Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  I nodded, sick at my stomach, having gotten the bad news I had bargained for.

  “But there’s something out there,” Percivale said. “That—” He indicated the same screen Modred had. “That’s a reading coming in, relative motion; and it’s getting stronger.”

  I thought of black holes and other disquieting things, all impossible considering the fact that we were still alive and functioning, and kept arguing with myself that we had been safe where nothing like this should have happened, in the trafficked vicinity of a very normal star—which might or might not be normal now, the nasty thought kept recurring. And what about all the rest of the traffic which had been out there with us when we went popping unexpectedly into jump, presumably with some kind of field involved, which could tear ships apart and disrupt all kinds of material existence. Like planets. Like stars. If it were big enough.

  “How—fast—are we moving?” I asked.

  “Can’t get any meaningful referents. None. Something’s there, in relation to which we’re moving, but the numbers jump crazily. The size of it, whether the thing we’re picking up is even solid in any sense ... or just some ghost ... we don’t know. We get readings that hold up a while and then they fall apart.”

  “Are we—falling into something?”

  “Can’t tell,” said Modred, with the same calm he would have used ordering another cup of coffee.

  I sat there a long time, letting the fright and the food settle. By now to my eyes the ship interior had taken on normal aspects, and my companions looked like themselves again. I reckoned that the same sort of thing must be happening with all of us, that about the time our bodies began to trouble us for normal things like food, our sensory perceptions were beginning to arrange themselves into some kind of order too.

  We wouldn’t starve, I thought, not—quickly. The lockers down there had the finest food, everything for every whim of my lady. The best wines and delicacies imported from faraway worlds. An enormous amount of it. We wouldn’t run out of air. The interior systems were getting along just fine and nothing had shut down, or we would have had alarms sounding by now. Bad air or starving would be easiest, at least for us, who would simply blank and die.

  I was terrified of the thing rushing up at us, or that we were rushing down into, or drifting slowly, whatever it was that those figures meant ... because we had just had a bad taste of being where we were not designed to be, and another fall of any length did not sit well with my stomach.

  But we could take a long time to hit and it seemed there was nothing to be done about the situation. I stood up, brushed my suit out of wrinkles. “I’m going to see my lady,” I said. “Is there anything I can tell her?”

  “Tell her,” Gawain said, “we’re trying to keep the ship intact.”

  I stared at him half a beat, chilled cold, then left the bridge and walked back out through the corridors which now looked like corridors ... back to my lady’s compartments.

  Griffin was there when I arrived. They had gotten him up and mobile at least, into the blue bedroom, to sit at a small table and pick at the food. My lady sat across from him. I could see them through the open door. And Viv and Lance waited outside the bedroom doors, Vivien sitting on a small straight chair which had ridden through the calamity in its transit bolts. Lance was picking up bits of something which had shattered on the carpet, and some of the tapestries were crooked in their hangings.

  I sat down too, in a chair which offered some comfort to my shivery limbs. Lance finished his cleaning up and took the pieces out, came back and paced the floor. I did not. I sat rigidly still, my fingers clenched on the upholstery. I was thinking about falling into some worse hole in space than we had already met, feeling that imagined motion of those figures on the bridge screen as if it were a hurtling rush.

  “Where are we?” Vivien asked, my former question. Her voice was hushed and hoarse.

  “In strange space,” I said. And then, because it had to be said: “The crew doesn’t really expect we’re going to get out of it.”

  It was strange who came apart and who did not. Lance, who was always so vain and so worried about his appearance and his favor with my lady—he just stood there. But Vivien sat and shivered and finally blanked on us, which was the best state for her, considering her upset, and we did not move to rouse her.

  “I think,” Lance said, looking on her sitting frozen in her chair, “that Vivien planned to live a long, long time.”

  Of course that was true. Poor Vivien, I thought. All her plans. All her work. She stayed blanked, and kept at it, and finally Lance went over to her and patted her shoulder, so that she came out of it. But she slipped back again at once.

  “It’s a ship,” Percivale’s voice broke over the intercom uninvited. “It’s another ship we’re headed for.”

  That brought my lady and Griffin out of their bedroom refuge, all in a rush of moved chairs. “Signal it!” my lady ordered, looking up at the sitting room speaker panel as if it could show her something. “Contact it!”

  Evidently they were doing something on the bridge, because there was silence after, and the lot of us stood there—all of us on our feet in the sitting room but Viv. Lance was shaking her shoulder and trying to get through her blankness to tell her there was some hope.

  “We’re not sure about the range,” Modred reported finally. “We’ll keep trying as we get nearer.”

  Griffin and lady Dela settled on a couch there near us, and we turned from Vivien to try to make them comfortable. Lady Dela looked very pale and drawn, which with her flaxen hair was pale indeed, like one of the ladies in the fantasies she loved; and Griffin too looked very shaken. “Get wine,” I said, and Lance did that. We even poured a little for ourselves, Lance and I, out of their way, and got some down Vivien, holding the glass in her hand for her.

  “We don’t seem to be moving rapidly in relation to it,” came one of Modred’s calm reports, in the aching long time that passed.

  “We are in Hell,” my lady said after yet another long time, speaking in a hoarse, distant voice. This frightened me on the instant, because I had heard about Hell in the books, and it meant somewhere after dying. “It’s all something we’re dreaming while we fall, that’s what it is.”

  I thought about it: it flatly terrified me.

  “A jump accident,” Griffin said. “We are somewhere. It’s not the between. Our instruments are off, that’s all. We should fix on some star and go to it. We can’t have lost ourselves that far.”

  There were no stars in the instruments I had seen on the bridge. I swallowed, recalling that, not daring to say it.

  “We have died,” my lady said primly, calmly, evidently having made up her mind to that effect, and perhaps after the shock and the wine she was numb. “We’re all dead from the moment of the accident. Brains perhaps function wildly when one dies ... like a long dream, that takes in everything in a lifetime and stretches a few seconds into forever ... Or this is Hell and we’re in it.”

  I shivered where I sat. There were a lot of things that tapes had not told me, and one of them was how to cope with thoughts like that. My lady was terrifying in her fantasies.

  “We’re alive,” Lance said, unasked. “And we’re more comfortable than we were.”

  “Who asked you?” Dela snapped, and Lance bowed his head. We don’t talk uninvited, not in company, and Griffin was company. Griffin seemed to be intensely bothered, and got up and paced the floor.

  It did not help. It did not hasten the time, which crept past at a deadly slow pace, and finally Griffin spun about and strode out the door.

  “Griffin?” my lady Dela quavered.

  I stood up; Dela had; and Lance. “He mustn’t give orders,” I said, thinking at least where I would be going if I were Griffin, and we heard the door to the outside corridor open, not that to his own rooms. “Lady Dela, he’s going to the bridge. He mustn’t give them orders.”

  My lady stared at me and I think if she had been close enough she m
ight have hit me. But then her face grew afraid. “They wouldn’t pay any attention to him. They wouldn’t.”

  “No, lady Dela, but he’s strong and quick and I’m not sure they could stop him.”

  Dela stirred herself then and made some haste. Lance and I seized up Viv and drew her along in Dela’s wake, out into the corridors and down them to the bridge. It was all, all too late if Griffin had had something definite in mind; but it was still peaceful when we arrived, Griffin standing there in the center of the bridge and the crew with their backs to him and working at their posts. Griffin was ominous looking where he was, in the center of things, hands on hips. None of the crew was particularly big ... only Lance was that, the two of them like mirrors, dark and gold, the lady’s taste running remarkably similar in this instance. And Lance made a casual move that took himself between Griffin and Gawain and Lynn at main controls, just standing there, in case.

  “Well?” Dela asked.

  “We don’t have contact,” Percivale said, beside Modred. “We keep sending, but the object doesn’t respond. We were asked about range: we don’t know that either. Everything has failed.”

  “Where is this thing we’re talking about?” Dela asked, and Modred reached and punched a button. It came up on the big screen, a kind of a cloud on the scope, all gridded and false, just patches of something solid the computer was trying to show us.

  “I think we’re getting vid,” Percivale said, and that image went off, replaced with another, in all the flare of strange colors and shapes that drifted where there ought to be stars, in between blackness measled with red spots like dapples that might be stars or just the cameras trying to pick up something that made no sense. And against that backdrop was something that might be a misshapen world in silhouette, or a big rock irregularly shaped, or something far vaster than we wanted to think, no knowing. It was flattened at its poles and it bristled with strange shapes in prickly complexity.

  “We’ve been getting nearer steadily,” Modred said. “It could be our size or star-sized. We don’t know.”

  “You’ve got the scan on it,” Griffin snapped at him. “You’ve got that readout for timing.”

  “Time is a questionable constant here,” Modred said without turning about, keeping at his work. “I refrained from making unjustified assumptions. This is new input on the main screen. I am getting a size estimate.—Take impact precautions. Now.”

  Near ... we were coming at it. It was getting closer and closer on the screen. My lady caught at Griffin, evidently having given up her theory of being dead. “Use the engines,” Griffin yelled at Gawain and Lynn, furious. “If we’re coming up against some mass they may react off that ... use the engines!”

  “We are,” Gawain said calmly.

  We grabbed at both Dela and Griffin, Lance and I, and pulled them to the cushioned corner and got the bar down and the straps round them, then dragged Vivien, who was paralyzed and nearly blanked, with us to the remaining pad. The crew was putting the safety bars in place too, all very cool. That we couldn’t feel the engines ... no feel to them at all ... when normally they should have been kicking us hard in some direction....

  Screens broke up. We were just too close to it. It had filled all our forward view and the last detail we got was huge. Something interfered with the pickup. I wrapped the restraints about myself while Lance did his, and all the while expected the impact, to be flung like some toy across a breached compartment on a puff of crystalizing air.... I didn’t know what was out there, but the most horrible fate of all seemed to me to be blown out of here, to be set adrift naked in that, whatever that stuff was out there. This little ship that held our lives also held whatever sanity we had been able to trick our eyes into seeing, and what was out there—I wondered how long it took to die in that stuff. Or whether one ever did.

  The last buckle jammed. I refitted it, in sudden tape-taught calm. I was with the ship and my lady. I had my referents. My back was to the wall and my most favorite comrades were with me. I didn’t want to end, but there was comfort in company—far better, I conned myself, than what waited for us by our natures, to be taken separately by the law and coldly done away. This was like born-men, this was—

  “Repulse is working,” Gawain said, about the instant my stomach felt the slam of the engines. “Stop rotation.”

  Don’t! I thought irrationally, because I trusted nothing to start working again once it had been shut down in this mad place, and if rotation stopped working the way it did when we would go into a dock at station, we would end up null G in this stuff, subject to its laws. We were not, for mercy’s sake, coming in at a safe dock with crews waiting to assist, and there was no place to put the Maid’s delicate noseprobe, all exposed out there.

  G started going away. We were locking into station-docking position, the crew going through their motions with heart-breaking calm, doing all the right things in this terrible place; and the poor unsecured Maid was going to be chaos in her station-topside decks.

  A touch came at my fingers. It was Lancelot’s hand seeking mine. I closed on it, and reached beside me for Vivien’s, which was very cold.

  She had, Lance had said it, planned to live, and everything was wrong for her. No hope for Vivien, whose accounts and knowledge were useless now. I understood suddenly, that Vivien’s function was simply gone for her; and she had already begun to die, in a way as terrible as being dumped out in the chaos-stuff.

  “The lady will need you,” I hissed at Viv, gripping her nerveless hand till I ground the bones together. “She needs us all.”

  That might have helped. There was a little jerk from Viv’s hand, a little resistance; and I winced, for Lance closed down hard on mine. My lady and Griffin screamed—we hit, ground with a sound like someone was shredding the Maid’s metal body, and our soft bodies hit the restraints as the ship’s mass stopped a little before that of our poor flesh. I blanked half an instant, came out of it realizing pain, and that somehow we had not been going as fast as I feared a ship might in this place (which estimate ranged past C and posed interesting physics for collision) or what we had hit was going the same general direction as we were, at an angle. Mass, I thought, if that had any meaning in this place/time ... a monstrous mass, to have pulled us into it, if that was what it had done. Our motion had not stopped in collision. The noise had not. We grated, hit, hung, grated, a shock that seemed to tear my heart and stomach loose.

  “We’re up against it,” Modred’s cool voice came to me. “We’d better grapple or we’ll go on with this instability.”

  Instability. A groaning and scraping, and a horrifying series of jolts, as if we were being dragged across something. The Maid shifted again, her dragging force of engines like a hand pushing us.

  Clang and thump. I heard the grapples lock and felt the whole ship steady, a slow suspicion of stable G that crawled through the clothes I wore and settled my hair down and caressed my abused joints and stomach and said that there was indeed up and down again. It was a kilo or so light, but we had G. Whatever we were fixed to had spin and we had gotten our right orientation to it.

  The crew was still exchanging quiet information, doing a shutdown, no cheers, no exuberance in their manner. That huge main screen cleared again, to show us ruby-spotted blackness and our own battered nose with the grapples locked onto something. Strong floods were playing from our hull onto the surface we faced, a green, pitted surface which was flaring with colors into the violets and dotted with little instabilities like black stars. It made me sick to look at it; but it was indeed our nose probe, badly abraded and with stuff coming out of it like trailing cable or black snakes, and there was our grapple locked into something that looked like metal wreckage. The lights swung further and it was wreckage, all right, some other ship all dark and scarred and crumpled. The lights and camera kept traveling and there was still another ship, of some delicate kind I had never imagined. It was dark too, like spiderweb in silhouette, twisted wreckage at its heart with its filament guts
hanging out into the red measled void.

  My lady Dela swore and wept, a throaty, loud sound in the stillness about us now. She freed herself of the restraints and crossed the deck to Gawain and Lynn, and Griffin came at her heels. I loosed myself, and Lance did, while Dela leaned there on the back of Gawain’s chair, looking up at the screen in terror. Griffin set his big hands on her shoulders. “Keep trying,” Griffin asked of the crew, who kept the beam and the cameras moving, turning up more sights as desolate. Aft, through the silhouette of the Maid’s raking vanes, there was far perspective, chaos-stuff with violet tints into the red. More wreckage then. The cameras stopped. “There,” Modred said. “There.”

  It was a curve, lit in the queasy flarings, a vast sweep, a symmetry in the wreckage, as if the thing we were fixed to were some vast ring. Ship bodies were gathered to it like parasites, like fungus growth, with red and black beyond, and the wrecks themselves all spotted with holes as if they were eaten up with acid light illusion of the chaos-stuff, or something showing through their metal wounds, like glowing blood.

  “Whatever we’ve hit,” Percy said quietly, “a lot have gone before us. It’s some large mass, maybe a station, maybe a huge ship—once. Old ... old. Others might fall through the pile into us the same way we’ve hit them.”

  “Then get us out of here,” my lady said. “Get us out!”

  Gawain and Lynette stirred in their seats. Wayne powered his about to look up at her. “My lady Dela, it’s not possible.” He spoke with the stillest patience. “We can wallow about the surface, batter ourselves into junk against it. If we loose those grapples we’ll do that.”