Tripoint (26 page)

Wasn’t in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I’ve traveled more lightyears than you. I’m ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?

He didn’t see things clearly. He wasn’t sure what he saw.

“You have to get used to it,” the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn’t make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn’t get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he’d ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spinning faster and faster as his heart speeded up and the sensual and sensory traded places in rapid succession.

Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn’t remember the answer to his question, or why he’d asked it. He hadn’t any breath. He couldn’t get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spinning through the dark into white space, and the sickening conviction of falling that came at system-drop.

Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.

“Don’t believe Christian,” someone said. “Nothing’s free.”

He was alone, then, couldn’t put reality with where he was or where he’d been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.

Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…

Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie’s language.

That’s a stupid thing to do. That’s just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?

Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.

Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can’t trust this crew won’t go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…

Jump-dreams like he’d never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn’t be in real life. He’d real memories. He’d the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein’s laws and Bok’s famous loophole.

Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he’d never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?

Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn’t gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?

The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he’d disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.

But he hadn’t a stitch on.

He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.

Couldn’t get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.

Christian’s face, Christian holding him up… down the hall. Christian’s clothes… skintights, and a sensual feeling in clothes he wasn’t used to…

Christian being so damned nice…

God!

It was too damn much. He couldn’t hold his head up, he was getting sick, and breaking into a sweat, thinking back into that pit of dark he’d come through, and past it, to the Tripoint jump, and the scratches he’d waked with there.

He felt a rising nausea. He could scarcely coordinate his fingers to pull the tab on the nutri-pack. He tried to calm down and think about that, only that, just getting his stomach settled.

Wholly absorbing problem for the moment. He sipped, counted his breaths, told himself somebody’d messed with his trank, and he’d hallucinated.

But hallucinations didn’t get that shirt off without the bracelet.

Hallucinations hadn’t left him lying on the floor last jump with scratches all over his body.

Something had happened. Someone had been walking about. When the brain and the body were in some kind of profound slowdown, tranked-out. You didn’t dare skip trank… doing that was stuff for the vids, for people who paid money to get scared out of their wits. It was for fools who believed the stories, that Mazian’s navigators and engineers could think through jump…

But, God, they did, they had a night-walker aboard. Somebody who didn’t trank was wandering the corridors for a Godforsaken month of no-time, coming in and out of locked doors, whispering in your ear, fingering whatever and whoever she pleased, while everybody was lying helpless as pieces of meat.

And that bracelet of stars…

He didn’t want to think about it. He lay still and, finding the one packet would stay on his stomach, ventured another, ghastly lemon-synth. He had to talk to Tink about lemon. Didn’t want lemon in the next batch. Please God. Not another one.

Another
v
-dump, pulse against the interface. He came to with the mingled taste of lemon and copper in his mouth, and seemed to have bitten his tongue.

Then the all-clear sounded. At least he surmised that was the reason of the siren blast, this time, and a woman’s voice said, velvet soft and razor steel, “This is Perrault. Free to move about. We have Pell’s signal.”

He undid the safety restraints, flung his legs out of bed, sat the edge, wobbly and aiming for the shower in his next effort.

Not a damn stitch on. The scratches… had healed. Like the bruises.

He braced an arm against the other wall and staggered along it to the bath and the shower, hell with any voyeur passing in the corridor… he got the door seal mostly made in spite of the trailing cable, enough that the lock would engage and the vapor jets would work. He shaved, with the razor connected to the console—and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the detergent vapor blasted out at him and made clouds he breathed with the air.

Spooked, he decided. He felt… as if the craziness about this ship had crept into his bed while he slept, as if, if he scrubbed hard enough, he could stop smelling a musky, spicy scent he dreamed he’d smelled in jump, and stop feeling as if something had done things with him, to him, he didn’t remember.

Paranoia and a streak of kink he’d never figured, he kept telling himself. Whatever brand of trank it was, it wasn’t the dosage he was used to, it wasn’t working right, he was hallucinating, and he had to talk to the meds about it and get the dosage adjusted before he
did
come out in mid-jump…

But underdosing couldn’t explain the cable on his arm and the clothes folded on his bunk, no more than it explained the equations running around the edges of his brain. Maybe, he thought desperately, maybe he’d understood the deep-tape better than he thought. Maybe information he’d picked up had clicked in and it all surfaced in his subconscious and made him think about tape he hadn’t had for ten years.

Bok’s equation… and snakes… and Christian…

Hell if it had.

It hit him then… a fit of shaking he couldn’t control. He wasn’t even sure it was fear—or exhaustion, or sickness, or just the overwhelming heat of the drier cycle. He sank down where it was private and safe and let the hot air blast around him, hair on end, knees and elbows knocking together, teeth clicking in sporadic shivers the air didn’t warm.

So why give a damn if somebody got off for a month at his expense? He wasn’t hurt. Didn’t matter what somebody had done to him that he didn’t half know about. Didn’t matter what he’d done, asleep…

He jerked, swung his hands back to catch the walls beside him, half-twisted a knee… it was that violent, that vivid an illusion of falling. Sexual arousal. Pain. Terror. He was back in jump-space.

Held his eyes open, even from blinking, while the surfaces dried in the vortex of warm air. He couldn’t see the shower wall. He knew it was white. He couldn’t remember white. He tried, desperately, and got something like UV. Glaring. Burning into his open eyes.

White, then, finally, white. Ordinary, cheap, gold-flecked paneling. The roar of the fans.

He had to get out of
Corinthian
. Christian had promised to let him go, he remembered Christian’s quarters, the clothes, the talk… and he knew he couldn’t trust the offer… nothing’s for free, echoed in the back of his skull. Nothing’s free.

He shivered, quick spasm of physical revulsion, not sure what he remembered.

Couldn’t be safe on this ship.
Someone
was wandering the corridors playing grotesque pranks, God knew what. A voice patiently telling him how hyperspace was configured, the equations running through his head like a nuisance piece of music, along with lying half-awake in a chaos of sequence, everything out of order, every sensation piling up with the last one—she’d said… she’d said… only the numbers were true.

His body reacted—quick, physical arousal.

Another spasm of shivering hit, then. And anger, this time—overriding everything but the common sense that said that if there was such a creature as a night-walker and if it was Capella, as he suspected…

He rested his forehead on his arms, he stared at the shower floor between his feet, and the snaking trail of the cable, the governing reality of his situation on
Corinthian
. He’d not
liked
the people he was with on
Sprite…
but he’d never been other than part of
Sprite
. He’d never had this sense of being stalked, never had to feel he hadn’t any resource whatsoever to protect himself. He was, point of fact, terrified—not so much of the night-walker whoever it was: that grotesque, strange episode wasn’t so bad as the notion he couldn’t do anything about what these people decided to do to him, no matter
what
they decided to do to him…

And somebody was telling him don’t believe Christian? Don’t believe in a way off this ship?

He had to. He fucking had to. He didn’t know what the next joke might be. And the captain knew—the captain had to know what was going on, knew there was such a thing as a walker, he knew who it was, and he sat smug while Christian and Capella played their dominance games, one against the other, and both of them with him—so, so damned funny, it had to be, to them…

Another shiver hit him, diminished in force. He felt sick at his stomach.

“Mr. Hawkins,” he heard, from outside. Male voice, stranger. Harsh. It sent him scrambling for his feet, and he heard the motor move the grid on its track. The next might yank the cable and him through the shower door and across the brig. He caught his balance on the wall, scraped his back on the water-vents doing it, and nipped the shower door latch.

Buck naked, confronted an officer he didn’t know, who gave him a stare as if he was a sale item in the bargain bin.

The pocket tab said
Michaels
.

He remembered the thump of blows falling, in the corridor, the man Tink called trouble. The presence turned out middle-aged, greying hair down to his shoulders and face set in an inbuilt scowl.

“Sir,” he said.

“Galley, mister. You’re on duty.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Two seconds. Getting my clothes.”

He flinched past Michaels in haste, grabbed his clothes off his bunk, pulled on underwear, skintights,—he couldn’t put on the shirt, and Michaels came and keyed open the bracelet, indicated he should get the boots on and get moving.

Which he did, pulling his shirt on as they left, no questions, no uninvited word of conversation or question with this man—

Michaels might find some excuse to use that spring baton he carried clipped to his belt; and he was vastly glad that they went straight down to the galley, with no detours and not a word exchanged.

Except Michaels said, when he delivered him to Jamal, at the galley section counter—”Kid’s shaky. Light duty.”

Shook him as badly as a curse. The dreaded Michaels personally braceleted his left wrist to the cable coiled up on the counter and walked out, all the while the cold traveled a meandering course to the nerve centers and started a tremor in the gut, in the knees, in the chest. Oh, God, he thought in disgust, but he couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t walk away and pretend it wasn’t going on—it went to all-over shakes. Reality was coming apart on him, in red and blue flashes, right over the white galley walls.

“Hey. “ Jamal pried him loose from the counter and about that time Tink arrived in the galley—”Kid sick?” Tink asked, grabbed his other arm, and between his shaking and his attempts to walk on his own, the two of them got him into a chair at a mess table. They hovered over him, debated calling somebody—”No!” he said, and somehow they materialized a cup of real fruit juice, a cup of the nutri-pack stuff, an offer of coffee or tea… he just sat there like a fool and shook, trying to drink the fruit juice… it was real, and rare, and he wasn’t about to waste it… with Tink patting him on the shoulder and saying how he should just sit there until he felt like moving, it was all right.

Damned near shook the cup out of his hand when Tink said that. He tried to figure why it made the shakes worse, and couldn’t, but somewhere in the back of his mind was the lonely feeling he not only couldn’t leave Tink, he didn’t want to leave Tink… don’t trust Christian, kept ringing in his head, but he didn’t know if that was any truer than Christian’s offer.

Crazy, he told himself finally, when he could set the cup down without slopping it, when he could glance up at the mundane white and blues and chrome of the galley and realized he’d been seeing something darker and less organized, some place with black patches and some place that was
Sprite’s
corridors, and cousins, and Marie’s office, and the muted beiges of Marie’s apartment. He was suddenly close to tears. He didn’t know why. He didn’t understand himself.