Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “See if you can fine it down now,” Griffin said. “What happened to your last setup on that?”

  “Everything’s shifted,” Modred said. I hoped he meant the figures.

  Griffin swore and turned away, paced the floor. Maybe it was hard for him to stare at the screens for any length of time. I know it got to my stomach; and even the crew looked uncomfortable, jolted out of sleep, with that terrible banging never ceasing. Tap. Bang. Bang. Tap-tap-tap.

  Lynette turned around at her place. “We might ungrapple,” she offered, looking at Dela, not Griffin. “We can push off and disrupt whatever they’re doing on the other side.”

  “Do it,” Dela said, snatched at that with all the force in her. Griffin looked like he wanted to say something and shut his mouth instead. Lynn turned about again, all coolly done. She touched switches and boards came alight.

  “Take hold,” Percy warned us. We hurried and got Dela and Griffin to the emergency cushions, got ourselves snugged in, Viv first, and Lance and myself together, holding hands for comfort.

  Moving would delay things. It would give us time. But maybe the thing out there had guns, I thought; maybe when we moved it would just start shooting and all we would have of life would be just the next moment, when the fragile Maid was blown apart.

  Did Lynn and the others think of that? Was that what Griffin had almost said? Maybe my listening to his tapes, all those things about wars and killing people, let me think such things. I felt like I was sweating all the way to my insides.

  The crew talked to each other. It took them forever ... judging, I guessed, how hard and how far and what we were going to grab to next that might make it harder for whatever was trying to hammer through our bow. Finally: “Stand by,” Lynette said.

  VIII

  And Vivien answer’d frowning yet in wrath:

  “O ay; what say ye to Sir Lancelot, friend,

  Traitor or true? that commerce with the Queen,

  I ask you. ...”

  It came simultaneously, the clang of the grapples disconnecting, the shudder that might be our engines working.

  “Shut it down,” Percy cried. “Shut it down!”

  “No,” Lynn said, and the shuddering kept up, like out-of-tune notes quavering through metal frame and living bone. Lynn reached suddenly across the board. The harmonies stopped. Gawain, beside her, made a move and the grapples slammed on again.

  “We didn’t move,” Dela said softly; and louder: “We didn’t move.”

  Lynn swung her chair about. “No.” There was thorough anguish on her freckled face. “Something’s got a grapple on us. We can’t break it loose.”

  “Do it!” Dela was unbuckling the restraints. She got them undone as the rest of us got out of ours. She stood up and thrust Griffin’s hand off when he got up and tried to put his hand on her shoulder. “You find a way to do it.”

  “Lady Dela, we already took a chance with it.”

  “Listen to your captains,” Griffin said, taking Dela’s shoulders and refusing this time to be shaken off. “Listen. Will you listen to what she’s trying to tell you?”

  “We didn’t move at all,” Lynn said, with soft, implacable precision. “Our own grapples went back on right where they had been, to the millimeter. We gave it repulse straight on and angled and we didn’t shake it even that much. That’s a solid hold they’ve got on us.”

  “Well, why did you let them get it on us?” Dela’s voice went brittle. “Why did you play games with it and let this happen?”

  “Last night at dinner,” Modred said in his ordinary, flat voice, “we should have investigated. But it was probably too late.”

  Only Modred was that nerveless, to turn something back at Dela. She cursed him, and all of us, and Griffin, and told him to let her go. He didn’t and Modred never flinched.

  “They’ve told you the truth,” Griffin said, making her look at him: there was no one but Lance could fight back against a strength like Griffin had; but he let her go when she struck at his arms, and stood there when she hit him hard in the chest in her temper. And we stood there—I, and Lance—even Lance, watching this man put hands on Dela, because somehow he had gotten round to Lynn’s side, and Modred’s and the ship’s, and we were standing with him, not understanding how it was happening to us.

  Maybe Dela realized it too. She made a throwaway gesture, turned aside, not looking at anyone. “Go on,” she said. “Go on. Do what you like. You have all the answers.”

  She stayed that way, facing no one, her hands locked in front of her. Griffin stared at her as if she had set him at a loss, like all of us were. Then he looked over at us. “Get her out,” he said quietly. “All of you who don’t have to be here, out. Crew too: offshift crew, go back to sleep. This may go on into the next watch. We have to put up with it.”

  I didn’t know what to do for the moment. I wasn’t supposed to take his orders about my lady Dela, but then, Dela was fit to say something if she wanted to say something. I hesitated. Lance did, not included in that order, things being as they were. “Come,” I said then, and went and hugged Dela against me. “Come on.”

  Dela put her arms about me, seeming suddenly small and uncertain, and I put mine about her and led her back through the corridor to her own rooms. Then she walked on her own, in her own safe sitting-room, but I held her hand, because she seemed to want that, and led her back into her own bedroom and did off her shoes and her robe and tucked her into that big soft blue bed. She was still shivering ... my brave, my strong-minded lady. Just last evening she had put courage into us, had talked to us and made us sit down and almost made us believe it would all turn out. She had made herself believe it too, I think; and it was all unraveling.

  Vivien had followed us ... not Lance. He had not felt permitted, or he would have. “Get her a drink,” I told Viv—when she could hardly round on me and tell me to do it myself; she gave me a black hysterical look and went over to the sideboard. I sat with my lady and kept my arm about her behind the pillow. The banging at the hull began again, and Dela’s hands were clenched whitely on the bedclothes.

  “It can’t get in,” I offered, not believing it myself any longer. “Or it would have done it already. It’s just wishing, that’s all.”

  Vivien brought the wine. Dela took it in both hands and drank, and seemed to feel better after half a glass. Vivien sat down on the other side of the wide mattress and I stayed where I was, just being near Dela. For a long time Dela drank in small sips, and stared with detached interest at some place before her, while the hammering kept up.

  “Go on,” my lady said finally, to Vivien. “Go on.” But she didn’t look at me when she said it, and when Vivien got up and left, I stayed. “Get me another drink,” she asked quite calmly. “I can’t stand that noise.”

  I did so, and took one for myself, because alone, we were not on formalities.

  And I sat there beside her while she was on her second glass, my hand locked in hers. Psych-set: Dela was hurting, above and beyond the fear; I could sense that. A frown creased her brow. Her blonde hair fell about her lace-gowned shoulders and she leaned there among the lacy pillows drinking the wine and looking oddly young.

  “Why doesn’t he come back?” she asked of me, as if I should know what born-men thought. “We’re stuck here. Why can’t he accept that?”

  “Maybe he thinks he could beat it.”

  She shook her head, a cascade of pale blonde among the pillows. “No. He doesn’t.” She freed her hand of mine and changed hands with the wineglass, patted Griffin’s accustomed place in the huge bed. “He’s so good to me. He tried so hard to be brave, and I know he’s scared, because he’s young—that’s not rejuv: that’s his real age. He doesn’t know much. Oh, he’s traveled a bit, but not like this.” A soft, desperate laugh, as if she had realized her own bad joke. A reknitting of the brows. “He’s scared. And he doesn’t have to be nice, but he is, and I do love him, Elaine. He’s the first one of all of them who ever didn’t have to b
e nice to me, and he is, and I hate that it has to be him in this mess with us.”

  I looked desperately at my lap, at my fingers laced there, not liking this business of being dragged into born-man confidence. But we’re like the walls. Born-men can talk to us and know our opinion’s nothing, so it’s rather like talking to themselves. Sold on, we’re erased; and here—here where we were, there was no selling, and no gossiping elsewhere, that was certain.

  “He’s good,” Dela said. “You understand that? He’s just a good man.”

  I remembered that he had hit me, but maybe he hadn’t seen me right, and he had been scared then. Hitting made no difference to me. Others had hit me. I held no grudges; that wasn’t in my psych-set either.

  “I’m seventy,” Dela said, still talking to me and the walls at once. “And do you know why he’s with me? Because we started out as allies to do a little bending of government rules ... because the government ... but it doesn’t matter. Nothing back there matters. His family; my estates—it doesn’t matter at all. There’s just that thing out there, and I wish he’d leave it alone, let it take its time.—Does dying frighten you, Elaine? Do you ever think about things like that?”

  I nodded, though I didn’t know if I thought of it the way she meant. She changed hands again and reached and stroked my hair. “Griffin and I ... you know there are people who don’t think you ought to exist at all—that the whole system that made you is wrong. But you value your life, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Griffin and I talked about it. Once. When it mattered. It doesn’t now. I meant what I said. We share everything, Griffin and I and all of you, all the food, everything, as long as there’s anything. That’s the way it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said. What could I say? She had frightened me badly and healed it all at once, and I put my arms about her, really grateful—but I knew better than to think they wouldn’t think on it again sometime that things really did run short. I knew my lady Dela, that she had high purposes, and she meant to be good, but as with her lovers and her hopes, sometimes she and her high purposes had fallings-out.

  The hammering, dim a moment, suddenly crashed out louder and louder. Dela rolled her eyes at the wooden beams overhead and looked as if she could not bear it. She slammed the empty glass down on the bedside table and scrambled out of bed in a flurry of gowns and blonde hair, on her way back to the intercom in the sitting-room.

  “Griffin,” I heard her say over the hammering on the hull. I took up her wineglass and refilled it, trembling somewhat, expecting temper when Griffin was Griffin and refused.

  “Dela,” he answered after a time.

  “Griffin, stop it up there and let it alone and come back down here.”

  “Dela,” I heard, standing stock-still and holding my breath. “Dela, there’s no waiting for this thing. Modred and I have something. There’re tubes, Dela, tubes going to all those ships we can see. We don’t know what or why, but we’re trying to get them a little clearer.”

  “What good is it to see it? Modred, Modred, let it all be, shut it down and let it be.”

  “Let them alone!” Griffin snapped back. “They’re doing a job up here. Do you want me to come down there and explain it all or do you trust me? I thought we had this out. I thought we had an agreement, Dela.”

  There was long silence, and I clenched my hands together, because there was no one born who talked to Dela Kirn that way, no one.

  “All right,” Dela said in an unhappy voice. There was a sudden silence, then another tap, very soft, that ran from the hull through my nerves. “All right. Modred, help him. All of you, work with Griffin.”

  She came back into the bedroom then, and for a moment instead of the youth the rejuv preserved, I saw age, in the slump of her shoulders and the gesture that reached for the doorway as if she had trouble seeing it. I started to go and help her; and then I froze, because I felt wrong in seeing such a thing. She was wounded and sometimes in her wounds she was dangerous. She might hit me. I resigned myself to that when she let go the door and came near, her hand stretched out for me. I took it and set her down on the bedside.

  No violence. She began to crawl beneath the covers and I tucked her in and sat down again on the bed, because she had not yet dismissed me. She lifted a hand and patted my check, with a mournful look in her blue eyes.

  “You’ll do what Griffin says too,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “if you ask me to.”

  “I do.” She stroked the side of my cheek with her finger as if she were touching statuary. “You’re special, you know that. Special, and beautiful, and maybe I shouldn’t tangle up your minds the way I have, but you’re people, aren’t you? You understand loyalty. Or is it all programming?”

  “I don’t know how to answer,” I said, and I was afraid, because it was a terrible kind of question, having my lady delve into my programming and my logic. There were buttons she could push, oh, not physical ones, but real all the same, keys she had that could turn me frozen or, I suspected, hurt me beyond all telling—the key instructions to all my psych-sets. “I could never know if I felt what you feel. But I know I want to take care of you. And I’m very glad it’s you and not someone else, lady Dela.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’ve met others and their owners, and I know how good you really are to us. And if it doesn’t offend you, thank you for being good to us all our lives.”

  Her lips trembled. Outside the hull the hammering still continued, like someone fixing pipes, and she pulled me to her, my face between her hands, and kissed me on the brow.

  It touched me in a strange way, like pulling strings that were connected to something deep and connected to everything else. Psych-sets. It’s a very pleasurable thing to fulfill a Duty, one of the really implanted ones. And this made me feel I had.

  I sat back and she just stared at me a time and kept her hand on mine, as if my being there mattered to her.

  “Griffin is a good man,” she insisted when I had never argued; and there was that frightened look in her eyes.

  I reckoned then for once Dela was up against something she just didn’t want to think about, just as she tried to believe us all dead when it began to go wrong. This wasn’t like the Dela who ran the house on Brahman, who built cities. Then she was all business and hard-minded and no one could say no to her; but now she had no inclination to go running up to the bridge to take command. She might have fought. She abdicated. Griffin showed himself more competent with the ship ... at least knowing how to talk to the crew. We hadn’t defended her. I think that hurt her deeply.

  Watch yourself, said I to Griffin, absent. Watch yourself, born-man, when you begin to take the Maid away from my lady.—But she had already lost it; and maybe it was that which had so broken Dela’s spirit, that the Maid which had been so beautiful and so free, which had been Dela Kirn herself in some strange metaphysical connection ... was held here and smashed and broken, and now threatened with further erosions. I perceived pain, and held to Dela’s hand, minded to go on pouring her drinks and to stay here until she could sleep, whatever the infernal hammering meant out there.

  I mean, Dela had never cared for the running of the ship, just that it did run, and she had bought Gawain and the others and they were good, the very best: that was her pride. Her money bought the best and it worked and she gave the orders and the ship ran ... all magical. She had not the least idea how it all worked, far less idea than I did, who lived with the crew. And now Griffin, who claimed to do a little piloting himself insystem ... just walked in and took them over; and Dela couldn’t fight any longer. We were pinned here ... I think that was the most horrible thing to her, that whatever we did, however we fought, there was never any hope, and while that was true, she had no spirit left at all.

  “Call Lance,” she said.

  My heart stopped. I opened my mouth to babble some excuse on his behalf: he can’t, he can’t, I thought; but there was no excuse that would hide the
truth, and perhaps—perhaps with her—I nodded, rose and went out to the com, pushed 21, the crew quarters. “Lance,” I said. “Lance.”

  “Yes?” the answer came.

  “My lady wants you in her quarters.”

  A silence. “Yes,” he said plainly. It was all that had to be said. And very quietly I slipped away out the door, because all that I could do was done.

  O Griffin, I thought, you never walk out on my lady; you didn’t know that. But you will. And more than that, you’re doing things your own way, and she’ll never bear with that, not where it touches the Maid. Not in that.

  But for Lance—for him I was mortally afraid.

  I didn’t want to go down the lift. I might meet Lance there, coming up, and that was not a meeting I wanted. The knell still rang against the hull, insane hammering that grew loud and soft by turns. I avoided the lift, kept to the main corridor, that took me back to the vicinity of the bridge, where I was not supposed to be, by Griffin’s order.

  Viv was there, just standing, where she could see in the open door, her hands locked together in an attitude of worry. I startled her, being there, and she scowled and looked back to the bridge.

  “What are they up to?” I asked.

  “What would you know?” she said. That was Viv. Her old self, worried as she was.

  I edged up into the doorway. The main screen was off, but they had a clear image on some. I stood there and stared at our neighbors.

  Tubes. Tubes, Griffin had said, and there were, everywhere. At every point a wreck contacted the wheel, the station, whatever it was that had snared us ... tubes like some kind of obscene parasites that sucked the life from them. Tubes between the ships, as if the growth had pierced them and kept going. The wounds I had thought to have seen, holes in the ships themselves through which the light bled ... some of those were not: some of those holes had been the arch of those tubes, against the chaos-stuff that was measled black in the still picture. They were huge, those structures, big enough for access, and irregular in their shapes, like many-branched snakes, like veins and arteries growing out of this thing we had snuggled up to and growing us to its body.