'Ah... what... how?' I didn't like that idea at all, and what knowledge I'd been nano-fed didn't explain why. Or perhaps I didn't know how to access what would explain it.
'Try thinking about Hawking wormholes for starters,' suggested the dark-haired woman. And take one of the front couches. You could sense the differentials.'
What kind of differentials? As I pulled myself along the handholds I found my mind scrolling through all the half-mentally-filed information that still felt unfamiliar and awkward.
You'll figure it out. You Dzin types do - eventually. Have a good trip to Omega Eridani.' With a brisk wave, she was gone.
I half slid, half pulled myself down into the front couch and studied the wide straps, then tugged them into place, shifting my body until I was as comfortable as I could be. I looked up at the shell-like block poised to mate with the couch assembly - with little room for my body. Looking up at that massive restraint block, my body trying to expand in all directions, I was even more certain that I wanted nothing to do with being a needle jockey.
My stomach growled, but I wasn't sure whether it was from hunger or protest at the null gravity.
A man in a uniform that was somehow both silver and green half-glided through a hatch at the front of the compartment, and the entry lock irised shut. 'You're the only passenger on this run. Not many go this far out' A wry smile crossed his face. 'What did you do?'
'Refused to be a needle jockey.' I kept my voice level.
'You'll change your mind. If you're lucky and smart enough to live to do that.' He shook his head. 'Now... we'll be going on ion boost for about a standard quarter hour to get clear. Stay in your couch until the bells sound. The small gee-force, like gravity, will go on for ten to fifteen minutes, and you can walk around - if you want. It's a better time to eat, and it's best to eat early.'
I could definitely understand that, the way I was still half fighting my stomach's desire to invert itself.
'There's a head aft, and a small canteen. When the bells sound the second time, you have five minutes to get strapped in. If you don't make it, you're dead. The captain can't change the insertion envelope at that point, not without destroying the ship. So ... you're out of luck. Understand?'
I understood. It was like everything else the demons did. How could it have been otherwise?
23
Enlightenment shatters the illusory realities of the world.
There is but the slightest hiss before all the force lines shift.
A tug... there. A twitch there ... and I and the ship - we shiver through a shower of gilded mist, clawing up a cliff of violet. A carillon of trumpet chimes cascades from the violet. A long straight channel of red beckons to my right, regular and even ... sharp and hard beats on twin tympanies.
I ignore it, for regularity means solid matter, not the swirling of vacuum and gases between the stars, and the channels are traps.
Along the footlighted strands I dance, each strand the strobe of a quasar that flashes across the overspace, singing lyric notes that Dzin never recognized. Silently, for the ship and I are unheard against and amidst the waves of sound, I edge farther upward across the linked lines of stars visible only in powder blue puffs that vanish as I stretch-and-fly across each, and violins vibrate in long strings against my back.
Flame burns at my fingertips as I push away from a black wall that echoes the heavy tempo of kettledrums rumbling ever lower. I search for a gap, any gap on the far side of the star-stage, grasping the strands that reach above me and stretch before that black wall.
Two channels open - red and green - on each side of the wall. I hesitate, then leap, grasping, digging fingers into the diaphanous fabric of the Web, letting the fire sear through me, for I am being dragged down by the leaden spines in my guts, as a chorus of tympanies marches up my backbone.
Another leap, another grasp, showered with cerise explosions and discordant polyphony from at least two unseen harpsichords, and we totter edgewise up the strands and across the high wire of yet another stage, a circus ring, our feet poised on hot coals. The scarlet fumes circle inward, twining to the tinny silver of a tambourine snapping out a flamenco beat.
I sense the deep white of the beacon, the faintest of clear lights in a swirling universe, centered in a smaller whitened web.
Three black spears loom from beneath, exploding upward toward my guts, lead-copper rock, punctuated with the reverberating twanging of massed steel-strung and hard-twanged guitars.
I point-toed leap, and drop, whirl, and dodge, lunging around the spears and toward the clear amber light, toward the soft and golden harp strings. One spear slashes across my laggard back, but I totter onward, stifling the scream.
Lilacs and the perfume of spring explode around us, silver strings soothing the chaotic polyphony below, and, while I breath deeply, we dance upside east, the pattern carrying us around a cliff of violet, past a red channel, and over a green ditch. A single, longing high C rides over the harp. Somehow, my feet stay upon the strands of the Web which suspend me above the now, dark and solid below, even as my back burns.
And I stretch and grasp the handle of the old-fashioned kerosene lantern, ringed in a circlet of lilac, centered in that smaller web. We are almost there, almost to ...
24
No society that places the individual above itself will survive; but neither will any society that places the individual below itself
The unnamed crewman and Martenya had both been right. Had I not been in the solid, gee-foamed, and nanite-restricted monolithic cocoon, my body would have been less than a thin film of jelly spread across the walls - bulkheads, rather. Beyond what I felt, I could sense the forces, almost like blocks of music somehow solid and massive or knifelike and deadly.
Then, after another twisting, screaming wrench, the music and the forces vanished. Shortly, following an initial acceleration, we decelerated. The cocoon opened, and I found that I had sweated so much that my greenish singlesuit was soaked through.
Using the faint 'gravity' provided by the deceleration, I made my way to the head, and then to the canteen, but I only drank some mixed fruit juice and ate an orangemond pastry. I knew that total null gravity would return soon enough.
'Return to your couch. Approaching destination station.' The words were clipped, as if an afterthought.
I strapped in and waited.
Even after the clunk that announced the needle ship's docking somewhere, the passenger compartment remained sealed, and, while I loosened the restraints, I did not remove them. I preferred not to fight the null gee when I had nowhere to go. So I sat under the loosened padded restraints until the ship's hatch or lock irised open and a figure appeared.
'I'm Gerbriik, and I'm the maintenance officer of the station.' The thin man who floated in the needle ship's open portal had a long square face, clean-shaven and large in proportion to a body even smaller and slighter than mine. He wore a shimmering silver one-piece suit. 'You're Tyndel, and you once were a mite Dzin master. None of that matters. What matters is that you're here for a ten-year tour. That will repay two thirds of what you owe.'
I'd known I owed; I'd recalled something about ten or fifteen years, but I'd never pursued it. It didn't matter. So I waited.
'Unstrap. No sense in wasting time.' He glanced around the compartment, then sniffed. 'Good thing you didn't make a mess.' A laugh followed. 'You'll appreciate that more and more.'