Surface Detail

The doll was standing at a funny angle. Being at that angle, it should be falling over. Maybe it had special feet with suckers on them, or magnets. She’d had a toy that could climb walls, once. She guessed the doll was the usual doll-size; about right for a human toddler to carry and cuddle like an adult would a baby. It had glowing yellow-brown skin, black, intensely curled hair and the usual too-big head and eyes and over-chubby limbs. It wore a little vest-and-pants set; some dark colour.

“Yime? Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

The voice was coming from the doll. Its mouth had moved as it had spoken, though it was a little hard to be sure because there was some stuff in her eye. She tried to bring her hand up to her face to wipe away whatever it was in her eye, but her hand wasn’t cooperating. Her whole arm wasn’t cooperating. She tried the other arm/hand combination, but it wasn’t being any more helpful. Signals seemed to be piling up inside her head from both arms, both hands, trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t make sense of whatever it was. There were a lot of signals like that, from all over her body. Another mystery. She was getting tired of them. She tried to yawn but got a strange grating feeling from her jaw and head.

She opened her other eye and saw two dolls. They were identical, and both were at the same strange angle.

“Yime! You’re back with me! Good!”

“Ack?” she said. She had meant to say “Back?” but it had come out wrong. She didn’t seem to be able to get her mouth to work properly. She tried to take a deep breath but that didn’t go too well either. It felt like she was sort of jammed, as though she’d tried to squeeze through a really tight gap and it hadn’t worked and she’d got trapped.

“Stay with me, Yime,” the doll squeaked.

She tried to nod, but… no.

“Okay,” she said.

There was only one doll, she’d worked out. Not two; it was a focusing problem. The doll was too close, there was stuff – black stuff – in her eyes and everything was at an odd angle. The ceiling, if you were going to call it that, seemed awfully close to the doll’s bubble-haired head. And the doll’s glowing skin seemed to be the only light within this cramped, shadowy space.

Where the hell was she?

She tried to think where she had been last.

She had been standing under the ship, being briefed, looking at images of stars and clusters and systems, the vast dark bulk of the ship directly above. No; she’d been walking out from underneath the ship, into rain, with the blunt snout of the ship like a black glass cliff poised above; a giant flat knife for cutting through to the underneathness of the universe…

“Yime!” something squeaked. She got one of her eyes to open. Oh yes, this weird little doll thing standing in front of her. Funny angle.

“Ot?” (“What?”)

“Don’t do that. Stay with me. Don’t drift off like that.”

She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Drift off? How? To where? She was trapped here, caught.

The doll wobbled towards her, its gait made awkward by its short, thick legs. It had something in its hand, something like a needle with a single slick-looking thread trailing behind it. The thread disappeared into the slanted narrow darkness behind the doll. She thought there was something familiar but wrong about the two very close-together surfaces behind the doll.

The doll had something in its other hand too. The toy waddled so close to her head she couldn’t see it properly any more. She could feel it, though; feel its little clothed body squeezing against the side of her head.

“Ot you doing?” she asked it. Something cold was pressed against her neck. She tried to move. Anything. Eyelids; they worked. Mouth; a bit. Her lips didn’t seem to be too keen on pressing together. Facial muscles; mostly. Tongue and throat and breathing; a bit. Fingers? No fingers. Toes? Toes not responding. Bladder muscles; something there. Great; she could pee herself if she wanted.

She could not move her head or body or limbs at all.

Suddenly the slanted narrow space made a sort of sense and she realised she was still in the ship, still in the lounge she’d been in earlier, when it had been accelerating. Accelerating? Did ships accelerate? This was the floor folded over and pressed up against the wall. She was lying on the wall and the floor had come up to meet the wall and she was lying crushed between the two. This would account for her not being able to move.

“What?” the doll squeaked, clambering lightly over her face as it moved to the other side of her neck.

“Ot you doing?” she repeated.

“I’m putting a micro med-pack on you and hooking you up to a distant-delivery med-pack that’s as close as I can get it, a couple of metres away.”

“Ang I trat?”