Love in Backspace
‘Sure, then you fuck up and get lost in infinity.’
‘I’ll be all right. Would I go out if I wasn’t sure?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Elivira. But look, I haven’t got that much time.’ I was having to palpate his bud with my middle fingertip, but he went for it. I went with him to his shack and collected four charge rods, then left to do a quick check on my rig. I was hauling it on its castors across the concrete by the towrope when my passenger returned. He jabbed his eyes at the raft, which must have looked to him something like a larger version of a kid’s go-cart, and I saw the fear returning.
‘It’s all up to you,’ I told him, and let the towrope go slack.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he gabbled. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Alongside the liner bays every phase port has a raft shack that uses exactly the same phase pusher as the big ships, like a kind of free ride, a minnow hitching a lift on a whale. I dragged the raft inside and set it on the rails.
‘I’ll need your identity card.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He dived into an inside pocket and fished out a honey-gold wallet. I had time to see plenty of kudos inside it before he came out with the card. I stepped to the terminal in the corner and slipped it in the slot, then gave the controller my registration number and destination.
‘Are we all set?’ my passenger asked as I handed the card back to him.
‘Yaw-Waw.’
A backraft is twelve feet long, five feet wide, and is cast in titanium-braced aluminium. There’s a charge-powered impeller motor, a navigator, and a cockpit-type passenger seat with safety belt and handgrips, which actually don’t do anything because you can’t fall out. The pilot sits on a silvery plate of mercury amalgam. He has a head-up display ‘grammed into his eyeballs, and a couple of joysticks, but all the fine control that makes backriding possible is by neural induction through the buttocks. That’s not only the best way, it’s the only way of rafting through backspace with a good chance of coming out alive; everything else has been tried, including neural induction directly from the brain through a headset. Praise to the male bum!
‘How do we breathe?’ he asked.
‘There’s a bubble comes over once we’re phased.’
‘Oh. How long will the trip take?’
‘Half an hour at best, up to an hour if the currents are slow.’ I showed him where to put his carry-all in the luggage space behind the seat, then helped him on all courteous-like, even fastening the strap for him. His hands were trembling. I rubbed mine together in business-like fashion and spoke jovially. ‘Ready to go?’
‘Yes, er, Yaw-Yaw,’ he responded feebly. Creep.
I stepped aboard and set my butt down on the guidance plate. Lovely sensation. ‘Control,’ I announced into the air, ‘this is 2318. Push, please.’
You could hear the snap as the pusher charged up, thinning out the consistency of frontspace so it could shove us through. Behind me I heard the customer whimper and grind his teeth. He ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, as they say somewhere or other.
Then came the jolt that turns your stomach over. At the same instant, the liquid polymer bubble expanded to canopy the deck of the raft (you could feel it passing over your skin just like a soap bubble), and the pearly blue effulgence of midspace surrounded us. Midspace. Smooth, smooth, smooooth. For the record, midspace is a half-phase shift. The only reason it’s there is that if you’ve got a front and a back, then naturally there’s got to be something in between . The rigid structure of frontspace is left behind or at least attenuated, and there’s no matter as such. And the physical constants ‘slip’ because there isn’t enough friction, so to speak, to make them stick, especially that big constant about the velocity of light. That’s why you can move faster there.
But not fast enough. The port pusher had given us the impetus to make the full phase shift of 180 degrees, turning us right round so as to experience existence from the other side. But the actual transition calls for a pilot’s skill. A lot of guys who want to be backjockeys do themselves a favour by never mastering that particular trick. I rotated the joysticks. I wiggled my bum. When you go through the curtain it’s like a blow in every somatic cell, a sweet shock to the nervous system. I made the phase shift and WHAM—we were on our way. Yow-Wow!
A fast current caught us right away and I was busy holding the raft steady; eddies were whirling on either side. I peered into the visor of the navigator, which I had previously calibrated to point the way to Elivira phase port, and at the same time I gunned the impeller on low power. There: I had the beckoning call of Elivira port. Now all I had to do was get there.
Everywhere around us backspace stretched to infinity. The polymer bubble does more than provide an air canopy; it also interprets what’s outside and adds false colour. Without it, if you had only an oxygen mask, you wouldn’t see anything: backlight doesn’t register on the human retina. Silver and gold predominate, then turquoise, indigo and red. We saw a limitless hell tumbling in all directions. It’s the turbulence you have to watch for. If you’re riding on something with a direction, you can at least kid yourself you’re in control. Get caught in that crazy all-over-the-place stuff and you’ll get lost or smashed to smithereens, like as not.
‘Here y’are buddy!’, I yelled. ‘You’re on the arse side of the universe!’ I’d hooked on to a fast current going roughly the way we needed, or not so far off, anyway, and I was getting high.
How often have you looked at somebody and decided you liked his arse better than his face? Particularly after you heard him speak? Well, I like backspace better. And I’ll tell you why.
