expressions that ranged from shock to concern to faint scorn.
He didn’t care. Something seemed to be stirring in his mind, a little tickle, a tiny little feeling so small that it could barely be grasped. He thought about hugging a tree and rubbing a matchstick between his fingers at the same time. It made him feel uncomfortable. What was all that about?
“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t feel…”
The tickling increased.
“Red, what is it?” he mumbled.
– I don’t know. It’s like one of the other personae…
“Red? Are you there? Blue? What’s happening?”
He held the glass of water close to his lips, hiding their movement. He was fooling nobody: the rest of the group looked on in concern.
He could feel something inside him waking up, something beginning to speak. Dizzily, he put the glass down. He heard a voice deep inside him, old and dry and incredibly strange. It was Grey, he realized. The grey pill was having an effect at last.
– Act normally, you fool. Don’t let them know you’ve noticed anything wrong.
“But…What…Can’t you see…?”
The others watched him mumbling to himself.
Grey spoke again, and his voice was petulant.-What’s up with Red? Why hasn’t he noticed? Gillian just got off a shuttle this morning that came from the edge of the solar system. Where did she get the white dress and the bangles? That’s this month’s fashion.
“Oh…I don’t know…It’s all too…” Constantine was still reeling. Punch-drunk…
– That’s it. I’m taking over, said Grey.
Suddenly Constantine began to speak: it was his voice, but the words weren’t his.
“I’m sorry, but I think I need a drink. It must have been hotter out there than I thought. I’m feeling a little dehydrated.”
His hand reached out for the glass of water of its own accord, adding supporting evidence to the words he was now being forced to speak.
It was Grey; Grey was controlling him. But that was impossible.
He was still reeling from the shock when Grey made him pass out.
Herb 3: 2210
…into darkness.
Darkness and silence.
Herb could touch, smell, taste, feel nothing.
A set of memories and no more.
He could remember their long climb up the tower into space, flickering from room to room and then, without warning, they had stopped. Robert Johnston had paused just long enough to announce that they could go no further with certainty, that they must now jump into the unknown-and they had jumped.
That was when the memories of a world ended. Memories of touch and sight and taste. Now there was… nothing.
So where was he? Robert had said that Herb’s consciousness had existed in the processors remaining after the VNMs of the Necropolis had failed to commit suicide correctly. He had therefore viewed the world through the senses of those machines. What if he had now jumped to a place where those senses no longer existed? What if his consciousness now existed in a processor with no connection to the outside world? How long would he remain here? Forever? To spend eternity without any senses, cut off from everyone and everything: the thought was enough to send his nonexistent pulse racing in panic. And then a second, more sinister, thought occurred to him.
Robert had said that many copies of his personality had been dispersed throughout the Enemy Domain to seek out the secret of its origin. What if other copies of Herb Kirkham were even now trapped in eternal darkness? Tiny bubbles of consciousness glittering unnoticed, suspended in endless silence throughout the dark ocean of the Enemy Domain.
Nothing, still nothing. A scream was building in Herb’s imaginary throat…
“Hey, buddy. What’s the matter?”
Robert Johnston thrust his face over Herb’s left shoulder, his features illuminated from below by some invisible light source. Herb blinked as his imaginary eyes adjusted to the darkness: his senses had switched on again. He
“Where are we? What happened?” Herb’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Robert stepped before him.
Robert was poised on his toes, gently shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he regained his sense of reality. Noticing Herb’s curious expression, he changed his movement into a little dance.
“Come on, Herb. Get with the beat.”
“Don’t give me that,” said Herb. “You were as frightened as I was. What happened back there?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle. There was nothing at the top of that elevator. Nothing. I think we lodged ourselves among the unused seed VNMs. I suppose they didn’t see the need to set them growing, once they realized the Necropolis had gone so badly wrong. There were no senses up there for me to use: they hadn’t been grown. I had to make an educated guess and jump us off in the direction of one of those ships hovering above the planet. I remembered the pattern they formed and sent us off on the path through the lattice that would most likely intersect with one of them. I got it right, but only just. We’re right at the far edge of the formation.”
Robert turned around and began to dance his way along the narrow walkway on which they stood, suspended over what Herb now recognized to be a spaceship’s outer hull. It looked surprisingly old-fashioned: struts and bracing were virtually unknown in these days of shell construction. Herb had a sudden sense of the otherness of the Enemy Domain. He wondered under which alien sun these ships had replicated. He imagined their juvenile forms, floating in bright blackness, the cold glare of some star picking out the stretching and sliding as the braces and struts tensed and tore themselves apart while the ships reproduced by binary fission.
“Look up.”
Herb obeyed as row upon row of silent coffins suddenly appeared above him.
“I just found the ship’s monitoring system for those things. I’ve linked them into our personalities as a visual feed. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
Herb licked his lips. “Are they occupied?” he whispered.
Robert paused a moment. “Let me see…No. They’re empty. I wonder. Do you think that they were supposed to be filled from that planet beneath us? Let me think about that. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Hmm.”
He lapsed into silence again and strode off along the walkway, his dancing forgotten now that his nerves were calmed. Yet again, Herb found himself following Robert Johnston into the unknown.
They were standing on the bridge of the spaceship. At least, that’s what Robert called it. Herb didn’t understand the concept. There was a wraparound window that made for ideal star-viewing, three comfortable padded chairs, equipped with straps for some reason, and between the chairs and the window, blocking the best standing position to take in the view, a bewildering array of controls.
“I don’t understand. What is this place for?”
Robert grinned. “For flying the spaceship, of course.”
Herb frowned. He ran his finger over the green, webbed material covering one of the chairs, then began to fiddle with one of the straps.
“I still don’t understand. How will these help fly the spaceship?”
Robert was watching him intently, saying nothing; it made Herb nervous. He was being tested, he was sure
