A Sudden Wild Magic

They had not expected the weightlessness. It happened after the second heavy jolt. Zillah found herself rising above her seat and grabbed for Marcus as he floated away from her, still asleep. The space ahead of her was full of floating bodies, lying in the air at all angles, some threshing about, some clinging to seats. Something was on fire down there, in four different places. People were making frantic efforts to beat flames out with hands that suddenly worked to different rules, and rebounding to the ceiling — which was now a side wall to Zillah — with the force of their efforts.

“I told them — I told her so!” Roz Collasso was crying out. “The place does have defenses! They’ve gone and burnt our virus-magic! Now what do we do?”

Along the sideways ceiling Zillah had an upside-down glimpse of Judy’s arm, ridged with straining tendons, shaking and shaking at the woman beside her. It was Judy’s voice doing all the screaming. “Something’s wrong with Lynne! Somebody help me! None of these controls work!”

A small, energetic person swooped down to Judy. Flan Burke, Zillah thought. Judy’s screams redoubled. “Flan, Flan, Lynne’s dead! I don’t know what to do! Somebody hel—!” There was the sound of a smacking blow. Flan’s body came arcing up again with the force of it.

“Shut up, Judy!”

The fires must have gone out. The metal space was murky with smoke, and a lot of people were coughing, including Judy, who was coughing and sobbing together, but there were no flames anymore. Everyone was sinking slowly toward what had been the right-hand wall. Some small pull of gravity seemed to be coming from there.

“We’re falling,” said the big black girl, among coughing and retchings.

“Falling where?” demanded Roz.

Judy’s voice was now low and grinding. “How the hell should I know? You can hit me all you like, Flan, but it won’t do any good. This screen’s no use at all. Look, if you don’t believe me!”

Among the crowding bodies, Zillah had a slowly rotating view of a screen over the two empty drivers’ seats, alight with meaningless colored whorls. Whatever they were receiving, it was not in the usual manner of VDUs, but in wide-spaced, wavy bands which changed width perpetually.

“And our viruses are gone,” Judy said dully. “And we don’t know where we are.”

“What do we do, supposing we are in Laputa-Blish?” asked a girl with a stiff, gangly body.

“Do what we came to do without the virus, of course, you stupid bitch,” Flan Burke said as she rotated, knees to chin, through Zillah’s view. She looked both fierce and comfortable. “Do you think we came for a holiday?”

“Flan’s right,” Roz proclaimed. “We mount an attack regardless.”

The walls, seats, and ceiling had been rotating spirally about them as they talked, spinning everyone into a kind of plait along the length of the Celestial Omnibus. Now the motion changed again. Zillah found herself falling, gently and inevitably, together with half the floating company, toward the rear of the capsule.

“What’s going on now?” someone squawked from the other end of the aisle. That aisle now stood up from Zillah like a tube, and people hung there at the other end with outspread arms, inexplicably.

“Rotation, that’s all. We must be flipping over and over. Gives us gravity at both ends.”

Whoever said that must be right, Zillah thought, as her feet landed on the silvery wall that concealed the life support. She could hear it hissing beyond the metal. She hoped it was meant to hiss. It sounded nastily like a gas leak. She had a vivid vision of the capsule turning over and over in space, perhaps endlessly. She had been mad to bring Marcus. He was stirring and mumbling against her shoulder, disturbed by the hissing and the changes of gravity — perhaps also by Zillah’s own rising panic. In a moment she was going to be screaming like Judy, and that would wake Marcus.

She soothed him and she rocked him, trying to throw her panic into the distance, out, away, into whatever appalling emptiness surrounded the capsule. Marcus calmed. He slept steadily again. Zillah tried to convince herself that she was calm, too, by turning to the young man who had landed curled up on the backrest of the seat sticking out of the wall beside her. He was nice-looking. She did not know him well, but she thought his name was Tam — Tam Fairbrother, or something like that.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I know it seems silly, but I only got here at the last minute. What is the attack Roz and Flan were talking about? Can you put me abreast of the plans?”

Tam did not answer. This puzzled Zillah at first. It took her a long, difficult minute to realize that Tam was dead. So was everyone else at this end of the capsule.

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