Love in Backspace
That was when things went wrong.
The sensation felt like the ground, the mushy bed beneath us, was melting into thin air. I pulled out of him and jumped up. The sandbank was breaking up, the landscape dissipating fast.
Was a supernova exploding? Was the centre of a galaxy on the point of squirting out those big gas jets? Or was a crystal of salt dissolving in somebody’s soup? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I yelled to him to get aboard the raft. Already the liquid polymer bubble was contracting in response to external change. It was an early model, not all that smart, and I didn’t trust it no to collapse round us, leaving us outside hanging in nowhere, blind and without air.
We made it just in time, him with his trousers still stuck around his knees. I switched on the motor. We’d drifted and needed to find a fast current. I bent to peer at the visor of the navigator, tapping the fine-tune button.
As I did that, an ominous grinding noise came out of the box. I blinked, peered again. The display was black. Like, I mean, blank.
Fear, the dead sickening type of fear this time, clutched at my stomach. I slapped the fine-tune button, banged the top of the unit, fiddled with the calibrator. Nothing worked.
A busted navigator is heavy-duty Yim-Bim. Like sort of lost, nowhere, dead dead dead. You can’t get back. Because you can’t find a phase port which means you’re out in backspace for ever. Or rather the atoms of your stupid useless corpse are.
Not the sort of detail to bother a passenger with. I gunned the raft and headed out as if we were going somewhere, giving myself a little while to think at the same time. A navigator is a serious piece of equipment, needing serious kudos to buy or repair, not the sort of thing you can jury-rig or quick-fix, and it does more than locate distant phase signals, clever though that is. Backspace is too shifting and disordered for the human mind to find a route through it unaided, so the navigator does half the job, giving the pilot the cues he needs; it’s known as pointing the way. You’re double-lost if you haven’t got one.
I reminded myself that the fault had been intermittent up to now, as I had said to Boy Galilee. But the box had never made that queer grinding noise before, and it had never gone completely blank before. Intermittent had acquired a sort of permanent tag.
Was there any other cause for hope? Well, yes. If you get close enough to a phase port you can actually see it on the polymer bubble as an orange glow. There a hundred and ten phase ports, so might I find one by chance, racing all over as fast as I could? Well, let’s see, if you want to work it out, the odds against would be, er, approximately, more or less, infinity to one.
At any rate nobody’s ever done it, and a straight line from A to B in backspace might be a loop halfway round the universe in frontspace for all anyone knows; but I decided if I was done for I might as well go out in style. I latched on to a stream so rough and speedy that normally I wouldn’t have gone near it, not even me. Nerve induction currents surged through my posterior as I went for the rockiest ride ever. My customer was declaiming behind me again, unaware as yet of his shortened life expectancy, going through the mood-swing people in backspace for the first time are prone to; getting weepy, burbling about his deep love for all mankind, longing to have every human prick that had ever existed moving affectionately up his bum—well, I hadn’t supposed I was anything special—in what you might call a universal anal rhapsody. However would you find time for a crap, I thought. It crossed my mind that the best thing, after a while, might be to find another sandbank and screw each other brainless.
Then short-circuit the polymer bubble.
He quietened down eventually and I heard him pull his trousers up. Steering the raft put me in a trance , saving me from having to think, and I didn’t notice how much time passed until he tapped me on the shoulder.
‘How much longer?’
I shrugged.
‘You said we’d be an hour at the most,’ he complained. ‘It’s been more than two hours already.’
‘We spent time on the sandbank.’
‘Only a few minutes!’
I started giving him guff about how a sandbank stopover distorts the timeflow and extends the journey time, making it up as I went along. I must have sounded unconvincing. He leaned forward to peer over my shoulder at the instrumental panel. He probably saw the blank navigator visor and understood the meaning of that, because he said, in a plaintive voice, ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Did I say the wrong thing? My passenger collapsed in a sobbing heap.
It was my finest hour. My swansong. The back universe soared and sang all around us. My raft rattled like it was plunging through broken shale. Yow-Wow. I had no idea where the hell we were—and that did it matter anyway?
Through recklessness, probably, the moment came when I made what should have been a fatal error of judgment. We were going through a flume. That’s different from a water flume, incidentally: the current rotates corkscrew fashion and the trick is in the timing. That was where I fell down. The raft tipped up, I lost all control and we were dumped into the turbulence, spinning like crazy and being carried further and further off.
