Alternate Realities Read Online Free PDF Page B

into it. Gawain had to get us out of this; that was all I could think of, and somehow Modred was pulling himself to his feet and heading in Gawain’s direction. I scrambled up to follow him, and stood swaying with one foot on one side of a chasm and the other foot on the other side, stars between, the whole flowing like a river in born-men’s Hell, all fire and glowing with the stars like brighter coals. Don’t move , my brain kept telling my body, and I didn’t for a moment. I stood there and shut my eyes.
    But there is an advantage in being what we are, which is that wherever we are, that’s what is , and we don’t have such problems as some do, trying to relate it to anywhere else. I was upright. I set one foot out and insisted to feel what was under it, and after that I knew that I could walk. I moved after Modred, though the room kept shrinking and expanding insanely, and sometimes Gawain was very far away and sometimes just out of reach, but two-dimensional, so that he seemed pressed between two pieces of glass, and his beautiful hair hanging down at an unconscious angle seemed afire like the river of stars, streaming and flowing like light.
    “Gawain!” Modred shouted, all distorted.
    “Gawain!” I shouted too.
    Gawain finally began to move, slow reaching of an arm which was at the moment two-dimensional and stretched all out of proportion. He tried to sit upright, and reached for the boards or what looked like an analogue of them in this distortion of senses, a puddle of lights which flowed and ran in swirling streams of fire.
    He’s there , I insisted to my rebel senses, and he began to be solid, within reach, as I knew he had to be. I grasped Modred’s arm and reached for Gawain’s, and Gawain twisted around and held onto both of us, painfully tight. “What you want to see, you can see,” I said. “Don’t imagine, Gawain. Don’t imagine .”
    He was there, all right. I could feel him heaving for breath, and I was breathing in the same hoarse gulps, and so was that third part of us, Modred.
    “We’ve been malfunctioned into jump,” Modred said, carefully, softly between gasps for breath. Voices distorted in my ears, and maybe in his too. “I think we’re hung up somewhere in subspace and there’s no knowing what happened back there. We could have dragged mass with us into this place. We could have dragged at the sun itself. I don’t know. The instruments aren’t making sense.”
    “Lady Dela,” I said, thinking about her caught in this disaster, Dela, who was the reason for all of us existing at all.
    “No drugs,” Gawain murmured. “We’re in this with no drugs.”
    That frightened me. We drug down to cope with the between of jump, that nowhere between here and there. But we were doing it without, if that was where we were ... and like walking a tightrope across that abyss, the only hope was not to look down and not to lose our balance to it. One necessity at a time. “I’m going for lady Dela,” I said.
    “You’ll get lost,” Gawain protested, because the floors were still going in and out on us, taming reds and blacks and showing stars in the middle. “Don’t. If we ripped something loose back there, if those corridors aren’t sound. ...”
    “Use com.” That was Modred, clearer headed than either of us. Modred passed me like a great black spider, and reached into the pool of lights, perhaps able to see them better because he knew what ought to be there. “Lady Dela,” he said. “Lady Dela, this is Modred on the bridge. Do you hear me?”
    “Modred!” a voice wailed back like crystal chimes. “Help!”
    “Lady Dela!” I said. “Make up your mind to see ... can you see? Look at something familiar until it makes sense.”
    “Help me,” she cried.
    “Do you see anything?” Gawain asked her. “Modred says we’ve had a jump malfunction. I agree. I think we’re hung up in the between, but what I have on instruments looks like the ship is intact. Do you understand