Feel the hovering presence, too, then a change in pitch of the surface he lay on. A finger brushed his cheek.
“You hear me, Tommy? No good shamming, I know you do.”
“Leave me alone,” he tried to say.
“Person’s truly sorry, Tommy-lad. “ For a while the touch went away, and came back again. The universe quaked. Ran colors. Tilted.
“Stop it, dammit. Saby’s. Saby’s place, here.”
“Yeah, sorry, Tommy-person. Didn’t come to devil you. Came to be sure you were all right. “ Air whispered against his forehead. A touch followed. “Gets lonely, in the dark. Gets cold. You know it. They don’t. You doing all right?”
“Yeah.”
“My fault you waked. Sex’ll do it sometimes.—And hell if I wanted Christian to ship you out to Earth—selfish me. I tried my best to warn you, Tommy-person, short of all the trouble you had. Tried to make you hear me. But you went out with him all the same. And now look. Saby’s got you. I lost out again.”
He felt the loneliness, and the cold. Then… just felt/ smelled/saw the colors a while. And vast, terrifying silence. He tried to move, then. He couldn’t feel things. Couldn’t tell up from down. He leaned into space, flinched back toward solid limits, and thought he was falling.
Arms were there. Caught him. Hands showed him where level was. “Tommy-person,” a voice said. “Sillyass. Easy. Easy. You took the trank. It’s still in your system, and I can’t watch you all the time. Break your silly neck, you will, or your nose. Lie still. Lie still. Enjoy it. Go with it… like sex… you got to go with it. You got to like it.—Deep breath. The willies will stop.”
He lay still—he thought he was lying down, Saby lying near him, but whether it was light or dark didn’t seem relevant to his eyes. He saw, somehow, or something like. The brain kept shifting things around or the walls truly ran in streams of color. Things just were. Couldn’t see Capella, then shivered at a strangeness as her hand met his body.
“Where were you?” he tried to ask.
“Upside, mostly,” Capella said. “The bridge. Everybody’s cold, everybody’s still. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you, just a sit-a-while, just a voice.”
“Yeah,” he said. He thought he could see and feel her, then, sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, depressing the mattress.
“Yeah, well, once you start to, you know, be aware, the trank’s real chancy. You’re a little disconnected. Distances go down a tunnel, don’t they?”
“Long. Long tunnel,” he said, because it was. That very well described it. He was astonished and relieved that someone else could see what he thought was his own senses out of control. “Cold. “ He didn’t remember walking. Didn’t know where he was, just that he was on his feet in a wildly tilting universe, but Capella’s hand found his arm. He was going to be sick, and then he wasn’t. Was just lying on his bed trying to be steadily solid.
“Relax. Easy. I got you. I won’t let you fall.”
Two deep breaths.
“You can tell, you know. The ones that fight it. The ones that can hear you. More can than do, if you understand.”
“Don’t. Understand.”
“Yeah. Easy. Don’t know why it’s cold. Metabolism, I guess. Maybe using up more ‘n we take in. You’ll drop a few kilos. Dehydrate. You got to drink, Tommy. Brought you a raft of the green stuff. Drink up.”
Didn’t want to. Wasn’t tracking real well. But you learned, if somebody said drink, you drank, no matter the taste.
Didn’t taste green. Tasted purple. Orange. Smelled blue. Stuff ran in front of his eyes. Colors made curls like water and oil in free-fall. Made you sick awhile. But it went away.
“Better?”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed. It sounded reasonable. Anything would have gotten his agreement, echoing as it did, being color, and taste. It echoed on for a long, frightening while.
“We got a little problem out there,” Capella said, after a long silence. He felt that sinking of the edge that told him most surely Capella was there, like a depression in space itself. “I think now there’s maybe three of us. But the instruments are screwed, you can’t tell, sometimes you get echoes off the interface, you see yourself. Lot of echoes in the sheet, sometimes from clear to hell and gone, you never don’t know where they come from. Maybe not even human, who knows?”