by John Grant
"What do you mean, 'buy'?"
"We are getting to the command deck," said Lan Yi. He wished he felt a bit more confident they would actually reach it. Every moment he expected to find himself back in Strauss-Giolitto's cabin.
"Where's everyone else?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"How do you mean?"
"We should have been stopped a few times by other people wanting to get on."
"I think something very bad has happened. I do not wish to speculate further."
"Cheery?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"We seem still to be alive."
"'Seem'?"
"That is as much as I can say. While you were unconscious there were some very strange things happening. There still are." The indicator was one level short of the command deck. He put his arm on Hilary's shoulder, ready to stop the child from dashing out on to the deck. Lan Yi wanted to take a careful look at what they were getting into before they got into it. "Have you tried to speak to the Images yet?"
"No." Strauss-Giolitto looked puzzled. "Where are they?"
"I do not know. That is one of the very many things that are concerning me."
The elevator reached the level of the command deck.
The door opened.
#
The thing looking at them was barely recognizable as Strider. Her cheeks had fallen in on themselves. The array of darkly yellow teeth that showed between the leathery lips was an image of death. The eyes looked as if they had seen too much time evolve in front of them. She was crouched in front of one of the Pockets, but looking back towards the door through which they had just entered. Her hair was grey. But her SSIA jumpsuit was the regulation blue, as if she had put it on just a few moments ago.
"Who are you?" the thing that was still just identifiable as Strider hissed.
"Lan Yi. Maria Strauss-Giolitto. A kid. Looks like we're your crew," said the tall woman.
Strider fell to all fours. She seemed to be growing older even as they watched. Lan Yi expected knuckle-bones to start showing through the flesh of her fingers.
"Everything's illusion," Strider said.
"A philosophically interesting point perhaps, but . . ." Lan Yi began.
"I'm not talking about eternity," said Strider. "I'm talking about now." She spat a decayed molar on to the floor in front of her, looked at it, picked it up, then put it back into her mouth and chewed it as if it were a toffee. "Don't believe everything you see. Don't believe anything you see."
Lan Yi took a couple of paces towards her.
"Don't come any closer." There was a lethal quality in her whisper that stopped him in his tracks. "I don't know who you are. You've told me names. I know the people whose names those are, but you don't look like them to me."
"You look like Leonie Strider to me," said Lan Yi, taking another pace forward.
"Bullshit to that," said Strider. "I no longer even look like Leonie Strider to me." She spat out another tooth, then picked it up and swallowed it as before. "What I see you as is walking mirrors, just reflections of real people. You could be anything." She pushed her hand back through her hair, and most of it came away between her fingers. "I don't know what the Helgiolath have done to us, but . . ."
"Were you in the place that was made up of mud?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"Yes. I was there half a thousand years ago."
"And something stomped on your back."
"That was only a century later."
"Yeah," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I was there as well. Then I saw what the stars are really like—they're not just pretty bright lights in the sky at all, are they?"
"No. They hate us."
"That's taking it a bit far, Leonie."
"I don't know. I think they probably do. Mind you, my perceptions may have been altered rather radically. I've stood guard here on the command deck for a hundred and fifty years, as far as I can estimate, without having even enough time off to eat or have a crap. The hunger isn't hard to cope with any longer; the constipation is."
"You really aren't Strider, are you?" said Lan Yi. He pushed Hilary behind him.
"Of course I'm Strider."
Lan Yi looked up at the view-window. There was nothing out there. Even if they'd shifted into intergalactic space there should have been some glimmer of light, somewhere.
"Go back to the elevator," said Lan Yi softly to Strauss-Giolitto. "Take the kid with you."
"Don't talk shit," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I'm bigger and faster than you. And I'm more expendable. Remember, I was the one who got to go down to Spindrift."
"OK, we'll both stay. Hilary, go to the elevator and take yourself somewhere very distant."
"Aw, but . . ."
"Look," said Strauss-Giolitto tautly, "find yourself a black hole and fall into it. Don't pause at the event horizon."
"Yeah, but . . ." said Hilary.
"Just for fuck's sake fuck off, fucking quick," said Strauss-Giolitto.
"Oh, right, Maria. Why didn't you explain before?"
The two heard the noise of the elevator door behind them. Lan Yi reached out his right hand to touch the back of Strauss-Giolitto's left. For a split second he felt her reject the physical contact, but then she returned the gesture.
"Who or what are you?" he said to the thing that looked like an ancient Strider.
"I'm your captain."
"I do not believe you. Just now you were telling us that we should not believe anything at all that we see. Now you are asking us to take it on credit that you are Leonie Strider." He glanced sideways at Strauss-Giolitto; the woman was looking even paler than usual. "Perhaps Pinocchio could judge."
"The bot has long ago turned into a heap of rust."
The thing that might or might not be Strider was crawling towards them. The movement seemed infinitely painful. What Lan Yi wanted to do was to step forward and pick her up in his arms. At the same time he knew that this was the very last thing he should do.
"I do not think that is so," he said. "Please start telling us the truth again. You did earlier when you said that everything around us at the moment is made up of illusion, and that we should not believe anything we saw. Now you are lying to us. I would be very grateful if you could stop lying."
He touched the back of Strauss-Giolitto's hand again. Even the slight contact was enough to tell him how tensely held in place the woman's body was.
The light on the command deck began to dim. The dimming was so slow that Lan Yi hardly noticed it at first, and then he discovered that he was having to screw up his unscreened eye to see the face of the thing that he now knew was not Strider.
The thing's mouth opened, and teeth spilled from it, rattling on the command deck's floor. Behind those teeth appeared others that were much smaller but much more numerous and seemingly much sharper. The blue jumpsuit faded away from around the form of the creature, and Lan Yi wondered how he had ever been able to think of this as a human being, let alone the human being he knew as Strider. Six-legged and with what looked like feathers covering the parts of its body that the illusion of the jumpsuit had hidden, it was poised to spring at him.
Its mouth opened wider and wider—impossibly wider. There was very little he could see now but the interior of that mouth, which was darker even than the starless space he'd seen through the view-window. There was nightmare in the blackness of that maw, which had become as large as the command deck.
"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"That is a difficult question to answer," said Lan Yi primly. "I very much hope that what you are seeing is less hideous than what I am seeing."
"Couldn't be."
The upper surface of the mouth had covered the view-window. The teeth of its lower jaw were slipping insidiously under their feet. They tried to move backwards, but the rear wall of the command deck stopped them.
The darkness inside the mouth of the Strider-thing was not absolute. There was a flipping black-yellow tongue several meters wide. Overhead, the t
eeth of the upper jaw were slowly lowering.
Lan Yi held his composure with great difficulty. His life had been a long one and it had been strewn with many griefs, most notably the way that Geena had so determinedly hurled herself out of it. He was not at all afraid of death, but he was certainly fearful of the pain that might attend his manner of dying. He wanted to bow down inside the mouth of the thing that had looked like Strider and beg for mercy, but he knew that he couldn't do that. He had to keep up the appearance of impassiveness for the sake of Strauss-Giolitto. Astonishingly, she was acting as calm as he was. Perhaps she was returning the compliment: keeping up appearances for his sake.
"Everything's illusion," Strauss-Giolitto said. "Just keep a hold of that. This isn't really happening."
"It feels as if it is."
She put her arm around his waist and hugged him to her. "Let's go for a walk down the Yellow Brick Road, shall we?"
"That?" he said, looking at the serpent-like tongue.
"We can't go back, so we might as well go forward. Just at the moment, it looks as if we have a choice of being eaten or allowing ourselves to be eaten. I'd prefer the latter. It has a bit more dignity. Besides, sooner or later we're going to wake up."
I woke her from a nightmare, Lan Yi thought. That's why she's so insouciant about all this. She thinks it's just another bad dream. It hasn't occurred to her that even illusions can kill you.
"Yes," he said. "Let's take that walk."
Darkness was falling as the huge mouth closed.
The most difficult part was climbing on to the tongue. Its tip was moving from side to side in unpredictable flickers of motion. Lan Yi tried to grab it to hold it still, but the oily flesh kept slipping out of his hands.
Strauss-Giolitto hit the tip of the tongue hard with the side of her hand. For a moment it stilled.
"Climb on," she said. "Dive on."
She threw herself on to the tongue, losing her balance before she could rise to her knees and, somewhat shakily, her feet. She looked the way that Lan Yi had looked the first time he had tried water-skiing, over seventy years ago. There was so little light left that he couldn't see her face. This was probably a good thing. About three minutes into his first attempt at water-skiing he had been prolifically seasick. He took her hand, and she dragged him up on to the greasy surface of the tongue. It had started moving from side to side once more. She tried to pull him erect alongside her, but instead fell almost on top of him.
"Doesn't look as if we're exactly going to be dancing along like Dorothy and the Scarecrow," she said into his ear.
"Let us keep going forward," he said, resigning himself to death. Better for her that she keeps thinking of all this as just a bad dream, something that will sooner or later be over. "Who knows what is at the end of the Yellow Brick Road?"
At the moment all that seemed to be at the end of the Yellow Brick Road was pitch blackness. The mouth of the Strider-thing had almost entirely closed. Lan Yi glanced behind him and saw just a strip of jagged-edged greenish light.
"Who goes first?" said Strauss-Giolitto.
"Whichever you prefer."
"All right, I'll lead you. Take hold of my ankle and follow me."
She crawled ahead of him. There was just enough light left for him to catch a glimpse of her foot, and he caught it in his hand. She gave a grunt of acknowledgement.
The jaws clenched tightly shut. There was nothing to see. The slippery tongue on which they were perched still moved erratically underneath them, so that even crawling was a delicate test of the ability to keep balance.
Lan Yi wondered how long he could keep going. Strauss-Giolitto had the fantasy that this wasn't really happening. He knew that it was. It might be an illusion, but so was the person on the other side of the mirror from yourself. If you ran to throw your arms around that mirror-person you could kill yourself just as easily as if you'd jumped off a tall building. He felt as if he were falling into Strauss-Giolitto's fantasy. Any minute now there would be the sound of breaking glass.
She was crawling ahead at such a speed that he found it difficult to keep up. Sometimes he found himself falling face-first into the accumulated mucus at the center of the tongue. Still he clung on to her ankle. It seemed the one safe reference point in a universe that was currently nothing but darkness.
"We'll get there soon," she said.
"Where?"
"At the end of the Yellow Brick Road there's always the Emerald City."
There was a slight glimmer of light. It was dark red—not emerald green—and unreliable, but at least it was there. Strauss-Giolitto's boot, in Lan Yi's hand, looked black.
Then a new ripple was added to the tongue's movement.
"I think we've reached the back of the throat," said Lan Yi, struggling for breath.
They were the last words he said before they found themselves sliding unstoppably downwards. The redness grew a little brighter.
Human stomachs are filled with acid. As he fell, releasing Strauss-Giolitto's foot at last, Lan Yi wondered what the stomach of the Strider-thing might be filled with. It seemed odd to be concerned about which particular fluid might be about to dissolve you, but Lan Yi couldn't help the curiosity.
But they weren't inside a stomach, he suddenly discovered: they were floating in free space, with the stars stretching out on every side as far as he could see. He stopped himself from screaming and looked at the figure of Strauss-Giolitto, tumbling out of control alongside him. Still she seemed unfazed by what they were going through—it was just another dream to her, maybe a dream she had already had. She was relaxing in the vacuum, stretching her arms out behind her as if she were luxuriating in a hot bath.
Lan Yi narrowed his eyes. The faintest points of light around them were swiftly winking out. He wondered why he was able to continue breathing in the vacuum: perhaps Strauss-Giolitto was right, and it really was some kind of dream. But it wasn't—he knew that. He'd experienced lucid dreams before, and this was identifiably not one of them. More of the stars were blinking into nonexistence. The whole of space around him and Strauss-Giolitto was beginning to glow softly. He reached out to take her hand. She smiled at him.
Almost all of the stars had gone now, and the glow of space was becoming dazzling. His body and Strauss-Giolitto's floated towards each other. He found himself wrapped tightly against her, so tightly that it was almost as if he might be absorbed into her. She had always been much larger than him; now she seemed to be twice his size. He wondered if she would next try to swallow him, in a recapitulation of what the Strider-thing had done to them.
Gravity returned suddenly, forcing them apart. They were lying on a hard surface of some kind which gleamed greenly.
"Ah, there you are," said a huge voice.
#
Strider finally narrowed the focus of the Pocket so that she could see Lan Yi and Strauss-Giolitto. They were the last of her personnel that she and Ten Per Cent Extra Free had been able to identify.
"Ah, there you are," she said, and reached into the Pocket to scoop them up. She held them carefully by the collars of their jumpsuits as she withdrew them from the Pocket's field. The first time she'd pulled someone out of the Pocket she'd held him on her upturned hand and then, when he was suddenly restored to his full size and mass, had been lucky to escape without broken bones.
"What an amazing imagination I have," said Strauss-Giolitto, recovering her balance. "Not that long ago I was being swallowed by you."
"Really?" said Strider drily.
"This is actually happening to us, isn't it?" said Lan Yi.
"It has been," said Strider. "The worst of it seems to be over now." She pointed upwards at the view-window. "Unless reality has become a lot looser than anything we've all been through we're back in the middle of the Helgiolath fleet."
"Have you any idea what happened?" said Lan Yi, obviously exerting considerable control over his body as he lowered himself into one of the command seats. He looked as if he were on the point o
f collapse. Strauss-Giolitto, by contrast, was pacing around the deck as if it were some new part of her dream, something that might reveal an interesting extra detail about her subconscious.
"The Helgiolath commander dictated to me how I was to shift the Santa Maria while still remaining a part of his fleet," said Strider. "Whatever's left of the Main Computer obeyed his orders. It's not something I'll let it do again." She grinned without any humor. "In future we'll just stick to the cozy old tachyonic drive, right? I don't think I could go through all that again."
Lan Yi was breathing with great deliberation and his face was paler than she had ever seen it. "One of these days we must compare nightmares," he said heavily, "but I would rather it were not soon. There is a lot I would like to forget. How, though, did Strauss-Giolitto and myself come to arrive in the Pocket?"
"As far as I can work it out," said Strider, "the Helgiolath make their ftl skips by thrusting themselves through different levels of reality—or different realities—before they reconstitute themselves somewhere else. Maybe they enjoy the experiences they undergo along the way. I didn't."
"I echo your opinions entirely," said Lan Yi.
"The Pockets seem to operate along the same principle," said Strider. She sat down near him. "I've spent the past four hours fishing people out of that damned Pocket. Two of them had been driven completely out of their minds by whatever it was they'd been through." She flexed the knuckles of her right hand at him so that he could see the bruises. "I had to hit both of them very hard to . . . sedate them. They're under the control of medbots now."
Strauss-Giolitto wandered towards them. Her eyes were bright.
"Has the nightmare ended?" she said.
"Yes," said Strider wearily. "At least, as far as I can tell it has."
Strauss-Giolitto looked disappointed.
"Are you all right?" said Lan Yi listlessly.
"Oh, I'm fine. Fine," said Strauss-Giolitto.
To Strider it was obvious that the woman was a very long way from fine. She wished that she cared a little bit more.
"Could you look after her?" she said to Lan Yi.
"I seem to have been doing that ever since we came on board the Santa Maria," he said with an air of resignation. "Yes, of course I shall." He hauled himself to his feet. "We must take the elevator back to our cabins," he said to Strauss-Giolitto.
