"That"s you," Jillan moaned. "Rafe, what"s happening to us?"
The lights went dim again. Rafe strode forward, desperate, recalling how the dying saw their bodies from some other vantage. He felt the cold, felt a vast love of that poor wounded flesh that was himself, wanting it back again.
"Rafe!" Jillan called, and the horror dawned on him, that they were dead, that Jillan and Paul were bodiless, and he almost was. "Rafe!"
The dark closed about him and he fought it, trying to get back to the light. He felt their hands like claws, clutching at him to drag him back to death with them.
"Let me go," he cried, "let me go!" cursing their selfishness.
Rafe moved, and knew that he moved. He felt other things, pain, and chill, and G holding him supine against a cloth surface. He opened his eyes and kept them open, on a graygreen arched ceiling of warts and white fuzz, like what his fingers and body felt under him, soft and rough like carpet. He felt a draft on all his skin so that he knew he was naked. His heart started speeding, his mind sorting. "Jillan-Jillan, Paul?" He rolled over, wincing from torn muscles, from a sudden lancing pain from eyes to the back of his skull.
Dim distance, warts and cobwebby stuff snaked on and on as far as he could see, graygreen to white in an irregular corridor, lumpish and winding as if the place abhorred a straight line.
He scrambled to his knees, trembling, and stopped cold. His blurred eyes fixed on nightmare. Bits and pieces of Lindy were rooted in the tunnel, the seats, part of the control console, the EVApod standing there like some humanoid monster rising out of the warted, gossamer wall at an angle. The sanitary compartment stood intact, enveloped in graygreen moss and cobweb above and below. The storage cabinets thrust up from the floor like angled teeth.
He pressed his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes, felt days-old stubble on his jaw. He staggered erect, his muscles gone weak from those lost days. The corridor went on and on jn that direction too, beyond the point where Lindy"s parts gave out, mossy and cobwebbed, all lit from luminous warts in the ceiling, irregularly placed, a line of lights winding with the serpentine turns.
"Jillan," he called aloud. "Paul?" His voice was terrible in that stillness. He turned, looked all about him, down two ways of the corridor equally desolate and strange and vanishing into turns and dark.
"Jillan," he shouted suddenly, desperate. "Jillan, Paul, do you hear me?"
Silence.
He searched for other sleepers, staggered among the nightmare remnants of Lindy until there were no more, and he faced only the warted corridor ahead. He went back and opened all the doors of the cabinets and the cases, even looked into the dark faceplate of the EVApod, fearing what he might find.
All empty. There were Lindy"s stores, food, supplies, clothing in the lockers . . . his, Paul"s, Jillan"s, all as it ought to be. He looked up in the panicked imagination of someone watching him. Nothing. No indication of any living soul.
He took clothes from his locker, dressed painfully, pulling seams past sore joints. He found his watch, his soft-soled boots, his tags . . . the pin that was from the old, the first Lindy, that had been his uncle"s. He sat down on the floor and put on the boots and the rest of it. His hands shook. His heart was doubling its beats. He went through mundane motions in this insane place and tried to go on functioning while flashes of memory came back, disjointed. He remembered the surface of the alien vessel and saw the same architecture everywhere about him. He had no doubt where he was. He remembered jumps.p.a.ce . . . and no trank; remembered (he had thought) dying- And worse things. Far worse than the nightmare of Lindy"s dissected portions at his side. Arms. Arms snaking into the ship. Machinery. Pain.
Pain.
"Jillan .. . Paul. . . ." He staggered up, hesitated between forward and back, the two ways from this place being alike. "Who are you?" he screamed at the ceiling.
There was no answer.
He walked the direction his mind sorted as ahead, treading around the hummocks of the floor. The wall evolved to white instead of graygreen; he touched it, but it felt like the other had felt . . . gossamer silk to a light touch, but rough to a harder one, like cobweb over stiff carpet, resisting compaction. The walls went on in alternate color changes, areas of graygreen, areas of white, all warted and noded and twisting and cob webbed, and he tried to think what manner of inhabitant might call this home.
They were across jump: that memory was solid. Other recollections came, of confinement like a coffin; of pain running through all his nerves at once, of pain so intense it was sight and hearing and being burned alive and clawed apart from inside; of pain that still ached through joints and bone and made his muscles shake. All the voices of the other ships had rung in his skull at once, over and over; Jillan"s voice and Paul"s voice and the voice of John Liles all wound together, pleading for help and rescue.
They had been in this place with him. He remembered them screaming, amid the pain. Remembered Paul"s voice calling his name.
There was no knowing where they had been brought, how far, how long. The intruder had simply dragged them off in its field, off into the dark, as if Endeavor star had been the firelight and this beast had just bounded into the light to s.n.a.t.c.h a victim ... to take it where it could do what it liked, at its leisure. There was no hope of help. They could be taken apart piece by piece and the whole procedure transmitted to Endeavor on vid, and there was nothing Endeavor could do about it. There was nothing here, not even human sympathy.
"Jillan," he called from time to time. It grew harder and harder to challenge that silence, which was greater and deeper than any he had known in his stationbound, shipbound life. He felt a pulse somewhere too deep for proper hearing, the working of some constant machinery . . . but no sound of fans, no ping of heating and cooling or sound of hydraulics. No feeling of being on a ship under acceleration. Just more and more corridor, cob-webbed, warted silence.
His knees grew weak in walking. He thought that it might be shock catching up to him. He realized he had no idea where he was going or why, and that his walking itself was reasonless. He sat down to rest and dropped his head into his arms.
The lights went out.
He sprang up in alarm, facing what light remained, far down the corridor. He went for the lighted section, stumbling over the nodes, hurrying until his ribs hurt-and those lights went out as he reached them as lights further on flared into life.
He understood the game then, that he was watched, that it/they wanted him to come-to them, to something. He moved helplessly toward the light that beckoned, afraid of dark and blindness in this place. They threatened to shut him off from his primary sense and he reacted in animal instinct, knowing what they were doing to him and how simply; and hoping somewhere at gut level that doing what they wanted might bring him to where Jillan and Paul were. He ran, even hurting, slowed only as his strength gave out and he fell farther and farther behind the lights until they stayed on at the limit of his sight, in one fixed sector, beyond which was unremedied dark. He reached that place as the lights dimmed and moved on into vastness where the walls were walls and were farther and farther apart.
Sweat chilled his face. What had been a limp became a stagger. He tended more and more toward the right-hand wall as the left-hand one strayed off into black, as the whole corridor opened into the likeness of a vast cavern, one with low k.n.o.bbed points to the ceiling like a cavern of warts, whose farther reaches were wrapped in deepening shadow.
A sudden bright light speared from the ceiling in front of him. He flung an arm across his eyes. "Who are you?" he asked the light and the darkness, irrational as cursing: there had been no answers and he expected none.
"I don"t know," a voice came back to him, and he was standing there, a naked man at one heartbeat strange and then-like recognizing a mirror where one had expected none-altogether familiar. He was staring at himself, at what might have been a mirror in its expression of shock and fear-he knew that look, was startled when it lifted a hand he had not lifted and opposed itself to him.
"d.a.m.n you," he cried to the invisible, the manipulater. "d.a.m.n you, use your own shape!"
"I am," the doppelganger said. Tears glistened in his/its eyes. "O G.o.d, don"t-don"t look like that. Help me. I don"t know where I am." "Liar," he told himself.
"Rafe." The voice drifted from the lips, his own, uncertain and lost and vague. "Please. Listen to me. You"re awake. I"m you. I think I am. I don"t know. Please" The doppelganger walked, sat down above a node, not quite phasing with it. It tucked its bare knees up, locked its arms about them, looked up at him with eyes full of shadow, as if the image were breaking down. "Please sit and talk with me."
He watched his own face shape words. The lips trembled, quirks in the chin that he knew and felt in his own gut, as if it were himself fighting tears, fighting for his dignity. It hurt to watch. He was trembling as if the tears were his, and they began to be. "Where"s Jillan? Where"s Paul? Can you tell me that?"
"Sit down. Please, sit down."
He found a place and sat, hugged his knees up until he realized he had taken the mirror pose, clothed version and naked one. His gut heaved, and he swallowed hard. "What"s your name?" he asked.
"Rafe. You have to call me something. I"m you. Or something like. I can see you-there. I guess you can see me. Do I look like you?"
"Where"s Jillan and Paul? The people with me where are they?"
"They"re" The doppelganger pointed off toward the dark outside the light. "They"re somewhere about. Not speaking to me. Please-let me try to explain this. I don"t know where their bodies are. I found you. Me. Lying there. I thought you know, the way you can see yourself-they say you can see yourself when you die. You float up near the ceiling and look down and see yourself lying there, and you can hear, and you don"t want to go back But I wanted to. I tried. Jillan and Paul-they"re like me. They"re with me. 1 think they are."
"You"re talking nonsense." He hugged himself, trying not to shiver, but the thought kept circling him that it was not an alien in front of him. He wanted it to be. He wanted it to change into something else, anything else. "Evaporate, why don"t you?"
"Please." The doppelganger seemed to shiver. Tears ran down its face. "I think I might. I don"t know. Maybe I"m you, a part of you, and we got separated somehow."
"Maybe I"m dreaming this."
"Or I am. But I don"t think so. There"s this dark place. I come and go out of it and I don"t know how. You walk and you cover so much ground you can get lost. Maybe you can lose yourself and not get back. I"m afraid that"s what"s happened to Jillan and Paul. I think they"re off looking-looking for their own selves. Like you. They"re not taking this well. I"m scared. Please don"t look like that."
"G.o.d, what do you expect me to look like?"
"I know. I know. I feel it like we were still connected when you look like that."
"You read my mind. Is that it? You"re the alien. You just pick up on what 1 think, what I"d think"
"Don"t." The doppelganger shook its head, wiped a fist across its mouth in an expression which was his own. "Don"t do that. I know I"m not. I know. I wouldn"t choose to feel like this if I had a choice. I don"t remember being anything else. 1 was born at Fargone; Jillan"s my sister; our kin all died"
"Cut it!"
"It"s all I know. It"s all I know, and-Rafe-I remember the jump, remember this place we were in"
He remembered too, the terror, the waving arms, the pain, the unG.o.dly pain. . . .
"I woke up in the dark," the doppelganger said. "And they were with me, Jillan was, and Paul. And somehow I found you. You were lying on the floor. I tried to get to you. I thought-1 thought we were dying then. That I had to get back."
"I don"t know why I"m talking to you." Rafe put his head down, ran his hand through his hair, looked up again in the earnest hope the apparition would have gone. It had not. It stared at him, a mirror image of despair.
"I"m afraid," it said. "O G.o.d, I"m scared."
"Where are they?"
"I don"t know."
He drew a deep breath and got to his feet, came closer and saw the image lose its coherency at close range. "I can see through you."
"Can you?"
"You"re an image. That"s all you are." He kept walking till the image lost all its coherency and he moved into it. He saw it projected around his outstretched hand. "Fake!"
"But I"m here," the voice persisted, forlorn, with an edge of panic. "Don"t. Don"t do that. Back off. Please back off."
He swept his arm about as if that could scatter it, like vapor. "You"re nothing, hear?"
There was no answer. The image reconst.i.tuted itself a little way away, naked and frightened looking. Tears still glistened on its face.
"I think," it said, "I think-somehow they made me. I don"t know how. While you were asleep. O G.o.d, hold onto me. Please hold onto me."
"How?" The terror in the voice was real. It hurt him, so that at once he wanted to deal it hurt and heal it. "I can"t touch you. You"re not here, do you hear me? Wherever you are, it"s not here."
"I think-think they made me out of you. Up to-I don"t know how long ago-we have the same memories, because I was you." The doppelganger folded his hands over his nakedness, wistful, lost-looking, in a dreadful calm. "I"m really scared. But I guess I haven"t got t.i.tle to be. All I am-I guess-is you."
"Look" he said to himself, hurting for himself, feeling half mad. "Look. Where are you? Can you tell that?"
"Here. Just here. There"s that other place. But it"s only dark. I don"t want to go back there."
"I think-I think they"ve made some kind of android."
"I might be."
"The Jillan and Paul with you-they"re like you?"
"I don"t know."
"What do you mean you don"t know? Bring them here."
"I don"t know how to look."
"Liar." He flung his arm at the doppelganger, somewhere between hate and pity. "Go try."
"It"s dark out there."
He wanted to laugh, to curse, to weep. He did none of them, feeling a shaking in his knees, a mounting terror. He had never liked dark confined s.p.a.ces. Crawlways, like Fargone mines. "Go on," he said. "Come back when you know something."
And that too was mad.
"Will you" his double asked, in a faint thin voice, "will you find something to call me-so I have a name?"
"Name yourself."
"You name me," the other said, and sent chills up his spine.
"Rafe," Rafe said. He could not commit that ultimate robbery. "That"s what you are, isn"t it?"
The shoulders straightened, the head came up, touching a chord in him, as if he had discovered courage in himself he had never seen. "That"s what I am," the doppelganger said. "Brother."
And it walked away.
What it had said chilled him, that it had said a thing he had not dreamed to say.
He sat down where he was, locked his arms over his head, thinking that he might have witnesses.
He looked up when he had got his breath back.
"If you"ve built that thing," he said to the walls, able to think of it as thing when he was not staring at it face to face, "you"ve got some way to interpret it. Haven"t you? You understand? Why are you doing this?"
There was no answer. He sat there until the strength had returned to his legs and then he began carefully to retrace his way back to the small horror that was his, the place stocked with food that he could use.
Habitat, he thought. As if I were an animal. He nursed hope, all the same, that if he had come through it, if the pain was done, then their captors were only being careful. It did not guarantee that they were benign. There were darknesses in his mind that refused to come into the light, the memory of the ship that had done what no ship ought to do; of pain-but they might have been ignorant, or in a hurry to save them.
So he built up his hope. The lights came on ahead of him, at an easy pace. He went, looking over his shoulder from time to time, and quickly forward, fearing ambushes.
He remembered the bogey"s size, like the starsta-tion itself. Hurling that into jump took more power than any engine had a right to use; and for the rest, for technology that could tear a mind apart and reconst.i.tute it inside an android-that was the stuff of suppositions and what-ifs, s.p.a.cers" yarns and books. No one did such things.
No one jumped a station-sized ma.s.s. By the laws he knew, nothing could, that did not conform to the conditions of a black hole. And it did it from virtual standstill.
He did not run when he had home in sight; he restrained himself, but his knees were shaking.
He sat down when he had gotten there, in the chair before the disjointed console, in the insane debris of Lindy"s corpse, and bowed his head onto his arms, because it ached.
Ached as if something were rent away from him.
He wiped his eyes and idly flipped a switch, jumped when a screen flared to life and gave him star-view.
He tried the controls, and there was nothing.
Com, he thought, and spun the chair about, flipping switches, opening a channel, hoping it went somewhere. "h.e.l.lo," he said to it, to whatever was listening. "h.e.l.lo-h.e.l.lo."
" "A aaiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!""
"d.a.m.n!" he yelled back at it, reaction; and trembled after he had cut it off.
He went on, shaking, trying not to think at all, putting himself through insane routine of instrument checkout, as if he were still on Lindy"s bridge and not managing her pieces in this madness.