Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “We’ll dress,” Lynn said, “and come up and relieve you.”

  “Get back to sleep,” Griffin said to those of us who were staff. “No need of your being here.”

  We went back to the crew quarters and got in bed again, except Lynn and Percy, who dressed and went topside again. Then Gawain and Modred came down and undressed and lay down with us as Lynn and Percy had—I think they were glad of the company, and worked themselves up against us, cold and tense until they began to take our warmth, and until they fell asleep with the suddenness of exhaustion.

  What went on out there, that noise, that thing outside our hull—it might go on again and again. It might not need to sleep.

  VII

  The huge pavilion slowly yielded up,

  Thro’ those black foldings, that which housed therein.

  High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms,

  With white breastbone, and barren ribs of Death,

  And crowned with fleshless laughter—some ten steps—

  Into the half-light—thro’ the dim dawn—advanced

  The monster, and then paused, and spake no word.

  We went about in the morning on soft feet and small steps, listening. We stayed to our duties, what little of them there were. Even the makeshift lab was quiet, where Vivien was setting things up ... running tests, that took time, and we could do nothing there. Griffin and Dela stayed together in her bed, and I walked and paced feeling like a ghost in the Maid’s corridors, all too conscious how vast it was outside and how small we were and how huge that rumbling voice had sounded.

  “It’s probably trapped here too,” Dela said when I came finally to do her hair, “and maybe it’s as scared as we are.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said, thinking that scared beasts bit; and I feared this one might have guns. On the Maid we had only the ancient weapons which decorated her dining hall and the lady’s quarters and some of the corridors. Precious good those were against this thing. I thought about knights and dragons and reckoned that they must have been insane.

  I finished my lady’s hair ... made it beautiful, elaborate with braids, and dressed her in her green gown with the pale green trim. It encouraged me, that she was up and sober again, no longer lying in her chambers prostrate with fear: if my lady could face this day, then things might be better. If there was an answer to this, then born-men could find it; and she was our born-man, ours, who dictated all the world.

  “Where’s Griffin?” she asked.

  “It’s eleven hundred hours. Master Griffin—asked Lance—”

  “I remember.” She waved her hand, robbed me of the excuse I had hoped for to stop all of that, dismissing it all.

  “Shall I go?” I asked.

  Again a wave of the hand. My lady walked out into the sitting room and sat down at the console there, started calling up something on the comp unit—all the log reports, I reckoned, of all the time she had slept; or maybe the supply inventories. My lady was herself again; and let Griffin beware.

  I padded out, ever so quietly, closed the door and wiped my hands and headed down the corridor to the lift as fast as I could walk. I went down and toward the gym in the notion that I had to be quiet, but quiet did no good at all: the gym rang with the impact of feet and bodies. They were at it again, Griffin and Lance, trying to throw each other.

  It was crazy. They were. I had thought of lying again, saying that Dela wanted this or that, but she was paying sharp attention today, and the lie would not pass. I stood there in the doorway and watched.

  They were at it this time, I reckoned, because there had been no decision the last encounter, thanks to me. No winner; and Griffin wanted to win—had to win, because Lance was lab-born, and shouldn’t win, shouldn’t even be able to contest with the likes of Griffin.

  They went back and forth a great deal, muscles straining, skin slick with sweat that dampened their hair and made their hands slip. Neither one could get the advantage standing; and they hit the floor with a thud and neither one could get the other stopped. They didn’t see me, I don’t think. I stood there biting my lip until it hurt. And suddenly it was Lance on the bottom, and Griffin slowly let him up.

  I turned away, fled the doorway for the corridor, because I was ashamed, and hurt, and I didn’t want to admit to myself why, but it was as if I had lost too, like it was my pain, that Lance after all proved what we were made to be, and that we always had to give way. Even when he did what none of the rest of us could do, something so reckless as to fight with Griffin—he was beaten.

  Lance came up to the crew quarters finally, where I sat playing solitaire. He was undamaged on the outside, and I tried to act as if I had no idea anything was wrong, as if I had never been in that doorway or seen what I had seen. But I reckoned that he wanted to have his privacy now, so downcast his look was, and I could hardly walk out without seeming to avoid him, so I curled up on the couch and pretended to be tired of my game, to sleep awhile.

  But I watched him through my lashes, as he rummaged in his locker, and found a tape, and set up the machine. He took the drug, and lay down in deepsleep, lost in that; and all the while I had begun to know what tape it was, and what he was doing, and what was into him. The understanding sent cold through me.

  He should not be alone. I was sure of that. The lady had deserted him and his having the tape in the first place was my fault. I took the drug and set up the connections, and lay down beside him in his dream—lay down with my fingers laced in his limp ones and began to slip toward it.

  The story ran to its end and stopped, letting us out of its grip; and whether he felt me there or not, he just lay there with tears streaming from his closed eyes. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and took the sensors off him and me and put my arms about him.

  But he mistook what I wanted and pushed me away, stared at the ceiling and blanked awhile.

  It was that bad.

  And when he came out of it he said nothing, but got up, went to the bath and washed his face and left. Me, who was so long his friend, he left without a word. I heard the lift go down again; and it was the galley or the gym down there, so I had no difficulty finding him.

  It was the gym. From the door I watched him ... doing pushups until I thought his arms must break, as if it could drive the weakness out of him.

  Now, Beast, I thought toward the voice that had terrorized our night. Now, if ever you have something to say. But it stayed mute. Lance struggled against his own self; and I wished with all my heart that someone would discover some duty for him, some use that would get him busy.

  He saw me there, turning suddenly. I knew he did by his scowl when he got to his feet, and I turned and fled down the corridor, to the lift, to the upper level, as far from the gym as I could excepting Viv’s domain.

  And came Percivale, down the corridor from the bridge, looking as dispirited as I felt.

  “Percy,” I said, catching at his arm. “Percy, I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?” he asked, blinking at my intense assault; and I explained I wanted him to go down to the gym and fight with Lance. “It’s good for you,” I said, “because we don’t know what’s out there trying to get in, do we? and you might have to fight, to protect the ship and the lady. I think it’s a good idea to be ready. Griffin’s been working out with Lance. I’m sure it would be good for all of you.”

  Percy thought about that, ran a hand over his red hair. “I’ll talk to Gawain and Modred,” he said. “But Lance is much stronger than we are.”

  “But you should try,” I said, “at least try. Lance did, with Griffin, with a born-man, after all; and can’t you, with him?”

  Percivale went down there first, and later that afternoon the three of them were looking the worse for wear and there was a little brighter look in Lance’s eyes when I saw him at dinner. I smiled smugly across the table in the great hall, next Griffin and my lady, with all the table set as it had been the evening before, and all of us again in our party be
st.

  “I think it’s given up,” my lady said, quite cheerful, lifting her glass.

  It was true. There had been silence all day. Modred was glum. His carefully constructed tapes had failed. Gawain said so ... and my lady laughed, a brave, lonely sound.

  Griffin smiled a faint, small quirk of the lips, more courtesy than belief. And drank his wine. Before dinner was done something did ring against the hull, a vague kind of thump; and the crew started from their places, and Griffin did.

  “No!” my lady snapped, stopping the crew on the instant, and Griffin, half out of his chair, hesitated. “We can’t be running at every shift and settling,” Dela said. “Sit down! The lot of you sit down. It’s nothing.”

  My heart felt it would break my ribs. But no further sound came to us, and the crew settled back into their places and Griffin sat back down.

  “We would have felt a settling,” Griffin said.

  “Enough of it. Enough.”

  There was silence for a moment, no movement, all down the table; but my lady set to work on her dessert, and Griffin did, and so did we all. My lady talked, and Griffin laughed, and soon we all talked again, even Lance, idle dinner chatter. I took it for a sign of health in Lance, that I might have done some good, and I felt my own spirits higher for it. Dela and master Griffin finished their meal, we took the dishes down, and Lance remained tolerably cheerful when we were in the galley together. He was smiling, if not overly talkative.

  But it didn’t help that night. Lance was sore and full of bruises, and he wanted to be let alone. He didn’t object to my moving my bed over or getting in with him, but he turned his back on me, and I patted his shoulder. Finally he turned an anguished look on me in the light there was left in the room, with the others lying in their beds. He started to say something. He didn’t need to. I just lay still and took his hand in mine, and he put his arm about me and stroked my hair, with that old sadness in his eyes, stripped of anger. I could hear noises from farther over toward the wall, where Lynn slept. Either Gawain or Percy had come somewhat off the duty fix, and presumably so had Lynette.

  Misery, I thought. And Lance just lay there in the dark looking at me.

  “It happens to born-men too,” I said. I knew that, and maybe he didn’t. He had been more sheltered, in his way. “They’re more complicated than we are, and they get this a lot, this trouble; but they get over it.”

  He shivered, and I knew he was caught somewhere in his own psych-sets, where I couldn’t truly help him, and he wasn’t about to discuss it. There was no reason for Lance, I thought. The lady and Griffin, and when it turned out that this voyage wasn’t ending, ever, then that was it for Lancelot, done, over. He cared for nothing else in all existence but my lady; and when he was shut away from her, that was when he—

  —heard the story in the tape, and learned what the meaning of my lady’s fancy was, and what he was named for, and he began to dream of being that dream of hers. That thought came to me while we lay there in the dark. And there was a great hollowness in me, knowing that. Lance had found himself a kind of purpose, but I had nothing like his, that touched his central psych-sets. Being just Elaine, a minor player in the tape, I was meant to do nothing but keep Lance entertained when my lady was otherwise occupied, and to do my lady’s hair and to look decorative, and nothing more, nothing more.

  Our purposes are always small. We’re small people, pale copies, filled with tapes and erasable. But something had begun to burn in Lance that had more complicated reasons; and I was afraid—not for myself, not really for myself, I kept reasoning in my heart, although that was part of my general terror. We should live as long as we liked. The lady had promised us, ignoring that thing out there, ignoring the uncertainties which had settled on us ... like growing old. Like our minds growing more and more complicated just by living, until we grew confused beyond remedy. We were promised life. The thing out there in the dark, the chaos waiting whenever we might grow confused enough to let our senses slip back into the old way of seeing—this living with death so close to us, was that different than our lives ever were? And didn’t born-men themselves live that way, when they deliberately took chances?

  It was just that our death talked to us through the hull, had called us on com, had tapped the hull this evening just to let us know that he was still there. Death, not an erasing; not the white room where they take you at the end.

  We’re already dying, my lady had insisted once; and my mind kept wandering back to that. I looked into Lance’s troubled eyes and sniffed, thinking that at least we were going to die like born-men, and have ourselves a fight with our Death, like in the fables.

  Thermopylae. Roland at the pass. When it got to us we would blow the horns and meet it head on. But that was in the fables.

  I began to think of other parts of the story, Lancelot’s part, how he had to be brave and be the strongest of all.

  And of what the rest of us must be.

  Lance slept for a while, and I snuggled up under his chin and slept too, happy for a while, although I couldn’t have said why ... something as inexplicable as psych-set, except that it was a nice place to be, and I found it strange that even in his sleep he held onto me, not the closeness we take for warmth, and far from sex too ... just that it was nice, and it was something—

  —like in the tape, I thought. I wondered who I was to him. I reckoned I knew. And being only Elaine, I took what small things I could get. Even that gave me courage. I slept.

  Then the hammering started again on the hull.

  I tensed, waking. Lance sat up, and we held onto each other, while all about us the others were waking too. It wasn’t the patterned hammering we had heard before. It came randomly and loud.

  Gawain piled out of bed and the rest of us were hardly slower, excepting Vivien, who sat there clutching her sheet to her chest in the semidark and looking when the lights came on as if it was all going to be too much for her.

  But she moved, grabbed for her clothes and started dressing. Modred was out the door first, and Percy after him; and Gawain and Lynette right behind them. Lance and I stopped at least to throw our clothes on and then ran for it, leaving Viv to follow as she could.

  We ran, the last bit from the lift, breathless, down the corridor to the bridge. The crew had found their places. My lady and Griffin were there, both in their robes, and my lady at least looked grateful that we two had shown up. I went and gave her my hand, and Lance stood near me—not that presumptuous, not with one of my lady’s lovers holding the other.

  “They say it’s the same place as before,” Dela informed us as Vivien showed up and delayed by the door. “But it doesn’t sound like a signal.”

  It sounded like someone working on the other side of the hull, to me. Tap. Bang. And long pauses.

  The crew was talking frantically among themselves—Modred and Percy answering questions from Lynn and Gawain, making protests. Griffin let go my lady’s hand and walked into that half U near them, leaning on the back of Percy’s chair.

  Only my lady Dela stood there shivering, and went over to a bench and sat down. I sat down and put my arms about her, and Lance hovered helplessly by while I tried to keep her warm in her nightgown. She was crying. I had never seen Dela cry like this. She was scared and trembling and it was contagious.

  “Give us vid,” Griffin was saying. “Let’s see if we can’t figure out what happened to the rest of the ships around us. See if they’re breached in some way.”

  Vid came on, all measled red and glare, shading off to greens and purples where some object was. “Forward floods,” Modred said “Wayne.”

  “Just let it alone,” Dela snapped. “Let it be. If we start turning the lights on and looking round out there we’ll encourage it.”

  Modred stopped. So did Gawain.

  “Do it,” Griffin said. And when they did nothing: “Dela, what are we going to do, wait for it?”

  “That’s all we can do, isn’t it?”’

  “It’s n
ot all I choose to do. We’re going to fight that thing if it has to be.”

  “For what good?”

  “Because I’m not sitting here waiting for it.”

  “And you encourage it and it gets to us—”

  “We still have a chance when we know it’s coming.—Put the floods on,” he said to Gawain.

  Gawain looked at Dela. “We think the sound is coming from inside the wheel ... not one of the smaller ships: from where we contact the torus.”

  Dela just shivered where she sat, between us; and Viv hovered near the door, frozen.

  “Dela,” Griffin said, “go on back to bed. Give the order and go back to bed. Nothing’s going to happen. We look and get some clear images of where it’s coming from, that’s all.”

  Dela gave the order, a wave of her hand. The floods went on and played over blacknesses that were other ships. We sat staring into that black and red chaos, at ships bleeding light through their wounds. Dela turned her face into my shoulder and I locked my arms about her as tightly as I could, stared helplessly into that place that I remembered of a sudden, that chaos senses had to forget the moment it stopped. I turned my face away from it, looked up at Lance’s face which was as chaos-lost as I felt; and Viv, Vivien holding on to the door. It was hard to look back again, and harder not to. Griffin was still giving orders—had the cameras sweep this way and that, and there was that ship next to us, the delicate one like spiderweb; and a strange one on our other side, that we had slid up against when we were grappling on; we couldn’t see all of it. And mostly the view dissolved in that red bleeding light. But when the cameras centered on our own bow, we could almost see detail, like it was lost in a wash of light across the lens, something that was like machinery. A cold feeling was running through my veins. “I don’t remember our nose like that” I said. No one paid attention to me.