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<> used lights and sounds and other stimuli, and mapped reflexes in the hologrammatic brains, obtaining sensory reactions from the imprints along the appropriate pathways. <> discovered what seemed to be a rest state and maintained the organisms close to sleep, yet able to react and speak, prolonging this interrogation in words and sensations.
The two weakest sank deeper, refusing when prodded to come out of this state, eventually deteriorating so that it required more and more stimulus to keep them functioning. At last decomposition set in.
The third subject remained in sleep-state. <> questioned it further and it reacted in dazed compliance.
The simulacra still reacted ... all three of them.
The surviving organism fell into deeper and deeper sleep and <> let it rest.
<> further examined the remains of the other two, analyzed them in their failure, finally committed them to cryostorage.
<> wasted nothing that <> took in.
Rafe moved, and knew that he moved. He felt no pain. His limbs seemed adrift in void, and when he opened his eyes he thought that he was blind.
“Jillan!” he cried, struggling to stand, reaching out with his hands. “Paul, Jillan!”
“Rafe—!” Jillan’s voice came back; and she was there, coming toward him in the starless void. Paul followed. They were naked, both; so was he; and their bodies glowed like lamps in the utter dark, as if they were their own light, and all the light there was. They began to run toward him, and he ran, caught Jillan in his arms, and Paul, ashamed for his nakedness and theirs and not caring, not caring anything but to hug their warmth against him. He felt the texture of their skin, their hands on him, their arms about him.
He wept, shamelessly. There was a great deal of tears, that first, that most important and human thing. “You’re here,” Jillan kept saying; “you’re all right, we’ve got you, oh Rafe, we’ve got you—hold on.”
—Because the fainting-feeling was on him, and they all three seemed to drift, to whirl, to travel in this dark. There were sounds, far wails, like wind. Something brushed past them through the dark, vast and impersonal, like the whisper of a draft.
“Where have we got to?” Paul wondered, and Rafe looked at Paul and looked at Jillan as they stood disengaged, in this dark nowhere.
“I don’t know,” he said, ashamed for his helplessness to tell them. I’m scared.He kept that behind his teeth. He looked about him, into nothing at all, and kept remembering jump, and the sinuous wave of arms.
“There was something—” Jillan said, her teeth chattering. “Oh God, God—” She stood there, shivering in her nakedness, and Paul hugged her against him. “Don’t,” he said, “don’t. Don’t think, don’t—”
“We’re through jump,” Rafe said as firmly as he could, filling the void, the dark about them all with words to listen to, making them fix on him. “There was that bogey; it’s got us. Remember? That’s where we are. It’s got us in the dark, and we can’t come undone, you hear me, both of you. Let’s think our way out of this. It’s kept us alive and together. That’s something, isn’t it?”
They said nothing. Their faces were dreadful, full of shadows within their glowing flesh.
“Why no light?” Jillan asked.
“Maybe they don’t have eyes,” Paul said.
She looked at her glowing hands, at him, at Paul, with a whole dreadful range of surmises in that glance.
“It’s some kind of effect,” Rafe said, searching for any plausible thing, “some light trick. That’s all.”
“Sure,” said Paul, attempting cheerfulness, “sure. Who knows what kind of thing.” But his voice was thin. He walked a little distance away and distances themselves played tricks, so that he became small rapidly, as if he strode meters at a time. “Come back,” Rafe said, and Paul turned, looking small and frightened.
“God, what is this place?”
“I’m cold,” Jillan said, hugging herself; but the air was not cold at all; it was nothing. It was the nakedness that diminished all of them, that made them vulnerable, the dark that made them blind.
“Look,” Rafe said, “let’s not go off crazy. We can’t ask questions. You have to know something to ask questions and we don’t. We’ve got no referents. We’re just alive, that’s all—” They hurt us,his memory insisted, and he fought that down. “Nothing matters but now and facts, and facts we’re short of. Calm down.”
“What do we do?” Jillan asked.
“We stay close together,” he said, “and we try not to lose each other. Let’s try to find a wall, a door, somewhere in this place.” He took her hand and walked to Paul in those curious several-meter steps that were the law here, while Paul stared at them with nightmare in his eyes that showed dark as the dark about them. “We’re having trouble with our senses,” Rafe said to them both, and even his voice seemed lost in void. “Maybe it isn’t even dark. Jump can do things to you. We weren’t tranked.”
“You mean we’re crazy,” Paul said. “All three of us at once. Or do I imagine you? Or you us? Or what?”
“I’m saying our eyes aren’t working right.”
“What about the floor?” Paul said, sinking to one knee, touching what felt like air underfoot. “I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel anything! I don’t even feel my breathing. Like it isn’t air.”
“We’ll come out of it,” Jillan said, and drew Paul to his feet. “Paul, we’ll make it. Rafe’s right; it’s the jump; it’s done something to us. We’re not getting sense out of it.”
“Between?” Paul asked, blinking as if he had just thought of that. “You mean we’re still in hyperspace? Could that be it?”
“Maybe,” Rafe said, clinging to that hope.
“O God,” Paul murmured, shaking his head, and looked up and about again—hopeless to ask how long, how far, where there was no reference. “That makes sense.”
Then light began to grow about them, white and green. It took on shadows of shapes.
It became a nightmare, bits and pieces of Lindyrooted in a noded, serpentine hallway fuzzed in gossamer like spiderweb over carpet. There stood the seats, part of the control console, the EVAPOD standing at attention like some humanoid monster grown from the wall at an angle. A row of luminants snaked like a chain of warts down the center of the noded ceiling, giving what light there was.
And Rafe saw himself lying there naked on the floor.
“That’s you,” Jillan moaned. “Rafe, what’s happening to us?”
The lights went dim again. Rafe strode forward, desperate, recalling how the dying saw their bodies from some other vantage. He felt the cold, felt a vast love of that poor wounded flesh that was himself, wanting it back again.
“Rafe!”Jillan called, and the horror dawned on him, that they were dead, that Jillan and Paul were bodiless, and he almost was. “Rafe!”
The dark closed about him and he fought it, trying to get back to the light. He felt their hands like claws, clutching at him to drag him back to death with them.
“Let me go,” he cried, “let me go!”—cursing their selfishness.
Rafe moved, and knew that he moved. He felt other things, pain, and chill, and G holding him supine against a cloth surface. He opened his eyes and kept them open, on a graygreen arched ceiling of warts and white fuzz, like what his fingers and body felt under him, soft and rough like carpet. He felt a draft on all his skin so that he knew he was naked. His heart started speeding, his mind sorting. “Jillan—Jillan, Paul?”He rolled over, wincing from torn muscles, from a sudden lancing pain from eyes to the back of his skull.
Dim distance, warts and cobwebby stuff snaked on and on as far as he could see, graygreen to white in an irregular corridor, lumpish and winding as if the place abhorred a straight line.
He scrambled to his knees, trembling, and stopped cold. His blurred eyes fixed on nightmare. Bits and pieces of Lindywere rooted in the tu