Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  He threw his whole body into it, rammed his feet into one of them, twisted with manic force and threw one of them over, came down on that one and rammed a freed forearm into his face. A blow dazed him, sent his vision red and black, and he tried to heave himself to his feet, met a body and heaved his weight into it. The body and a table went over, and they went on hitting him, over and over again, until his balance left him and he hit the floor on hip and shoulder. “Don’t kill him,” one reminded the others. “Don’t risk killing him.” One trod on his arm, and a boot came down on his hand, smashed down on it repeatedly. He tried to protect himself, but they had him, rolled him on his face and smashed the other hand. He had not, to his knowledge, made a sound—did then, cried out from the pain and lost all his organization to resist the blows that came at him and the blurred figures which swarmed over him. He curled up when they had let him go. Even that instinctual move came hard, muscles twitching without coordination, some paralyzed. One of them kicked him in the belly and he could not prevent it.

  They walked away then. He lay aching on the concrete floor and heard the door open and close. He moved his arms and tried to move his legs and to lift his head. His stomach started heaving, dry heaves that racked torn muscles from chest to groin. He tried to push his right hand against the floor and there was both pain and numbness. He saw the hand in front of him distorted beyond human form, hauled the left arm from under his ribs and went sick with the pain as wrist and fingers ground under him, that hand distorted like the other. He moaned to himself, tried again and again to roll onto his elbow to get an arm under him while his stomach spasmed. He collapsed, tried it again, finally sat up and tucked his wounded hands under his arms, rocking and grimacing against the pain that washed over him in blurring waves.

  He saw himself finally. He saw himself sitting in a room where enemies could come back and find him, to hurt him further or simply to stare. He saw himself faced with the need to go outside, a Master of the University, who had to go maimed into public view and face the people who had feared him and the people who had relied on him for their own realities, and the students he had taught and most of all Waden Jenks and Keye Lynn. He shuddered, swallowed down another spasm and could not stop shivering. He tried to get up, finally made it, still doubled over, and reached the wall to lean on.

  Had to go out. There was nowhere to go and nowhere to stay. He hurt, and he could not straighten, could not even change the clothes which were smeared with clay and dust and blood. He tried, ineffectually, to straighten the studio ... gathered up the sketchbook which had been stepped on, clenching his teeth against the waves of sickness. Tried. There was no saving the clay; it was ruined, and he did not want to look at it. He managed finally to stand with his back against the wall, though it hurt, managed to catch his breath.

  Waden’s reality. They came now, the Outsiders, whenever they would; and wherever they would ... Waden’s doing. Waden had meant this—always meant this.

  His eyes stung; he wept, and pushed from the wall to the doorway, managed finally with his ruined hand to reach the latch and to open it.

  No one saw him, down the hall and down the stairs. They looked at first, but he flinched and they flinched from seeing him.

  He fell on the steps outside. It was a moment before he could recover from the impact, and some had started toward him, but when he looked up at them and they looked at him, they pretended they had been going somewhere else, because he had fallen from more than the height of the steps, and he knew it and they knew it. It was a matter outside their realities. He gathered himself up finally, and leaned against the wall for a time until he could walk.

  He did so, then, because he ached and walking seemed to make the ache less, or it distracted him, or it was the only reality he had left, simple motion to evidence life. He was no longer sure.

  XXII

  Waden Jenks: Freedom is my beginning, not my limit.

  Master Law: We once talked of hubris.

  Waden Jenks: And discounted it.

  He kept walking, a slow, a public process ... incredible how long it took just to go the length of the building unsupported; or to try the next distance. He went the opposite way from the Residency, which was along Port Street, and necessarily toward the port, because there was no way off Port Street in this direction but that wire gate at the end. There were some students walking, three, four meetings to endure; but they passed without evidencing that they saw. He walked bent, because of the pain, and when he would reach a place where there was a surface to lean on he would rest. He was not, at present, rational, and knew it, but standing still hurt, and he was too ashamed to sit down. He had no idea where he was going, only where he refused to go, which was to Waden Jenks, or to the center of Kierkegaard where people could see him, or the University where he had to face people he had taught and people he had directed.

  The port gateway was ahead; he did not want that either, but when he stopped, swaying on his feet and subconsciously reckoning how long he could stand without falling and how much strength he had ... he conceived of himself wandering mindlessly back and forth, back and forth on Port Street between the Residency and the University until he dropped, too dazed to do otherwise.

  He went for the port. Passed the vacant gateway, walked along the edge by the fence, leaning on it when he had to, shoulder against the wooden posts and wire, scuffling through the debris the wind gathered there, among the empty drums and stacked cargo bins. The stacks were the only privacy he had found. He dropped to his knees and leaned against the wire and curled up, trying to will the pain away, winced from the sight of his hands, which were knotted and swollen, at once so deadened and so bone-deep with pain that he could not let them hang down. He kept them tucked up, so that the blood did not throb in them so much. He rocked because motion comforted, even when he lacked the strength to walk.

  It got worse. And worse. The numbness of the injuries wore off, and he sat still finally, in a haze of pain; the only comfort was the chill of the concrete and he stretched out on it three quarters on his face, simply trying to last through it.

  He was thirsty; that, most of all. His lips were cracked and his tongue stuck to his mouth. He thought of places he could get a drink, one by one realized they involved witnesses. There was the river itself if he could walk that far, but he could not, at present. Once there had been the port market, but he was not sure it was open; what had been going on out here at the port, what had been going on in general, he had no clear picture because until now he had not wanted to know. He wished he could think. He was, he knew on one level, functioning on animal instinct; and it was keeping him going when perhaps he was going to wake up from this and wish he had not survived it. He had no idea what else to do but what he had done.

  Waden perhaps expected him to come back, to plead for shelter; he reckoned that he could still do that. A sting of anger welled up in his eyes, but he had no tears. Keye ... was with Waden. And there was no one else. Shivers began, convulsive and painful, which jerked muscles against damaged joints, and for a long time he lay as still as he could with as little thought as he could, only counting the intervals and trying to calculate whether the spasms were increasing or decreasing.

  After that came a blur of time and misery. He heard machinery, once jolted awake in the apprehension that the moving of drums might crush him, because the booming and shifting of the loaders came nearer and nearer. Then it stopped, and there was nothing for a long time, but cold. The sky clouded, and the warmth of the sun diminished, even that. He laughed at that final calamity, in which the whole universe conspired.

  And he wept.

  Finally, because a feverish strength had come back to him, and because the paving itself had begun to hurt his joints, he worked at getting to his feet again. Walked, following the fence which divided the port from Kierkegaard. Far across the pavement, diminished by distance, the alien machines conducted their business; and somewhere across the port, Outsiders settled into residence behind
new fences. He saw the market, a scattering of small buildings and stalls, and his pulse quickened with hope, because some looked open, at least a few of them. He staggered in that direction, tried to straighten and walk normally, but he could not keep his steps from weaving.

  Outsiders were among the shoppers, trading among the booths, strangers in no-color uniform; and citizens staunchly pretended not to see them while they were robbed of whatever the Outsiders wanted to carry off.

  “Look at them,” Herrin raged when an Outsider simply walked away from a merchant with a silver bracelet. “See them; they’re here.” But no one did; no one seemed to see him, standing out from the market on the pavement, filthy and disheveled. Only some of the Outsiders looked his way, and he went cold under those stares, hesitating to come in at all until they had decided to go about their business.

  There were booths where food was sold, and drink; Outsiders clustered there, and some owners must have left, because some booths were wholly Outsider, with an Outsider tending grill and tapping the beer and passing it out as fast as it could come.

  Citizens crowded together at one booth ... where a harried woman tried to keep up with demand, where mugs were snatched as soon as they could be poured, and Herrin thrust his way into the crowd which melted about him, tried to get to his pocket where he had a little money, but his hands could not bear the pain. “I have money,” he said to the woman at the counter. “I have money,” because he was not an invisible, who could pilfer what he wanted. “If someone could get it from my pocket. ...” But she paid no attention to him, just mopped at the crumbs on the counter and took an order from someone else. She set the mug on the counter, amber and frothing and wet, and he reached for it in desperation, with a hand that could not hold it; the owner did not stop him. “I want my beer!” the man shouted at the owner as if she had failed to deliver his order; and Herrin got his other arm to the counter, braced the mug between his wrists and got it to his lips. The cold liquid eased his mouth and throat. He found space about him; the crowd had simply melted aside and come at the booth from another angle, while he stood hunched and drinking with huge, bitter swallows, all the while feeling the heavy wet glass sliding from his awkward grip on it.

  “Master Law,” a female voice said, and someone touched him gently on the arm. He looked round into Leona Pace’s eyes, a face surrounded by chestnut hair and a blue hood.

  “Get away from me!” He dropped the mug, and it broke. He lurched away and stumbled, recovered and kept going. She did not follow. He fled, until he came to the corner of a building and leaned there, and suddenly found himself face to face with Outsiders.

  He turned and ran, darted into another aisle, bent with pain and uncontrolled. Walkers evaded his touch, even when he stumbled and sprawled; he lay on the concrete and they simply walked around him.

  One did not. He saw blue robes sink into a puddle of cloth, felt a touch. Leona, he thought, willing finally to surrender, because he knew where he was, and what he had become. He levered himself up to look into the face that looked at him, and saw blue skin like leather, wet and large black eyes, a nose—if it was a nose—that curved toward something like a mouth. A hand was on his shoulder; he began to shudder as it moved to touch his back. It spread the midnight blue cloak, which smelled of wild grass and country herbs and something dry and old; it enveloped him. He stared into a face ... nothing at all human, with that hypnotized compulsion with which he looked at a model, the liquid black of the vast eyes, at midnight blue skin which took alien, symmetrical folds about down-arching nose and pursed, small mouth. The teeth were small and square, inverted lips parted upon them as if it might speak. His arm shuddered under him and he feared falling, being helpless with this thing, whose cloak was about him. Go away, he almost said, and bit it back; he did not see this thing, refused to see it.

  Its arm across his back tightened and it pulled him over face-up; he resisted and stopped resisting in panic. He did not see it, refused this reality, and the other arm slid beneath his legs as it gathered him to its breast beneath the cloak. Panic assailed him, fear of being dropped in his pain—no one had handled him that way, ever, in his memory; in infancy, surely, but that was not in his memory—was not there, and did not happen. It was strong; he had never comprehended ahnit as strong. It rose with him without apparent effort, hugged his stiff body against it the more tightly and snugged the cloak about him, enveloping him in its scent, its color, its reality. He was aware of its powerful strides, of the sound of sane citizens it passed, of conversations which passed without interruption by a reality which was not theirs.

  Help me, he might cry to them; but there was nothing there when they should look, nothing that they would want to see, only something which had been Herrin Law being swept away by something which had nothing to do with humans.

  There was no pity, not for what they did not perceive.

  There was no fighting this thing, for even by fighting he lost. He tried not to feel what was happening, nor to perceive anything about him; he retreated into his own mind, rebuilding the reality he chose, as he chose, which ignored the pain, which denied that anything extraordinary had happened this morning, insisted that in fact he might continue to be in his bed, to sleep as late as he chose. That if he chose to open his eyes—in his imagination he did—he would see the clay bust of Camden McWilliams sitting on the table as it had been, where it would go on sitting until he chose to do something with it.

  His reality, as he chose to have it.

  He imagined the clay under his undamaged hands, imagined it malleable again and the face, the most perfect work he had ever done (but he would do others) gazing into infinity with a look of desire.

  He felt the arms about him. He had gone limp within them, yielded to the motion; it had nestled him more comfortably, and there was dark cloth between him and the daylight, a woven fabric which scarcely admitted the declining sun; there was alien perfume in his nostrils; there was midnight cloth against his cheek, which rested on a bony breast as hard as the arms which enfolded him.

  No, he thought to himself, trying to rebuild that warm bed in the studio. When he was aware, his hands hurt, and his ribs did, and the pain throbbed in rhythm with his heart and the movement of what carried him. He made no move. Horror occurred to him, that perhaps it took him away to commit some further pain on him, or to feed on ... he knew nothing of ahnit, or what they did, and there was no rationality between human and ahnit.

  There is no relevancy, he insisted to himself. It and Herrin Law were not co-relevant; and what it in its reality chanced to do to Herrin Law were overlapping but unrelated events.

  He could choose not to feel it; but his self-control was frayed already by the pain. And he was not strong enough to prevent it, had not even the use of his hands.

  Here was an external event; he had met one or his mind had betrayed him and conjured one. It had taken him up, and the three greatest minds on Freedom, he and Waden Jenks and Keye Lynn ... had not planned this. Only he might have caused it. He had shaped his reality; and the shape of it suddenly argued that he had not been wise.

  Or that something was more powerful, which was a possibility that undid all other assumptions.

  Muscles glided, even, long steps; arms shifted him for comfort, adjusted again when the position hurt his ribs and he flinched. The pain eased and it kept walking. He heard nothing more of the human voices of the port, heard rather the whisper of grass, and his heart beat the harder for realizing that they had passed beyond help and hope of intervention. The pain had ebbed and exhaustion had passed and his betraying senses were threatening to stay focused, to keep him all too aware of detail he had no wish to comprehend.

  It’s not here, he tried to tell himself, testing the power of his mind; but sense told him that it was striding down a steep slope; that he heard water moving and smelled it ... they had come to the river. It might fall, or might drop him, or even fling him in, and he could not catch himself. His hands throbbed, shot pai
n through his marrow—it shifted its grip, was going to drop him. ...

  He stiffened and slipped, tried to catch at its shoulder and could not, his hand paralyzed; but it caught him itself and slowly, a shadow between him and the sinking sun, its cloak still tenting him, eased him to the ground. He hurled his body frantically aside, to get away, but it knelt astride him and pressed his shoulder down, keeping him from going anywhere. He twisted his head. They were beside the water, on the riverbank. He looked dazedly at the brown current, staring in that direction and trying to think, muddled with pain and longing for the water; he had hurt his hand trying to use it. The pain was starting up again, headed for misery.

  The ahnit got off him, a tentative release; he stayed still, not looking at it, reasoning that if he treated it as humans always did, it might treat him as ahnit always did and simply go away.

  It moved into his unfocused vision, a mere shadow, and dipped water; it was only a shadow—he had achieved that much. But then the shadow moved closer and obscured all his view, like dark haze in the twilight; it leaned above him and laid a cold wet hand on his brow, so that he flinched. It bathed his face with light touches of leathery thin fingers. It leaned aside and dipped up more water and repeated the process. Let it, Herrin thought, and tried to stare through it.

  Then it picked up his hand, and he flinched and cried out from the pain. It did not let go, but eased its grip. He stared into the midnight face, the wet dark eyes. Tried, with tiny movements, to indicate he wanted to pull his hand back; even that hurt.

  “You see me,” it said.

  It was a rumbling, nasal voice. A rock might have spoken. It chilled him and he ceased even to reason; he jerked from it and hurt himself. Quickly it let him go.

  “You see me,” it said again.

  He stared at it, unable to unfocus it. It reached to his collar, touched the brooch he wore there, forgotten. “You see this, you see me.”