Colors washed to right and left of him, red and blue and into infrareds and ultraviolets, a tunnel at the black peripheries of his vision. He daren’t come any further. Christian wasn’t his friend. This woman wasn’t. This dream was destructive. He could make it go away.
But Capella came to him, a series of advances without movement, Capella’s arms came around his neck, and Capella’s mouth was on his. They weren’t standing. They were on the bed. A voice spoke faintly, or he remembered it, about waves being everywhere, or particles being the same, all the while he was feeling waves of another kind and carried along a wavefront of mindless, endless sensation.
(Don’t do it in jump, the senior cousins said, or you’ll go crazy.)
He was shivering again. Was living it again, a physical spasm that climaxed and quit, leaving him cold. Didn’t want it. Did. He was paralyzed in the between of choices. Wasn’t sure he could get that high again, it was like a drug, that was what they said, wasn’t it? You’d never be able to do it realtime, you’d freeze up?
Everything spun, a whirlpool of primal urges, a coming and going of sound so deep it hit the base of the brain and the base of the spine.
“It’s all right,” Capella said, out of that sound. “You can’t fall.”
Liar, he thought, gasping for breath, feeling the abyss behind his head, as if he could just, if he shut his eyes, pour himself through the bottom of his own brain and fall forever. He felt himself sliding, sensations flowing one after the other across his skin… colors that crawled across the room, splashes of color that whipped away into the dark and withered and slipped away, in laughter, in a crashing great energy that broke in waves of grating, murmurous sounds.
Hard, slim body against his, riding the waves of compressing subspace, then spiraling violently, over and around and down, voices echoing in his ears, louder and louder, bodies involved with his, multiplying with the voices that were the music, the erotic and the horrific tangled and snarled into each other. He gained a moment of escape and it wasn’t Capella, it was Marie clawing at him, it was a band of drunken spacers, it was the spacer with the snakes, half purple and green, hands he couldn’t escape, violence and need twisting through him and around him until the waves of force flooded up into his brain, twice a hundred hands and twice again the arms and legs that closed about him, one layer onto another in a mathematical, sequential blur.
Until he was inside the living universe, endless interlace of rhythmic filaments that were living flesh and human minds, thunderous sound, violence over with now,—until he realized the waves were his own heartbeat and space became one screaming edge inside him, that fall through the back of his head…
It was his body in the dark, or all the ship hurtling into an annihilating spin, tearing his hands from grips and tearing the ship apart, bolt groaning away from plate, and everything rushing away from center…
—v—
RED DREAM, COASTING THE INTERFACE, dream of red violence and dark, anger that had no destination until now. Until now it had always just been, and carried its own energies, destruction and creation, tearing apart a life and making a new one.
But this time it had a place to go and something to reach for.
Sprite was running fifteen days behind him, with a full hold, headed for a sink of dark matter, three points that danced a complex pass around a common center, a pit in space-time into which all realspace matter that passed this way was damned to fall.
System of failed stars, potential unachieved, radiating masses forever tagging each other, like Sprite with Corinthian. But the numbers added right this time. Cosmic rendezvous. Union.
Consummation.
He was there in the space where all space touched. Marie dreamed his ship brushed hyperspace at this very instant, occupying the same space-time. He was that close. He had to feel her breathing, had to feel her anger and the high and the power it gave her… the energy of the ship became one hollow, drunken roar, I am, I am, I am, against a universe otherwise void. She reached orgasm with it, multiple times, with the thought that he didn’t consent to her being there, he didn’t consent to her knowing about him what he’d thought was secret… he didn’t consent to her tracking him and making herself an inseparable, inescapable part of his life every day, every hour since their meeting…
Dear Austin. I love you the way you loved me.
Look over your shoulder now, you son of a bitch.
—vi—
THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY EXISTED again. That was always the first assessment when the ship dropped into Einsteinian space and linear time.
But it wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be lying on his side, face against the wall.
On the deck. The tiles were cold under his arm and his hip and his knee. Cold air traveled over bare skin. He was half out of his clothes. His skin stung, raw with scratches.
He moved, panicked at the queasy sensation of coming out of jump, and knew he shouldn’t be loose like this… a ship exiting jump might have to take emergency action, he wasn’t belted, he could break his neck… he didn’t know where he was, room was a meter too wide as he rolled over, but he scrambled on his knees, saw the bunk and the restraints and scrambled in, breath hissing between his teeth as he struggled to get the first belts fastened, instinct in a spacer-brat as sure as the fear of falling.
Snap. Lock fastened, upper legs, snap, the one across his chest, snap. He was all right then, hard-breathing, at least telling himself he’d beaten disaster if it came.
Except it wasn’t Sprite. Except it wasn’t his quarters he was in.
Bars beyond his feet. Walls he remembered, now, in dismay.
Corinthian.
Heart started a dull, leaden panic, telling him that his danger wasn’t past. And he didn’t know what could have happened to put him where he waked, against the wall, except maybe they’d exited subspace before this and he’d unbelted too soon… he still felt the last racketing of sex through his blood and brain, last echoes of a bad trip and a nightmare to end all. His skin felt raw, coveralls mostly unzipped, he didn’t know how he’d done that, either, but he’d gotten up, maybe started to go to the shower and fallen.
Hell of a dream. He lifted his head to look at himself and saw red scratches all over his chest, his pale blue coveralls had bloody specks, from a subspace hallucination.
Healed and half-healed scratches, and lately-made ones? Not all recent.
Scratched himself, was what he’d done. He felt embarrassed as hell, and hoped to God there wasn’t an optic spy somewhere, or a tape record.
He couldn’t face it, if there were. He let his head fall back, just to let his blood flow back to his brain and let the walls stop rippling in his vision. He’d exerted too much just now in getting back to his bunk. He’d broken into a clammy sweat, and the air circulation felt cold, stinging salt in the scratches.
Worse, he felt a wave of nausea and told himself he’d been a double fool, first exerting himself to get back in his bunk and then not getting to the nutri-packs on priority, because sneaking up his veins right now was the grandfather of all sick headaches.
He triggered the e-panel one-handed. He clawed the packs out of the wall-storage onto the mattress and ripped one open, hands shaking, fumbled out the sipping tube, valved so you didn’t have to raise your head to use it, thank God. By the small time it took to do that much, the pain that wasn’t quite pain yet was building up as pressure in his temples and behind his eyes, an old, old acquaintance. And to keep it company, his stomach was behaving under its own precarious rhythm, as if some bone-deep jolt out of hyperspace hadn’t left his consciousness, or quit running over his skin in waves of fever heat and clammy sweat.