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He pressed his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes, felt days-old stubble on his jaw. He staggered erect, his muscles gone weak from those lost days. The corridor went on and on in that direction too, beyond the point where Lindy’s parts gave out, mossy and cobwebbed, all lit from luminous warts in the ceiling, irregularly placed, a line of lights winding with the serpentine turns.
“Jillan,” he called aloud. “Paul?” His voice was terrible in that stillness. He turned, looked all about him, down two ways of the corridor equally desolate and strange and vanishing into turns and dark.
“Jillan,”he shouted suddenly, desperate. “Jillan, Paul, do you hear me?”
Silence.
He searched for other sleepers, staggered among the nightmare remnants of Lindyuntil there were no more, and he faced only the warted corridor ahead. He went back and opened all the doors of the cabinets and the cases, even looked into the dark faceplate of the EVApod, fearing what he might find.
All empty. There were Lindy’s stores, food, supplies, clothing in the lockers ... his, Paul’s, Jillan’s, all as it ought to be. He looked up in the panicked imagination of someone watching him. Nothing. No indication of any living soul.
He took clothes from his locker, dressed painfully, pulling seams past sore joints. He found his watch, his soft-soled boots, his tags ... the pin that was from the old, the first Lindy, that had been his uncle’s. He sat down on the floor and put on the boots and the rest of it. His hands shook. His heart was doubling its beats. He went through mundane motions in this insane place and tried to go on functioning while flashes of memory came back, disjointed. He remembered the surface of the alien vessel and saw the same architecture everywhere about him. He had no doubt where he was. He remembered jumpspace ... and no trank; remembered (he had thought) dying—
And worse things. Far worse than the nightmare of Lindy’s dissected portions at his side. Arms. Arms snaking into the ship. Machinery. Pain.
Pain.
“Jillan ... Paul ...” He staggered up, hesitated between forward and back, the two ways from this place being alike. “Who are you?”he screamed at the ceiling.
There was no answer.
He walked the direction his mind sorted as ahead, treading around the hummocks of the floor. The wall evolved to white instead of graygreen; he touched it, but it felt like the other had felt ... gossamer silk to a light touch, but rough to a harder one, like cobweb over stiff carpet, resisting compaction. The walls went on in alternate color changes, areas of graygreen, areas of white, all warted and noded and twisting and cobwebbed, and he tried to think what ma
They were across jump: that memory was solid. Other recollections came, of confinement like a coffin; of pain ru
They had been in this place with him. He remembered them screaming, amid the pain. Remembered Paul’s voice calling his name.
There was no knowing where they had been brought, how far, how long. The intruder had simply dragged them off in its field, off into the dark, as if Endeavor star had been the firelight and this beast had just bounded into the light to snatch a victim ... to take it where it could do what it liked, at its leisure. There was no hope of help. They could be taken apart piece by piece and the whole procedure transmitted to Endeavor on vid, and there was nothing Endeavor could do about it. There was nothing here, not even human sympathy.
“Jillan,” he called from time to time. It grew harder and harder to challenge that silence, which was greater and deeper than any he had known in his stationbound, shipbound life. He felt a pulse somewhere too deep for proper hearing, the working of some constant machinery ... but no sound of fans, no ping of heating and cooling or sound of hydraulics. No feeling of being on a ship under acceleration. Just more and more corridor, cobwebbed, warted silence.
His knees grew weak in walking. He thought that it might be shock catching up to him. He realized he had no idea where he was going or why, and that his walking itself was reasonless. He sat down to rest and dropped his head into his arms.
The lights went out.
He sprang up in alarm, facing what light remained, far down the corridor. He went for the lighted section, stumbling over the nodes, hurrying until his ribs hurt—and those lights went out as he reached them as lights further on flared into life.
He understood the game then, that he was watched, that it/they wanted him to come—to them, to something. He moved helplessly toward the light that beckoned, afraid of dark and blindness in this place. They threatened to shut him off from his primary sense and he reacted in animal instinct, knowing what they were doing to him and how simply; and hoping somewhere at gut level that doing what they wanted might bring him to where Jillan and Paul were. He ran, even hurting, slowed only as his strength gave out and he fell farther and farther behind the lights until they stayed on at the limit of his sight, in one fixed sector, beyond which was unremedied dark. He reached that place as the lights dimmed and moved on into vastness where the walls were walls and were farther and farther apart.
Sweat chilled his face. What had been a limp became a stagger. He tended more and more toward the right-hand wall as the left-hand one strayed off into black, as the whole corridor opened into the likeness of a vast cavern, one with low knobbed points to the ceiling like a cavern of warts, whose farther reaches were wrapped in deepening shadow.
A sudden bright light speared from the ceiling in front of him. He flung an arm across his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked the light and the darkness, irrational as cursing: there had been no answers and he expected none.
“I don’t know,” a voice came back to him, and hewas standing there, a naked man at one heartbeat strange and then—like recognizing a mirror where one had expected none—altogether familiar. He was staring at himself, at what might have been a mirror in its expression of shock and fear—he knew that look, was startled when it lifted a hand he had not lifted and opposed itself to him.
“Damn you,” he cried to the invisible, the manipulater. “Damn you,use your own shape!”
“I am,” the doppelganger said. Tears glistened in his/its eyes. “O God, don’t—don’t look like that. Help me. I don’t know where I am.”
“Liar,” he told himself.
“Rafe.” The voice drifted from the lips, his own, uncertain and lost and vague. “Please. Listen to me. You’re awake. I’m you. I think I am. I don’t know. Please—” The doppelganger walked, sat down above a node, not quite phasing with it. It tucked its bare knees up, locked its arms about them, looked up at him with eyes full of shadow, as if the image were breaking down. “Please sit and talk with me.”
He watched his own face shape words. The lips trembled, quirks in the chin that he knew and felt in his own gut, as if it were himself fighting tears, fighting for his dignity. It hurt to watch. He was trembling as if the tears were his, and they began to be. “Where’s Jillan? Where’s Paul? Can you tell me that?”
“Sit down. Please, sit down.”
He found a place and sat, hugged his knees up until he realized he had taken the mirror pose, clothed version and naked one. His gut heaved, and he swallowed hard. “What’s your name?” he asked.