He wasn't afraid, in this visitation—aroused, more than anything, but not acutely so, more a languid half-aware state, in which something brushed against him, made a dizzying slow incline in the surface under him, shadowed the air above him.
He dreamed a textureless voice, for a subjective long while. It told him in an idle, distracted way, about the War, about the hazards and the solitude of the fringes of the fighting, about space deeper and more silent than any merchanter would know—and qualities in hyperspace that proved it had events linked to Einsteinian space by the deformations of spacetime a star made. One could trade temporality for position and vector for event potential.
Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don't do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That's how we found them.
He'd the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn't the least notion who'd found 'them' or what 'they' were. He'd missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn't sure, but he wasn't in danger.
Wasn't in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I've traveled more lightyears than you. I'm ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?
He didn't see things clearly. He wasn't sure what he saw.
"You have to get used to it," the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn't make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn't get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he'd ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spinning faster and faster as his heart speeded up and the sensual and sensory traded places in rapid succession.
Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn't remember the answer to his question, or why he'd asked it. He hadn't any breath. He couldn't get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spinning through the dark into white space, and the sickening conviction of falling that came at system-drop.
Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.
"Don't believe Christian," someone said. "Nothing's free."
He was alone, then, couldn't put reality with where he was or where he'd been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.
Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…
Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie's language.
That's a stupid thing to do. That's just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?
Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.
Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can't trust this crew won't go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…
Jump-dreams like he'd never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn't be in real life. He'd real memories. He'd the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein's laws and Bok's famous loophole.
Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he'd never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?
Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn't gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?
The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he'd disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.
But he hadn't a stitch on.
He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.
Couldn't get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.
Christian's face, Christian holding him up… down the hall. Christian's clothes… skintights, and a sensual feeling in clothes he wasn't used to…
Christian being so damned nice…
God!
It was too damn much. He couldn't hold his head up, he was getting sick, and breaking into a sweat, thinking back into that pit of dark he'd come through, and past it, to the Tripoint jump, and the scratches he'd waked with there.
He felt a rising nausea. He could scarcely coordinate his fingers to pull the tab on the nutri-pack. He tried to calm down and think about that, only that, just getting his stomach settled.
Wholly absorbing problem for the moment. He sipped, counted his breaths, told himself somebody'd messed with his trank, and he'd hallucinated.
But hallucinations didn't get that shirt off without the bracelet.
Hallucinations hadn't left him lying on the floor last jump with scratches all over his body.
Something had happened. Someone had been walking about. When the brain and the body were in some kind of profound slowdown, tranked-out. You didn't dare skip trank… doing that was stuff for the vids, for people who paid money to get scared out of their wits. It was for fools who believed the stories, that Mazian's navigators and engineers could think through jump…
But, God, they did, they had a night-walker aboard. Somebody who didn't trank was wandering the corridors for a Godforsaken month of no-time, coming in and out of locked doors, whispering in your ear, fingering whatever and whoever she pleased, while everybody was lying helpless as pieces of meat.
And that bracelet of stars…
He didn't want to think about it. He lay still and, finding the one packet would stay on his stomach, ventured another, ghastly lemon-synth. He had to talk to Tink about lemon. Didn't want lemon in the next batch. Please God. Not another one.
Another v-dump, pulse against the interface. He came to with the mingled taste of lemon and copper in his mouth, and seemed to have bitten his tongue.
Then the all-clear sounded. At least he surmised that was the reason of the siren blast, this time, and a woman's voice said, velvet soft and razor steel, "This is Perrault. Free to move about. We have Pell's signal."
He undid the safety restraints, flung his legs out of bed, sat the edge, wobbly and aiming for the shower in his next effort.
Not a damn stitch on. The scratches… had healed. Like the bruises.
He braced an arm against the other wall and staggered along it to the bath and the shower, hell with any voyeur passing in the corridor… he got the door seal mostly made in spite of the trailing cable, enough that the lock would engage and the vapor jets would work. He shaved, with the razor connected to the console—and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the detergent vapor blasted out at him and made clouds he breathed with the air.
Spooked, he decided. He felt… as if the craziness about this ship had crept into his bed while he slept, as if, if he scrubbed hard enough, he could stop smelling a musky, spicy scent he dreamed he'd smelled in jump, and stop feeling as if something had done things with him, to him, he didn't remember.
Paranoia and a streak of kink he'd never figured, he kept telling himself. Whatever brand of trank it was, it wasn't the dosage he was used to, it wasn't working right, he was hallucinating, and he had to talk to the meds about it and get the dosage adjusted before he didcome out in mid-jump…