Norton, Andre - Anthology (24 page)

 
          
 
I almost thought I reached something as my
hand fell open, the string dangling again between my fingers, a filament of
light like sound laying out upon darkness. Tink's purr hit me again as a soft
paw patted the string. The sound lifted me, pushing me again, farther, and for
a moment a star glimmered above me in a pale shimmer.

 
          
 
Tink's nose butted my hand again as she pushed
up against my side to curl up beside me. I lay still among the dark waters as
her purr washed over me, its power drawing me together, holding me in a soft
envelope of sound. It pushed at me when I wanted to stop, to just lie there
wrapped in its warm familiarity. It stubbornly nudged me onward where I could
not make myself go. Its thrum was warmth, light, feeling; I wanted it to hold
me as I fell down into it. And suddenly I was cold, stars glittered, and hard
cold metal lay under my face.

 
          
 
"Are you all right, Lise?" Cor asked
me. She held my head up with one hand, the other brushing my forehead. Her
touch was cool and dry. A vibration inside me slowed and faded. I was hot and
my stomach sat at the bottom of my throat, its acid a bad taste about to erupt.

 
          
 
I let Cor roll me over as Pak hurried onto the
bridge. His glass eyes reflected cold metal and blinking lights. My stomach
settled as the first pain surged, lighting coals of fire in the bones on the
left side of my face.

 
          
 
"Where are we?" he asked, not quite
looking at me, focused on the board as he tried to sort out its readings. I
tried to sit up, but the deck seemed to roll, sliding away from underneath me.
My hands were cold and slick with sweat. I lifted the hair off of the back of
my neck to cool the perspiration gathering there.

 
          
 
"I'm okay. I'm okay," I told Cor. I
was shaking so hard my arm could barely hold me up as I propped myself in a
sitting position against the bulkhead. Blood roared in my ears, reminding me of
something I'd heard before. Waves of fire licked up the side of my face,
blinding my left eye. I tried to close my eyes to slits, shutting out the
painful light stabbing at me in glasslike shards.

 
          
 
"We're way off," Pak said, leaning
over the board and fingering switches. He settled into the empty chair to try
to sort it out. "I can't make out where we are. The readings don't
fit." His fingers hit switches on the board and some of the alarms shut
off, leaving cold silence behind them. The bulkhead was a cold weight at my
back, cold and quiet. The engines were down. The metal wall held me up while
the spinning slowed and pain grew. Cor had left me and was already standing
next to Pak, giving him what aid she could. The crushing pain in my head hit an
early, sudden peak, breaking there.

 
          
 
"The hold is breached," Cor added.
"Whatever it was took out the corridor, too, so we can't get anywhere near
it." She droppedJfito tire chair at her board, her fingers fast on
readings. "It'll be short rations, too. The galley door was open onto that
corridor. We'll have to secure that before we get to the rest of the
damage." Cor had long, dark hair, thick and wavy and she held it back now
with one hand over her forehead as she scanned the rest of her board, her other
hand adjusting sensors. "Might be a while. Looks like the door itself was
split. We'll have to weld a sheet over it before we can access the galley and
fix the door." Her voice was tight and urgent.

 
          
 
"We're out of the galactic plane,"
Pak finally said. His left hand reached for main comp again. He'd taken more
readings and was now waiting for comp's data. Looking up from where I sat, I
could see his hand was a shivering, pale shadow against the background of the
board, white against silver, matte against metallic gleam. He rubbed the pads
of his fingers against the thumb tip, as if to rub feeling back into
still-frozen flesh. I still couldn't move. I still couldn't lift myself up off
the floor to help at the board. His finger hit comp again and stayed there,
paralyzed, as he waited for the new data.

 
          
 
I pushed myself up. The pain had gone just a
bit, the nerve pathways in my face still smoldering, but bearably. My bones and
muscles felt like loose sand, and moving made it worse. I grabbed hold of the
board and let myself fall into my seat next to Pak's. I let out my breath as my
head swam, then breathed a couple of times, slow and calm, until my head and
stomach steadied. I held onto the cold board for what seemed like a long time,
my fingers white ice, trembling and nerveless. I tried to figure out what Pak
was seeing on the main instruments. I lit the screen so we could see something,
anything. All it showed was darkness with a shimmering patch in its depths. I
rotated the starboard sensors and stars glittered there in a cluster.

 
          
 
Cor was still assessing systems damage. Pak
was still punching up figures, the same ones again and again.

 
          
 
"Pak?" I asked. He shook his head.

 
          
 
"I can't find us," he finally said.
'I can't even find where we were, and I can't match any of these stars to the
signatures in comp." Comp carried the signature spectroscopic analysis of
all known stars. We'd updated it at our second-to-last stop. We didn't want to
be stuck somewhere out in the reaches of the Renoult arm without an updated
record at hand. What Pak wasn't saying was that he couldn't find our way back.
We could be lost in some far place, and even hyperspace transit wouldn't be
able to get us back if we were somewhere in the immense distances between galaxies.

 
          
 
I continued to rotate ship's position, trying
to find a field of stars comp would recognize. The signatures and positions
were all strange. The cluster's glowing points just weren't recognizable. I
noticed the shimmer again. It followed as I switched to each of the sensors,
gathering data from each one of them, so I thought this was either an optical
illusion born of headache, or a glitch in the board caused by the breach and
our propulsion in and out of hyperspace.

 
          
 
"Pak," I asked, "can we orient
to the nearest galaxy? Maybe that would give us a relative placement." I
hoped we'd just come out on the wrong side. He tried it, his fingers faster
than mine. When the answer came, he cursed, a hiss between his teeth, then his
fingers punched, reconfiguring it again. The lifeless glass of his eyes showed
nothing, but I knew the board's answer had scared him.

 
          
 
"Pak?" I asked. Cor looked up from
her instruments, half aware, half thinking what needed to be done on repairs.
Pak's breath was a hiss between his teeth.

 
          
 
"We crossed the void," he said,
"it's a different galaxy. Andromeda. Maybe. Comp says it's only sure to
ninety-three percent accuracy. It can't tell enough to be sure of orientation.
Any one of those lights could be home. The puncture must have pushed us through
hyperspace like a jet stream." My head throbbed and the taste in the back
of my throat stung like acid. The shimmer was still there on my screen. It had
an odd shape. My head throbbed when I looked at it, but not with pain, more
like a distant sound.

 
          
 
"What's that?" I pointed to it.

 
          
 
"What's what?" Pak answered. I knew
he couldn't see it on his screen, even wtth enhanced vision, but he absently
punched comp, bringing up the figures on that spot while he checked for sensor
damage on the exterior of the hull. On my screen the shimmer had moved to the
lower right near a saucer-shaped disk of glowing lights. I decided that what I
saw was the visual aura that sometimes accompanies migraine, a floater from
vascular contraction, a symptom I'd been spared when I was younger. I waved my
fingers, as if I could wave it away.

 
          
 
My fingers tingled as if they almost brushed
against something light and soft, like cobwebs.

 
          
 
Pak drew in breath quickly, sharply. "It
just might be home, Lise. And it just might be close enough that we can make it
home with the supplies we have." He rubbed the edge of his palm against
the board as if it itched. He entered a few more figures, orienting information
with our position, parallaxing against distant clusters and disks bright in the
darkness.

 
          
 
"It could be," he finally added.
"Of this, comp is only sixty-one percent sure, but if we jump closer, and
position ourselves to the edge of the galactic plane, it can get a better
reading." He turned to look at me, his glass eyes reflective and blind.
"We have to try it." It was like my vision was narrowing, widening,
and narrowing again to a long tunnel of darkening light. "They're going to
be long jumps, about nine of them. But we're dead if we stay out here." My
fingers hurt from holding onto the board. But he was right.

 
          
 
In the end, once my head settled, once the
ship stabilized with what Cor could do on repairs, once we'd calmed down and
assessed damages, we agreed we had to try to make it back. Cor and Pak welded a
sheet of metal across the galley door while I took what pills I could. They
were old, and probably wouldn't help me once the jumps started, but I took them
anyway. Then I went to help my partners. The pain was not as bad as it had been
and somehow I couldn't face a dark room alone this time. This time I felt
alone, more than usual. I was sure Tink had been with me there in hyperspace. I
was sure I could still hear her purring like she always had when I was sick.
I'd rather endure the additional nausea and pain this time than lie alone
missing her.

 
          
 
It took us eight long jumps to get near the
galactic plane. I almost didn't make it. We'd rested out there in the null
space between galaxies for a short time before we began our long journey back.
Even so, after the first jump, I didn't think I would make it. The left side of
my face felt as if the bones were being crushed. Cor and Pak took turns taking
over the boards on the bridge while I stayed in my cabin. It was going to be
hard on all of us. Hyperspace transits were not easy on anyone. They wrenched
physical reality in ways that could be felt, if not fully measured, bringing on
strokes and heart attacks in veteran spacers. Magnetic fields distorted, their
edges bent, and time seemed to curl back in upon itself in hyperspace.

 
          
 
By the end of the second jump, I couldn't sit
up, the nausea was so bad. I just lay there, lights out and ice for my mouth
near at hand. I had no more medicine, and I was far beyond its help, if I could
even move to take it. By the third jump, I lost consciousness. I felt myself
dissolve into the waiting blackness of hyperspace again. The shimmer in my
sight grew larger, until it was so large it wrapped itself about me and held me
close in a semi-limbo where I could see nothing, and I lay there listening to a
dull throb pulsing beside me. I curled about it, letting it fill me, hold me
like home.

 
          
 
I don't remember the other jumps. I was no
longer conscious, just drifting in darkness, held together by something warm
and silklike that nudged me from time to time as I slid along the crests and
troughs of hyperspace emptiness. It pushed me along, slipping under my hand,
curling against my side, warming me, propelling me in and out of consciousness,
back into realspace and the subsiding pain, pain that quickly slipped away.

 
          
 
When I woke, the Veritage had stopped. The
pain was only a dull, background ache that merged with the sound of the
Ventage's resting engines. The shimmer had almost vanished with the pain, too.
There was just a slight sparkle around the edges of my vision that never
afterwards completely left me.

 
          
 
Pak had been right; the Nearest galaxy now was
the Milky Way. We stayed where we were for a day to rest and take stock of the
ship's condition. The jumps had taken about two days altogether. Time didn't
pass in hyperspace—the moment we went in was the moment we came out. Time
itself seemed to hang suspended as the anti-mass generators bent space, leaving
the ship wrapped in nullspace as it went from one point instantaneously to
another. It was truly a never-land. My sensory experience was not theoretically
explainable. Nor was the experience of other spacers, either. There were
qualities to hyperspace that were yet unknown. Humanity could use a technology
based on the phenomenon without fully understanding it.