Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Being a Stoic, I can receive impulses that warn me, “That candle flame is going to burn my fingers if I touch it,” but I can say, through experience, “Only if I’m too slow.” And I can put it out with my fingers.

  Being a Stoic, I can say, “I control my own perceptions. I am completely in charge of my own happiness. If I am unhappy, it is my own fault. So I can be happy if I can change the situation or change my own opinion.” Both require energy. Both are a bit of work—but usually worth it.

  As to whether it is worth it—that’s my choice. So everything is my choice.

  Others are also free to choose. I’m not in control of them.

  There are, besides that, forces larger than I am. If I fall off a boat a thousand miles from shore I can’t think I’m not drowning, though I suppose a positive thought would make the situation more pleasant. What I am responsible for, when outgunned, is my state of mind, and being able to say, “Well, this is an interesting phenomenon. I wonder how deep it is ...” is a way of life for a writer who enjoys her craft.

  But there are people who carry the art of positive thinking to an extreme.

  To them ... this book is dedicated.

  I

  Man is the measure of all things.

  —Protagoras

  Freedom was one of those places honest ships avoided, a pleasant world of a pleasant star, but lacking a station at which ships could dock, and by reason of its location on the limb’s sparse edge, inconvenient for ships on fixed schedules.

  A few outsiders came here, pirates who were afforded a shuttle landing, and who therefore restrained themselves from their habitual destructions, preferring to charge exorbitant prices selling what on Freedom were rare goods. There were occasional free merchants with similar larceny in mind, but there was also a strong likelihood of meeting one of Freedom’s piratical clients in the neighborhood, and that prospect discouraged most merchants of any category. Freedom was moreover a poor world, in outsider reckoning. It had grain and preserved meats and vegetables. That attracted the pirates, who had no world at their disposal and needed such things; it did not attract much trade of other sorts.

  There were inevitably the military ships, who came pursuing the pirates on one of the occasional campaigns for order, whenever the pirates had gotten too daring and touched off a hunt, or when the powers which ran the Alliance decided it was time to hold a military exercise.

  Freedom had no ships of its own, not since the original, which had once been intended as an orbiting station, but which had finally, through disuse and failure of its maintenance, broken up in a spectacular display over the Sunrise Sea. Freedom had assets, sunny skies over large land masses, abundant population both indigenous and human—a condition completely contrary to Science Bureau regulations, since they mingled without safeguards. There was in fact no place on all of Freedom where both human and ahnit could not in theory mingle unchecked and without expectation of violence, a condition superior to that of some worlds under Science Bureau management and control. Freedom possessed broad, moderately saline oceans, reasonable weather with rainfall in convenient places, an oxygen/nitrogen/carbon-dioxide atmosphere with replenishment by vegetation, a vegetation which incidentally furnished inhabitants a minimum of ordinary difficulties with natural poisons and allergens. Tides, under the benign influence of the large single moon, bathed white sand beaches and thundered majestically against basalt, jungled cliffs, sufficient to have inspired poetry in the deadest souls. Humanity thrived on Freedom, multiplying at a rate sufficient to give the main zone of settlement, on the curved, many-peninsulaed continent named Sartre, a very respectable shuttleport city, Kierkegaard, with industry and manufacture sufficient to supply the needs of the farmers who ploughed Sartre’s fertile plains. Freedom was almost totally agricultural, virgin abundance well-suited to man (or ahnit), and its lack of trade was no handicap to the economy.

  But even the pirates refused to go outside Kierkegaard’s port area, and the occasional military personnel who paid official visits to the Residency and the First Citizen, went and returned as swiftly as possible, staying to modern Port Street, which tall firebush hedges screened from the rest of the town.

  Curiously, Freedom was not a notorious world, not, like Gehenna II and some of the limb’s other plague spots, a breeding ground of legends. Those who had visited Freedom had no wish to talk about it, indeed, tried to ignore it as thoroughly as ships avoided it in their courses.

  It was not that it was a place where humanity failed, or where men lost their souls to the strangeness of aliens.

  Freedom was a mutual failure.

  II

  Instructor Harfeld: What is truth?

  Herrin: Whatever is real, sir.

  Instructor Harfeld: What is reality?

  Herrin: Whatever the strongest thinks it is, sir.

  Instructor Harfeld: Who is that, Herrin?

  Herrin: Here? In this room?

  Instructor Harfeld: Of us two, who is stronger?

  Herrin: You’re older.

  Instructor Harfeld. Does that make me stronger?

  Herrin: Right now it does.

  Herrin Law thrived on Freedom, young, well favored by nature, chance, and the powers which governed the world. “He’s gifted,” the instructional supervisor had visited the Law household to say one night: Herrin recalled the night with perfect clarity through the years, the amazing visit of a man all the way from the township of Camus, to their bare-boards farmhouse in Law’s Valley, where he and his father and mother and sister had been gathered in their town best clothes to see this caller, who had come all the way out from the township to report the result of his first tests. “He’ll be University material,” the man—citizen Harfeld—had told his parents. His parents had cried a little after the visit, as if it were some kind of disaster; but during it, citizen Harfeld had patted him on the shoulder and congratulated him on a talent so rare that Camus could not possibly nurture it properly.... “He’ll have the taped courses, to be sure,” Harfeld had said, “up to appropriate level; there’ll be a government stipend, all the best for such a special student. An educator searches a lifetime for such talents—rarely finds them.” So Herrin had swelled up with a seven-year-old’s vulnerable pride in himself and understood that he was something different from anyone else in the house, so he was already able to look at his parents’ reaction from a certain distance of that specialness. His older sister looked on him differently, too, and seemed to shrink after that special night, casting furtive looks at him, jealousy and perhaps a little self doubt, which increased over the years, and cast her in a new role of second sibling despite their sequence of birth. She developed a whole new bearing after that night; and so did he.

  He loved his family, from his slight distance. He was capable of being wounded when his parents petted his sister Perrin in a different way than they did him. He clung to the consciousness that he would be leaving and that in a way he had already left them; and Perrin because she was a walking wound, and she was the one who would stay with them into their old age. Perrin was duty. She tormented herself with her inferiority; she lost all confidence, and bestowed superiority on others who had her about them. Perrin was uncertainty and self-doubt; Perrin clung; and Herrin, after that night of the visitor, was simply separate, understanding the position his precocity enabled him to enjoy as virtual outsider. That this was the price of superiority, that the same height from which he looked down on others and analyzed their feelings, also obliged him to live removed from the run of humanity. He grew up extraordinarily handsome and more graceful than his agemates; grew up with a sensible reserve which made it possible for him to associate with agemates less mature and less self-assured than he. He was confident of his merit and basked in slightly lonely love, loved in return from that height at which he lived; and tolerated jealousy with the understanding that those less favored had to have some defenses. He was kind because no cruelty had ever shaken him from that plateau on which he lived, since that
momentous visit. Love poured up to him, and he rained it down again.

  III

  Perrin: I hate you.

  Herrin: Yes. I know.

  Perrin: You want everything.

  Herrin: Yes. I do.

  Perrin: That’s not fair. What do I get?

  Herrin: Take what you want from me.

  Perrin: How?

  Herrin: Just do it. Be stronger. Take it.

  Perrin: How?

  Herrin: (Silence).

  He felt pain when he parted with his family, seventeen and bound for University in Kierkegaard. They cried, even Perrin, but his parents cried because they were hurting at losing him and Perrin cried because.... Perrin’s tears were more complex constructions, he thought, jouncing along in the leather seat of the Camus bus over the dirt roads, and eventually over the smoother road on the weekly Camus-Kierkegaard run. Perrin cried for herself, and that she saw a chance departing which had never been hers.

  They would all be happier without him, he reckoned, leaning his head disconsolately against the window brace and watching the cultivated fields roll past the unwashed windows. He had been too strong for them, and despite all the tears of various quality shed at his parting—the wound would heal now; Perrin might blossom in her share of the sun, a belated, slightly twisted blossoming, to be sure, but it was possible now; and his parents could devote themselves to their more comfortable offspring and he—he could draw breath in a somewhat wider room. That reasoning did not entirely cure the loneliness, but he was used to separation in all its aspects. He did not, with the confidence he possessed, brood overmuch on other possibilities. He would not choose to be anyone but Herrin Law, eminently satisfied with his fortunes. He had seen Perrin, who was popular, and unlike Perrin, he understood the reason of her popularity, and he was too kind to explain it to her: he simply congratulated himself that he was not Perrin, or anyone else he had met in Law’s Valley or in Camus, even citizen Harfeld, who, from his almost adult perspective, was considerably diminished, a rather sad man who sought out and encouraged an excellence which Harfeld himself was not competent to comprehend—a useful job, but a depressing one.

  Herrin created. He had discovered in himself an aptitude for art; and while he pursued the literary and philosophical and musical studies the school of Caraus had promoted, his real joy was in form and substance. He worked in clay and in stone, finally settling on stone as his greatest love, work with old-fashioned chisel and more modern tools, with ambitions still greater than his young hands could yet achieve. He had, boarding that bus for Kierkegaard, left every item of his art behind as inadequate, incomplete, a provincial past to be forgotten along with every other taint of his upbringing.

  If anything frightened him at this stage it was his own power, his own intellect, which was in steady ascension. He realized that he was dependent on such as Harfeld, educators of less than his ability, who yet possessed the experience he knew he lacked.

  He knew that he could be warped, even destroyed, by inexpert guidance, like some machine of vast power which, set off balance, could destroy itself by its own force. He knew that he must analyze all the help that he was offered for fear of being misdirected; that he must, in essence, train those who were to help him in the proper handling of Herrin Alton Law, and that mere good intent or worldly wisdom in those about him was not sufficient, because most people were not capable of comprehending the logic on which he functioned or of comprehending the abilities which he felt latent within himself. This made him uneasy in going among strangers ... not the strangeness itself, because he was perfectly confident that his own grasp of a situation was superior to that of others, and that, if anything, it would be a relief to be safe within the environment of the great University, where he could reasonably anticipate that his instructors might be more competent to direct him and that his companions—perhaps a few of them—might be strong enough to withstand his strength at full stretch. He was just generally cautious.

  He feared ... that Kierkegaard itself might be a disappointment, that perhaps nowhere in all Freedom was there a place of sufficient stretch for him and that somehow his self might still fray its edges at the limits of what Freedom could offer. He was young; he was not sure that the universe itself could contain him.

  He got off the bus on hedge-rimmed Port Street, and walked the short distance to the University, which was, like the Residency near it, of sufficient magnificence compared to Camus to reassure him. He registered, received all the suitable authorizations in his papers, and settled into the very comfortable apartment the government allotted him.

  IV

  Senior Student: What do you see on the streets of Kierkegaard?

  Herrin: What I wish, sir.

  Senior Student: Are you aware of things you would not wish, Citizen Law?

  Herrin: I am aware of everything I wish.

  Senior Student: You’re evading the question.

  Herrin: I’m aware of everything I wish to be aware of. I do not, sir, evade the question.

  Senior Student: That is a correct answer.

  Master: How large is the universe?

  Herrin: How long is a string?

  Master. Should Freedom concern itself with space?

  Herrin: The universe is irrelevant: the possibilities of Freedom are as infinite as the possibilities of all other locations in the universe.

  Master: Should Freedom concern itself with Others?

  Herrin: The only meaningful concern of man is man.

  Kierkegaard was a city growing according to plan, now three hundred years old and acquiring some sense of time. There was of course the Residency of the First Citizen, Cade Jenks, descended from the original Planner of Kierkegaard. In that long, five-storied building the government was carried on, and the planners had their offices and facilities. There was the University, mirror image of the Residency and next to it on that section of Port Street which lay within the city limits. The rest of Port Street extended to the shuttleport, the mostly disused facility which interested Herrin only in theory. MAN, the inscription over the Residency’s main entrance proclaimed, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS, and it was humanity which wanted attention, not—not whatever was outside. Freedom itself was on its way to what it might become, and it had no love of the outsiders who came intruding on its search. The port was, like those who came in through it, irrelevant.

  There were ten streets in Kierkegaard itself, excluding Port Street, which everyone did. The central street at a right angle to Port Street, beyond an archway and footpath through the firebush hedge, was called Main. Two vertical streets ran on either side; there was a central east-west named Jenks with two laterals paralleling it, and a paved commons where Jenks and Main intersected: Jenks Square. Warehouses, manufactories, apartment houses, all production and residence fit, completely mingled, within the geometry of the City Plan; an apartment might stand next a mill or a manufactory next a warehouse. The port’s near edge was the site of all small trade, in a daylight market. Of construction, there was great regularity: a company in Kierkegaard turned out building slabs, all concrete on a meter of the upper section and a meter of the lower, and covered with river pebbles on the middle; there was one completely without openings, one with a warehouse-size door; one with a double door; one with a single. There was one with a window, a meter square. Out of these the whole city of Kierkegaard was built, with such conformity that it seemed all one building. It was an eye-pleasing coherency. Only the port escaped it. It was a city without ornament or variance. The whole world lay at its vulnerable beginning. Its greatest minds were being brought from all regions of Sartre to assure the right beginning—and Herrin Law was part of the program. He surpassed his instructors; he gazed on the void regularity of Jenks Square with a proprietary eye and the sobering consideration that the artistic expression of a planet lay under his young and guiding hand, for he knew that the blankness in Kierkegaard which was meant to be filled with art was his arena, that his work which would one day stand ther
e—he was sure it would—would influence the total of artists to come in Kierkegaard. He knew that if it were great, they must either imitate or react against what he chose to do, and that therefore he would, more than those in the halls of the Residency, shape the reality of Freedom.

  His reality, imposed on a forming world.

  His self, extended over all the globe of Freedom, because there was talk now of going into the other hemisphere and the continent of Hesse. His work would go there, as well.

  It was a thriving city, with vehicles coming in from all the Camus River plain, and going out again with raw materials converted into needed goods. It held thousands upon thousands of residents, who passed—afoot—in its streets. But Herrin did not form associations with the folk who came and went in the streets of Kierkegaard. The important ones he met at social gatherings at the University and the Residency; the unimportant went their ways in their own and limited realities, reminding him much of those he had associated with back in Camus Province. He brushed past them on his trips through the city, noticing with simple aesthetic satisfaction that the run of people in Kierkegaard were better dressed than those in Camus. That there was prosperity here, fit his sense of what Kierkegaard should become.

  There were more Others, too, which one might expect: a great city was like a magnet for drawing things to it, and like a great machine for producing debris of broken parts. There were those who were mad, or defective. It was debated in University what to do with them. It was early in the history of Freedom, so it was deemed enough until the ethical dilemma was resolved, to allow the defectives to resolve their existence in their own reality, which existed principally at the shuttleport, at night, and rarely in the city. They were the Unemployed, the invisibles; they were excluded and in abeyance. They were inconvenient, but not greatly so. They were not greatly ... anything.