Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  It didn’t take much guesswork now to know what was proceeding out there with all those noises. Or why we were stuck fast. There’s a thing I’d seen on vid, an access box, and they use it when there’s some emergency ... Hobson’s Bridge, I had heard it named. It’s a tube and two very powerful pressure gates; and they use it in shipboard disasters when ships have to be boarded and suits aren’t sufficient to get people off. You rig it at one side and ride it across; you lock on with the magnetic grapple and you make the seal. You cut through. You’re in.

  Sometimes I wished I listened to fewer tapes.

  Griffin had looked around. He caught me in the doorway, fixed me with that mad blue-eyed stare of his. “Elaine. Did Dela send you?”

  “She dismissed me, sir.”

  He nodded, in a way that more or less accepted my presence there. I took a tentative step inside. Noticed by a born-man, one doesn’t vanish when his back is turned. Griffin walked the length of the U at controls, stopped by Modred and looked back again at me. “You understand what we’ve got here?”

  I swallowed against the tightness in my throat and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “How’s Dela taking this?”

  She had told me to take Griffin’s orders, even if she really didn’t want me to; and I stood confused, not knowing what I owed where; but I’m high-order, and I don’t blank in choices. “I think she’s scared, sir; and I don’t think she wants to think about it for a while.”

  That at least was the truth; and it kept Lance out of it. I didn’t want Griffin dashing back there to comfort Dela, not now, no.

  Griffin ran a hand through his pretty golden hair, and he leaned standing against the chair absent Percy used, looking mortally tired. I felt sorry for him then, and I was not in the habit of feeling sorry for Griffin. He was trying. He had sent Lynn and Percy to rest; and Lance and Viv ... even if no one was able to. He tried to solve this thing. So did the crew ... fighting for the Maid, even if Dela saw no hope in it.

  “You know what a Bridge is?” he asked. “Ship to ship?”

  I nodded.

  “And Dela—what does she say?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But she would understand if she saw that.”

  He looked still very tired. Looked around at all of us, Gawain and Modred, and back to me. “You’re good,” he said. “You’re very good.”

  I made a kind of bow of the head, pleased to be told that, even by a stranger. We knew our worth; but it was still good to hear.

  “What they’re doing,” Griffin said, and all at once I was conscious that the hammering had stilled for a while, “is linking into all those ships. That means that something’s been alive and doing that a long, long time.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, contemplating the age of those ships that had come here before us. I looked round the control center, a nervous gesture, missing the sound. “It doesn’t take long to set up a Bridge, does it?”

  “No,” Griffin said. “But I daresay they’re jury-rigging. They. It. We have to do something to stop it. You understand that. When you talk to Dela—” He spoke very, very softly, in conspiracy. “When you talk to her, believe that. Protest it in her ear. For her sake. It’s your duty, isn’t it?—Where’s Lance?”

  I must have flinched. “Below, sir.” We can lie, in duty. He looked at me—he could not have suspected when he asked that question; me, with my face—he had to suspect something behind that flinching, had to think, and know why one of us would lie, and for whom.

  “When you see him,” he said, ever so quietly, only that tired look on his face, “tell him I’ll see the whole staff up here at 1000 this morning. I want to talk to all of you at once. And keep it quiet. I don’t want to frighten Dela. You understand that.”

  I nodded. He walked away himself, his hands locked behind him, and stopped and looked at the screens. I stood there, while Modred and Gawain consulted and did things with the comp that showed up in the image on the screens.

  It looked uglier and uglier, defined, where before the bleeding smears of light had masked all detail. It took on colors, greens and blues. Finally Griffin walked over to the side and looked at Gawain and Modred. “You’ve got that inventory search run.”

  “Yes,” Modred said, and reached and picked up a handful of printout. Griffin took it. The hammering started again, and even Modred reacted to it, a human glance at the walls about us. Griffin swore, shook his head.

  “Go get some rest,” he told them. “I’m doing the same.”

  He started away then, and I moved out of the doorway, to show respect when a born-man wanted past. My heart was beating very fast: com, I was thinking, I could get to com before Griffin could get to Dela’s rooms; I could think of something casual to say—something; but Griffin delayed, fixed me with a strangely sad look. “I’m going back to my quarters,” Griffin said.

  I felt my face go hot. I stood there, he walked out, and I didn’t make the call. I walked down the corridor after him, headed my own way, for the lift that would take me down to the crew quarters.

  Vivien trailed after me, maybe the others too; but I watched Griffin’s broad back, his shoulders bowed as if he were very tired, his head down, and for a moment he looked so like Lance in one of his sorrows that I found myself hurting for him.

  I knew pain when I saw it. Remember ... it’s my function.

  I wished I might go to him, might balance things, set it all right by magic. I walked faster, to overtake him; but my nerve failed me, with the thought that I had no instruction from Dela, and I could not side against her. Not twice. I stopped, close by the lift, and Viv pushed the button, opening the door.

  Tap, the sound came against the hull. Tap-bang.

  IX

  In love, if love be love, if love be ours,

  Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:

  Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

  We fled into the crew quarters, Gawain and Modred, Vivien and I ... quietly as we could, but Lynn and Percy lifted their heads from their pillows all the same. We started taking off boots, settling down for a little rest.

  “Where’s Lance?” Gawain asked, all innocent.

  “Dela called,” I said, from my cot where I had lain down next Lance’s vacant one; and Gawain’s face took on an instant apprehension of things. Viv looked up from taking off her stockings. I closed my eyes and folded my hands on my middle, uncommunicative, trying to shut out the sound from the hull. It was down to a familiar pattern now ... tap-tap-tap. It grew fainter. I thought of the tubes like branching arteries. Maybe they were working somewhere farther up, at some branching. I imagined such a thing growing over the Maid, a basketry of veins, wrapping us about. I shuddered and tried to think of something pleasant. About the dinner table with the artificial candles aglow up and down it, dark wood set with lace and crystal and loaded with fine food and wines. I would like a glass right now, I thought. There were times when I would have gone to the gallery and stolen a bottle. I didn’t feel I should. Share and share alike, my lady had said; and the good wine was a thing we would run out of.

  Supposing we lasted long enough.

  There was silence. I opened my eyes.

  “It stopped,” Percy said, very hushed.

  “Whatever they’re doing,” Modred said, “they’ll have it done sooner or later. I’m only surprised it’s taken this long.”

  “Stop it,” Vivien said, very sharp, sitting upright on her bed, and I rolled over to face them, distressed by Viv’s temper. “If you’d done your jobs,” Viv said, “we wouldn’t be in this mess. And if you did something instead of sit and talk about it we might get out.”

  “Someone,” Lynn said, “might go out on the hull with a cutter.”

  “In that?” Percy asked. That was my thought; my stomach heaved at the idea.

  “I could try it,” Lynn said.

  “You’re valuable,” Modred said. “The gain would be short term and the risk is out of proportion to the gain.”

 
Like that: Modred’s voice never varied ... like Viv’s sums and accounts. I had had another way of putting it all dammed up behind my teeth. But the crew wasn’t my business, any more than it was Viv’s.

  “What are you going to do?” Viv asked. “What are you doing about this thing? Our lady depends on you to do something.”

  “Let them be,” I said, and Viv looked at me, at me, Elaine, who did my lady’s hair and had no authority to talk to Vivien. “If it was your job to run the ship you could tell them what to do, but they’ve done everything right so far or we’d none of us be alive.”

  “They left us grappled to this thing. Was that right? They talked to that thing instead of breaking us loose on the instant. Was that right?”

  “Grappling on,” Modred said, unstoppable in locating an inaccuracy, “was correct. We would have damaged the hull had we kept drifting.”

  “And talking to it?”

  “Let them be,” I said, because that argument had bit them: I saw that it had. “Maybe it was right to do. Wasn’t that our lady’s to decide, and didn’t she?”

  “Griffin,” Viv said. “Griffin decides things. And he wouldn’t be deciding them if the crew’s incompetency hadn’t dropped us into this. We were in the middle of the system. You can’t jump from the middle of the system. And they did it to us, getting us into this.”

  “We were pulled in,” Gawain said. “There wasn’t any warning. No evasion possible.”

  “For you. Maybe if you were competent there’d have been another answer.”

  That was Vivien at her old self again: she did it in the house at Brahmani Dali and sent some of the servants into blank. Now she tried it on the crew. I sat up, shivering inside. “Maybe if Viv’s hydroponics don’t work out, she can go out on the hull,” I said. It was cruel. Deliberately. It left me shivering worse than ever, all my psych-sets in disarray. But it shut Viv down. Her face went white. “I think,” I said between waves of nausea my psych-sets gave me, “you’ve done all the right things. So it breaks through. It would do it anyway; and so you’ve talked to it: would it be different if we hadn’t? And so it’s got us; would we be better off if we’d slid around over the surface until we made a dozen holes it could get in, and it grappled us anyway?”

  They looked at me like so many flowers to the sun. Percy and Gawain and Lynn looked grateful. “No,” Modred said neatly, “the situation would be much the same.”

  Viv could scare them. She could scare anyone. She had my lady’s ear ... at least she had had it when she did the accounts; and she had that reputation. But so did I have Dela’s ear. And I would say things if Vivien did. I had that much courage. Dela’s temper could make the crew make mistakes. She could order them to do things that might endanger all of us. She could order Lynn out on the hull. Or other dangerous things.

  “We’re supposed to be resting,” I said. “It’s against orders to be disturbing the crew.”

  “Oh. Orders,” Viv said. “Orders ... from someone who skulks about stealing. I know who gets tapes they’re not supposed to have. Born-man tapes. I suppose you think that gives you license to tell us all how it is.”

  “They might do you good. Imagination, Viv. Not everything comes in sums.”

  That capped it. I saw the look she gave me. O misery, I thought. We don’t hate like born-men, perhaps, but we know about protecting ourselves. And perhaps she couldn’t harm me: her psych-set would stop that. But she would undermine me at the first chance. I was never good at that kind of politics. But Viv was.

  It didn’t help my sleep. I was licensed to have that tape, I thought; I was justified. My lady knew, at least in general, that I pilfered the library. It was all tacit. But if Vivien made an issue, got that cut off—

  I had something else to be scared of, though I persuaded myself it was all empty. Bluff and bluster. Viv could not go at that angle; knew already it would never work.

  But she would suggest me for every miserable duty my lady thought of. She would do that, beyond a doubt.

  The hammering started up again, tap, tap, tap, and that hardly helped my peace of mind either. We quarreled over blame, and it meanwhile just worked away. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling, shut them with a deliberate effort.

  Everyone settled down then, even Vivien, but I reckoned there was not much sleeping done, but perhaps by Modred, who lacked nerves as he lacked sex.

  I drowsed a little finally, on and off between the hammerings. And eventually Lance came back—quietly, respecting our supposed sleep, not brightening the lights. He went to his locker, undressed, went to the bath, and when he had come back in his robe he lay down on his bed next to me and stared at the ceiling.

  I turned over to face him. He turned his head and looked at me. The pain was gone. It could not then have gone so badly; and that hurt, in some vague way, atop everything else.

  I got up and came around and sat on the side of his bed. He gave me his hand and squeezed my fingers, seeming more at peace with himself than he had been. “I was not,” he said, “what I was, but I was all right. I was all right, Elaine.”

  Someone else stirred; his eyes went to that. I bent down and kissed him on the brow, and his eyes came back to me. His hand pressed mine again, innocent of his difficulties.

  “Griffin knows,” I warned him. I don’t know why it slipped out then, then of all times, when it could have waited, but my mind was full of Griffin and dangers and all our troubles, and it just spilled. He looked up at me with his eyes suddenly full of shock. And hurt. I shivered, that I had done such a thing, hurt someone for the second time, and this time in the haste of the hour.

  “They quarreled,” I said, walking deeper into it. “Lance, we’re supposed to help him ... you understand ... with the ship. Lady Dela says so. That we’re to help. She’s afraid, and there’s something going on—” The hammering stopped again. This time the silence oppressed me, and a cold breeze from the vents poured over my skin. I put my hands on Lance’s sides, and he put his on my shoulders, for comfort. There was dread in his face now, like a contagion. “Bridges,” I said. “Whatever-it-is means to use a Bridge to get to us. All the other ships ... have tubes going in and out of them. They’ve seen it ... the crew ... when they fined down the pictures on the bridge. That’s what that hammering is out there.”

  He absorbed that a moment, saying nothing.

  “Lady Dela’s not to know yet,” I said. “Griffin doesn’t want to frighten her.”

  Lance nodded slightly. “I understand that.” He lay there thinking and staring through me, and what his thoughts were I tried to guess—I reckoned they moved somewhere between what was working at us out there and what small happiness I had destroyed for him.

  “What are we going to do about it?” he asked finally.

  “We’re supposed to be back up on the bridge at 1000. All of us. I think Griffin’s got something in mind. I hope so.”

  “It’s after 0800, isn’t it?”

  I turned around and looked at the clock. It was 0836. “I think I should have gotten everybody breakfast. There’s still time.”

  “I don’t want it. Others might.”

  “Lance, you should. Please, you should.”

  He stayed quiet a moment, then got up on his elbow. “You go start it, I’ll come and help.”

  I got up and started throwing on my clothes again. There was time, indeed there was time; and it was on my shoulders, to see that everyone was fed. Everyone would think of it soon, and maybe our spirits wanted that, even if our stomachs were not so willing.

  It took all kinds of strength to face that thing out there, and in my mind, schedules were part of it, insisting that our world went on.

  But I kept thinking all the while I rode the lift down to the galley and especially before Lance came to help me, that it was very lonely down there. The hammering was stopped now; and I was in the outermost shell of the Maid, so that the void was out there, just one level under my feet while I was making plates of toast and cups of coffee. I fe
lt like I had when I had first to walk the invisible floor and teach my eyes to see—that maybe our Beast didn’t see things at all the way our senses did, and maybe it just looked through us whenever it wanted, part and parcel of the chaos-stuff.

  Lance came, patted me on the shoulder and picked up the ready trays to take them where they had to go. “I’ll take those topside,” I said purposefully, meaning Dela, meaning Griffin; and I took them away from him.

  He said nothing to that. Possibly he was grateful. Possibly his mind was somewhere else entirely now, on the ship, and not on Dela; but I doubted that: his psych-set didn’t make that likely.

  Dela was abed, where I looked to find her. She stirred when I touched her bare shoulder, and poked her head up through a curtain of blonde hair, pushing it back to discover breakfast. “Oh,” she said, not sounding displeased. She turned over and plumped the pillows up to take it in bed. ‘Is everything all right then? It’s quiet.”’

  “I think it’s given up for a while,” I lied, straight-faced and cheerfully. “I’m taking breakfasts round. May I go?”

  “Go.” She waved a dismissing hand, and I went.

  Griffin I found asleep too—all bent over his desk in his quarters, the comp unit still going, the papers strewn under him on the surface. “Sir,” I said, tray in hand, not touching him: I was wary of Griffin. “Sir.”

  He lifted his head then, and saw me; and his eyes looked his want of sleep. I set the tray down for him and uncovered it, uncapped the coffee and gave that into his hands.

  “It’s stopped,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes, sir, off and on. It’s been quiet about half an hour so far. It’s 0935, sir.”

  He turned with a frown and dug into the marmalade. I took that for a dismissal on this occasion and started away.

  “Have you slept, Elaine?”