Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Modred!” a voice wailed back like crystal chimes. “Help!”

  “Lady Dela!” I said. “Make up your mind to see ... can you see? Look at something familiar until it makes sense.”

  “Help me,” she cried.

  “Do you see anything?” Gawain asked her. “Modred says we’ve had a jump malfunction. I agree. I think we’re hung up in the between, but what I have on instruments looks like the ship is intact. Do you understand me, Lady Dela?”

  “Get us out!” she screamed.

  “I’m trying, lady. First I have to know where we are.”

  And to anyone who was thinking, that answered it, because even I knew enough to know we weren’t anywhere at all that our instruments were ever going to make sense of.

  Com was open. There were voices in from all over, like tiny wailings. I could make out either Lynette or Vivien, and Percivale and Lancelot. And Griffin, giving orders.

  “I can’t,” Gawain was saying. It was to his credit that he didn’t blank, nor did Modred; but this was not an emotional crisis, this was business, and we were in dire trouble with things to do—if we could do them under these conditions.

  I shivered, thinking that I had to navigate the corridors and somehow get to lady Dela. I clung to something solid on the bridge, trying to remember what the hallways looked like down to the last doorway, the last bolt in the walls, because if I forgot, I could get very, very lost.

  “We may have been here a while,” Modred’s voice came to me out of the surges of color that filled my vision, and I made him out, black and slim, in front of the pool of lights. “Our senses are adjusting to interpret by new rules. If we’re very careful, we should be able to keep our balance and find our way about.”

  “How long?” I asked. “How long can we have been here?”

  “We play games with time and space both,” Gawain’s near-far voice returned, loud and soft by turns. “Jump ... does that. Only we haven’t come out of it. We’re somewhere in subspace. And in the between, haven’t is as good a prediction as we can make.”

  “Time,” said Modred, “is the motion of matter; and relatively speaking, we’re in a great deal of trouble. We don’t know how long. It means nothing.”

  I grasped that. Not that I understood jump, but I knew that when ships crossed lightyears of distance by blinking here and there through jump, there had to be some kind of state in between, and that was why we took the drugs, not to have to remember that. But of course we were remembering it now: we were sitting in it, or moving through it, and whether time was stretched and we were living all this in seconds or whether we were really what Modred and Gawain said—hung—my mind balked from such paradoxes They juggled such things, Gawain and Modred and Percy and Lynn, but I had no desire to.

  All at once Lynette came wading through the red and black toward us, stained with the glow that was everywhere, and walking steadily. It was a marvelous feat, that she had gotten from the lower decks up here, and gotten to her post, but there she was, and she pushed me out of the way and sat down in the phantom of a chair, reached into the pool of lights and started trying to make sense of things.

  “Percy’s coming,” she said. And he was. I could see him too, like a ghost striding across the distances which behaved themselves better than they had been doing a moment ago. Everyone was getting to their posts, and I knew mine. I stood up and reached out my hands so that I wouldn’t crack my skull and I walked, having less trouble about it than I feared. Spatial relationships were still giving me trouble, so that things looked flat one moment and far away the next, but I kept my arms out for balance and touched the sides of the corridors when I could, shutting my eyes whenever the chaos got too bad.

  It meant going far back through the ship, and the corridor writhed like a transparent snake with a row of lights down its spine. At times I shut my eyes and felt my way, but the nerves in my hands kept going numb from time to time and the walls I couldn’t see felt sticking-cold and burning hot if I let them.

  But they were only feelings, lies my senses tried to tell me, and once and long ago I had lived in that white place where only the tapes are real—where I got so good at seeing that I could make pictures crawl across the walls of my cell just as if the tapes were really running. Reality—that doubtful commodity that I had learned to play games with a long time ago, because my own reality was dubious: I knew how to make up what I liked; and I had flown and flashed from world to world with my lady Dela; and I had sat in country meadows under blue skies at Brahmani Dali and talked to simpler-trained servants who thought the blue was all there was, and who patted the ground and said that that was real—but I knew it wasn’t. Their up and down was all relative, and their sitting still was really moving, because their world was moving and their sun was moving and the whole relational space of stars was spinning out in the whirlpool eddy of this galaxy in the scattering of all galaxies in the flinging-forth that was time.

  But their time, these servants’ time, was the slow ticking away of decay in their cells, and in the motion of a clock toward the date that they would be put down, and their reality would end.

  They would have gone crazy here, walking down a heaving belly of a snake in that place which somehow bucked the flinging-outward that made all they knew; and I did not break down, being sensible, and having an idea from the beginning that it was all like the tapes back in the labs, that told our senses what to feel and do and pay attention to. There was no sense being emotional over it: new tapes, new information.

  So I kept telling myself, but my nerves still would not obey the new rules and my brain kept trying to tell me I was falling and my stomach wanted to tell me I was upside down.

  I sent strong orders to my eyes. The wall straightened itself marvelously well when I really bore down on it, but shadow was really shadow, like holes into nothing. Like snippets cut out of the universe. I saw space crawling there, with hints of chaos.

  Left turn. I felt for a doorswitch, wondering if anything was going to work with the ship where it was, but com had worked; and the instruments back in controls were still working, even if they picked up nothing sensible. And the door did open.

  I kept going, down a corridor which seemed nightmarishly lengthened. The door at my right was open, and these were my lady’s compartments. I held out my hands and walked along quite rapidly now, felt my way through the misshapen door.

  Someone was sobbing, a throaty, hoarse sound that moaned through the walls: that guided me. I tripped over something that went away like chimes, over and over again, caught myself on something else I could not recognize and tried to get my bearings. There were points of light, shimmers of metal—the artificial flame lamps and the old weapons that Dela loved. That puddle of color up/down? was one of the banners, a lion in gold and red and blue. And beyond that puddle was a doorway I knew. I went to it, and through the corridor inside, to the open door of her bedroom ... a lake of blue, a great midnight blue bed, and a cluster of shapes amid it.

  My companions ... they had reached her. Lance sat there holding my lady in his arms, and Viv huddled next to him.

  “Who is it?” my lady wailed.

  I came and joined myself to the others, and we held and comforted her. “It’s all right,” Lance kept saying. “It’s all right.” And I: “You know our faces. Look at us and everything will be what you tell it to be. It’s Elaine. Elaine. Tell your eyes what they should see, and make them believe it.”

  “Elaine.” Her hands found my face, felt for it, as if to be sure. “Go. Go help Griffin. Where is Griffin?”

  “He’s well,” I said. “I heard him giving Wayne orders.”

  “Go,” she pleaded, so abjectly I knew she was upsetting herself. I gathered myself up and steadied my own nerves, felt Lance’s hand clinging to mine. I pulled loose of it, reached out my own toward the doorway and found it—better, much better now that I had walked this way once. I forced the room into shape and got to the corridor, felt my way along it past the libr
ary doors on the left and toward Griffin’s door at the end. I got it open and a voice bellowed out at me, echoing round and round in my head.

  Griffin was sick, blind sick and raving. I found the bed, found him, and stripped sheets to do what I could to comfort him. He lay on the mattress and writhed, and when I tried to make him be still he fetched me a blow that flung me rolling. It was some few moments before I could clear the haze from my eyes again, with the floor going in and out of touch with my hands, but I made it behave itself, felt the carpet, made myself see the texture of it. When I could sit up and rub the starbursts from my eyes, Griffin was sitting up and complaining; and demanding Gawain get us out of this place.

  “Can’t, sir,” I said, hanging on the back of a chair. “We’re in the between and we don’t know where we are.”

  “Get away from me,” he said. I couldn’t, because my lady had told me to stay, but I pulled myself around to the front of the chair and sat down there with my knees tucked up in my arms, listening to Griffin swear and watching him stumble about the room knocking into furniture.

  Eventually he discovered what we had discovered already, that he could control his stomach, and see things, and he finally seemed to get his bearings. He stood there the longest time, holding onto the dressing counter and looking at me with an expression on his face that clearly said he had not known I was there. He straightened back, stood up, felt with spidery moves of his hands toward the wall close by him. Ashamed. That was clear. And that surprised me despite everything else, because it was the first time Griffin had ever looked at me, really seemed to notice whether I existed. He turned away, groped after the bed and threw the remnant of the bedclothes over the side. Then he sat down and leaned his head into his hands, in brittle control of things. I think it took Griffin longest of all of us because he was used to having his own way, and when the whole world stopped being what suited him, it really frightened him. But our lady Dela, who lived in fantasies, she was mobile enough to attack the corridors, and showed up unexpectedly, using Lance for her help, and with Vivien trailing anxiously after.

  “Worthless,” lady Dela snapped at me, finding me still perched on a chair and her precious Griffin evidently neglected, sitting on the bed. I started to warn my lady when she swept down on Griffin, but at least he refrained from hitting her. He cursed and shook her hand off ... her precious Griffin, I thought, who had never once asked about Dela.

  “Out,” Dela ordered me, so I got up and left her to her ministries and her lover, finding the floor a great deal plainer than it had been and the walls at least solid. I walked out, and she cursed Lance and Viv too, telling them they ought to be about their proper business, so I waited for them outside, and caught Lance’s hand and held onto it for comfort when they came outside the door. What we were supposed to be doing, what our business was now, I had no least idea. Lance looked vastly shaken. Vivien looked worse than that, her eyes like one vast bruise, her hair disheveled, her fingers locked like claws on Lance’s other arm, as if she were afraid he would dissolve at any moment. I reckoned that Vivien, who was so very good at books and figures, really had the least concept of all what had happened to the Maid and to her; she was narrow, was Viv, and so long as her accounts balanced, that was enough. Now they did not.

  “I think maybe we should get Viv to bed,” I said, and Lance pried her fingers loose and took her hand. We put our arms about her and guided her between us, all the long confusing way back to the lift; and that was the worst, that little loss of vertical stability after all the rest had been ripped away from us. Viv simply moaned, too dignified to scream, and leaned on us. We got her out again at the bottom and back to the crew quarters. She was better when we had put her into bed, not troubling to undress her. I tucked the sheet up over her and Lance patted her forehead and got her a drink, holding her head with great tenderness despite all his own distress. It seemed strange how Lance and I managed better than Dela and Griffin and even Vivien, who until now had managed our lives and told us what to do. But we didn’t have to cope with the whys and the what-nows, just do little things like walk the halls and keep ourselves on our feet. The ones I least envied in this calamity were the Maid’s crew, who were up in controls trying to figure where we were and even when—with no reference points.

  IV

  ... but Arthur with a hundred spears

  Rode far, till o’er the illimitable reed,

  And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle,

  The wide-wing’d sunset of the misty marsh

  Glared on a huge machicolated tower....

  Hour by hour, if that was really a word we could use any longer, the world grew clearer, and Vivien confessed she would live. Then came peevish orders from my lady, who complained she was deserted by the whole staff: she wanted Lance—which meant Griffin was better, I reckoned, since she sounded more angry than hysterical.

  Lance went off in his pained despair, called up there to be near Griffin, which he hated, and with Dela, which was all he ever wanted. That left us with Vivien in the crew quarters then, in disfavor, I suspected. Vivien had drifted into quiet, exhausted, and we had given her a little sedative we had had ready for jump, belatedly, but it let Viv rest, not quite out, not really tracking on much either. And in a ship the walls of which were none too stable yet in my senses ... the lonely quiet seemed to put me all too far from everyone else. I was also conscious suddenly that my stomach was terribly empty. If time had gone as wrong as we thought it might have, then it might have been a long while that we had not wanted food or water, but now it hit me all of a sudden, so that I found my limbs shaking, as if all the demands of some long deprivation were coming due.

  And sure enough about the same time came Lynette’s voice ordering one of us to get food up to the bridge as quickly as we could, claiming they felt faint. I was not sure that my lady Dela and particularly Griffin or Viv wanted to see food yet, but I staggered down to the lift and out on the lowermost level to the galley, and tried to put food for all of us together, out of the shambles our wild careering into jump had made of the place.

  Then Vivien showed up in the doorway, a little frayed about the edges, it was true, muzzy with the drug, but moving along without touching the walls. She said nothing. Her face was set and determined with more fortitude than I had reckoned existed in Viv, and she had put most of the strands of her hair back into place so that she looked more herself. She was hungry, that was what: discomfort had gotten her moving again the same way it had sent her to bed, and without a by-your-leave she started into one of the trays. So had I, truth to tell. I had been stealing a bite and a drink while I was making the rest, because I wanted to stay on my feet to do it.

  “Do they know anything yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. I refrained from adding that they weren’t going to, not to pull the props out from under Viv a second time. The intercom came on: “My lady Dela wants a breakfast sent up,” Lynette advised me, from the bridge, and I frowned: it was a lunch I had just put together. “If she wants it quick,” I said back, “she can have a lunch that is ready. She’d have to wait ten minutes for the breakfast.”

  A delay. “She wants it now,” Lynette relayed back. “Anything.”

  “It’s coming.” I stacked up the trays in a carrier, along with the coffee, looked up at the sound of a step in the corridor. Lance showed up and leaned there in the doorway, a shadow of himself. “Tray for you too,” I said. “Here.”

  “She’s sent for breakfast.”

  “I got the call. She takes what she can. Here.” I put a hot roll into his hand and he ate that while I finished stacking the other carrier for the crew. I gave Dela and Griffin’s carrier to Lance.

  “I’ll go,” Vivien said, swallowing down her milk. She dried her hands, wiped possible wrinkles from her clothing. “I’ll go with you.”

  Lance nodded, the carrier in one hand. He left, and Vivien went with her arm locked in his ... up where Dela was. I might have gone. I might be where there was
Dela to make sense of things. But I remembered the other carrier and Lynette, the whole crew up there, and then I realized what Vivien had done, leaving the work all to me.

  I picked it up, grabbed another roll for myself and carried the box to the lift, rode it up, swallowing a mouthful of the roll and trying to keep my stomach down as well.

  They were anxious for the food when I arrived, shadow-eyed and miserable. Percivale came and took the carrier from me and passed it round, looked puzzled at me when there were not enough. “I had a roll down below,” I said, settling on a counter edge, still chewing the last of it and knowing it must sound as if I had fed myself first of all. “While it was in the oven.”

  They said nothing, but peeled back the covers and drank out of cups that shook in their hands ... working harder than the rest of us and using up their reserves far faster, I thought, wishing I could have hurried it. As for me, I could go now to my lady, find what comfort there was now in her—but that was none, I thought. The screens all looked full of the same bad news. “Where are we?” I asked, after lingering there a moment, after they had at least had a chance to get a few swallows of the food down. “What’s happening? Can you tell anything?” I thought—if there was any hope, I would like to take it to Dela. But they would have done that: they would have called her at once, if there were.

  “We’re nowhere,” Lynette said sourly.

  “But moving,” said Modred.

  The idea made me queasy. “Where?”

  Modred waved a hand at the screen nearest Percy. It showed nothing I could read, but there were a lot of numbers ticking along on it.

  “We’ve tried the engines,” said Gawain. “We’re moving, but we don’t get anything. You understand? We’ve tried to affect our movement, but what works in realspace won’t work here at all, wherever here is. We’ve tried the jump field and it won’t generate. We don’t know whether there’s something the matter with the vanes or whether we just can’t generate a field while we’re in this space. Nothing works. We’re without motive power. No one’s ever been here before. No one knows the rules. Jumpships only skim this place. We’re in it.”