My second experience of a continuum threshold was less harrowing than the first. For one thing, this time I knew that if we got all the way through – and I still can’t figure out how a thing like a harbour ferry suspended from a giant helium-filled football can zoom from planet to planet without shredding like an old shopping bag – I would be hovering in the familiar air of my hometown. I knew this wasn’t a wormhole to nowhere.
Still, it was no fun. The sensation of shooting forward, and then crunching to a stop; the moments of feeling my body weight swell till I was heavy as granite, followed by long minutes of weightlessness. (This time, I strapped myself to a chair in the lounge, and all I snatched out of the air was a single red Smartie, which I ate.) The Doppler effect colours shifting throughout the spectrum was, at one point, all we could see through the windows (evidently, those colour bands could be used to map Sorcerer’s progress through stages in the threshold).
After my triumph with the Smartie, I felt I was an accomplished enough thresholder to unbuckle. For a few moments I stayed in place, then a movement of my foot, to test my position, sent my body bobbing toward the ceiling.
I could get the hang of this. Wriggling like a free diver, I got my legs in the air, kicked away from the ceiling, and was in a perfect slow-motion dive toward the door. Slowing as I reached the corridor – air resistance, I guess, since I could feel drafts from the air vents pushing me this way and that – I grabbed the door jamb and swung myself in a turn that took me along the corridor toward the bridge. A wave of nausea rebounded from my stomach to the crown of my head and then, just like an ocean wave, subsided. Approaching the next corner, I drew up my legs and kicked against the wall, sending me even faster along the corridor.
I was good at this, like an intelligent eight ball that knew exactly how to bank-shot itself to get in the pocket. Obviously, if I ever wanted to, I’d make a first-rate astronaut, champion of many a space-station Olympics.
As I approached the corridor junction, a blush of red light shone from around the corner – perhaps the bridge door was open, and this was the shine of the magenta running lights from the cabin, darkened for the threshold crossing, although, curiously, this glow brightened and pulsated, with shadows moving like figures against firelight. I drew in my legs, extended my arms toward the junction wall and, when I hit it, stopped myself with my hands, then stooped and kicked against the walls, changing direction to send myself soaring down the corridor. When I saw what was ahead, I gasped and flailed my arms and legs, trying to stop.
It was suspended in mid-corridor, just outside the door to the bridge – the Kaindl-thing, a throbbing storm front of sunset, pain and lightning. Its body a writhing mass of worms that flowed upward to crown a head where two eye sockets seethed with volcanic heat. Below them a mouth gaped and I heard the voice inside my head.
Freed. I must be freed.
The Kaindl-thing rose from the floor, as if Sorcerer’s deck was a gateway to hell, and I was flying toward it, with no way of stopping myself. I squeezed my eyes shut and helplessly collided with the visitation. Striking out at what was, after all, empty air, my right hand connected with the handle to the bridge door. I grabbed it, and as I pulled myself to the door the visitation disintegrated, fading away into the flickering light of the corridor fluorescents.
At that moment, gravity returned. Still gripping the door handle, I swung out of the air and into the door, falling face forward onto the threshold. I lost my grip on the latch and the door swung open. I heard Agnes’s voice. “What in the world is that?”
Stunned and dizzy, I stayed on the floor. Tobias and Agnes glanced back at me; Gretchen and Margrit looked up, annoyed, then got back to work. Outside the bridge windows, clouds and blue sky.
“Four thousand metres,” Tobias said. “Wind from the northwest – we did it!”
I didn’t sense much sympathy or interest in my recent harrowing experience.
“We’re dead centre in our previous arc transient – let’s take a chance they haven’t seen us, and head for the hangar,” Agnes said.
I felt woozy and my forehead smarted – from hitting my head, from the return of gravity, from my running into the visitation. I was not quite ready to stand up.
“Can someone close the damn door?” Tobias sniped from the helm. “And help Nate get up off the floor?”