TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

It didn’t work, quite, but he kept his mouth shut about it.

He lived. You didn’t die from dreams.

Ship was going up… You could feel it, a strange feeling, like everything was spreading wider and standing still when there wasn’t any referent for still…

Think about Sheila, she was his safety-valve when his mind started free-wheeling and the ship went strange, think about meeting Sheila… he could see her down the dockside at Mariner, silver-flash coveralls, small figure in the distance, near the huge gantries, the way he’d first seen her, his Polly spacer, who never talked about him, never listened if he did, sometimes, slip. She told jokes, she made fun, she said she liked him, never would love him, forget that crap, that was too serious, and most of all she taught him to calm down, laugh a little, and let her do some of the instigating, that was what she said.

She was older, Sheila Barr was, and she’d told him once how she occasionally thought about having a kid, and kept changing her mind. She didn’t want that commitment, but she wanted the immortality. He’d never thought about either. He’d been busy surviving his own childhood when he took up with Sheila Barr, hadn’t been ready in the least for immortality, just desperately—a little vindication with the guys…

She won’t look at you, Rodman had said.

But she did. She had. She waltzed him into a sleepover for fourteen straight days and darks and showed him things he’d never gotten out of tapes or holocards—he came back knowing things the cousins didn’t, he quickly found that out, and set Rodman’s nose mightily out of joint when the youngers listened to him as one who Knew.

So he got a reputation, such as it was. And proved he could still beat hell out of Rodman, one on one. But he still froze up, getting dates when Polly wasn’t in port, which, God, he didn’t want Rodman or anybody else to find out… he managed. Looks helped, he had that over Rodman, by some, and brains, but it didn’t cover everything, and on some liberties he just hung out, disappeared a night or so, claiming he was missing Sheila, which was true, for different reasons.

Silver figure turned dark in his dream. Wasn’t Sheila he was meeting, then, on that dock. For a moment he was scared it was Rodman. The whole image started coming apart on him, and Sheila’s dark-haired, lanky self went strange, indefinite, separated from him by a gridwork of steel bars…

Pale, then. Capella’s blonde, brazen flash and try-me attitude, Capella standing there with her bare arms resting through bars he recalled he wasn’t dreaming, with the bracelet of stars evident on her wrist. It wasn’t the freedom of the docks he was in, he was in a box he couldn’t get out of, and an exposure that let the whole ship come and stare at him if they liked.

Capella gave him an I-don’t-give-a-damn rake of the eyes, leaned there, enigma like the fatal holocards. Her hands were death and life together, the serpent and the equation that cracked the light barrier, the bracelet no honest spacer wore…

“Get up,” she said, this apparition. “You can do it. Take a walk.”

Nobody could. Not really. But in his dream he unbuckled the restraints and got up, and walked part of the way.

The bars weren’t there.

“Well, well,” she said, “Christian’s older brother. How are you?”

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.)

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