Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

Sbi’s lips pursed in one of those unreadable expressions. “That would be a far walk, Master Law.”

  “Where are your kind? Where do you live? What do you do with your lives?”

  Silence.

  “Sbi, what do you want from me?”

  Again silence, which was like what his mother and father had done to him, and he did not find it comfortable. But Sbi put out an arm and embraced him very gently, beginning to walk from where they had camped. “I’ll tell you,” said Sbi, “that there are very few of us now. You brought us disease. Disease went where humans never have, into the far hills. We died in great numbers; but you never saw. It was a significant fact to us; but it wasn’t real to you. We used to live in the hills, but we yielded up this valley. We were in awe of you ... once. But I am educated in your University; and you never saw me. That’s why we came, to learn the things you know.”

  He walked, not looking at Sbi, finding Sbi’s embracing arm a heavier and heavier weight as they descended the hill. “What will you do with those things you know?”

  Silence.

  “Sbi, is that it? That you stay with me ... because you think I can teach you something? Is that what you want from me?”

  “No,” Sbi said.

  “What then?”

  Silence. They walked the level ground now, making their way across the fields in the direction Sbi chose, back the way they had come into the pocket valley. Herrin thought, tried to reason, kept turning back to the thought of ahnit in the University, invisible in the halls. In the Residency. In the dome in the Square, where others had started seeing them.

  Sbi embraced him still, keeping him warm, keeping him close. So Waden had done to him, lulling his suspicions, using his weakness to bypass his reason. That Sbi was doing so seemed only reasonable. There would be a time that Sbi had extracted all the use possible from him, but for the moment it was a convenient source of help. The difficult thing, he decided, was knowing when to pull away, when to elude such users before they had their chance to harm him.

  But he did not know where to go.

  The size of what Sbi wanted, he reckoned, had to be measured in terms of the discomfort Sbi was willing to tolerate to get it; and what Sbi wanted had to do with his own will, his own consent, or something beyond the physical, because anything other than that, Sbi could do.

  He tried to reason around an alien mind, and there was no reason; he tried to reason what he himself wanted, which was formless. Mostly he was not afraid of the world when he was with Sbi; he was only afraid of Sbi, and that limited things to a visible, bearable quantity.

  That day, Sbi led him out of the valley and again into the hills. Sbi stopped whenever he grew tired, and comforted him and kept him warm, which was the limit of what he asked. It was limbo, and Sbi seemed patient with it.

  He slept that night in Sbi’s arms, his belly comforted with pilfered food, his misery somewhat less than it had been; he thought again and again, half-sleeping, what pains Sbi had taken with him, and what inconvenience Sbi suffered, and he wondered.

  Sbi hated him, possibly, for what he had made the ahnit do, in taking that small life.

  But then the ahnit was not capable of killing him and he did not easily imagine that Sbi meant to do something to him.

  To do something with him, undoubtedly. Whatever use he had left in him that appealed to an alien mind. He thought of his own work in the heart of Kierkegaard, and of the lonely pair of figures in the hills which Sbi had so wanted him to see, and neither made sense.

  Sbi’s hand massaged his back, over tense muscles. “Pain, Master Law?”

  “No.” The voice had startled him. He had not known the ahnit was awake. It disturbed him and he tried to relax, while Sbi’s hand massaged a spot which was particularly tense.

  “You haven’t slept much.”

  “Nor have you.”

  “I don’t sleep as much as you.”

  “Oh,” he said, and shut his eyes again and accepted the comfort, tired and puzzled at once.

  “Master Law,” said Sbi, “why did they cripple you?”

  He stiffened all over. It was the Statement again; it was never, to Sbi’s satisfaction, answered.

  “I don’t know, Sbi. What is it that I don’t see?”

  Silence.

  “And how could you know?” he asked. “You weren’t there. You don’t know Waden Jenks. How am I missing the answer?”

  Silence.

  “Waden—couldn’t bear a rival. He warned me so.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Either. Why warn you?”

  He thought about it. “It wasn’t rational, was it?”

  Silence.

  It lay at the center of what he did not want to think about. He lay still, staring into the dark. “Sbi. Where do you want me to go? What do you want?”

  Silence.

  “Whatever you want,” he said, “I’ll do it. I don’t see anything else. I don’t see anywhere else. You don’t make sense to me. I don’t know why you’re out here or why you bother or what you want. What is it?”

  Silence.

  “Sbi.”

  More silence. He grew distraught. Sbi patted him gently, as if trying to soothe him to sleep.

  “Let me alone.” He scrambled up, pushing with his hands, which hurt him, and stalked off close to striking at something, his bound ribs not giving him air enough. He stopped, staring out across the plains and finding nothing on the horizon but grass and night-bound sky, and stars, which belonged to strangers, the vast Outside, which went on and on, challenging illusions.

  Suddenly he was afraid. He looked back, half expecting to find Sbi gone, or near him. Sbi simply waited.

  And that did not wholly comfort him either.

  XXVIII

  Master Lynn: Where were you?

  Waden Jenks: Where I chose. Is that your concern?

  Master Lynn: You were out there again. In the Square. Consider your appearance. You pay homage to that thing. Your curiosity has you, not you it.

  Waden Jenks: I find its counsel superior.

  Master Lynn: He was your enemy. Do you consider that?

  Waden Jenks: Are you my friend?

  Master Lynn: Is anyone, Waden Jenks?

  There was no particular direction. Sbi walked east, this day, and sat down after a time, munching a grass stem, and seemed content to sit. Herrin lay down full length on his back and stared at the clouds drifting, fleecy white and far, with such a weight on his mind that it seemed apt to break.

  “Sbi,” he said at last, “teach me.”

  “Teach you what, Master Law?”

  “My name is Herrin.”

  “Herrin. Teach you what?”

  “What reality is.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Sky.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “Pain, Sbi.”

  “Both are real.”

  “Whose reality?”

  “Everyone’s.”

  “What,” he snorted, having finally discovered Sbi’s depth, “everyone’s forever and however far? That’s hardly reasonable.”

  “Throughout all the universe.”

  “You’re mad.”

  Silence.

  “How can external events be real to you, Sbi?”

  “I feel them.”

  It angered him. In frustration he slammed his hand against the ground and rolled a defiant look at Sbi, with tears of pain blurring his eyes. “You tell me you felt that.”

  “Yes. All the universe did.”

  Sbi proposed an insanity. He retreated from it, simply stared at the clouds.

  “I’ve taught you,” said Sbi, “all I know.”

  “You mean that I’m not able to perceive it.”

  “Where shall we go, Herrin?”

  He bit down on his lip, thought, trying to draw connections through the maze of Sbi’s logic. He gave up. “How long are you prepared to sit here, Sbi?”

  “Is this where you
wish to be, then?”

  “What does it matter what I want?”

  Silence.

  “Sbi, I was wrong. I’ve spent my life being wrong. What can I do about it?”

  Silence. For the first time he understood that answer. He turned on his side and looked at Sbi, who sat chewing on another grass stem. His heart was beating harder. “What were you waiting for all those years in the city? For me? For someone who could see you?”

  “Yes.

  “And what difference does it make whether I see you?”

  Silence.

  “It makes a great deal of difference, doesn’t it, Sbi?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That it makes everything wrong. That the whole world is crazy and I’m sane. Where does that leave me, Sbi?”

  “Invisible. Like me.”

  He found breathing difficult, not alone from the bandage. He pushed himself up on his elbow. “You had to let me go back to my own house to find that out.”

  “I had no idea what would happen. Reality is not in my control. Nor are you.”

  “You’ll wander all over Sartre taking care of me if that’s what I decide, is that so?”

  “I will stay with you, yes. And keep you from harm if I can.”

  “Why?”

  Sbi sucked in the grain-bearing head and chewed it. “Because I want to. Because when you struck your hand I had the pain, Herrin.”

  “I could ask you; I could ask you question after question and when I got close to what I really want to know you’d say nothing.”

  “The important questions are for you to answer. It is, after all, your world that’s in jeopardy; mine is long past that.”

  “Why were you among us?”

  “If someone had destroyed your world, would you not have an interest in those who had done so?”

  “They did. And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to see them again or be seen.”

  Sbi simply stared at him.

  There was no relief for the silence, none. He sat up with his bandaged hands in his lap and contemplated them, flexed his hands slightly against the splints and bit his lip at the pain which won him no great degree of movement.

  “Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?”

  He shut his eyes, weary of the repeated question.

  “Why?” Sbi asked inevitably.

  He shook his head slowly, drew a breath which suddenly stopped in his throat. His eyes unfocused. He thought to Fellows’ Hall, a certain evening, and a conceit which had gripped them both, him and Waden. “I’d begun to see you. I’d begun to see things the way they were; and Waden was never dull. I think he saw too, Sbi. I think he did. He does. Sbi, I’m going back.”

  “Yes,” said Sbi.

  He had reached for the bundles of toweling and grass rope which were all his possessions; and suddenly he caught Sbi’s expression, and Sbi’s tone, and it was not the same as when he had proposed going to the valley. Then there had been disappointment, vague reluctance. Now it was different.

  “You’ve pushed me to this,” he said, wrapping his arms about the bundles and staring at Sbi. “Sbi, have I guessed enough of what you want? Or do you go on the way you have?”

  “I don’t know that you’re right,” Sbi said. “But your logic seems irrefutable save by Waden Jenks. I will tell you what I want, Herrin. I have found it: a human who can see. I’ll tell you what I’ve waited for all these years as you say ... to learn what that human will do, when he sees. But one thing frightens me: what those who don’t see will do to him.”

  “They won’t be able to see me,” he said, disliking Sbi’s proposition. But he thought about it. “There are the Outsiders, aren’t there? And they see.”

  “To my observation—yes.”

  He sank down off his heels and frowned with the pain and with the fear the pain set in him. He stared straight before him and thought about it for a long while.”

  “Now it’s hiding,” he said finally.

  “How, hiding?”

  “Before, I was surviving. Now it’s hiding, staying up here in the hills. Now I don’t go back because I’m afraid. Or if I don’t go back I am afraid.” He rolled a glance at Sbi. “You’re good; you’ve had the better of me. You set it all up. Located the best of us ... studied how to intervene. You had your best chance when I came out of the University and worked in the open. Then you could get to me. Accosted me in the dark that night, on Port Street. That was you. Drove Leona Pace over the edge. Came back to plague me. Worked at me—constantly.”

  “Yes,” said Sbi.

  “Now I should go back to the city. Now I should take on Waden Jenks and finish drawing him into this.”

  “Yes.

  “Why, Sbi?”

  “Our survival.”

  “Reasonable,” he said, trying at least to admire the artistry of it.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He shook his head. “Surrender Freedom to your manipulation? That’s what you’ve set me up to do, isn’t it? Me, and Waden Jenks; one of us set against the other ... myself, taken out of influence; and on the other hand given the chance to change the world. I’m one of the invisibles. It occurs to me that murder is possible for one of us. That I can push Waden over the edge ... I can do that, because I’ve nothing to lose, have I? Or I can sit here in the hills and know that the greatest thing I ever did fitted your purpose.”

  “All that humans have done is bent around us, Herrin Law. The way you live, the pains you take to ignore us, the insanity which claims some of you ... are these things spontaneous? Were you ever—reasonable?”

  He stared at the horizon, colder and colder. “No,” he said.

  “Herrin. I’ll go with you. I’m concerned for you.”

  He thought of the statue in the hills; of a small dead creature in Sbi’s hands; of Sbi’s hands caressing what Sbi had killed.

  Of his parents going about their business not seeing him.

  He rested his face against the back of his hand, wiped at the left eye. “So, well, tell me this, Sbi, what do you expect to happen?”

  “I don’t know. But it will be of human choosing, and my choosing, both, my friend. Both at once. Is it not reasonable?”

  It was, as Sbi said, reasonable. “I’ve taught students,” Herrin said. “I thought I knew, and thought I saw, and I taught. For them, I’m going back, and Waden ... I don’t know about Waden.” He struggled to his feet, started to bend for his belongings again, but Sbi anticipated him and caught them up.

  “It’s not far,” Sbi said.

  He had guessed that too, that Sbi had brought him generally in the direction Sbi wanted him to go.

  XXIX

  Waden Jenks: Do you know what frightens me most in the world, Herrin? Not dying. Discovering—that I’m solitary; that my mind is the greatest one, and that I’m damned to think things beyond expression, that I can never explain to any living being. Have you ever entertained such thoughts, Herrin?

  Master Law: (Silence.)

  Waden Jenks: I think you have, Herrin. And how do you answer them?

  Colonel Olsen: The module’s come through; the station begins its construction. Now there’s a matter of the other agreements. Of supply. My aides will draw up a list of requirements.

  Waden Jenks: Of no interest to me. Consult appropriate departments in the Residency.

  Colonel Olsen: We find no cooperation in these departments of yours.

  Waden Jenks: You intrude, colonel, we have our ways. You persist in coming in person. Use the liaisons we are training in University, that’s their purpose, after all.

  Colonel Olsen: Nothing you’ve given us has been of value; not your information; not your promises of cooperation.

  Waden Jenks: Yet you remain; you and I both know you are obtaining something you desire: a base. Supplies have become important to you. Let’s then admit that you want them badly and that it’s a matter for my personal attention; let’s adjust the price accordingly. Let’s talk about agreeme
nts that keep your bureaus from disturbing us. From setting foot here.

  Colonel Olsen: We have policies....

  Waden Jenks. They don’t get you what you want.

  A ship passed in the night sky, a shuttle, headed offworld. Herrin watched it go, from the hills above Kierkegaard. He looked down on the city, with its dimly lighted streets, with the bright glare of the port like a bleeding wound. He felt Sbi’s presence at his elbow without needing to look. “Do you know what that was, Sbi?”

  “One of the shuttles. I know. You taught us about other worlds.”

  “Does it occur to you that we two don’t control everything?”

  “Ah, Herrin, I understand more than that.”

  “What more, Master Sbi?”

  “That somewhere among those points of light stand others who misapprehend their limits; that somewhere at this moment someone is in pain; that somewhere a life has begun; that somewhere one has ended; I feel them all tonight.”

  “I’m trying to feel them.”

  “Somewhere,” said Sbi, “is someone else wrestling with dilemma. Somewhere is someone wondering the value of life itself. The universe is always asking questions.”

  “Somewhere,” said Herrin, “someone is scared.”

  “Beside you, Herrin Law.”

  He turned and looked at the ahnit, who almost blended with the night, a shadow among shadows. A strange impulse possessed him, a melancholy; he opened his arms and embraced Sbi’s alien shape, gently, because contact hurt. He had done so in his life with his parents, with his sister when they were both small; with Keye when he made love; with Waden when Waden had a public gesture to make; with the workers when they helped him from the scaffolding ... only those times in his life had someone touched him; and with Sbi again it was different. Sbi embraced him very gently, and he stepped back and looked at Sbi sadly. “I don’t see you have any need to go down there.”

  “Probably you don’t see,” Sbi said. “In some things you’re very complicated. Why did you go to your old house, Herrin Law, and to those people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A Master does something and confesses not to know why?”

  “I wanted shelter. It didn’t quite work out, did it?” Heat came to his face. “I’ve made that mistake several times; it brought me here. Possibly it’s got hold of me again. Why else am I going down there? Stubbornness. I have some perverse desire to try it again, to talk to people I knew, to shake them till they see. I’m sure the Outsiders will see. I’m sure those who did this to me will.” He thought a moment. “I’m mad, aren’t I? Invisibles are. So why should you go?”