Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  So we all came—not alone Lance and I, but all of us on the ship, the rest of them already gathered there, in that hall beneath the embroidered lion. My lady Dela was at the head of the table along with Griffin, and my place and Lance’s and Modred’s were vacant. We went to our places, Lance and I having to pass all that long distance down the table—and Modred took his after a moment, understanding that was what was wanted of him. Gawain was there, his hands clenched before him on the table, not looking up. Percy sat there equally pale, beside Lynette. And Vivien, whose bright eyes missed nothing.

  “We’ll have an account, if you please,” Dela said, “Modred.”

  “Lady, I think you’ll have had access by now to the tape I used. I’m sure Percy can understand it.”

  “I don’t care to go through it all. I want to know why you did such a thing.”

  Dela had not learned what had happened to us—my heart leapt and sank again in guilty relief—no one had told her about the stolen tape. I should, and had not the courage. And then I thought what that would do for Modred, how Dela would never trust him if she knew what he had heard. Or Lance. Or look at any of us the same.

  And Modred as likely might tell her—having no nerves; and no knowledge of born-men.

  “I explained,” Modred said, “that there was a chance of contacting it.”

  “He—” I said aloud, my heart beating against my ribs, “Modred told me, lady Dela, that he had it figured—that if his plan failed, then—then there was Lynn’s, wasn’t there? But if Lynn’s failed—then—”

  “How many of you consulted on this?” Dela asked sharply. “Gawain? Elaine?”

  “I never—” I said. “I—”

  But all of a sudden I was having trouble concentrating, because something had stopped, the noise forward stilled, and that diminished a great deal the noise that had been constant with us for days.

  “I—” I tried to continue, thinking I ought, trying to gather a denial, to explain, but Griffin held up his hand for quiet.

  “It’s stopped out there,” Griffin said.

  “It’s—” Dela said.

  And then that Sound was back again, our Beast talking to us over com. It had heard. None of us moved for the moment, and then Modred got out of his seat, and Griffin did, and the rest of us, as Modred headed out of the room.

  We knew where he was going.

  “Modred!” my lady cried.

  But that did no good either.

  XIV

  ... but she saw,

  Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights,

  The Dragon of the great Pendragonship

  Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.

  And even then he turn’d; and more and more

  The moony vapor rolling round the King,

  Who seemed the phantom of a Giant in it,

  Enwound him fold by fold and made him gray

  And grayer, till himself became as mist

  Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.

  Our Beast snarled at us, whispered to us, a low ticking that rose and assaulted our ears as we came—shaking us with the power of its voice. Vivien had come: she clung to the doorway with a kind of demented fixation on the sound. She had become entranced with her destruction, but that noise got to the bones and put shivers into the flesh, and Viv was right now close to sanity, in sheer fright. The crew headed for their places, but Lance laid hands on Modred to stop him.

  “Let him go,” Griffin said, and Lance looked at Dela, and did what he was told. I stood by shivering, physically shivering in the horrid sound. But we were better than we had been, and braver: my lady stood there with her fingers clenched on the back of Modred’s chair and wanted answers from him—at once, now, immediately.

  “We’re getting screen transmission,” Percy said, and it came up, a nonsense of dots and static breakup.

  “That’s an answer,” Modred said calmly. He half turned, looking at my lady at his back, but receiving no instruction, he turned back again.

  “What’s it saying?” Griffin asked.

  Modred ignored the question, busy with a flood of beeps that came through, and Griffin allowed it, because Modred was doing something, and Percy was, and then Lynn and Wayne came over from their posts to watch. It was craziness; the bass clicking stopped and became a maddening loud series of pulses. I wrapped my arms about myself, standing there and not understanding any of it. Griffin and Dela didn’t understand: that also I came to believe. But they let the crew work with the computer.

  “Equipment’s not compatible,” Modred said finally, the only word he gave us in all that time. “Stand by: we’re getting it worked through comp.”

  “So it can hear us,” Dela murmured. She moved back, shaking her head, and Griffin put his arm about her shoulders.

  Lance and I and Viv, we just stood there, not understanding anything—until of a sudden lines began to come across one of the screens and it began to build itself downward into a picture. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see—whatever it was. “We can clean that up,” Gawain said. The crew began to work, and Percy sweated over the computer in greatest concentration, while Modred intervened with small gestures, an indication of this and that, quiet words. And then Modred reached for another control. Lynn reached out instantly and checked his hand from that. “No,” Lynn said.

  “My lady.” Modred half turned in his seat. “We have to transmit and give it something back to keep its interest. This is going to take us time.”

  “Give it—what?” Griffin asked.

  “The same thing as before,” Modred said. “Repeating it. Giving it the notion we’re still working.”

  “All right,” Dela said quietly, and Lynette took her hand away, so whatever Modred wanted to send went out.

  It went on a long while, this consultation, this meddling with the computer, and sometimes the lines on the screen grew clearer, and sometimes more confused. My knees ached, and my back and shoulders, so that finally I went over to that bench near the door where Vivien had sat down. After a moment more Lance came and took the place by me, silent company, image of other terrible nights trying to cope with this place.

  But my heart was tired of beating overtime, and my limbs were all out of shivers. Terror had acquired a kind of mundanity, had become an atmosphere, a medium in which we just went on functioning, and did what we were supposed to do until somehow our Death would get to us. I reckoned that tired as I was it might not even hurt much. Maybe Vivien reckoned that way, sitting by me with her hands clasped in her lap—not blanked at all, but following this; and maybe Lance felt the same—who had Dela and Griffin in front of him, their arms about each other. Only the crew went on driving themselves because they had something left to do.

  Our born-men—they had no least idea, I reckoned, what made sense to do, but they stood there, while the voice of our Beast rumbled away over the distant sound of hammering. At last Dela turned away as if she would leave—having had enough, I thought: this might wear on for hours. Almost I got to my feet, thinking she might need me—but no, she went only as far as the bench on the other side of the door, drawing Griffin with her, and they sat down there to wait it all out while the crew kept on at their work.

  The image came clear finally, and it made no sense, being only dots. “Get the other one up,” Modred said, and they started it all over again.

  So the crew kept at their work, still getting something, and whatever-it-was kept up its noise. And my lady, who once would have gone to her rooms and shut out the sound—stayed, not even nodding into sleep, but watching every move Modred made.

  Not trusting him. Modred had said it. It was very clear why all of us were here, why this one night the lady stayed to witness, and therefore all the rest of us stayed. Modred had to know that.

  There had been a time, when the Maid had made tame voyages ferrying lovers from star to star, that my lady had liked Modred in contrast at her banquets, with his dark dour ways. He was the shadow in her fancy, the sk
eleton at the feast, the memento mori—a dangerous-looking sort whose impudence amused her, whose outrages she forgave. But that was before things had passed out of control, and we all had to rely on him. O my lady was afraid of him now, for all the wrong reasons—a grim face, an insolence which had taken matters into his own hands. And a name that had stopped being a joke. He was Modred: she had always had a place for him in her fancy. And so she stopped trusting him.

  Me, with my little understanding—I watched him work, the fevered concentration, the sometime flagging of his strength, and the cold, cold patience of his face; and I heard his voice, always quiet, cutting through Percy’s dismay at something or Gawain’s and Lynn’s frustration—like ice it was, beyond disturbance ... and I knew what it was I feared. I was afraid of his reasoning. Modred dealt with our Beast because it was there to be dealt with like the chaos outside, like the numbers that came up on the machinery, a part of this universe and no more alien to his understanding than I was.

  But Modred understood now he was not trusted, and he was threatened somehow by that. One little emotion had to be gnawing at him, who could feel nothing else. He had been jolted through a host of sensations in that tape, things his nerves had never felt before. It must have been like a dip in boiling water, leaving no clear impression what the water had been like because the heat was everything.

  And what he wanted now, what drove him so, I had no least idea.

  The work continued. As with our general terror, information wore us out and left us without reaction—one could only look at so many lines and dots and listen to so much talk that made no particular sense. I found my head nodding, and leaned on Lance, who was more comfortable than the wall; Lance leaned back then and his head bowed over against mine—I went plummeting down a long dark, just too tired to make sense of anything, and the voice of our Beast and the hammering at the hull sang me to sleep.

  I came out of it aware of an ache in my neck and of a set of voices in hushed debate.

  “No,” one said, and: “It’s been quiet all this time,” the other—Lynn and Modred. “No.” Percy’s voice. “There’s no way—” Gawain’s, rising above the level of the others. “Modred, no.”

  “Lady Dela,” Modred said.

  I waked thoroughly, sat up as Lance did, as all of us who had been drowsing came awake. Modred looked like death—no sleep, no food or drink but what I had brought him: it showed.

  “Lady Dela, it’s answered. The transmissions—there’s an urgency—” He turned and started touching controls, bringing up a sequence of images, that was all dots and squiggles and lines and circles. “We’ve rationalized its number system, gotten its chemistry—it’s methane. There are all kinds of systems on the wheel—” He brought up another diagram, that was all a jumble of lines, and he pointed to it as my lady and Griffin got to their feet. “There, see—”

  “I don’t make any sense of it,” Dela said.

  “There.” Modred’s hand described a circle: I could see it among the lines when I looked for it, among the other shapes that radiated out from it. And then it made sense—the wheel and the ships appended to it, and the network of tubes that wove them all so that the whole looked like a crown seen from above, with rays and braidings going out in all directions. Modred’s thin finger lighted on a single point of this. “This is the Maid. Here. Oxygen.” His finger underlined a series of dots, and swept to another, impossibly complicated series of dots inside the wheel. “That’s methane out there. But here—” His finger swept the torus. “See, there’s oxygen, just beyond that partition out there; and a line going that way, from our bow, to that partition. We docked in the wrong segment, and they’ve corrected that. The torus—has seven divisions. Water, here: they must melt ice. And process other things. Here’s a different mix of oxygen; methane/ammonia and sulphur ...”

  “You profess to read this thing’s language?”

  “A dot code, lady.” Modred never looked back, went on showing us his construction—its construction, whosoever it might be. “It’s compartmented, various pressures, I’d guess, various temperatures for all its inhabitants. But these—” His hand went to the network of veins. “Methane. All methane. And we may be dealing with a time difference ... in thought. The creature talking to us sends the images very slowly. But put them together and they animate. Percy—”

  Percy ran it back again to earlier images, and we watched, watched the torus naked of ships; and then ships arriving. We watched the network actually grow, watched the lines start from one ship and penetrate the torus, then penetrate the neighboring ship-figure. The dots in it—I had not noticed, but suddenly there were a lot of them.

  “Do you see?” Modred asked. “The atmosphere in that ship went to methane. It changed.”

  But now the lines were going in both directions. New masses popped up, more ships arriving; or asteroids and whole planetoids swept in, docked like ships, because some of the shapes were tiny and some were unaccountably lumpy. Some acquired lines crossing the torus to other sections. I watched, and I felt cold, so that when Lance put his arm about me, I was grateful. Maybe he was cold too. I reached out for Vivien, while the thing went on building, took her cold hand, but she simply stood there with her eyes fixed on the screen and no response at all to my touching her.

  So the lines advanced, like blind worms, nodding about and leeching onto a ship-form or a bit of rock; and generally the ships went to that complicated pattern that meant methane. So Modred had said. He watched it grow and grow until the network was mostly about the torus. Until Modred pointed to a ship that suddenly appeared amid the net.

  “Ourselves,” he said, and the course of it was all but finished except for the waving of the tubes that attached themselves—so, so sinister those thin lines, and the line that appeared leading in another section, and the arrival of another bit of debris far across the wheel ... something our last jump had swept in, I reckoned.

  And Modred looked back at us then. “It’s shown us our way out,” he said. “We’ve got to open our forward hatch and go to it.”

  “O dear God,” Dela said with a shake of the head.

  “No,” Lynette said. “I don’t think that’s a thing to do that quickly.”

  “You persist,” Modred said, “against the evidence.”

  “Which can be read other ways,” Griffin said. “No.”

  “Lady Dela,” Modred said. Patiently, stone-faced as ever, but his voice was hoarse. “It’s a question of profitability. Some of those ships on the ring didn’t change. At some points that intrusion failed. And others directly next to them changed. So some do drive it off. There’s the tubes, and separately—the wheel itself. It’s made an access out to the point where we touch the wheel. We’re very close to an oxygen section. Very close to where we should have docked. It can let us through where we have to go.”

  “Has it occurred to anyone,” Vivien asked out of turn, “that however complicated—however attractive and rational and difficult the logical jump it’s put us through to reach it—that the thing might lie?”

  A chill went through me. We looked at one another and for a moment no one had anything to say.

  “It’s a born-man,” Percy said in his soft voice. “Or creature. And so it might lie.”

  I felt myself paralyzed. And Modred stood there for a moment with a confusion in his eyes, because he was never set up to understand such things—lies, and structures of untruth.

  Then he turned and walked toward the main board, just a natural kind of movement, but suddenly everyone seemed to think of it and the crew grabbed for him as Lance and Griffin moved all in the same moment

  Modred lunged, too near to be stopped: his hand hit a control and there was a sound of hydraulics forward before Lance reached past Gawain and Percy and Lynn who pinned Modred to the counter. Lance hauled Modred out and swung him about and hit him hard before Griffin could hinder his arm. Modred hit the floor and slid over under the edge of Gawain’s vacant seat, lying sprawled and limp
, but Lance would have gone after him, if not for Griffin—And meanwhile Lynette was working frantically at the board, but there had not been a sound of the hydraulics working again.

  Our lock was open. Modred had opened us up. The realization got through to Dela and she flew across the deck to Griffin and Lance and the rest of them. “Close it—for God’s sake, close it,” Dela cried, and I just stood there with my hands to my mouth because it was clear it was not happening.

  “It’s not working,” Lynn said. “Lady Dela, there’s something in the doorway and the safety’s on—”

  “Override,” Griffin said.

  “There might be someone in the way—”

  “Override.”

  Lynn jabbed the button; and all my nerves flinched from the sound that should have come, maybe cutting some living thing in half—But it failed.

  “They’ve got it braced wide open,” Gawain said. “Percy—get cameras down there—”

  Percy swung about, and reached the keyboard. All of a sudden we had picture and sound, this hideous babble, this conglomeration of serpent bodies in clear focus—serpents and other things as unlovely, a heaving mass within the Maid’s airlock. The second door still held firm, and there was our barrier beyond—there was still that.

  “We’ve got to get down there,” Griffin said.

  “They can’t get through so quickly,” Dela said. Her teeth were chattering.

  “They don’t have to be delicate now they’ve got that outer lock braced open.” Griffin was distraught, his hands on Dela’s shoulders. He looked around at all of us. “Suit up. Now. We don’t know what they may do. Dela, get to the dining hall and just stay there. And get him out of here—” The latter for Modred, who lay unmoving. “Get him out, locked up, out of our way.”

  Lance bent down and dragged Modred up. I started to help, took Modred’s arm, which was totally limp, as if that great blow had broken him—as if all the fire and drive had just burned him out and Lance’s blow had shattered him. For that moment I pitied him, for he never meant to betray us, but he was Modred, made that way and named for it. “Let me,” Percivale said, who was much stronger, and who would treat him gently. So I surrendered him to Percivale, to take away, to lock up where he could do us no more harm.