Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Welfare agents?

  Paul?

  Things muddled in his mind, defense collapsing.

  “Paul,” he murmured, and felt the invasion of his mind, the superfluity of limbs which worked against his will.

  “They’re there,” Paul whispered to him. It seemed that he could see the folk of Icarus far across the dark. “There they are.”

  “Crazy,” Rafe whispered back; and in a paroxysm of effort: “Paul—you died.”

  “Good,” Paul said, quite satisfied with his state. “They’re Icarids, Rafe. Aren’t they? Let’s go do something about them, why don’t we?”’

  The legs moved.

  “No,” Rafe cried, “no, no, no.”

  And Paul enjoyed it. It was a weapon, Rafe’s fear, and he had mastered it.

  They were no nearer than they had ever been on that dark and starless plain, the horizonless void which felt like nothing to their feet. The glow moved steadily, changing angles as they did, as if some invisible line connected it and them.

  “It’s leading us,” Rafe said, glancing aside as he said it; and Paul agreed the same heartfrozen moment that something turned up in their midst, all black segmented coils and legs glowing yellow, at their joints as if light escaped. It towered among them, in nodding blind movements of its head.

  “Aaaiiii!” it wailed.

  “Get back,” Jillan cried, hauling at his arm. “Run, for God’s sake, run! Paul! It can’t catch us—”

  It did. Shock numbed his nonexistent bones, ached in his joints as it roiled into him and out again. “Paul!” Jillan yelled; she and Rafe came back to distract it from him, darting this way and that.

  “Help,” came a strange multiple voice, choruslike, as it pursued their darting nuisance to it. “Help, help, help—”

  “Look out!” Paul cried, for Jillan misjudged: he flung himself at it as Rafe did, as she screamed.

  It hit like high voltage: the beast itself yelped and writhed aside. All of them screamed, and then was silence.

  Paul froze ... in the numbness after shock, the fear that Jillan and Rafe were likewise crippled—all these things applied. Most, it was the voice, the dreadful voice that wailed at them and stole wits with its frightfulness. “Help,” it kept saying, and its forward end nodded up and down serpentlike, like something blind. It made a whistling sound. “Rafe? Rafe? Fles-sh-sh.”

  “O God,” Jillan, breathed, moving then, tugging backward at their arms. “Get back, hear me—get back. It’s nothing we can handle, not this thing—”

  “Lonely,” it said, snuffling; it had the sound of a ventilation system, a periodic sibilance. “F-f-flesh-sh. Rafe—lonely.”

  “Don’t!” Paul cried, for it had encircled them, leaving them nowhere left to run. And to nothing at all, to the betraying, light-less air: “Kepta! Help!”

  “Can’t,” it said, snuffled, in its myriad of voices. “Name—can’t—Aaaaiiieee!”

  “It’s that howler-thing!” Jillan cried.

  “Aaaaaaee,” it said. The head swayed back again and aimed toward the dark. “Came to this ship. We. Long time—long—Crazy, some. Rafe-mind ran.”

  “What, ran?” Rafe Three asked it.

  “Fight,” it said, blind head questing. “Fight.” The voices entered unison. “—go with. Fought once. Paul—” The head nodded off toward the star, the glow along the horizon, that seemed nearer now.

  “What are you?” Paul asked.

  “Fought once,” it said, which seemed the sum of its identity. It started off, in pursuit of the ebbing light.

  Dead, Paul reminded himself. You’re already dead. Quit worrying. Time’s short. And he wished that death was all.

  “Come on,” he said to Jillan and Rafe Three, because he saw nothing else to do. He started walking in the wake of the looping creature, which humped and zigged its way through the dark like some great sea creature aswim in the murk, with graceful fluidity.

  Rafe was by him; he never doubted his constancy; and Jillan at his other side, never faltering.

  The star grew in their sight.

  Worm came circling back to them when the will-o’-the-wisp they chased had begun to shine globular and planetlike in the dark.

  “Paul,” Worm named that light. “Rafe. Pain.”

  “Take us there,” Rafe Two demanded, of that Jillan-shape that had come to them. “Take us there, you hear me? If you want your enemies fought, then, dammit, let us out of here!”

  And the shadow-eyes turned from regarding the wall, came back to them, so full of secrets that a chill stirred all through Rafe’s own all-too-substantial bones.

  “You,” Jillan yelled at Jillan-shape, “answer, will you? Why do you keep us here?”

  “For his defense,” it said; Jillan/Marandu in a far, soft voice. “For yours.”

  “Kepta cares,” Rafe Two said in heaviest bitterness. “I’m sure.”

  “For his defense,” it said again, making different sense than before.

  “For Kepta’s?” Rafe asked, himself. “Is that the game?”

  “Game.” The thing stood there with that infinity-look, god/goddesslike in stillness. “That’s not what to call it. The ship is at risk. We’re all at risk. There are always quarrels. Some would like to sleep. Some find that more comfortable. Time wears—on some. But we go on doing what we were set to do.”

  “What?” Rafe asked. He stood behind Rafe Two’s shoulder, dodged round him, to the fore as if he were solid, out of courtesy. “What were you set to do? What are you up to?”

  “Some passengers never ask,” Marandu said. “There’s one, for instance, completely without curiosity. It doesn’t dream either. But it knows a lot of things. It can’t dream because it can’t forget. Different approaches to consciousness.”

  “Stop the nonsense,” Jillan snapped at it. “You’ve got your fingers in my mind right now. You can guess what I’d ask; so answer it.”

  “Where the others are?” A blink. “But you don’t know that. You think you’re physical. So do they.” It cast a disturbed look at Rafe. “You know. Kepta knows you know. You saw the apparatus. You ought to have told them.”

  A chill like ice came over him, foreknowledge of harm.

  “What’s it mean?” Rafe Two asked. “Rafe, what’s it saying?”

  “You don’t have physical bodies,” Rafe said. He turned his shoulder to the intruder, to look instead at them. “Patterns, Computerlike. Simulacra. You’re not physical.”

  “What do you mean?” Jillan asked. “Make sense, Rafe.”

  “I’m making the best I know.”

  “We’re here,” Jillan said.

  “Position in the ship,” said Jillan/Marandu, “is simultaneous. You only control a small priority. Kepta’s, mine—is virtually universal in the circuitry. Size—is illusory; distance is; all these things—are what you choose to manifest. What I choose—in your shape.”

  “You mean we’re bloody programs?” Rafe Two cried, and with a wild, despairing look: “Rafe?”

  “You’re real,” Rafe said. “You go on living, changing. You always knew that. Is a separate body so important?”

  “Oh, damn,” Rafe Two breathed, and shook his head. “Dammit, twin.”

  “Rafe,” Paul said fretfully, stepping through the counter. “He doesn’t know. Paul doesn’t know ... what he’s up against out there. They don’t know what they are. Marandu—whatever you call yourself—Send me to him. Now. While there’s time.”

  There was doubt in Jillan/Marandu. It showed in the eyes, in the nervous clench of hands to the breast. Indecision.

  “Where’s Kepta?” Rafe asked, in sudden, horrid certainty. “Marandu, has Kepta—place?”

  The head jerked in a faint—perhaps—negation.,

  “What is Kepta, Marandu?”

  “I,” it said, flinching back, almost fading out. It looked afraid. “I’m one version.”

  “One?”

  “One,” it said.

  It had grown from globe to legged
shape to figure, still coasting along the formless horizon in the dark.

  But the legs were many; the reverse-silhouette warned of deformity.

  “Steady,” Paul told his companions, told himself, for now he truly knew why he had come, that it was his monster; and that in one sense and perhaps both shapes he was to die here, again, and soon. He searched for Rafe’s hand, Jillan’s, hugged them close; and Worm lurched along beside him.

  The light receded then.

  “It’s running away,” Jillan said. “How can it get distance on us, when we can’t catch it?”

  “Now,” said Worm in its multiplicity of voices. “Fight. Fight now.”

  “How?” Paul asked it. He had nerved himself, and now in default, the old weakness came back, the old insecurity, deadly as swallowed glass, and worked within his gut. He should not have taken the lead. He was not up to this. It outmaneuvered him—that easily.

  Then he cast a look at Worm, one wild surmise. “Worm—how? How do you come and go?”

  It knotted upon its coils like a wounded snake, convulsed, phased with them in one aching shock that hit the nerves and fled.

  “O God,” Rafe moaned, catching his balance where it had thrown him, as it had thrown them all. Jillan gasped and staggered on her feet, and Paul—Paul refused to think of ground or up or down, but absorbed the shock and shuddered.

  Homeworld, he thought out of some source like old memories; remembered—a world like orange ice, with skies that melted and ran; with lightnings like faint glow constant in the clouds; and drifters, drifters with no color at all except the backflare of the clouds—That you? he whispered to Worm. Was that you? But whatever Worm had tried to say was gone.

  The nodding head touched him, and now, with the whiskered, chitin-armored head thrust up before him, it arched its body and presented to him the upper surface; five jewels shone atop its head, black and glistening, and he thought of eyes.

  “Come,” it whispered back, and its bristles quivered. “Passage.”

  There was difference in the dark, as if something dire had happened, and yet nothing had changed.

  Except suddenly, to their left, a figure loomed distinct.

  “O God,” Jillan said. “It’s moved us—”—meaning Worm; for they were where the enemy was.

  Paul stood still, and Rafe did beside him, facing this nightmare, this many-limbed amalgam of themselves, a thing of legs and arms and faces. It turned slowly, presenting Paul-face to them, and it smiled with a gorgon look.

  “The thing got you here,” Paul One said. “I wonder if it can get you out. What do you think?”

  And Rafe-face answered: “Kill it, Rafe, kill it, stop it, stop him—”

  “Let me hold you,” said Paul One, offering its arms; and Worm gibbered: “No—”

  “What do we do?” Rafe asked, Rafe Three, tight and low, backing up until they made one line with Jillan. “Paul, did it tell you what to do?”

  “Worm,” Paul said, his gut liquid with fear. “Worm, get us out of here!”

  They were elsewhere, at a little greater distance. They hugged one another in shock, trembling. Paul held Jillan; Rafe held them both; and Worm made a circle about them, looping and making small hisses of defiance or consternation.

  Lost, Paul thought. We’re lost, we’re helpless against that thing.

  And then he remembered Jillan, and took her gold-glowing face between his hands, making her look up at him. “It hasn’t got you,” he said. “It hasn’t got you, Jillan. That monster’s one short. We’re one stronger. You’re my difference.”

  “I can’t do it, Paul. Can’t.”

  You must meet it on its own terms, Kepta had said.

  You will know what to do when you see it, or if you don’t, you were bound to fail....

  “There’s one way,” he said to her, “one way we can meet it all at once, the way it is, on its terms.” Jillan looked so much afraid, for once in her life afraid. He wanted to cry for her; wanted to hit out at whatever threatened them, and instead he touched Jillan’s face, reminding himself they both were dead and hopeless and illusion only. Rafe had more than he: a living self. And less, far less. “Want you to trust me,” he said, “Jillan; want you to do with me—with me—what it’s done to Rafe. Just slip inside; we’re not that substantial: it did it. So can we.”

  There was already contact. She pressed herself against him then, harder and harder. “I can’t, she said then. “I can’t. You’re solid to me.”

  He tried too, from his side. “Rafe,” he said, extending his left arm, and Rafe came against them, held them tight with all his strength, but there was no merging.

  “Won’t work,” Jillan said, “won’t.”—And he felt all too much the fool, trying the possible-impossible, the thing that Paul did, that Kepta did as a matter of course. Worm looped about them all, circled, wailing its distress. “Help,” It cried. “Help, help—”

  Worm.

  “Worm—how do you do it? How do you pass through us? Show us, Worm!”

  “Make,” Worm said.

  “What—make? Make what?”

  It whipped through their substance with one narrowing of its legged coils. Rafe screamed, becoming part of it, and Jillan—

  The pain reached him. His vision divided, became circular, different from his own, and he owned many legs—

  —view of skies like running paint, lightnings, repeated shocks, the sound of thunders never ceasing—

  Fargone swinging in ceaseless revolution; Lindy’s dingy boards; the oncoming toad-shaped craft and, the merchanter John Liles—

  Got to destruct, destruct, destruct—All those kids and lives—

  A thousand of them, Rafe—

  —self-abandonment—

  It’s dumping!—

  Jillan’s voice, reprieve, with his finger on the button, the red button that was a ship’s last option—

  Cool and calm: It’s dumping, Paul—

  We’re here, Rafe said, calmer and calmer now.

  We’re—wherever we’ve gotten to. Take it easy, Paul; easy—

  The pain had stopped. Worm eased from their body. Their hearing picked up multiple sound from somewhere, like wind rushing; there was—if they opened their eyes—too much sight, though the universe was black; and the knowledge ripped one way and the other like tides, memories viewed from one side and the other, shredded, revised.

  —walkwalkwalk—

  Some one of the multiple brain chose movement: Rafe, Paul thought; Paul tried to cooperate. There was progress of a kind.

  Awkward trifaced thing maneuvering into Paul’s way. There was humor in that self-image, even in extremity: that was Rafe-mind, steady and self-amused.

  I love you, Paul thought to their amalgamated self over and over again, without reservation, without stint; and got it back, Rafe-flavored. He wanted Jillan too; felt her fear, her reserve against all their wants: it was all too absolute.

  Me, she insisted, me, myself, I, I, I—even while she moved her limbs in unison with them. There was pain in that.

  “We need you,” Paul whispered, desperate. He knew, of a sudden, knew what privacy in Jillan this union threatened. She shielded them from her own weapons, from rage, from resentment, every violence.

  “You’re our defense, Jillan; Rafe’s our solid core; me—I go for him when I can get at him. But I need what you’ve got—all of it, hear—no secrets, Jillan-love.”

  “No one needs all,” Jillan flung back at them both. “But that was always what you asked.”

  It stung, it burned. It took them wrathfully inside itself and taught them privacy.

  No one, thought Jillan-mind, with a ferocity that numbed, no one can ask myself of me.

  Our shield, Paul whispered to Rafe, in the belly of this amalgam they had become. Give way. Give up for now. Let Jillan have her way.

  There was outrage left: memories of Fargone docks, of Welfare and Security.

  You asked it. That was Rafe, in self-defense.

  I
never asked. You made up your own mind what I should be.

  His arm was broken. He had never talked. He never would.

  There was terror (Jillan now) in the dark, hiding there, dodging a drunken spacer who had a yen for a fourteen-year-old, a kid without ship name to defend her—she eluded him, hurled invective at him; shook, afterward, for long, stomach-wracking minutes.

  Grandmother had a number (Paul-mind, in self-defense) which all lab-born had.

  “Why don’t I?” he had asked, wanting to be like this tranquil model of his life. He touched the number, fascinated by it. He could see it forever, fading-purple against Gran’s pale mine-bleached skin, against frail bones and the raised tracery of veins under silk-soft skin. It was one with the touch of Gran’s hand, the softest thing he knew; but she had wielded blasters, shoved rock, had a mechanical leg from a rockfall in the deep. Her eyes, her wonderful eyes, black as all the pits, her mouth seamed and sere and very strong: the number brought back that moment.

  “You don’t want one,” his mother said, harshly, as harshly as she ever spoke to him. “Fool kid, you don’t want one of those.”

  “Your gran’s lab-born,” a girl had said once, seven and cruel as seven came, the day his gran had died. “Made her in a tank. That’s what they did. Bet they made a dozen.”

  He had cried at the funeral; his mother did, which reassured him of her humanity.

  But perhaps, he thought even then, she was pretending.

  “None of her damn business,” Jillan-mind insisted of that seven-year-old, with a great and cleansing wrath; and Rafe was only sorry, gentler, in his way. “Stupid kid,” he said. There was no doubt in them of humanity; the memory grew clean, purged; “She loved you,” Rafe-mind said, confusing his own half-forgotten spacer mother with the daughter of lab-born gran. He knew; Jillan knew; there was no doubt at all in them, why a woman would work all her life and hardly see her son—to leave him station-share, the sum of all she had, her legacy. Merchanters knew, who had bought a ship with the sum of their own years.

  They progressed; limbs began to work.

  Rafe’s suffering in this—a stray thought from Paul, shame, before the man who was so godlike perfect, feeling his horror at the shambling thing they had become.