing a bite and a drink while I was making the rest, because I wanted to stay on my feet to do it.

“Do they know anything yet?” she asked.

“No,” I said. I refrained from adding that they weren’t going to, not to pull the props out from under Viv a second time. The intercom came on: “My lady Dela wants a breakfast sent up,” Lynette advised me, from the bridge, and I frowned: it was a lunch I had just put together. “If she wants it quick,” I said back, “she can have a lunch that is ready. She’d have to wait ten minutes for the breakfast.”

A delay. “She wants it now,” Lynette relayed back. “Anything.”

“It’s coming.” I stacked up the trays in a carrier, along with the coffee, looked up at the sound of a step in the corridor. Lance showed up and leaned there in the doorway, a shadow of himself. “Tray for you too,” I said. “Here.”

“She’s sent for breakfast.”

“I got the call. She takes what she can. Here.” I put a hot roll into his hand and he ate that while I finished stacking the other carrier for the crew. I gave Dela and Griffin’s carrier to Lance.

“I’ll go,” Vivien said, swallowing down her milk. She dried her hands, wiped possible wrinkles from her clothing. “I’ll go with you.”

Lance nodded, the carrier in one hand. He left, and Vivien went with her arm locked in his ... up where Dela was. I might have gone. I might be where there was Dela to make sense of things. But I remembered the other carrier and Lynette, the whole crew up there, and then I realized what Vivien had done, leaving the work all to me.

I picked it up, grabbed another roll for myself and carried the box to the lift, rode it up, swallowing a mouthful of the roll and trying to keep my stomach down as well.

They were anxious for the food when I arrived, shadow-eyed and miserable. Percivale came and took the carrier from me and passed it round, looked puzzled at me when there were not enough. “I had a roll down below,” I said, settling on a counter edge, still chewing the last of it and knowing it must sound as if I had fed myself first of all. “While it was in the oven.”

They said nothing, but peeled back the covers and drank out of cups that shook in their hands ... working harder than the rest of us and using up their reserves far faster, I thought, wishing I could have hurried it. As for me, I could go now to my lady, find what comfort there was now in her—but that was none, I thought. The screens all looked full of the same bad news. “Where are we?” I asked, after lingering there a moment, after they had at least had a chance to get a few swallows of the food down. “What’s happening? Can you tell anything?” I thought—if there was any hope, I would like to take it to Dela. But they would have done that: they would have called her at once, if there were.

“We’re nowhere,” Lynette said sourly.

“But moving,” said Modred.

The idea made me queasy. “Where?”

Modred waved a hand at the screen nearest Percy. It showed nothing I could read, but there were a lot of numbers ticking along on it.

“We’ve tried the engines,” said Gawain. “We’re moving, but we don’t get anything. You understand? We’ve tried to affect our movement, but what works in realspace won’t work here at all, wherever here is. We’ve tried the jump field and it won’t generate. We don’t know whether there’s something the matter with the vanes or whether we just can’t generate a field while we’re in this space. Nothing works. We’re without motive power. No one’s ever been here before. No one knows the rules. Jumpships only skim this place. We’re
in
it.”

I nodded, sick at my stomach, having gotten the bad news I had bargained for.

“But there’s something out there,” Percivale said. “That—” He indicated the same screen Modred had. “That’s a reading coming in, relative motion; and it’s getting stronger.”

I thought of black holes and other disquieting things, all impossible considering the fact that we were still alive and functioning, and kept arguing with myself that we had been safe where nothing like this should have happened, in the trafficked vicinity of a very normal star—which might or might not be normal now, the nasty thought kept recurring. And what about all the rest of the traffic which had been out there with us when we went popping unexpectedly into jump, presumably with some kind of field involved, which could tear ships apart and disrupt all kinds of material existence. Like planets. Like stars. If it were big enough.

“How—fast—are we moving?” I asked.

“Can’t get any meaningful referents. None. Something’s there, in relation to which we’re moving, but the numbers jump crazily. The size of it, whether the thing we’re picking up is even solid in any sense ... or just some ghost ... we don’t know. We get readings that hold up a while and then they fall apart.”

“Are we—falling into something?”

“Can’t tell,” said Modred, with the same calm he would have used ordering another cup of coffee.

I sat there a long time, letting the fright and the food settle. By now to my eyes the ship interior had taken on normal aspects, and my companions looked like themselves again. I reckoned that the same sort of thing must be happening with all of us, that about the time our bodies began to trouble us for normal things like food, our sensory perceptions were beginning to arrange themselves into some kind of order too.

We wouldn’t starve, I thought, not—quickly. The lockers down there had the finest food, everything for every whim of my lady. The best wines and delicacies imported from faraway worlds. An enormous amount of it. We wouldn’t run out of air. The interior systems were getting along just fine and nothing had shut down, or we would have had alarms sounding by now. Bad air or starving would be easiest, at least for us, who would simply blank and die.

I was terrified of the thing rushing up at us, or that we were rushing down into, or drifting slowly, whatever it was that those figures meant ... because we had just had a bad taste of being where we were not designed to be, and another fall of any length did not sit well with my stomach.

But we could take a long time to hit and it seemed there was nothing to be done about the situation. I stood up, brushed my suit out of wrinkles. “I’m going to see my lady,” I said. “Is there anything I can tell her?”

“Tell her,” Gawain said, “we’re trying to keep the ship intact.”

I stared at him half a beat, chilled cold, then left the bridge and walked back out through the corridors which now looked like corridors ... back to my lady’s compartments.

Griffin was there when I arrived. They had gotten him up and mobile at least, into the blue bedroom, to sit at a small table and pick at the food. My lady sat across from him. I could see them through the open door. And Viv and Lance waited outside the bedroom doors, Vivien sitting on a small straight chair which had ridden through the calamity in its transit bolts. Lance was picking up bits of something which had shattered on the carpet, and some of the tapestries were crooked in their hangings.

I sat down too, in a chair which offered some comfort to my shivery limbs. Lance finished his cleaning up and took the pieces out, came back and paced the floor. I did not. I sat rigidly still, my fingers clenched on the upholstery. I was thinking about falling into some worse hole in space than we had already met, feeling that imagined motion of those figures on the bridge screen as if it were a hurtling rush.

“Where are we?” Vivien asked, my former question. Her voice was hushed and hoarse.

“In strange space,” I said. And then, because it had to be said: “The crew doesn’t really expect we’re going to get out of it.”

It was strange who came apart and who did not. Lance, who was always so vain and so worried about his appearance and his favor with my lady—he just stood there. But Vivien sat and shivered and finally blanked on us, which was the best state for her, considering her upset, and we did not move to rouse her.

“I think,” Lance said, looking on her sitting frozen in her chair, “that Vivien planned to live a long, long time.”

Of course that was true. Poor Vivien, I thought. All her plans. All her work. She stayed blanked, and kept at it, and finally Lance went over to her and patted her shoulder, so that she came out of it. But she slipped back again at once.

“It’s a ship,”
Percivale’s voice broke over the intercom uninvited. “It’s another ship we’re headed for.”

That brought my lady and Griffin out of their bedroom refuge, all in a rush of moved chairs. “Signal it!” my lady ordered, looking up at the sitting room speaker panel as if it could show her something. “Contact it!”

Evidently they were doing something on the bridge, because there was silence after, and the lot of us stood there—all of us on our feet in the sitting room but Viv. Lance was shaking her shoulder and trying to get through her blankness to tell her there was some hope.

“We’re not sure about the range,” Modred reported finally. “We’ll keep trying as we get nearer.”

Griffin and lady Dela settled on a couch there near us, and we turned from Vivien to try to make them comfortable. Lady Dela looked very pale and drawn, which with her flaxen hair was pale indeed, like one of the ladies in the fantasies she loved; and Griffin too looked very shaken. “Get wine,” I said, and Lance did that. We even poured a little for ourselves, Lance and I, out of their way, and got some down Vivien, holding the glass in her hand for her.

“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.”