Alternate Realities by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

... we don’t know. We get readings that hold up a while and then they fall apart.”
    “Are we—falling into something?”
    “Can’t tell,” said Modred, with the same calm he would have used ordering another cup of coffee.
    I sat there a long time, letting the fright and the food settle. By now to my eyes the ship interior had taken on normal aspects, and my companions looked like themselves again. I reckoned that the same sort of thing must be happening with all of us, that about the time our bodies began to trouble us for normal things like food, our sensory perceptions were beginning to arrange themselves into some kind of order too.
    We wouldn’t starve, I thought, not—quickly. The lockers down there had the finest food, everything for every whim of my lady. The best wines and delicacies imported from faraway worlds. An enormous amount of it. We wouldn’t run out of air. The interior systems were getting along just fine and nothing had shut down, or we would have had alarms sounding by now. Bad air or starving would be easiest, at least for us, who would simply blank and die.
    I was terrified of the thing rushing up at us, or that we were rushing down into, or drifting slowly, whatever it was that those figures meant ... because we had just had a bad taste of being where we were not designed to be, and another fall of any length did not sit well with my stomach.
    But we could take a long time to hit and it seemed there was nothing to be done about the situation. I stood up, brushed my suit out of wrinkles. “I’m going to see my lady,” I said. “Is there anything I can tell her?”
    “Tell her,” Gawain said, “we’re trying to keep the ship intact.”
    I stared at him half a beat, chilled cold, then left the bridge and walked back out through the corridors which now looked like corridors ... back to my lady’s compartments.
    Griffin was there when I arrived. They had gotten him up and mobile at least, into the blue bedroom, to sit at a small table and pick at the food. My lady sat across from him. I could see them through the open door. And Viv and Lance waited outside the bedroom doors, Vivien sitting on a small straight chair which had ridden through the calamity in its transit bolts. Lance was picking up bits of something which had shattered on the carpet, and some of the tapestries were crooked in their hangings.
    I sat down too, in a chair which offered some comfort to my shivery limbs. Lance finished his cleaning up and took the pieces out, came back and paced the floor. I did not. I sat rigidly still, my fingers clenched on the upholstery. I was thinking about falling into some worse hole in space than we had already met, feeling that imagined motion of those figures on the bridge screen as if it were a hurtling rush.
    “Where are we?” Vivien asked, my former question. Her voice was hushed and hoarse.
    “In strange space,” I said. And then, because it had to be said: “The crew doesn’t really expect we’re going to get out of it.”
    It was strange who came apart and who did not. Lance, who was always so vain and so worried about his appearance and his favor with my lady—he just stood there. But Vivien sat and shivered and finally blanked on us, which was the best state for her, considering her upset, and we did not move to rouse her.
    “I think,” Lance said, looking on her sitting frozen in her chair, “that Vivien planned to live a long, long time.”
    Of course that was true. Poor Vivien, I thought. All her plans. All her work. She stayed blanked, and kept at it, and finally Lance went over to her and patted her shoulder, so that she came out of it. But she slipped back again at once.
    “It’s a ship,” Percivale’s voice broke over the intercom uninvited. “It’s another ship we’re headed for.”
    That brought my lady and Griffin out of their bedroom refuge, all in a rush of moved chairs. “Signal it!” my lady ordered, looking up at the sitting room speaker panel