I remembered to move aside so others could use the hatch. There were lots of handgrips nearby; I worked myself sideways like a crab and “lay on my back” a few inches “above” the bulkhead I’d just come through. As Glenn and the other three women emerged into the cave behind us, they too grabbed handholds, stabilized themselves, and stared.
After a long few moments of silence, Glenn cleared her throat. “Which way to the egress, do you suppose?”
The unseen woman spoke again. “Can all of you see the tunnel that’s blinking green over there, Inboard and One-ish?”
Again I failed to spot any speakers, and realized this time that there were none; her voice was simply homing in on my ears somehow. The last two terms she’d used were meaningless to me, but there was no mistaking the tunnel she meant. Soft green lights around its mouth had suddenly started to flash on and off. “We see it.”
“That’s where you’re headed for, now.”
“All the bloody way up there?” Kirra squeaked.
“Push off gently, Kirra,” our companion said soothingly. I hadn’t realized she knew our names. She must have a terrific memory. “Be prepared to take a long time getting there. You’ll find that in jaunting long distances, aim is much more important than strength. And you’re not in a hurry. Why don’t you go first?”
“Well…I guess I—bloody hell!”
Kirra had absently let go of her handhold at some point, instinctively trusting to gravity to keep her in place. But there was none. In the twenty seconds or so we’d been here, she’d drifted far enough away from the floor (as I called that wall in my mind, since it had been under my feet when I started) to be unable to touch it again. Her attempts only put her into a tumble from which she couldn’t figure out how to emerge. “Oh my,” she groaned as she spun. “I think I’m gonna be a puke pinwheel in a minute…”
I tried to reach her, but I couldn’t quite do it without letting go with my other hand myself. And the gap between us was slowly widening.
“Make a chain,” our friend said, and one of the women I didn’t know, who was nearest to me, reached and got one of my ankles in a one-handed deathgrip. I let go of my handhold, lunged, and got an equally firm grip on one of Kirra’s ankles as it went by. Her mass tried to tug me sideways as I stabilized her spin, and partially succeeded. The woman holding me reeled us both in, a little too hard: Kirra and I thumped firmly together into what I thought of as the floor, and clutched it and each other.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have used up our giggles earlier; we could have used some now.
“I’m right,” Kirra said. “Ta, love…I feel a right idjit.”
“It happens to everyone here, sooner or later,” our unseen friend told her. “Proper etiquette is to lend assistance if needed and otherwise ignore it. Are you ready to jaunt now, Kirra?”
She was game. “Reckon so. Where’s that blinkin’ tunnel? Pun unintended.” She spun round to face the cavern and got her feet under her. “Oh, there it is. See you on the other side, mates—”
She kicked off, gently, and began to rise into the air.
Now we giggled. We couldn’t help it. Her lazy ascension looked exactly like a bad special effect. We heard her laughing too, with a child’s delight. She mugged for us as she went, folded her arms and legs into tailor seat, opened out into a swan dive, then tucked and rolled and came out of it making exaggerated swimming motions—in our direction. Any embarrassment she might have felt a moment ago was gone. “I dreamed of this,” she sang, her voice high and dreamy, “so many years ago, it’s like a memory—”
I set my feet, let go of the wallbehindme/floorbeneathme bulkhead, took a deep breath, and jaunted after her.
If you’ve done it you know what I mean, and if you haven’t I can’t convey it. All I can say is, mortgage your condo, take the Thomas Cook Getaway Special, and jaunt in free fall once before you die. That way you’ll know your way around Paradise when you get there.
We were all giggling like schoolgirls as we jaunted up through the vast chamber, drawing amused looks from the old hands. “I like it, Morgan,” Kirra called down to me.
“Me, too,” I called back. I was mildly disappointed that this big cave had no perceptible echo. But I suppose the fun of one would have worn off the first time you smacked your head on bare rock, or tried to make yourself understood to someone on the other side of the chamber.
Kirra had followed instructions, jaunted very gently and therefore slowly. My own jaunt had been a little more impulsive: I was gradually overtaking her. “Look out above—here I come!”
She glanced down, rotated on her axis, and opened her arms for me so that I slid up into a hug—one of the oddest, most pleasant experiences of my life! We grinned with delight and embraced.
Looking past her fanny I noticed four p-suited males emerging from a hatch near the one we’d just left. Robert wasn’t among them. Well, what did I care?
At about the mid-point Kirra and I began to think about the other end of the journey, and plan our landing. As we did so, it suddenly dawned on us both that we were not floating up—we were upside down, falling. It was as if the whole cave had flipped end over end in an instant. We clutched each other even tighter…and then relaxed, trying to laugh at ourselves. But there was a queasy feeling in my stomach that hadn’t been there before. This “thinking spherically” business they kept talking about at Suit Camp was going to take some work. And time…
I could see, now, why some people just can’t ever get it. For the first time, I seriously wondered whether—dancer or no dancer—I might be one of them. I had automatically assumed that spherical perception would be a snap for any modern dancer, since we do our moving much farther from the vertical axis than ballet dancers…but when I thought about it, weren’t even modern dancers more tied into gravity and perpendicularity than ordinary people? A civilian tries to not fall down; a modern dancer tries to move all over the place in odd and interesting ways, and not fall down: therefore she pays more attention, more of the time, to not falling down—pays more heed to gravity. Maybe I had more to unlearn than my companions…
But I thrust aside the thought, determined to keep enjoying this magic jaunt, and got Kirra to show me that reversing-your-vertical trick. It turned out to be something like trying to exaggerate a swan dive, if that helps you. I ordered my stomach to settle down. Fine, it said, Define “down.” I told it “down” was toward my feet, and that seemed to help a little.
When I’d kicked off to follow Kirra, she’d been a near target, so I’d aimed well enough to jaunt right into her embrace. But the target she’d been aimed at was much farther away, and docking with me had probably further disturbed her course. We landed close to the tunnel mouth we wanted, but not very. About ten seconds later Glenn threaded it like a needle, spinning around the bungee cord like a high-bar gymnast, and those of us who could applauded. The others did no better than Kirra and I. We all met at the tunnel mouth.
“Not bad at all,” our woman friend said. “And Glenn, that was excellent.”
I understood that she was monitoring us from some remote location—but it seemed odd that she was still giving us her attention. Surely there were other women coming out of Decontam after us. Yes, there was one now: I could see her “up” there, emerging upside down from the hatch we’d left, gaping up at us…
The penny dropped.
Now how did one phrase this? “Uh…excuse me?”
“Yes, Morgan?” she said.
“…are you organic?”
There was a smile in her voice now. “Elegantly put, dear. No, as you’ve guessed, I’m an AI program in Top Step’s master computer.”