Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don’t do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That’s how we found them.
He’d the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn’t the least notion who’d found ‘them’ or what ‘they’ were. He’d missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t in danger.
Wasn’t in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I’ve traveled more lightyears than you. I’m ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?
He didn’t see things clearly. He wasn’t sure what he saw.
“You have to get used to it,” the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn’t make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn’t get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he’d ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spinning faster and faster as his heart speeded up and the sensual and sensory traded places in rapid succession.
Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn’t remember the answer to his question, or why he’d asked it. He hadn’t any breath. He couldn’t get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spinning through the dark into white space, and the sickening conviction of falling that came at system-drop.
Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.
“Don’t believe Christian,” someone said. “Nothing’s free.”
He was alone, then, couldn’t put reality with where he was or where he’d been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.
Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…
Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie’s language.
That’s a stupid thing to do. That’s just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?
Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.
Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can’t trust this crew won’t go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…
Jump-dreams like he’d never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn’t be in real life. He’d real memories. He’d the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein’s laws and Bok’s famous loophole.
Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he’d never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?
Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn’t gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?
The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he’d disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.
But he hadn’t a stitch on.
He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.
Couldn’t get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.