Alternate Realities by C. J. Cherryh

as if it could show her something. “Contact it!”
    Evidently they were doing something on the bridge, because there was silence after, and the lot of us stood there—all of us on our feet in the sitting room but Viv. Lance was shaking her shoulder and trying to get through her blankness to tell her there was some hope.
    “We’re not sure about the range,” Modred reported finally. “We’ll keep trying as we get nearer.”
    Griffin and lady Dela settled on a couch there near us, and we turned from Vivien to try to make them comfortable. Lady Dela looked very pale and drawn, which with her flaxen hair was pale indeed, like one of the ladies in the fantasies she loved; and Griffin too looked very shaken. “Get wine,” I said, and Lance did that. We even poured a little for ourselves, Lance and I, out of their way, and got some down Vivien, holding the glass in her hand for her.
    “We don’t seem to be moving rapidly in relation to it,” came one of Modred’s calm reports, in the aching long time that passed.
    “We are in Hell,” my lady said after yet another long time, speaking in a hoarse, distant voice. This frightened me on the instant, because I had heard about Hell in the books, and it meant somewhere after dying. “It’s all something we’re dreaming while we fall, that’s what it is.”
    I thought about it: it flatly terrified me.
    “A jump accident,” Griffin said. “We are somewhere . It’s not the between. Our instruments are off, that’s all. We should fix on some star and go to it. We can’t have lost ourselves that far.”
    There were no stars in the instruments I had seen on the bridge. I swallowed, recalling that, not daring to say it.
    “We have died ,” my lady said primly, calmly, evidently having made up her mind to that effect, and perhaps after the shock and the wine she was numb. “We’re all dead from the moment of the accident. Brains perhaps function wildly when one dies ... like a long dream, that takes in everything in a lifetime and stretches a few seconds into forever ... Or this is Hell and we’re in it.”
    I shivered where I sat. There were a lot of things that tapes had not told me, and one of them was how to cope with thoughts like that. My lady was terrifying in her fantasies.
    “We’re alive,” Lance said, unasked. “And we’re more comfortable than we were.”
    “Who asked you?” Dela snapped, and Lance bowed his head. We don’t talk uninvited, not in company, and Griffin was company. Griffin seemed to be intensely bothered, and got up and paced the floor.
    It did not help. It did not hasten the time, which crept past at a deadly slow pace, and finally Griffin spun about and strode out the door.
    “Griffin?” my lady Dela quavered.
    I stood up; Dela had; and Lance. “He mustn’t give orders,” I said, thinking at least where I would be going if I were Griffin, and we heard the door to the outside corridor open, not that to his own rooms. “Lady Dela, he’s going to the bridge. He mustn’t give them orders.”
    My lady stared at me and I think if she had been close enough she might have hit me. But then her face grew afraid. “They wouldn’t pay any attention to him. They wouldn’t.”
    “No, lady Dela, but he’s strong and quick and I’m not sure they could stop him.”
    Dela stirred herself then and made some haste. Lance and I seized up Viv and drew her along in Dela’s wake, out into the corridors and down them to the bridge. It was all, all too late if Griffin had had something definite in mind; but it was still peaceful when we arrived, Griffin standing there in the center of the bridge and the crew with their backs to him and working at their posts. Griffin was ominous looking where he was, in the center of things, hands on hips. None of the crew was particularly big ... only Lance was that, the two of them like mirrors, dark and gold, the lady’s taste running remarkably similar in this instance. And Lance made a casual move that