“I’ll see to it,” I said, and patted his shoulder. Actually Modred fascinated me because he couldn’tbe moved, and it was my function to move people. I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was a new chance to try.

I had once tried more direct approaches, in the crew quarters. I think Modred wanted, with some dim curiosity, to do what others did, but it was only curiosity. “Let him alone,” Lynn had said when she saw it, with a frown that meant business.

So you play the same game with him, I had thought then, but likewise Lynette was not one to cross lightly; and when it occurred to me that I might hurt someone my psych-set intervened and cooled me down at once. I confined myself after that to small games that Modred himself found pleasant.

“We’re going to make jump in another hour,” Gawain said from his post.

I wrinkled my nose. That meant getting my lady and the rest of us prepped with the drugs to endure jump. That was what she wanted, then. Jump always scared me, even drugged. It was the part of voyages that I hated.

And then: “ Modred—” Gawain said in a plaintive voice I had never heard him use. It frightened me. Modred’s reaction did, because he flung off my hand and reached for another board in a hurry, and alarms were going off, shrieking.

“Out!” he shouted, and Modred never shouted. I scrambled toward the exit, staggering as the whole ship heeled, and then vocal alarms were going, the take-hold, which means wherever you are, whatever is closest, regardless. I never made the door. I grabbed the nearest emergency securing and got the belt round me, while already the Maidwas swinging in a roll so that we came under Glike coming off a world.

“We’re losing it,” Gawain shouted into com. “We’re losing it—Modred—”

“I don’t know what it is,” Modred yelled back. “Instruments ... instruments are going crazy. ...”

I looked up from my position crouched against the bulkhead, looked at the screens, and there was nothing but black on them. We were in the safe area of our own home star and with traffic around us. There was no way anything ought to be going wrong, but Gwas pulling us and making the lights all over the boards blink red, red, red.

Then it was as if whatever was holding us had just stopped existing, no jolt, but like sliding on oil, like a horrible falling where there isno falling.

And jump. Falling, falling, falling forever as we hurtled into subspace. I screamed and maybe even Modred did—I heard Gawain’s voice for sure, and it became space and color. There was no ship, but naked chaos all around me, that stayed and stayed and stayed.

III

... and from them rose

A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,

And, as it were one voice, an agony

Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills

All night in a waste land, where no one comes,

Or hath come, since the making of the world.

Idon’t like to think of that time, and it was a long, long while before it dawned on me that I could move, and draw myself back from the void where I was. Things were all distorted. It seemed I could see through the hull, and through myself. Sometimes the chaos was red and sometimes the red became black and red spots crawled here and there like spiders. I cried, and there were other sounds that might be other voices, or the Maidherself still screaming.

Then like in the time before I left that white place where I was made, I had to have something to look at, to control the images, to sort truth from illusion, and I concentrated simply on getting my hand in front of my face. Knowing what it ought to look like, I could begin to make it out, bones and veins and muscles and skin. Not red. Not black. My own true color. I concentrated on it until it took the shape and texture it ought to have, and then I was able to see shadows of other things too, like the deck, and the rest of my own body lying there.

“Gawain,” I cried, and by concentrating on shapes I could see the controls, and Gawain, who looked dead hanging in the straps; and Modred, who lay on the floor ... his restraint had given way, as mine must have, and it should have broken my ribs, but it had not ... there was, at least, no pain. Modred was trying to move too, like something inky writhing there on the deck, but I knew who it was, and I crawled across the floor which was neither warm nor cold nor rough nor smooth ... I made it and got his hand, and hoped for help, because Modred was frightened by nothing, and if there was any of us who had a cold enough mind up here to be able to see what to do, I had most hope of Modred.

“Hung in the between,” he said. “I think we’re hung up in the between.”

His voice did strange things in my head, echoed round and round as if my brains had been some vast room. For a moment I didn’t want to look down, because there wasa Down and we were still falling into it. Gawain had to get us out of this; that was all I could think of, and somehow Modred was pulling himself to his feet and heading in Gawain’s direction. I scrambled up to follow him, and stood swaying with one foot on one side of a chasm and the other foot on the other side, stars between, the whole flowing like a river in born-men’s Hell, all fire and glowing with the stars like brighter coals. Don’t move, my brain kept telling my body, and I didn’t for a moment. I stood there and shut my eyes.

But there is an advantage in being what we are, which is that wherever we are, that’s what is, and we don’t have such problems as some do, trying to relate it to anywhere else. I was upright. I set one foot out and insisted to feel what was under it, and after that I knew that I could walk. I moved after Modred, though the room kept shrinking and expanding insanely, and sometimes Gawain was very far away and sometimes just out of reach, but two-dimensional, so that he seemed pressed between two pieces of glass, and his beautiful hair hanging down at an unconscious angle seemed afire like the river of stars, streaming and flowing like light.

“Gawain!” Modred shouted, all distorted.

“Gawain!” I shouted too.

Gawain finally began to move, slow reaching of an arm which was at the moment two-dimensional and stretched all out of proportion. He tried to sit upright, and reached for the boards or what looked like an analogue of them in this distortion of senses, a puddle of lights which flowed and ran in swirling streams of fire.

He’s there, I insisted to my rebel senses, and he began to be solid, within reach, as I knew he had to be. I grasped Modred’s arm and reached for Gawain’s, and Gawain twisted around and held onto both of us, painfully tight. “What you want to see, you cansee,” I said. “Don’t imagine, Gawain. Don’t imagine.”

He was there, all right. I could feel him heaving for breath, and I was breathing in the same hoarse gulps, and so was that third part of us, Modred.

“We’ve been malfunctioned into jump,” Modred said, carefully, softly between gasps for breath. Voices distorted in my ears, and maybe in his too. “I think we’re hung up somewhere in subspace and there’s no knowing what happened back there. We could have dragged mass with us into this place. We could have dragged at the sun itself. I don’t know. The instruments aren’t making sense.”

“Lady Dela,” I said, thinking about her caught in this disaster, Dela, who was the reason for all of us existing at all.

“No drugs,” Gawain murmured. “We’re in this with no drugs.”

That frightened me. We drug down to cope with the between of jump, that nowhere between here and there. But we were doing it without, if that was where we were ... and like walking a tightrope across that abyss, the only hope was not to look down and not to lose our balance to it. One necessity at a time. “I’m going for lady Dela,” I said.