Simultaneous arrival in both eardrums, the voice of reason whispered, and that voice actually was in his head, purely imaginary, giving him something to compare these actual sounds against. The difference was, so to speak, pronounced. So perhaps he was in a real place after all. In his ship, alive inside the Ring Collapsiter? That seemed as unlikely as Heaven itself.
His senses told him nothing familiar, filled him with confusion and terror and nothing more. Start with vision: he saw, or seemed to see, a dim, sourceless, colorless light all around, like a fog. Within the light he perceived movement, rapid and repetitive. He perceived shapes, or rather, shapeless regions with a different sort of translucence. Some of these moved; others did not. Some were close; others were not.
Aha! So stereo vision still worked in this place. Bruno still had two eyes, which were capable of angling inward or outward to judge distance. That was something, a major clue! But what were those two eyes seeing? Not ordinary light, certainly. Start with the assumption, then, that he was inside the collapsium. What would that imply? A greatly reduced zero-point field, for one thing. Like the ertial shield’s wake, but symmetric all around him? With no acceleration to restore some grudging sense of inertia? The speed of light would be much higher, meaning the frequency of light would be much higher for a given energy. Visible light photons would phase off into the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum, without gaining the energy wallop of true gamma rays. And low-energy photons? Might they become visible?
Try sound next: He couldn’t localize it, the way he could localize light. But while stereo vision was related to angles, independent of anything else, stereo hearing relied on differences in a sound’s arrival time from one ear to the other. This related directly to the speed of sound—the higher the speed, the vaguer the perceived direction. Yet he did hear human voices, or something like them. So perhaps the speed of sound—and thus its frequency—wasn’t that different, maybe increased by a factor of a few hundred. Perhaps friction and viscosity played a larger role in sound waves than inertia did. If he spoke in low tones, could he make himself understood?
“HELLO!” he rumbled in his deepest, loudest bass, and indeed, he felt and heard a scratchy whisper that was faint but— at least to him—reasonably intelligible. He was rewarded with a renewed cacophony of sounds, urgent sounding but otherwise devoid of meaning.
He was still furious and afraid, still awaiting his chance to grieve, but now he was fascinated as well. Rarely did physics problems present themselves in such dramatic and tangible ways!
All right, then; try the sense of touch: He felt light impacts all around him, like puffs of air. There was no feeling of weight or motion, but the touches on his skin did seem to correspond in some way to the dancing translucences all around him. He reached out a hand, and it flicked out like a whip and then stopped as quickly. To his astonishment he felt the shapes of a human nose and cheek touch it lightly, for an instant, then bounce away. The face had felt rigid, as if carved out of wax, but it had been a face, warm and sticky-slick with natural oils. For an instant it had even looked like a face in a vague, watercolor sort of way, before it flickered off into the fog again.
Finally, his senses began to integrate. To give them a few moments’ peace, he took a breath and closed his eyes. Those actions felt normal enough, at least. When he looked again, things were clearer.
He could make out the insides of the Sabadell-Andorra, yes, her hull all but transparent in this foggy light. Inside that space were the many human bodies he and Muddy had collected, but they were bouncing around off every surface, like ping-pong balls. Sometimes they spun, sometimes not. Sometimes they’d stop suddenly, and then be knocked into motion again by the collision of someone else. All their transitions were instantaneous, rigid. Bruno himself was not bouncing, since he was strapped into his ghostly-clear couch. Another form—Deliah, in her folding chair?—was also motionless, though the body twitched in a quick, unpleasant, insectile way.
The screams continued.
“ER, TRY TO REMAIN CALM,” he rumbled at them. “SEE IF YOU CAN GRAB ONTO SOMETHING.”
Almost immediately, one of the bodies stopped bouncing. Bruno peered at it, trying to make out details. A person, desperately gripping Muddy’s control panel with arms and knees?
“it works,” a faint, whispery voice, barely audible sounded, “you can stop yourself you can catch yourself”
Another body froze in place against the hatchway. Soon someone else was clinging to that. Then a pair of bodies were bouncing together, clinging to each other but not to anything else.
Suddenly there were voices rather than screams, “where are we hey that’s my hair i’ve got you don’t let go we are inside the ring collapsiter i thought we were dead for sure…”
“SHIP?” Bruno tried.
“… because i can’t reach it that’s my eye you will have to climb over…”
“SHIP!”
“Y-r-mnk-str-hhhhhhk”
“SABADELL-ANDORRA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“C… d not pro… d”
“SHIFT YOUR AUDIO FREQUENCIES. TRANSMIT LOWER. LISTEN HIGHER. THE SPEED OF SOUND HAS CHANGED.”
“C… nsating. This is a test signal. Can you hear me, sir?” The voice was tinny but clear.
“YES! CAN YOU REBROADCAST OUR VOICES IN A FREQUENCY-SHIFTED DOMAIN?”
Now in a stronger voice: “Th . .‘t should be possible in a moment, sir. I’m experiencing an enormous number of intermittent computational malfunctions, but I have established sufficient redundancy to compensate. Shift and rebroadcast is enabled.”
Bruno cleared his throat, then tried to speak normally. “Hello?” His voice, despite an echoey, underwater quality, sounded much better. And with much less effort, too.
“Hello!” four or five other voices called back.
Then a new burst of chatter broke out.
“I can hearl”
“… got my voice back.”
“I feel really sick.”
“Help! I don’t like this!”
“Excuse me, Madam, I need you to move a little to the left. Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you.”
Outside the weirdly translucent hull, Bruno could just barely make out stippled rows and columns of pinpoint brightness in the fog: the collapsium lattice that surrounded them. Curiously, it moved only slightly, vibrating a few centimeters back and forth in irregular bursts. Was the ship stuck against it somehow? It was not easy to see, to perceive any details at all, but there did seem to be some sort of kink in the tunnel ahead of them.
“What do we do now?” someone wanted to know.
An excellent question! This was no comfortable place—it was weightlessness and ertial travel, fever and sensory deprivation, hallucination and drowning all rolled into one. Bruno had felt more at ease on rickety sailboats, riding the stormy seas of Tonga! But how to escape? And where to go?
“Sykes may believe we’re dead,” Cheng Shiao’s voice said tightly, through tinkling bells and underwatery echoes. “That’s something.”
Vivian Rajmon’s voice replied. “I half believe it myself, Cheng. Is that your hand? It feels like wood!”
Bruno peered and squinted, trying to perceive the two, to tell them apart from the others. Were there visual cues when a person spoke? Did translucent angel-amoebas have a discernible body language? He picked out two figures huddled together by the fireplace and decided that was probably who they were.