Strider's Galaxy (29 page)

Moving again around the forcefield bed, he lifted her legs on to it. She was at a diagonal angle across the bed, her head hanging over the far edge. He did his best to try to straighten her body out. She must mass at least fifty per cent more than he did.

Her eyes closed. He hoped that this meant that she had fallen into real sleep, rather than whatever it was that she had been experiencing.

For a third time he ran to the elevator. Now it refused to respond to his call. He beat the side of his hand repeatedly against the pad, but nothing happened.

The elevator two hundred meters away likewise declined to appear for him. It didn't seem worth trying another.

He was increasingly unnerved by the almost-silence. There were still faint sounds from Strauss-Giolitto's cabin, but everywhere else there was nothing. He hadn't realized until now how much a part of the environment within the
Santa Maria
the insects and birds were. Yet again he looked up at the ceiling, seeing himself looking back.

He stopped at the next cabin he came to and nervously opened its door. All the holohorrors he had ever watched told him this was the wrong thing to do. When there's a preternatural silence you shouldn't be opening doors, because on the other side of them you'll inevitably find nasties. Much better to run like fuck.

Except that Lan Yi had nowhere very far to run.

The forcefield bed in the cabin had fallen to the floor. The glow of the forcefield was absent. There was dust everywhere, as if no one had been in here for a decade, or a century. Carefully moving his foot aside so that he did not step on the desiccated corpse of a spider, Lan Yi went through to the further rooms. He was less worried now about horrors, more concerned that he was trespassing—as if he were deliberately trampling on someone's grave.

The bathroom was empty, although the bath itself was full. He dipped his fingers into the water and found it hot. He flushed the lavatory, just to reassure himself that something around here still worked normally. He was back in the cabin's main room before it registered on him that yes, the damned gadget had done its stuff.

The little kitchen was likewise deserted. It was perfectly clean and dustless, as if its owner had scrubbed every surface carefully before departing.

This wasn't like the personnel aboard the
Santa Maria
. The joys of rediscovering plenteous clean water and safely edible food after a lifetime of Earth's pollution or Mars's shortages made most of them profligate with the stuff—had turned them into slobs. There should have been some scraps lying around, unless the cleanerbots had got here first. But if that had been the case the bots would have cleared all the dust out of the main room.

He checked the next cabin and found things very much the same, although the bath was empty. As he left the little building Lan Yi sang a few notes from Donizetti's
Maria Stuarda
just to make himself feel that he wasn't the only person left alive. Then he remembered how Mary Stuart had come to her end and the song stilled in his throat.

Four more cabins went by. Could it be that Strider had called everyone up to the command deck? No—that didn't make any sense. If that had been the case there'd still have been junk left lying around—half-eaten meals or kids' toys or
anything
. Instead, everywhere he looked there was this bizarre mixture of utter cleanliness and a mess that betrayed all the signs of years having passed.

"Is there anyone there?" he yelled. The only replies were echoes.

Lan Yi squatted down on his lean haunches for thirty seconds or so and looked all around him. He knew this wasn't just a rotten dream—he was always aware of it when he was dreaming.

Just as he was getting to his feet again he heard a tiny sound. There was a whir as something rubbed against something else, and a small human grunt of effort. Infuriatingly, the noise stopped just before he could locate where it had come from.

Then he heard it again. It had come from one of the nearby cabins.

Hilary, playing with a spinning top, looked up as Lan Yi appeared in the doorway.

"Why didn't you answer when I called?" the out-of-Taiwanese asked, not sure if he was angry with the child or relieved that at last he'd found someone else alive. He softened his tone. "Are you all right?"

"I'm perfectly fine," said Hilary, "except I can't get this bleeding top to stay upright, no matter how hard I try. Could you help me?"

Something drastic had happened to the
Santa Maria
, Lan Yi knew, but right now it seemed as if getting the kid's top to work was more important: big tragedies can be put out of your mind for a while, but small ones are more immediate.

He went down on his knees beside the boy. "The trick is," he said, "to wind the cord very accurately and neatly around the spindle. Oh," he added, picking with his fingernails, "and it's a good idea not to get knots in the string."

"Where has everyone else gone?" said the boy. "I'm getting hungry."

"I'm not sure," said Lan Yi. "Apart from you and me, the only other person around seems to be your teacher."

"Maria?"

"Yes."

"Oh, that's OK then. I like
her
." Hilary gave the cord a sharp tug and this time he got the top to spin rapidly. It waltzed away across the floor of the cabin, made an astonishing dart under the forcefield bed, and hit the far wall with a clatter. "Could you wind it up again?"

"I think you had better come with me. I want to check up on Maria. She wasn't in very good shape when I left her. Bring the top with you if you want to."

Hilary fetched the toy. It was obvious that Lan Yi was being boringly and disgustingly
adult
. Also, both he and Lan Yi had been here before: there had been some trouble, and Lan Yi had come along with Maria to rescue him from it. It had happened so long before that Hilary could remember it only as if it had been part of a dream. The child's face was telling Lan Yi that the best way of coping with a nightmare that keeps coming round and round again was to ignore it. One method of ignoring it was to perform displacement activity—like spinning a top. It was as good a way as any.

Was Lan Yi in Hilary's dream, or was Hilary in Lan Yi's?

Dream. Not-dream. It didn't matter. This was the reality with which Lan Yi was trying to grapple.

"You can play with the top in Maria's cabin, if you want to," said Lan Yi as he took Hilary's hand. "It might even help her. Even if it doesn't, I want the three of us to be close together."

"Yeah, I guess that's OK," said Hilary. His mother had kitted him out in a miniature replica of the standard-issue SSIA jumpsuit. Lan Yi wondered where Hilary's mother and her seamstressry skills had gone to. He had a sudden vision of himself as a surrogate mother, and didn't like it at all. Geena would have been an excellent mother, but it had never happened; perhaps that was one of the reasons why she had died. "When you have a cello, who needs a brat?" she had often said, and he'd believed her. "They say that Kiliostrov's Second Concerto is more difficult than labor pains, particularly the pizzicato bits," she'd said, "but a lot more rewarding when you get it right." He'd believed her then, as well. "And a cello costs less," she'd said one night in Algiers, "except when an effing string breaks. Lan, there's this place down by the river that stays open late. Do you think you could . . .?"

And he'd taken the money that had been going to be a bottle of rosehip juice and bought her a new string. Maybe that was something else that had turned her away from life—the lack of the rosehip juice one night. He'd never know.

Lan Yi deliberately walked at a child's pace as they went towards Strauss-Giolitto's cabin. His own mind was racing, trying to figure out various possibilities as to what might have happened, but he wanted to keep Hilary as calm as possible. Lan Yi still had to get Strauss-Giolitto out of whatever form of hysterical attack it was that she'd fallen into. The longer Hilary simply accepted that, you know, things were a bit odd but there wasn't much to worry about really, the easier Lan Yi's task would be.

When Hilary saw Strauss-Giolitto contorted on her forcefield bed he let go of Lan Yi's hand and ran to her.

"She's ill!" he said. "Maria's ill!"

"She will be all right soon," said Lan Yi, following more slowly, wishing he was a bit more certain about what he'd just said. "She is just having a tough dream. You must have had bad dreams in your time. Now it is her turn."

Lan Yi sat down beside Strauss-Giolitto and put his palm on her forehead. It was much cooler than before. Her breathing seemed to be easier, and her eyes were still closed.

"She mending is," said Lan Yi and was almost at once annoyed with himself for his lapse in basic Argot. "She's mending," he said.

As if on cue, Strauss-Giolitto opened her eyes. The madness had gone from them but it was plain that she was puzzled. "Where are we?" she said.

"Where we've always been," said Lan Yi. "On board the
Santa Maria
. At least, that's where I think we are. The cabins are more or less the way they used to be, but the rest of the configuration of the ship seems to have altered. To have
been
altered."

In her left hand she took one of his. In her right she accepted Hilary's small fingers, which were pursed tightly and only reluctantly eased open to curl round hers.

"I was somewhere else entirely," she said, "and it seemed to be forever. I was trapped in rotting mud, and then something stamped on me, and then I was being turned inside out, and then . . ."

"You were here on your bed," said Lan Yi, and then realized how foolish the statement was. Her body had been here, but it had been all too obvious that her mind had not been. He was prepared to take her word for it that she had been suffering some quite different existence.

He said this.

"There were others there with me," she said once he'd finished. "I could sense them being there."

"Others of the personnel?"

"I don't know," she said. "Just
others
. I think they weren't humans. It didn't
feel
as if they were."

She sat up and wiped her eyes with her hand, getting rid of the tears. "Why's Hilary here?"

"Because the three of us seem to be the only people left on this level of the
Santa Maria
," said Lan Yi. "I can't get the elevators to work. Everyone else seems to have vanished."

He could see Strauss-Giolitto feeling around with her tongue for the commline that had been there throughout her adult life, then saw her disappointment. "Yes, it is like that," he said. "I begin to wish that I had allowed myself more augmentation than just a secondary retinal screen—then perhaps I could try to communicate with any others who might have survived this . . . hazard."

"What's so bad?" said Hilary. "Maria's OK now."

"Kid, where's your mother?" she snapped. Lan Yi thought she was being cruel, then realized she was giving Hilary the equivalent of a therapeutic slap across the face, much as Lan Yi himself had done to her a little while ago.

"I dunno," said Hilary. "She died a while ago. Maybe she'll be back in another while."

"Let's hope it's not too long a while," said Strauss-Giolitto, pulling herself into her jumpsuit. In other circumstances Lan Yi might have been sad to see her nakedness covered up. The child seemed not to have noticed. Lan Yi's mind was roaming around all the physics he knew, trying to figure out what had happened. Parallel universes—yes, the Images might have sucked away most of the
Santa Maria
's personnel to their own reality for some reason of their own, but it seemed hardly likely. A reverse in the time flow, so that the
Santa Maria
had gone back to a time before any of the personnel were born—but then why would he and Strauss-Giolitto and Hilary have been exempted? Or were the three of them victims of some gross mental abnormality, so that their memories were misleading them?

None of it made sense.

"I think we should try the elevators again," he said.

"Too right," said Strauss-Giolitto, resuming the child's hand. "Hilary, look, dammit, just leave that blasted top here. We can come back and get it later."

"Aw, but I wanna . . ."

"Belt up," said Lan Yi.

"Where'd you learn that?" said Strauss-Giolitto, looking across at him. For a second or so he thought she might smile, but there was still too much fear in her for that.

"From Strider," he said. "When she first told me to do that I started looking for a belt, assuming it was a safety instruction. It was very embarrassing for her to have to explain to me."

This time Strauss-Giolitto did smile, albeit wanly. Lan Yi felt he had got rid of another obstacle. Strider had never in her life even dreamt of telling him to belt up, but the lie had served its purpose. There were now at least two adult human beings capable of dealing with the strange new environment this part of the
Santa Maria
had become. That was twice as many as there had been a couple of minutes ago.

"Hey, that's not a very kind thing to say to a . . ." the child began.

"The motion has been proposed and seconded, Hilary," said Strauss-Giolitto.

Lan Yi took the boy's other hand. "We must explore the
Santa Maria
and see if we can discover the root of this mystery," he said, again aware that his Argot was slipping. "This is a brave endeavor. We shall all gain great glory through it, not least yourself."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes," said Strauss-Giolitto. "Say, would you like us to swing you?"

"Spose so."

After three swings between them, the third time doing an alarmingly dangerous-seeming backward somersault, the child was prepared to be cooperative. Strauss-Giolitto gave Lan Yi a glance over Hilary's head that said a lot. Lan Yi remembered what a pain in the butt he himself had been at this age and was able to give her back no more than a feeble grin. He reckoned that, on current showing, Hilary was in for a bright future. Although Lan Yi had no scientific evidence to back it up, he believed that the most intelligent people displayed a form of neoteny: they became mature long after they had reached physical adulthood. Before that they were insufferable. Hilary, who was about five—he had been one of the first born to the
Santa Maria
's personnel—looked according to this theory as if he were going to be a genius in later life. At the same time, Lan Yi wished he could think of a good excuse for dumping the kid somewhere safe, secure and soundproofed.