I didnt even know how to run, when the only thing holding me to the floor was the floor itself. Fortunately, the floor and the walls did know what to do. They were not only smart, but the kind of smart that didnt need rehearsals. The real function of the mechanical voice wasnt to urge us to action but to prepare us to be acted upon.
The corridors, which had seemed to my ungrateful eye to be merely corridors, had abilities that might have been explained to Adam Zimmerman, but came as a complete surprise to me. I wasnt in any state to notice exactly how they coped with the fact that we had been walking two abreast in our horribly ungainly fashion, but they sorted us out with no difficulty at all. They closed in on us, and engulfed us.
Maybe Niamh Horne and her fellow crew members knew enough to be reflexively grateful for that, but I hadnt been educated to their kind of world. I was terrified. I had the words extreme danger ringing in my ears, and I had no idea what form that extreme disaster might take. When the walls rushed in upon me I had no way of judging whether that might be an aspect of the danger in question rather than my salvation: a danger whose extremity would make itself manifest by crushing me to a pulp, or perhaps by asphyxiating me.
I might have screamed but if I had, I dont think anyone could have heard me. I didnt hear anyone elses scream.
Twenty
Invaders from Beyond
The impression that I was in the process of being unceremoniously killed cant have lasted more than five or six seconds, but time really does become elastic when youre in the grip of that kind of terror. The moments stretch as your mind tries to make the most of the little time you have left, and the terror is compounded by the tortuous strain of their extension. My IT must have been doing its best to help, but IT can only deal efficiently with the underlying physiology; consciousness remains a mystery, which works in its own strangely creative ways.
In retrospect, I suppose I should have been glad of the terror and the way it expanded to fill the horizons of time, on the grounds that it offered further evidence that I really was alive and that I really was myself. Alas, I wasnt capable of being grateful at the time.
When the moment came to realize that I was actually in the process of being saved that the walls were bearing me away to the pod where I was supposed to be, snugly and securely cocooned against any probable disaster I was in no mental state to seize the realization. More hideous seconds had to tick by while I was lost in confusion, unable to recognize the mercy of my situation.
Somehow, the pod didnt feel like a pod at all. My internal organs still seemed to be jostling for position, but now it was impossible to tell whether they were still confined by my body wall. I had a peculiar sensation of having been turned inside out. It was false, but it was the kind of illusion that my clever IT couldnt even begin to cope with.
Subjectively speaking, it took a long time for me to reconcile myself to the fact that I wasnt dead, or dying, or in pain, or madand that all I had to do to retake control of myself was to accept that I was still alive and still in the game. In the game was, I realized, the best way to think about my predicament. I had played my share of scary games while wearing a full-body VE suit. I had done this sort of thing for fun, and still could, if I could only calm down and go with the flow.
It wasnt until I finally opened my eyes that I realized that I wasnt blind. The ships AI could feed information to me exactly as if I were in a VE immersion suit which, in essence, I was. Even then, it wasnt until I had been looking out into a visual field filled with mile-high letters saying
PLEASE REMAIN CALM for at least three minutes that I remembered that I could still interact with the pod. I didnt have to settle for the default setting.
Whats happening? I demanded, as soon as I figured out that I could make demands and get answers.
The answer I got wasnt reassuring, but it was an answer.
The ship is under attack, the voice of Child of Fortune s AI autopilot told me. It wasnt shouting now, but its slightly breathless timbre seemed perfectly appropriate to the gravity of the news.
By whom? I demanded, incredulously.
I do not recognize the attacking vessels, the AI told me.
It took a couple of seconds for the implications of that statement to sink in. Child of Fortune was a state-of-the-art ship, if not quite the pride of the Saturnian fleet then not so far behind. It had to be programmed to recognize any spaceship built or employed within the solar system.
What the AI was telling me, indirectly, was that we were being attacked by aliens. Aliens from God-only-knew-where were trying to murder Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Niamh Horne, Christine Caine, Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Lowenthals bodyguard
That was when it first occurred to me that the AI might be lying. I was, after all, in a VE suit, prey to any manufactured illusion the AI cared to feed me. I wasnt even completely sure that I had been in meatspace before the melodrama had got under way, and given that this was melodrama through and through, the hypothesis that it was all fake couldnt be ignored.