Alternate Realities Read Online Free PDF

prepped with the drugs to endure jump. That was what she wanted, then. Jump always scared me, even drugged. It was the part of voyages that I hated.
    And then: “ Modred —” Gawain said in a plaintive voice I had never heard him use. It frightened me. Modred’s reaction did, because he flung off my hand and reached for another board in a hurry, and alarms were going off, shrieking.
    “Out!” he shouted, and Modred never shouted. I scrambled toward the exit, staggering as the whole ship heeled, and then vocal alarms were going, the take-hold , which means wherever you are, whatever is closest, regardless. I never made the door. I grabbed the nearest emergency securing and got the belt round me, while already the Maid was swinging in a roll so that we came under G like coming off a world.
    “We’re losing it,” Gawain shouted into com. “We’re losing it—Modred—”
    “I don’t know what it is,” Modred yelled back. “Instruments ... instruments are going crazy. ...”
    I looked up from my position crouched against the bulkhead, looked at the screens, and there was nothing but black on them. We were in the safe area of our own home star and with traffic around us. There was no way anything ought to be going wrong, but G was pulling us and making the lights all over the boards blink red, red, red.
    Then it was as if whatever was holding us had just stopped existing, no jolt, but like sliding on oil, like a horrible falling where there is no falling.
    And jump. Falling, falling, falling forever as we hurtled into subspace. I screamed and maybe even Modred did—I heard Gawain’s voice for sure, and it became space and color. There was no ship, but naked chaos all around me, that stayed and stayed and stayed.

III
    ... and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,
And, as it were one voice, an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world.
    I don’t like to think of that time, and it was a long, long while before it dawned on me that I could move, and draw myself back from the void where I was. Things were all distorted. It seemed I could see through the hull, and through myself. Sometimes the chaos was red and sometimes the red became black and red spots crawled here and there like spiders. I cried, and there were other sounds that might be other voices, or the Maid herself still screaming.
    Then like in the time before I left that white place where I was made, I had to have something to look at, to control the images, to sort truth from illusion, and I concentrated simply on getting my hand in front of my face. Knowing what it ought to look like, I could begin to make it out, bones and veins and muscles and skin. Not red. Not black. My own true color. I concentrated on it until it took the shape and texture it ought to have, and then I was able to see shadows of other things too, like the deck, and the rest of my own body lying there.
    “Gawain,” I cried, and by concentrating on shapes I could see the controls, and Gawain, who looked dead hanging in the straps; and Modred, who lay on the floor ... his restraint had given way, as mine must have, and it should have broken my ribs, but it had not ... there was, at least, no pain. Modred was trying to move too, like something inky writhing there on the deck, but I knew who it was, and I crawled across the floor which was neither warm nor cold nor rough nor smooth ... I made it and got his hand, and hoped for help, because Modred was frightened by nothing, and if there was any of us who had a cold enough mind up here to be able to see what to do, I had most hope of Modred.
    “Hung in the between,” he said. “I think we’re hung up in the between.”
    His voice did strange things in my head, echoed round and round as if my brains had been some vast room. For a moment I didn’t want to look down, because there was a Down and we were still falling