Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Or as narrow. Not even Modred.

  We came last into the dining hall, Lance and I and Vivien, but not by much. It was our stronghold, our safe place, the long table under the lion banner, amid the weapons. We could hear the hammering, but more faintly here than elsewhere. We knew our proper seats and settled into them.

  “Have we got a location, on the attack?” Griffin was asking.

  “Middecks after section,” Modred said, “portside. And topside forward. That’s main storage and the hydroponics. As well as the action at the bow.”

  “They’re slow about it,” Griffin said.

  No one said anything to that. We were only glad it was so.

  “We look forward,” Griffin said then, “to more traveling. To going on and on with this thing. This ship. Whatever it is. But if it travels, it leaves this space from time to time. If we could somehow break loose ...”

  “If you’ll pardon me,” Modred said, “sir, the crew has been working on that possibility. It won’t work.”

  Griffin’s face remained remarkably patient. “I didn’t much reckon that it would, but spell it out. Mass?”

  “Mass, sir. It’s growing with every acquisition, not only the ships, but debris. Mass, and something that just confirmed itself. We’re moving. We have an acquired velocity in relation to realspace and there’s no means to shed it. This mass has been slingshotted as many times as there are ships gathered out there; if we could hazard an unfounded presumption, and even factoring it conservatively, the acquired velocity would itself increase our mass beyond any reasonable limit. We’re a traveling discontinuity, an infinitude, a local disturbance in spacetime. We are the disturbance and our own matter is the problem.”

  I blinked, my hands knotted in my lap under the table, understanding more of what Modred said than I usually did; but Modred was talking down to us. To Griffin.

  “If I could reconstruct what happened,” Gawain said, “something a long time ago either kicked or pulled the original core object into subspace. And either it never had control or it lost it. So it careens along being attracted by the gravity wells of stars and accelerating all kinds of debris into its grasp. It hasn’t got a course. Just velocity. It picks up velocity at the interface and it never gets rid of it. It’s no part of our universe any longer.”

  “We are in Hell,” Dela murmured, shaking her head.

  “Wherever we are,” Griffin said, “we have company. And if we can’t hope to get out of it, then we have to do something about it. Lynette, you had an idea—to breach the core object itself.”

  Lynn looked up, eyes aglitter in her thin face.

  “I’ve seen a place,” she said, “not so far from the emergency lock starboard. I think we could get into it there.”

  “And create what kind of difficulty inside the wheel,” Griffin asked, “if you breach their lifesupport?”

  “We’ll rig a Bridge from our own side. Pressure seal. We can do it.”

  Our eyes went from one face to another—seeing hope, seeing doubt, one and then the other.

  “We could save time,” Modred said dryly, “by opening our own forward hatch and using theirs.”

  “We can control matters,” Lynn said, “by building our own lock. By having a way round behind their position. We could attach to our upper airlock and have a way to attach either to a tube they might build to our upper section or to attach to the wheel itself and have an access we control so we don’t get trapped.”

  “And then they move behind us, don’t they? And we don’t know what we’re going to meet in weapons. No. It won’t work.”

  “Lynn could be lost out there,” Dela said, adding her force to Modred’s.

  “No, lady,” Lynn said. There was that kind of look on Lynn’s face that had to be believed while she was saying it. “I can do it. Give me the chance. It’s all that can stop us being trapped.”

  “It’s worth the try,” Griffin said.

  “Lady,” Modred said.

  “I can do it,” Lynn said again.

  She wanted to so badly: she said it herself, how it hurt to be useless. We all had this compulsion to serve. And Lynn’s, I thought, might well be the end of her.

  “All right,” Dela said.

  “Lady—” Modred objected.

  “Let her try,” Dela said. “Someone has to do something that works.”

  Modred subsided. His face—I had never seen him so out of countenance—He looked like murder.

  “Let’s find what we have to use,” Griffin said then. But he sat there a moment, as if some of the strength had drained out of him, while our Beast—we knew now for sure it was more than one—battered at the hull on all sides of us.

  “We don’t really have any choice,” Dela said. “We have to do something, and that’s all there is left to do, isn’t it?”

  “That’s all there is to do,” Griffin agreed.

  “Isn’t—” Viv asked, breaking the silence she had kept in our councils, “isn’t there the shuttle? Couldn’t we get off in that?”

  Faces turned toward her. “We could use it,” Gawain said, “not for that—but to get up against their hull. Without breaching our own.”

  “And getting back again?” Griffin asked.

  “That,” Gawain admitted, “not so likely.”

  “The shuttle might end up anywhere,” Lynn said. “It might swing off against the hull somewhere else and we couldn’t control it. The only answer has to be a kind of Bridge. That’s all that has a chance of working.”

  “We could get off from the ship,” Viv protested.

  “No,” Lance said patiently, having understood things a long time ago, “we can’t. You don’t understand, Viv. The shuttle engines are less powerful than the Maid’s. And engines only work here, up against the mass.”

  “Where matter exists at all,” Modred added.

  Viv simply shut her eyes.

  “Don’t,” Dela said. “Vivien, it’s all right.”

  Vivien didn’t understand. She simply didn’t want to understand. I think we all knew that much, even Dela, who understood us least of all.

  And Vivien opened her eyes again, but she kept her mind sealed, I was sure of that.

  “What do you reckon to do?” Griffin asked Lynn. “Do you have it mapped out?”

  “There’s equipment and parts in storage,” Lynn said.

  “Let’s find it,” Griffin said.

  So Griffin launched himself—wherever we were now, and whatever had changed since that leap through space we had made. Dela still sat at table after the others had left, and I did, and Vivien did.

  “Might I get you something?” I asked Dela.

  “No,” Dela said hoarsely, her hands locked before her on the table. And so we sat for a while. “He has to do something. That’s Griffin’s nature. I couldn’t let him not do something, could I? But we’re in danger of losing Lynn.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid we might.”

  “It’s awful, that place out there. It’s a terrible way to die.”

  “Lynn’s not that afraid,” I said.

  Vivien got up from the table and fled, out the door.

  “But some of us are,” I added.

  “Vivien’s worthless,” Dela said. “Worthless.”

  “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “She was very good, with the books. They’re just not here, now.”

  Dela looked up at me, puzzled-seeming. So hard she could be, my lady; but she looked straight at me, not into me, not through me, as sometimes she would. It was as if I had gotten solid enough for her to see. “Do you care?” she asked. “Vivien doesn’t care about anyone at all but Vivien.”

  “She can’t,” I said, thinking of that tape, the tape, and what wounds that Vivien had suffered that our own Viv had shared. Like Modred. Like the rest of us. And Lynn. O Lynette, who had to be brave and brash and find a way to be that other self if it killed her. My lips trembled. “My
lady—” I almost told her. But I couldn’t face the rage. “Some of us don’t have our sets arranged like that,” I said. “Some of us have other priorities.”

  “I know Vivien’s,” Dela said. Of course, she knew us all.

  “She’s Vivien,” I said, afraid. “And she would be happy if she weren’t.”

  ‘That’s a strange things to say.”

  “Like I’m Elaine,” I said. “And Lance is Lance.”

  Dela said nothing at all, not understanding, perhaps, the thing I tried to creep up on, to tell her. She gave me no help. I found the silence heavier and heavier.

  “We should do something,” Dela said. “It would be healthier if we did something.” She dropped her head into her hands. I patted her shoulder, hating to see her that way.

  “We could go help them,” I said. “We can fetch things.”

  It was unthinkable, that impertinent we. But that was the way it had come to be. Dela lifted her head, nodded, got up, and we went to find the others.

  We, my lady and I, as if she were one of us, or as if I had been born.

  Finding them was another matter. They had disappeared quite thoroughly when we called to them from the lift on one and the other level.

  “The holds,” Dela said, “if they’re going to be hunting supplies.”

  So we went to the bridge to track them down, because the Maid had a great many nooks and dark places where it was difficult to go and no little dangerous.

  Especially now.

  So we came to the bridge, and found one of them after all, because Modred was at his post, talking to them, running catalogue for them, as it seemed. We walked in, my lady and I, and waited, not to interrupt. After a moment Modred seemed to feel our presence and turned around.

  “Where are they?” my lady asked.

  “Middecks hold number one section,” Modred said. “It’s not a good idea,” he added then, with never a flicker. “This operation. But no one argues with master Griffin.”

  “Do what he told you to do,” my lady said sharply, and turned and walked out. She had no wish to be told it was hopeless. Neither did I, but I lingered half a breath and looked back at Modred, who had not yet turned back to his post.

  “Lynn will die,” Modred said, “if she has her own way.”

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  “Be glad it will take them days to be ready.”

  “And then what?” I asked. “In the meanwhile, what?”

  Modred shrugged, looking insouciant. Or dead of feeling. He turned his back on me, which hurt, because I thought us friends, and he might have tried to answer. If there were answers at all.

  “Elaine,” my lady called, impatient, somewhere down the corridor outside, and I turned and fled after her.

  So we found the rest of them, all but Vivien.

  They were on middecks, down the corridors from the crew quarters, and bringing parts out of storage by now, out of that section of the Maid that was so cold they had to use suits to go retrieve it; the stuff they set out, a big canister, and metal parts, was so cold it drank the warmth out of the air, making us shiver. “We make a Bridge,” Griffin explained to us. “We’ve got the rigging for it if we improvise. We use our own emergency lock on our side, and grip onto whatever surface we choose with a pressure seal, so we can sample their atmosphere before we break through.”

  Dela said nothing to this. I knew she was not sanguine. But Griffin was so earnest, and so was Lynn, and it was what we had to do.

  It was a matter of finding everything and then of carrying it all up the difficult areas of the Maid, into places our present orientation made almost inaccessible. We had weight to contend with—and Gawain and Percy got up on juryrigged ladders in the impossible angles of passages we were never supposed to use in dock as we were, in places where the hammering outside the hull rang fit to drive us mad. We added to it the sound of drills and hammering of our own, making a rig of ropes that would let us lift loads up the slanting deck and get it settled.

  We worked, all that day, fit to break our hearts, and most all we had done was just moving the materials into place and making sure that the area just behind the lock was pressure-tight, and that everything they would need was there. Modred never came, nor did Vivien.

  It was, I knew, I think more than one of us knew, only another one of Griffin’s schemes, that Lynn had been convenient to lend him; and if it had not been this, it would have been another. But it kept us moving; and when we had worked all the day, we went to our quarters exhausted, aching in our arms and elsewhere.

  Even Lynn—even she looked hollowed out, as if she had finally gotten the measure of what she had proposed doing, and being tired and full of bruises had beaten the mettle out of her. But she had said no word of giving it up. And no one told Lynn it was hopeless.

  Not until we met Vivien.

  I suppose that Vivien had been in our quarters most of the day; or in some comfortable hole of her own devising. She was there to meet us when we came in, sitting robed and cross-legged on the couch with one of the study tapes running, a soft murmur that drowned out the tappings from outside. I was glad when I saw her, relieved that she was no longer sick: this was the reflex my psych-set gave me, to be so naive.

  But Viv knew where to put a shot.

  “You know he’ll believe anything now,” she said right off, in that low and proper voice of hers. “So now everyone’s working to build something to kill the lot of us. It’s one project today, and that’s not going to work; and what new one tomorrow? It’s only worse, and he never knew what he was doing. No more than you do.”

  We all stood and stared at her, bereft of anything reasonable to say. She got up from the couch like a fire going up, all full of heat and smoke, and we were all disarranged.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” I said.

  “So she gave him the crew and the ship because it’s broken. And the best idea you come up with is going out there with it.”

  “It’s all we can do,” Lynn said, defending herself.

  “Of course, like you didn’t move us until it was too late. That was all your idea too. And now you want to make a way for them to get in as if it weren’t happening fast enough. You never knew what you were doing.”

  “Shut up,” I said. But Lynn just sat down, elbows on her knees—not staff, Lynette, not prepared against lies that we who dealt with born-men knew how to deal with. The crew was innocent and told the truth. Vivien worked at them in painful ways. “It was all your doing, Viv,” I said, “that tape, everything—I know who would have taken it. I know who could be a thief in our quarters. I should stop feeling sorry for you. Everything that ever happened to you, you brought on yourself.”

  “I took that tape,” Percy said in a faint voice, very loud in that quiet. “I did, Elaine. I never expected—that ... I never ...”

  I felt cold all over. I just stood there, wishing that someone would say something, even Viv. Percy’s voice trembled into silence, asking answers, and I had never meant to hurt him, not Percy, not any of them.

  “We’re none of us right,” Percy said, looking at me, at Lance. “If we weren’t supposed to have it—what is it? And why?”

  How do you make sense of a whole life in a why? I shook my head, looked at all the pain I had made, at Lynn who was trying to kill herself, at Gawain who had lost all his cheerfulness and gone sullen; at Vivien who had turned on us; at Percy that I had named a thief, when there was no one more kind and gentle, not even Lance. “The why won’t make sense,” I said. “But there were people like us a long time ago. Born-men. We can’t be what they were. Or maybe never were.”’

  “They were ourselves,” Gawain said, finding his voice.

  “No.”

  “I never saw myself that way,” Gawain said distressedly, far from hearing anything I said. And it was so: that Elaine, myself, me, I—there was no sorting it. She was far more live than I: she loved.

  And what did their images—but love, and want,
and struggle—things far more live than they? I knew the Lancelot who stood behind me now, who gently put his big hands on my shoulders. And oh, what was Vivien’s pettiness to that Vivien’s malice; or Percy’s kindness to that Percivale’s goodness; or Lynn’s bravery to Lynette’s? We tried to live, that was what; we caught sight of something brighter and more vivid than ourselves and we wanted that.

  Even Vivien—who, wanted power, who was made and not born, and who knew nothing about love in either case. She struggled to be more than she was and narrow as she was, it threatened her sanity.

  “Oh Viv,” I said aloud, pitying.

  “Oh Viv,” she mimicked me, and turned away, playing the only role she knew how to play, the only one her psych-set and her name fit her for. I stood there trembling.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Lancelot said, his fingers pressing my shoulders.

  “She’s not to blame,” I said. “It’s all she can see.”

  “So what do we do?” Percy asked. “Elaine?”

  “We do what we see to do.”

  “Where’s Modred?” Lance asked suddenly.

  A silence among us.

  “It’s not right,” I said, “to think about him the way the tape is. Modred’s not changed. It can’t have affected him, not him. We can’t all walk off from him. And we can’t treat him like that.”

  “He won’t say anything about it,” Percy said. “He won’t talk.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Gawain said.

  “He’s still working up there,” Lynn said, from where she sat, her arms about her thin knees. “He’s convinced about his program. He still hopes for that.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Percy said. “Against orders. Not on his own.”

  Lance’s hands were heavy on my shoulders. “Maybe somebody ought to see about him.”

  “Let him be,” Gawain said sharply.

  “What’s he up to?” Lance asked. And when Gawain stood there staring back at us: “Gawain, what’s going on up there?”

  Still no answer. Lance let go my shoulders and turned for the door. Gawain started after him and I spun about, “Lance,” I cried. “Gawain—”

  Gawain overtook him at the door, but there was no stopping Lance when he was in a hurry: he shrugged off Gawain’s hand with one thrust of his arm and kept going.