Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Please.” The doppelganger seemed to shiver. Tears ran down its face. “I think I might. I don’t know. Maybe I’m you, a part of you, and we got separated somehow.”

  “Maybe I’m dreaming this.”

  “Or I am. But I don’t think so. There’s this dark place. I come and go out of it and I don’t know how. You walk and you cover so much ground you can get lost. Maybe you can lose yourself and not get back. I’m afraid that’s what’s happened to Jillan and Paul. I think they’re off looking—looking for their own selves. Like you. They’re not taking this well. I’m scared. Please don’t look like that.”

  “God, what do you expect me to look like?”

  “I know. I know. I feel it like we were still connected when you look like that.”

  “You read my mind. Is that it? You’re the alien. You just pick up on what I think, what I’d think—”

  “Don’t.” The doppelganger shook its head, wiped a fist across its mouth in an expression which was his own. “Don’t do that. I know I’m not. I know. I wouldn’t choose to feel like this if I had a choice. I don’t remember being anything else. I was born at Fargone; Jillan’s my sister; our kin all died—”

  “Cut it!”

  “It’s all I know. It’s all I know, and—Rafe—I remember the jump, remember this place we were in—”

  He remembered too, the terror, the waving arms, the pain, the ungodly pain....

  “I woke up in the dark,” the doppelganger said. “And they were with me, Jillan was, and Paul. And somehow I found you. You were lying on the floor. I tried to get to you. I thought—I thought we were dying then. That I had to get back.”

  “I don’t know why I’m talking to you.” Rafe put his head down, ran his hand through his hair, looked up again in the earnest hope the apparition would have gone. It had not. It stared at him, a mirror image of despair.

  “I’m afraid,” it said. “O God, I’m scared.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He drew a deep breath and got to his feet, came closer and saw the image lose its coherency at close range. “I can see through you.”

  “Can you?”

  “You’re an image. That’s all you are.” He kept walking till the image lost all its coherency and he moved into it. He saw it projected around his outstretched hand. “Fake!”

  “But I’m here,” the voice persisted, forlorn, with an edge of panic. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Back off. Please back off.”

  He swept his arm about as if that could scatter it, like vapor. “You’re nothing, hear?”

  There was no answer. The image reconstituted itself a little way away, naked and frightened looking. Tears still glistened on its face.

  “I think,” it said, “I think—somehow they made me. I don’t know how. While you were asleep. O God, hold onto me. Please hold onto me.”

  “How?” The terror in the voice was real. It hurt him, so that at once he wanted to deal it hurt and heal it. “I can’t touch you. You’re not here, do you hear me? Wherever you are, it’s not here.”

  “I think—think they made me out of you. Up to—I don’t know how long ago—we have the same memories, because I was you.” The doppelganger folded his hands over his nakedness, wistful, lost-looking, in a dreadful calm. “I’m really scared. But I guess I haven’t got title to be. All I am—I guess—is you.”

  “Look—” he said to himself, hurting for himself, feeling half mad. “Look, where are you? Can you tell that?”

  “Here. Just here. There’s that other place. But it’s only dark. I don’t want to go back there.”

  “I think—I think they’ve made some kind of android.”

  “I might be.”

  “The Jillan and Paul with you—they’re like you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Bring them here.”

  “I don’t know how to look.”

  “Liar.” He flung his arm at the doppelganger, somewhere between hate and pity. “Go try.”

  “It’s dark out there.”

  He wanted to laugh, to curse, to weep. He did none of them, feeling a shaking in his knees, a mounting terror. He had never liked dark confined spaces. Crawlways, like Fargone mines. “Go on,” he said. “Come back when you know something.”

  And that too was mad.

  “Will you—” his double asked, in a faint thin voice, “will you find something to call me—so I have a name?”

  “Name yourself.”

  “You name me,” the other said, and sent chills up his spine.

  “Rafe,” Rafe said. He could not commit that ultimate robbery. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

  The shoulders straightened, the head came up, touching a chord in him, as if he had discovered courage in himself he had never seen. “That’s what I am,” the doppelganger said. “Brother.”

  And it walked away.

  What it had said chilled him, that it had said a thing he had not dreamed to say.

  He sat down where he was, locked his arms over his head, thinking that he might have witnesses.

  He looked up when he had got his breath back.

  “If you’ve built that thing,” he said to the walls, able to think of it as thing when he was not staring at it face to face, “you’ve got some way to interpret it. Haven’t you? You understand? Why are you doing this?”’

  There was no answer. He sat there until the strength had returned to his legs and then he began carefully to retrace his way back to the small horror that was his, the place stocked with food that he could use.

  Habitat, he thought. As if I were an animal. He nursed hope, all the same, that if he had come through it, if the pain was done, then their captors were only being careful. It did not guarantee that they were benign. There were darknesses in his mind that refused to come into the light, the memory of the ship that had done what no ship ought to do; of pain—but they might have been ignorant, or in a hurry to save them.

  So he built up his hope. The lights came on ahead of him, at an easy pace. He went, looking over his shoulder from time to time, and quickly forward, fearing ambushes.

  He remembered the bogey’s size, like the starstation itself. Hurling that into jump took more power than any engine had a right to use; and for the rest, for technology that could tear a mind apart and reconstitute it inside an android—that was the stuff of suppositions and what-ifs, spacers’ yarns and books. No one did such things.

  No one jumped a station-sized mass. By the laws he knew, nothing could, that did not conform to the conditions of a black hole. And it did it from virtual standstill.

  He did not run when he had home in sight; he restrained himself, but his knees were shaking.

  He sat down when he had gotten there, in the chair before the disjointed console, in the insane debris of Lindy’s corpse, and bowed his head onto his arms, because it ached.

  Ached as if something were rent away from him.

  He wiped his eyes and idly flipped a switch, jumped when a screen flared to life and gave him star-view.

  He tried the controls, and there was nothing.

  Com, he thought, and spun the chair about flipping switches, opening a channel, hoping it went somewhere. “Hello,” he said to it, to whatever was listening. “Hello—hello.”

  “Aaaiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!”

  “Damn.” he yelled back at it, reaction; and trembled after he had cut it off.

  He went on, shaking, trying not to think at all, putting himself through insane routine of instrument checkout, as if he were still on Lindy’s bridge and not managing her pieces in this madness.

  Com was connected to something—what, he had no wish to know. Vid gave him starfield, but he had no referent. The computer still worked, at least in areas the board had not lost. The lights still worked; one of the fans did, insanely; their tapes were still there, but the music would break his heart.

  He slumped over finally and hid
the sight of it from his eyes, suspecting worse ahead. It played games with him. He already knew that they were cruel.

  IV

  There was the dark, forever the void, and Rafe moved in it, calling sometimes—“Jillan, Paul—” but no one answered.

  He should have been cold, he thought; but he had no more sense of the air about him than he had of the floor underfoot.

  He turned in different directions, in which he found himself making slower and slower progress, as if he walked against a wind and then found himself facing (he thought) entirely a different direction than before.

  “Aaaiiiiiiiiii!” something howled at him, went rushing past with a glow and a wail like nothing he had ever heard, and he scrambled back, braced for an attack.

  It went away, just sped off insanely howling into the dark, and he sank down and crouched there in his nakedness, protecting himself in the only way he had, which was simply to hug his knees close and sit and tremble, totally blind except for the view of his own limbs.

  “Jillan,” he whispered to the void, terrified of making any noise, any sound that would bring the howler back. His own gold-glowing flesh seemed all too conspicuous, beacon to any predator.

  Android. He reminded himself what he was, that he could not be harmed; but his memories insisted he was Rafe Murray. It was all he knew how to be. And he knew now that they were not alone in this dark place.

  At last he got himself to his feet and moved again, no longer sure in what direction he had been going, no longer sure but what the darkness concealed traps ahead, or that he was not being stalked behind.

  “Jillan,” he called aloud. “Paul.”

  Had that been one of the aliens—that passing, mindless wail, or some other victim fleeing God-knew-what ahead?

  What is this place?

  They were androids. That was what they were, what he had been when he had met his living body—met Rafe. Something had projected him into that green-noded corridor.

  But then, he reasoned, Rafe ought to have been a projection sent in turn to him, and he had not been. Viewpoint troubled him, how he had seen through hologrammatic eyes. How that Rafe had thrust his hand into the heart of him and cursed him—Evaporate, why don’t you?

  Why not? a small voice said. If I’m an android they can make me what they like. Can’t they?

  Maybe they have.

  Fake, that other Rafe had said, screaming at him his outrage at self-robbery.

  That Rafe Murray had the scars, the bruises, the pain that proved his title to flesh and life.

  Where are we? Where are Jillan and Paul? What will they do to us? What have they done already and what am I?

  “Jillan,” he screamed with all his force. “Paul! Answer me! Answer me ...” with the terror that he would never find them, that they had been taken away to some final disposition, and that it would take him soon, questions all unanswered.

  Why did they make us?

  He feared truths, that whoever had made him could throw some switch and bring him somewhere else, back where they had made him, back to that place with the machinery and the blood; perhaps would unmake him then. He feared death—that it was still possible for him.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaauuuuu!” Another thing passed him, roaring like some machine out of control, and he stopped, stood trembling until it had faded into the distance.

  “Stop playing games with me,” he said quietly, trusting of a sudden that something heard him better than it would hear that other, living Rafe. “Do you hear me? I’m not impressed.”

  Could it speak any human tongue? Had it learned, was it learning now?

  “Damn you,” he said conversationally, shrugged and kept walking, pretending indifference inside and out. But the cold that was not truly in the air had lodged beneath the heart. God, he appealed to the invisible—he was Catholic, at least the Murrays had always been; but God—God was for something that had the attributes of life.

  Rafe One had God; he had Them. It. Whatever had made him. It might flip a switch, speak a word, reach into him and turn him inside out for a joke. That was power enough.

  “Jillan!” he yelled, angry—He could still feel rage, proving—proving what? he wondered. The contradictions multiplied into howling panic. “Jillan!”

  “Rafe?”

  He turned, no more anywhere than before, in the all-encompassing dark. He saw a light coming to him, that wafted as if a wind blew it. It was Paul, and Jillan came running in his wake.

  “Rafe,” Jillan cried, and met him and hugged him, warm, naked flesh that reminded him flesh existed here—synthetic? he remembered. Paul hugged him too; and his mind went hurtling back to that howling thing in the dark, remembering that here it would be palpable and true, He shivered in their arms.

  “There are things in here,” Jillan said.

  “I know, I know. I heard them,” he said, holding her, being held, until the shivers went away.

  “Don’t go off from us again,” Paul said. “Dammit, Rafe, we could get lost in here.”

  He broke into laughter, sobbed instead. He touched Jillan’s earnest, offended face and saw her fear. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Dark, “Jillan said. “Just dark. No way out.”

  “I met someone,” he said to them, and let the words sink in, watching their faces as the sense of it got through. “I met someone.”

  “Who?” Jillan asked, carefully, ever so carefully, as if she feared his mind had gone.

  “Myself. The body that we saw. There in the corridor. He wants to talk to you.”

  “You mean you went back,” said Paul.

  “I talked to him.”

  “Him?”

  “Myself. He’s alive, you understand that? I met him—face to face. Jillan—” he said, for she began to turn to Paul. “Jillan—we’re not—not the real ones. They’ve made us. The memories, our bodies—We’re not real.”

  There was devastated silence.

  “If we could get back,” said Paul.

  “It’s not a question of getting back,” Rafe said, catching at Paul’s arm. “Paul, we’re constructs.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  Rafe laughed, a sickly, sorrowful mirth. “Yes,” he said. “Out of his. The way you came out of Paul’s; and Jillan’s out of her. Constructs, hear? Androids. Robots. Our senses—aren’t reliable. We got only what the ones who made us want. God knows where we really are.”

  “Stop, it!” Jillan cried, shaking at his arms. “Rafe, stop it, you hear me?”

  He seized her and hugged her close, felt her trembling—Could an android grieve? But it was Jillan’s grief, Jillan’s terror. His sister’s. Paul’s. It was unbearable, this pain; and like the other it did not look to stop.

  “Rafe,” Paul said, and pulling him away into his arms, pressed his head against his shoulder and tried to soothe him as if he had gone stark mad. There was the smell of their flesh, cool and human in this sterility; the touch of their hands; the texture of their hair—Real, his senses told him. Someone was playing with their minds; that was the answer. That’s why Rafe’s solid to me and I’m not that way to him.

  “Please,” he said, pushing away from them. “Come with me. Let me take you to him. Talk with him.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” Jillan’s eyes had all space and void in their depths. “Rafe, pull yourself together. Don’t go off like this. They’re tricks. They’re all just tricks. They’re working on our minds, that’s what’s happening. That’s why none of this makes sense.”

  “Get out of it, how, Jillan? We came through jump. Lindy’s in pieces, back there in that hall.”

  “It’s illusion. They want us to think it is. They’re lying, you understand?”

  “Jump wasn’t a lie.”

  “We’ve got to do something to get out of here.”

  “Jillan—” He wanted to believe her. He wanted it with all his mind. But he suspected a dreadful thing, staring into her eyes. He suspected a whole spectrum
of dreadful truths, and did not know how to tell her. “Jillan,” he said as gently as he could. “Jillan, he wants to talk to you and Paul, he wants it very much.”

  “There is no he!” Paul shouted.

  “Then come with me and prove it.”

  “There’s no proving it. There’s no proving anything about an illusion, except you put your hand into it and it isn’t there.”

  “He did that to me. Put his hand through me. I wasn’t there.”

  “You’re talking crazy,” Paul said.

  “All you have to do is come with me. Talk to him.”

  “It’s one of them. That’s what it is.”

  “Maybe it is,” Rafe said. He felt cold, as if a wind had blown over his soul. “But prove it to me. I’ll do anything you want if you can prove it to me. Come and make me believe it. I want to believe you’re right.”

  “Rafe,” Jillan said.

  “Come with me,” he said, and when they seemed disposed to refuse: “Where else can we find anything out for sure?”

  “All right,” Jillan said, though Paul muttered otherwise. “All right. I’m coming. Come on, Paul.”

  She took his hand. Paul came up on his other side. He turned back the way he had come, as near he could remember, walking with two-meter strides, not knowing even if he could find that place again. But the moment he started to move it began to be about him again, the light, the noded, green-gossamer corridor, Lindy’s wreckage like flotsam on a reef.

  And the other Rafe, the living one, sat on the floor against the wall. That Rafe looked up in startlement and scrambled stiffly to his feet, wincing with the pain.

  “Rafe,” Rafe said, for it had been a long and lonely time, how long he did not know, only he had had time to meddle uselessly with the console, to shave and wash, and sleep. And now the doppelganger was back, in the shadows where his image showed best, naked as before.

  And on either side of him arrived Jillan and Paul, naked, pitiful in their fear.

  At least their images—whose eyes rested on him in horror, and warned him by that of their fragility. He could not hurt them. His own doppelganger—that was himself, but Jillan and Paul drove a wedge into his heart. “He found you,” he said to them, patient of cruel illusion, of anything that gave him their likenesses, even if it mocked him in the gift.