She shook her head. “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.
“Beg your pardon?”
“You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”
“What; you mean an ablationary plume?”
“Yes. What the fuck is that, now?”
“Oh, come on; this is just the stuff I have to deal with, an emergence from the weird-shit space I happen to pass my days in.” If Lededje hadn’t known better she might have thought the avatar was hurt. “An ablationary plume,” he said, sighing. “It’s what happens when a ship tries to hit the ground running and fails, in e-Grid terms; its field engines are unable to connect efficiently with the Grid and — rather than blowing up or being flung out, wrecked, to coast for ever — its engines ablate a part of themselves to cushion the energy blow. Slows the ship, though at great cost. Immediate total engine refit required. The point is that the resulting plume’s visible from way far away in e-Grid terms, so it can work as a sort of emergency distress signal. Embarrassing enough during peacetime and likely fatal in a war.” The avatar fell silent, seemingly contemplating this odd turn of events.
“… E-Grid?” Lededje asked tentatively.
“Oh come on!” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Do they teach you nothing at school?”
Somebody was calling her name. Everything was a bit fuzzy, even including her sense of who she was. Her name, for example. There it was again. Somebody saying it.
Well, they were saying something. Her first thought was that they were saying her name but now she thought about it she wasn’t so sure.
It was as though the sounds meant something but she wasn’t sure what, or maybe she knew what they meant but couldn’t be sure what the sounds actually were. No, that wasn’t what she meant. Fuzzy.
Yime. That was her name, wasn’t it?
She wasn’t entirely sure. It sounded like it was supposed to mean something pretty important and it wasn’t an ordinary word that she knew which meant something. It sounded like a name. She was pretty sure it was a name. Chances were it was her name.
Yime?
She needed to get her eyes open. She wanted to get her eyes open. She wasn’t used to having to think about opening her eyes; usually it was something that just happened.
Still, if she was going to have to think about—
Yime? Can you hear me?
—it, she’d just have to think about it. There it was again, just there, while she’d been thinking about getting her eyes open; that… feeling that somebody or something had said her name.
“Yime?” said a tiny, high-pitched voice. It was a silly voice. A pretend, made-up voice, or one belonging to a child who’d just sucked on a helium balloon.
“Yime? Hello, Yime?” the squeaky voice said. It was hard to hear at all; it was almost drowned out by the roaring sound of a big waterfall, or something like a big waterfall; a high wind in tall trees, maybe.
“Yime? Can you hear me?”
It really did sound like a doll.
She got one eye open and saw a doll.
Well, that fitted, she supposed. The doll was standing looking at her, quite close to her. It was standing on the floor. She realised that she must be lying on the floor.
The doll was standing at a funny angle. Being at that angle, it should be falling over. Maybe it had special feet with suckers on them, or magnets. She’d had a toy that could climb walls, once. She guessed the doll was the usual doll-size; about right for a human toddler to carry and cuddle like an adult would a baby. It had glowing yellow-brown skin, black, intensely curled hair and the usual too-big head and eyes and over-chubby limbs. It wore a little vest-and-pants set; some dark colour.
“Yime? Can you see me? Can you hear me?”
The voice was coming from the doll. Its mouth had moved as it had spoken, though it was a little hard to be sure because there was some stuff in her eye. She tried to bring her hand up to her face to wipe away whatever it was in her eye, but her hand wasn’t cooperating. Her whole arm wasn’t cooperating. She tried the other arm/hand combination, but it wasn’t being any more helpful. Signals seemed to be piling up inside her head from both arms, both hands, trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t make sense of whatever it was. There were a lot of signals like that, from all over her body. Another mystery. She was getting tired of them. She tried to yawn but got a strange grating feeling from her jaw and head.
She opened her other eye and saw two dolls. They were identical, and both were at the same strange angle.
“Yime! You’re back with me! Good!”
“Ack?” she said. She had meant to say “Back?” but it had come out wrong. She didn’t seem to be able to get her mouth to work properly. She tried to take a deep breath but that didn’t go too well either. It felt like she was sort of jammed, as though she’d tried to squeeze through a really tight gap and it hadn’t worked and she’d got trapped.
“Stay with me, Yime,” the doll squeaked.
She tried to nod, but… no.
“Okay,” she said.
There was only one doll, she’d worked out. Not two; it was a focusing problem. The doll was too close, there was stuff — black stuff — in her eyes and everything was at an odd angle. The ceiling, if you were going to call it that, seemed awfully close to the doll’s bubble-haired head. And the doll’s glowing skin seemed to be the only light within this cramped, shadowy space.
Where the hell was she?
She tried to think where she had been last.
She had been standing under the ship, being briefed, looking at images of stars and clusters and systems, the vast dark bulk of the ship directly above. No; she’d been walking out from underneath the ship, into rain, with the blunt snout of the ship like a black glass cliff poised above; a giant flat knife for cutting through to the underneathness of the universe…
“Yime!” something squeaked. She got one of her eyes to open. Oh yes, this weird little doll thing standing in front of her. Funny angle.
“Ot?” (“What?”)
“Don’t do that. Stay with me. Don’t drift off like that.”
She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Drift off? How? To where? She was trapped here, caught.
The doll wobbled towards her, its gait made awkward by its short, thick legs. It had something in its hand, something like a needle with a single slick-looking thread trailing behind it. The thread disappeared into the slanted narrow darkness behind the doll. She thought there was something familiar but wrong about the two very close-together surfaces behind the doll.
The doll had something in its other hand too. The toy waddled so close to her head she couldn’t see it properly any more. She could feel it, though; feel its little clothed body squeezing against the side of her head.
“Ot you doing?” she asked it. Something cold was pressed against her neck. She tried to move. Anything. Eyelids; they worked. Mouth; a bit. Her lips didn’t seem to be too keen on pressing together. Facial muscles; mostly. Tongue and throat and breathing; a bit. Fingers? No fingers. Toes? Toes not responding. Bladder muscles; something there. Great; she could pee herself if she wanted.
She could not move her head or body or limbs at all.
Suddenly the slanted narrow space made a sort of sense and she realised she was still in the ship, still in the lounge she’d been in earlier, when it had been accelerating. Accelerating? Did ships accelerate? This was the floor folded over and pressed up against the wall. She was lying on the wall and the floor had come up to meet the wall and she was lying crushed between the two. This would account for her not being able to move.