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“You’ll get lost,” Gawain protested, because the floors were still going in and out on us, taming reds and blacks and showing stars in the middle. “Don’t. If we ripped something loose back there, if those corridors aren’t sound. ...”
“Use com.” That was Modred, clearer headed than either of us. Modred passed me like a great black spider, and reached into the pool of lights, perhaps able to see them better because he knew what ought to be there. “Lady Dela,” he said. “Lady Dela, this is Modred on the bridge. Do you hear me?”
“Modred!”a voice wailed back like crystal chimes. “Help!”
“Lady Dela!” I said. “Make up your mind to see ... can you see? Look at something familiar until it makes sense.”
“Help me,” she cried.
“Do you see anything?” Gawain asked her. “Modred says we’ve had a jump malfunction. I agree. I think we’re hung up in the between, but what I have on instruments looks like the ship is intact. Do you understand me, Lady Dela?”
“Get us out!” she screamed.
“I’m trying, lady. First I have to know where we are.”
And to anyone who was thinking, that answered it, because even I knew enough to know we weren’t anywhere at all that our instruments were ever going to make sense of.
Com was open. There were voices in from all over, like tiny wailings. I could make out either Lynette or Vivien, and Percivale and Lancelot. And Griffin, giving orders.
“I can’t,” Gawain was saying. It was to his credit that he didn’t blank, nor did Modred; but this was not an emotional crisis, this was business, and we were in dire trouble with things to do—if we could do them under these conditions.
I shivered, thinking that I had to navigate the corridors and somehow get to lady Dela. I clung to something solid on the bridge, trying to remember what the hallways looked like down to the last doorway, the last bolt in the walls, because if I forgot, I could get very, very lost.
“We may have been here a while,” Modred’s voice came to me out of the surges of color that filled my vision, and I made him out, black and slim, in front of the pool of lights. “Our senses are adjusting to interpret by new rules. If we’re very careful, we should be able to keep our balance and find our way about.”
“How long?” I asked. “How long can we have been here?”
“We play games with time and space both,” Gawain’s near-far voice returned, loud and soft by turns. “Jump ... does that. Only we haven’t come out of it. We’re somewhere in subspace. And in the between, haven’tis as good a prediction as we can make.”
“Time,” said Modred, “is the motion of matter; and relatively speaking, we’re in a great deal of trouble. We don’t know how long. It means nothing.”
I grasped that. Not that I understood jump, but I knew that when ships crossed lightyears of distance by blinking here and there through jump, there had to be some kind of state in between, and that was why we took the drugs, not to have to remember that. But of course we were remembering it now: we were sitting in it, or moving through it, and whether time was stretched and we were living all this in seconds or whether we were really what Modred and Gawain said—hung—my mind balked from such paradoxes Theyjuggled such things, Gawain and Modred and Percy and Ly
All at once Lynette came wading through the red and black toward us, stained with the glow that was everywhere, and walking steadily. It was a marvelous feat, that she had gotten from the lower decks up here, and gotten to her post, but there she was, and she pushed me out of the way and sat down in the phantom of a chair, reached into the pool of lights and started trying to make sense of things.
“Percy’s coming,” she said. And he was. I could see him too, like a ghost striding across the distances which behaved themselves better than they had been doing a moment ago. Everyone was getting to their posts, and I knew mine. I stood up and reached out my hands so that I wouldn’t crack my skull and I walked, having less trouble about it than I feared. Spatial relationships were still giving me trouble, so that things looked flat one moment and far away the next, but I kept my arms out for balance and touched the sides of the corridors when I could, shutting my eyes whenever the chaos got too bad.
It meant going far back through the ship, and the corridor writhed like a transparent snake with a row of lights down its spine. At times I shut my eyes and felt my way, but the nerves in my hands kept going numb from time to time and the walls I couldn’t see felt sticking-cold and burning hot if I let them.
But they were only feelings, lies my senses tried to tell me, and once and long ago I had lived in that white place where only the tapes are real—where I got so good at seeing that I could make pictures crawl across the walls of my cell just as if the tapes were really ru
But their time, these servants’ time, was the slow ticking away of decay in their cells, and in the motion of a clock toward the date that they would be put down, and their reality would end.
They would have gone crazy here, walking down a heaving belly of a snake in that place which somehow bucked the flinging-outward that made all they knew; and Idid not break down, being sensible, and having an idea from the begi
So I kept telling myself, but my nerves still would not obey the new rules and my brain kept trying to tell me I was falling and my stomach wanted to tell me I was upside down.
I sent strong orders to my eyes. The wall straightened itself marvelously well when I really bore down on it, but shadow was really shadow, like holes into nothing. Like snippets cut out of the universe. I saw space crawling there, with hints of chaos.
Left turn. I felt for a doorswitch, wondering if anything was going to work with the ship where it was, but com had worked; and the instruments back in controls were still working, even if they picked up nothing sensible. And the door did open.
I kept going, down a corridor which seemed nightmarishly lengthened. The door at my right was open, and these were my lady’s compartments. I held out my hands and walked along quite rapidly now, felt my way through the misshapen door.
Someone was sobbing, a throaty, hoarse sound that moaned through the walls: that guided me. I tripped over something that went away like chimes, over and over again, caught myself on something else I could not recognize and tried to get my bearings. There were points of light, shimmers of metal—the artificial flame lamps and the old weapons that Dela loved. That puddle of color up/down? was one of the ba
My companions ... they had reached her. Lance sat there holding my lady in his arms, and Viv huddled next to him.