That was the only good part of being here, except the ship was in one piece and he was.
Barely.
Jump space was an unsettling experience, no matter how many times you’d done it and how you’d acclimated, you were always a heartbeat away from crazy and-or dead, and, God, people could do odd things, coming out of it.
Had to have been on the down-slide, when they were making drop. Medics said you couldn’t move, during jump, something about long motor nerves being just too slow to coordinate in the feedback to the brain and inner ear, or some such crap that probably made sense to the physics people and the medics, but there was still a lot the medics didn’t know, according to the folklore, or couldn’t make clear, even to people who didn’t want to believe the fools. The science people were still arguing whether brains could remember anything happening during jump. Or whether events could happen in hyperspace that affected realspace matter. Consensus said if anything seemed to have had an effect on something that belonged in realspace, namely human brains, it was nothing but a sequential memory screwup, like in a witness situation, where nobody could agree on what happened first, or what colors somebody was wearing. Further you got from it, the less certain the memory was.
Meaning you only thought you’d done it, or you’d done it before or after jump and only deceived yourself how and when it was in relation to other things.
But myth regularly took over where medics left off, and probably all over human space, they told about Grandiosa and the night-walker, how this crewman had gone crazy during jump and could move, and went out and bloodily murdered his shipmates until Grandiosa got crazier and crazier and people wouldn’t trank down and went crazier and crazier…
Then the night-walker changed the jump coordinates and screwed up the navigation and ate all the rest, that he’d hung in the ship’s food locker.
Bogeymen. Ghost stories. Kids’ lofts were full of them. They were all stupid stories, probably told them about water-ships on old Earth, or on the old sublighters, and there was no Grandiosa on record anywhere, older cousins said so.
The fact was, in jump you were always naked to forces that you didn’t understand and that physicists couldn’t measure because physicists couldn’t measure without instruments and instruments didn’t work there, or at least didn’t produce consistent results. You couldn’t stay awake and aware through it no matter what, and it was too much like dying, crossing that boundary, which a long-hauler spacer did, six, seven, eight times a ship-year.
He didn’t want to think about it. He heard Tink’s voice, down the corridor, talking with several somebodys. He’d finished his snack and he was sweaty and cold, now, he wanted a shower if they’d just stay stable.
Supposing the shower worked, which he couldn’t expect, considering the bars and the cable and all—nobody was interested in his comfort.
Then he looked at the cable on his wrist and realized he couldn’t get his clothes off.
“Damn!” he said, and wanted to throw the tray against the bars.
In the self-same moment he was aware of a shadow against the grid.
A woman stood there, the way Capella had, in his dream.
Not Capella. Dark-haired, the same stance… but not the same. And not a dream.
He got off the bunk. His visitor was wearing the same green coveralls he’d seen on Corinthian crew dockside… professional woman, he thought, cool, businesslike. Had to be an officer. Maybe medical, come to check on him.
“Are you all right?” she asked, with the kind of accent he dreamed he’d heard before, somewhere, maybe the intercom, he wasn’t sure.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and her mouth quirked. A pretty mouth. He was respectful, but he wasn’t dead… he felt this strange, sandpapered-raw sense of nerves with her, a consciousness of his own skin, scratch-scored and sensitive in intimate places, and didn’t even know what about her demanded his attention. He just…
… reacted. And stood there embarrassed as hell.
“Christian’s brother, huh?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She seemed amused. “I’m not ma’am.”
On some ships there was only one, senior-most, matriarch. And she clearly wasn’t.