For a moment I don’t know where I am. My heart is thudding in my chest, my blood is racing, a terror laces through the incredible sense of well-being that I have, my body feels lusciously pleasant but for the throbbing in my hand, the fright in my heart. I am struggling for consciousness, struggling to bring my dislocation under control. I feel the light pain my eyes as I open….
“Wake up,” Collette is saying, holding a glass of orange juice to my lips, her hand shaking. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the ship, there’s an alarm. Werhner called down from the dome.”
The cool liquid runs down my throat, its sweetness heavy on my tongue. “How… long…?”
“We’ve been under all night, it’s day fourteen, Rawley. Here, drink more. This will detoxify you. There’s an alarm. He wants you to come up to the dome.”
My eyes blink, I see Collette, robe open, perspiring, fear in her face, I reach out and touch the pulsing vein in her neck. Turn to see the cabin, its edges sharp—the paintings askew, utensils tumbled from drawers in the kitchen/bar, the closet door hanging open, the lights dim and flickering, coming steady.
“There was a jolt, Rawley.”
My mind comes awake; the drug, I wonder, the fright. I am sitting up and rubbing my face for a long minute, feel the blood rise to my cheeks and temples. I look up to the videon:
ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM
“He wants you to come up to Dome A.”
I have slipped off my robe, pulled open my bag, and am pulling on my flight suit, stop with one arm remaining to shove through and punch Dome A on the console:
ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM
TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN
ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM
The ship is terribly unsteady. I run my hands through my hair, the ship pitches, and I have to reach out for support against the recliner. I see Collette wiping her face with a towel, reaching for a silver jump suit.
“Look, Collette…”
“I’m coming along,” she says.
On the lift to Dome A I hold the cold handrail so tightly I know without looking that the back of my hand is white—with my other arm I hold Collette against me, her silver jump suit slides against the palm of my hand, her body warm beneath.
“Kiss me,” she says, her face close to mine, she’s barely smiling. I look down at the glistening of her lips, into her liquid green, frightened eyes.
I meet her lips, her tongue, lose myself for a moment in the flesh-and-blood warmth of her, run the back of my hand over the soft chocolate skin of her cheek. I don’t know what to tell her, how to articulate the terror I feel lacing through the pleasure of her presence. What was it that I saw, I am thinking now, what was it through the hatch, familiar and strange at once? The question mingles in my blood with echoes and reverberations from the hologram, the eerie sense of its unreality and the vividness of its visions.
My hand grips the handrail even more tightly, aches. The fingers of my other hand run their course through Collette’s black hair, twist together before they have passed through. I pull Collette’s head back by the hair down her back. Her eyes widen, her mouth opens, her gaze is directly into mine. Her neck muscles tense, her head seems an upward weight against the pull of my twisted fingers.
Smile lines creep from the corners of her eyes.” Ahhh,” she says, “You have an imagination.”
“I do,” I say, releasing my fingers, relaxing my hand. “I have an imagination, all right.” Collette shifts her weight against the accelerating upward pull of the lift, leans against the spun-steel wall still watching me, smiling. How odd, it wasn’t my imagination, but an impulse to feel the simple, present reality of her that made me cause her pain. Even as I think this I begin to lose it again in our distorted reflection on the opposite wall, the vague soft map of ourselves which moves even as we both move to unlock our knees and stand flat to the wall behind us against the abrupt deceleration of the lift as the panel light begins to flash DOME A.
Something’s wrong. As the lift doors open I am feeling the ship’s slow roll to steady, feel for a moment that odd sensation of leg muscles ready to move for balance when there is no need to, suddenly steady on, I almost fall stepping from the lift. As the lift doors close behind I can see in the amber light of the hatchway to port pontoon a large, blue-suited figure across in program, yet the dome seems deserted—a half-eaten sandwich on a near console, equipment out of place, a thick oil seeping over the magnesium-alloy floor from the high bank of condensers. As if by habit I close a slowly swinging locker door, only then look across and see Werhner seated at the navigator’s console, absorbed, intent on his instruments, digging into his curry, so absorbed he isn’t looking at his plate but eating heartily. I feel a temperature change on the exposed surfaces of my skin, cold. I look up.
Through the concave hexagons of the dome itself an expanse of spectral, brilliant light lies across the port quarter, something huge—and on the starboard side nothing, not a trace, starless, an inky void. A chill runs down my spine, I feel something crawl across my lower lip. The lull. The ship’s instability has passed; we are in a lull so motionless I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. Only once before have I had these sensations, seen what I am seeing now, only once and forever—four years ago.
“Rawley, look at the instruments. Look.”
Werhner is waving me over to the vane console without glancing up; in a daze I make it over to my station, lean on the vane console with both hands. Lull figures, absolute lull figures, the needle of each instrument pinned by its own thin weight at zero.
“SciCom circuits overloaded,” Werhner says. “Even Committee Pilot’s patched out to give them more room. Christ, Rawley—the ship was blind-sided. Something came up faster than we are, came up from behind us, the other two hulls are gone. The other two hulls are gone. And I show… this… configuration, a ring singularity entry horizon, that’s what I’m showing, Christ, just…”
Now when he looks at me I can see how wide Werhner’s eyes are, his cheeks seem stretched back, an aura of light around his head the wildness of his sandy hair. Neither of us wants to say it, to think it, but I can smell it in the burned insulation in the cold air, feel it as a tingling on the back of my neck, see it in the array of the dome: the presence of the Daedalus beneath my hands is as palpable as the pads on my fingertips; I can feel it in the rhythm of the faint vibrations running through the console.
A hand at my shoulder: Collette. I move my hand to her shoulder, squeeze. I can see my own distress in her face, my horror; she asks weakly, what’s wrong, what’s wrong. Yet I sense she sees in my face a staggering weight to the answer, doesn’t want an answer. For an instant an afterimage from the hologram returns to me, the metallic voice of a calm, old man, saying that the highest pleasure of an organism consists of its return to its own nature, the afterimage of a searing burn of launch seen up through a ship. Feel swept away, I am being swept away, feel obliterated as I felt in the early hours of the hologram today, or was it yesterday…. And why not the same trip? My experience with Maxine translated in Collette, an ongoing tension with SciCom, each launch a course correction to lead me here.
I am still holding Collette, she is pressed against me, her warm body tender and firm, the warm dampness of her breath on my neck.
I turn back to the instruments.