Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “He’d fight for us,” I said to Griffin, thinking that we could hardly spare Modred’s wit and his strength, whatever there was left to do now.

  “We can’t rely on that,” Griffin said. He laid his hand on my shoulder, with Dela right there in his other arm. “Elaine—all of you. We do what we planned. All right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and Gawain the same. A silence from Vivien.

  “Come on,” Griffin said.

  So we went, and now over com we could hear the sound of what had gotten into the ship. I imagined them calling for cutters in their hisses and their squeals, and scaly dragon bodies pressing forward—oh, it could happen quickly now, and my skin drew as if there had been a cold wind blowing.

  No sound of trumpets. No brave charge. We had armor, but it was all too fragile, and swords, but they had lasers, all too likely; and all the history of this place was theirs, not ours.

  XV

  A land of old upheaven from the abyss

  By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

  Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

  And the long mountains ended in a coast

  Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

  The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

  ... And there, that day when the great light of heaven

  Burned at his lowest in the rolling year,

  On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

  Nor yet had Arthur fought a fight

  Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

  A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:

  Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

  Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

  With formless fear; and ev’n on Arthur fell

  Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

  For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

  And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew.

  We had put the suits all in the dining room, all piled in the corner like so many bodies; and the breathing units were by them in a stack; and the helmets by those.... “Shouldn’t we,” I said, taking my lady’s suit from Percy, who was distributing pieces. I turned to my lady. “—shouldn’t we take Modred’s to him—in case?”

  “No,” Griffin said behind me, and firmly. “He’ll be safe enough only so he stays put.”

  I doubted that. I doubted it for all of us, and it seemed cruel to me. But I helped my lady with her suit, which she had never put on before, and which I had never tried. Lance was helping Griffin with his; but Lynn and Gawain had to intervene with both of us to help because they knew the fittings and where things should go and we did not.

  Griffin was first done, knowing himself something about suits and getting into them. He had his helmet in his hand and waved off assistance from Gawain. “Dela,” he said then, “you stay here. You can’t help down there, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” she said, “but I’m coming down there anyway.”

  “Dela—”

  “I’ll stay back,” she said, “but I’ll be behind you.”

  Griffin looked distraught. He wanted to say no again, that was sure; but he turned then and took one of the swords in hand, his helmet tucked under his arm. “There’ll be no using the beam cutters or the explosives,” he said. “If that’s methane out there. Modred did us that much service. So the swords and spears are all we’ve got. Dela—” Maybe he had something more to say and changed his mind. He lost it, whatever it had been, and walked off and out the door while we worked frantically at my lady’s fastenings.

  “Hurry,” Dela insisted, and Lynette got the last clip fastened.

  “Done,” Lynn said, and my lady, moving carefully in the weight, took her helmet from my hands and tucked that up, then gathered up several of the spears.

  “Vivien,” my lady said sharply, and fixed Viv with her eye, because Viv was standing against the wall with never a move to do anything. “You want to wait here until they come slithering up the halls, Vivien?”

  “No, lady,” Vivien said, and went and took the suit that Percy offered her.

  “Help me,” Viv said to us. She meant it as an order. But my lady was already headed out the door, and Lance and I were in no frame of mind to wait on Vivien.

  “Get us ready,” I said to Lynn and Gawain. “Hurry. Hurry. They’re alone down there.”

  But Percivale delayed his own suiting to attend to Vivien, who was all but shivering with fright. I heard the lift work a second time and knew my lady had gone without us ... and still we had that sound everywhere. Lynn batted my overanxious hands from the fastenings and did them the way they should be done, and settled the weight of the lifesupport on me so that I felt my knees buckle; and fastened that with snaps of catches. “Go,” she said then, and I bent gingerly to get my helmet and took another several of the spears. But Lance took a sword the same as Griffin’s, and a spear besides. He moved as if that great weight of the suit were nothing to him. He strode out and down the corridor, and I followed after him as best I could, panting and trying not to catch a spearpoint on the lighting fixtures of the walls.

  I had no intention that he should wait; if he could get to the lift and get down there the faster, so much the better, but he held the lift for me and shouted at me to hurry, so I came, with the shuffling haste I could manage, and I got myself and my unwieldly load into the lift and leaned against the wall as he hit the button with his gloved knuckles. It dropped us down that two deck distance and the door opened on a hideous din of thumps and bangs, but remoter than I had feared.

  My lady was there, and Griffin. They stood hand in hand in front of the welded barrier, their weapons set aside, and they looked glad to see us as we came.

  “Elaine,” Griffin said right off, “your job is to protect your lady, you understand. You stay beside her whatever happens.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And Lance,” he said, “I need you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lance said without quibble, because it meant being up front beyond a doubt, with all our hopes in defense of all of us.

  “They’re not through the airlock yet,” Dela said. “They’re working at it.”

  “When our atmospheres mix,” Griffin said, “we’re in danger of blowing everything. At least they know. I imagine they’ll use some kind of a pressure gate and do the cut in an oxygen mix. If they’ve got suits, and I’m betting they do.”

  “We could set up a defense on next level,” Lance said.

  “Same danger there; they convert this level to their own atmosphere, then we’ve got it all over again. Our whole lifesupport bled out into all that methane would diffuse too much for any danger; but if they let all that methane in here—it could blow the ship apart. A quick way out. There’s that. We could always touch it off ourselves.”

  “Griffin,” Dela said.

  “If we had to.”

  I felt cold, that was all, cold all the way inside, despite that carrying the suit made me sweat.

  The lift worked. Vivien came, alone, walking with difficulty, and she had gotten herself one of the spears, carrying that in one hand, and her helmet under the other arm. She joined us.

  And the lift went up and came down again with Gawain and Lynn and Percy, who moved better with their suits than the rest of us. They had swords and spears, and some of the knives with them.

  “We wait,” Griffin said.

  So we got down on our knees, that being the only way to sit down in the suits, and I only hoped we should have a great deal of warning, when the attack came, because even the strongest of us were clumsy, down on one knee and then the other, and then sitting more or less sideways. I was all but panting, and I felt sweat run under the suit, but my legs felt the relief, and finding a way to rest the corner of the lifesupport unit against the deck gave me delirious relief from the weight.

  Bang. Thump.

  Be careful, Beast, I thought at it, imagining all its minions and ourselves blown to atoms, to
drift and swirl out there amongst the chaos-stuff. In one part of my mind—I think it was listening to the wrong kind of tapes—I was glad of a chance like that, that we might do some terrible damage to our attackers and maybe put a hole in the side of the wheel that they would remember ... all, all those scaly bodies going hurtling out amongst our fragments.

  But in the saner part of my mind I did not want to die.

  And oh, if they should get their hands on us. ... Hands. If they had hands at all. If they thought anything close to what we thought.

  If, if, and if. Bang. Thump. Griffin and my lady told stories—recollected a day at Brahmani Dali, and smiled at each other. “I love you,” Griffin said then to Dela, a sober, afterthinking kind of voice, meaning it. I knew. I focused beyond them at Lance, and his face looked only troubled as all our faces did. It was no news to him, not now.

  So we sat, and shifted our weight because the waiting grew long.

  “They could take days about it,” Dela said.

  “I doubt it,” Griffin said.

  “They’ll suit up,” Gawain said. “They’ll have that weight to carry, just like us.”

  “I wish they’d get on about it.” That plaintive voice from Vivien. Her eyes were very large in the dim light of the corridor, where the makeshift bulkhead had cut off some of the lighting. “What can they be doing out there?”

  “Likely assuring their own safety.”

  “They can’t come at us with firearms,” Lynn said. “If we can’t use them, they daren’t.”

  “That’s so,” Dela breathed.

  “Not at close range,” Griffin said. He laughed. “Maybe they’re hunting up weapons like ours.”

  That would be a wonder, I thought. I was encouraged by the thought—until I reckoned that the odds were still likely theirs and not ours. And then the realization settled on me darker and heavier than before, for that little breath of hope, that we really had no hope at all, and that we only did this for—

  When I thought of it, I couldn’t answer why we tried. For our born-men, that was very simple ... and not so simple, if there was no hope. It was not in our tapes—to fight. But here was even Vivien, clutching a spear across her knees, when I knew her tapes were hardly set that way. They made us out of born-man material, and perhaps, the thought occurred to me, that somewhere at base they and we were not so different—that born-men would do things because it leapt into their minds to do them, like instincts inherent in the flesh.

  Or the tapes we had stolen had muddled us beyond recall.

  The sound stopped again, close to us, though it kept on above. “They’ve arranged something, maybe,” Dela said. “God help us.”

  “Easy,” Griffin said. And: “When it comes—understand, Dela, you and Elaine and Vivien take your position back just ahead of the crosspassage. If anything gets past us you take care of it.”

  “Right,” Dela said.

  If. It seemed to me a very likely if, recalling that flood of bodies I had seen within our lock.

  But the silence went on.

  “Lady Dela,” Percy said then, very softly.

  Dela looked toward him.

  “Lady Dela, you being a born-man—do you talk to God?”

  My heart turned over in me. Viv’s head came up, and Lance’s and Gawain’s and Lynn’s. We all froze.

  “God?” Dela asked.

  “Could you explain,” Percivale went on doggedly, stammering on so dreadful an impertinence, “could you say—whether if we die we have souls? Or if God can find them here.”

  “Percy,” Viv said sharply. “Somebody—Percy—”

  Shut him up, she meant—right for once; and I put out my hand and tugged at his arm, and Lance pulled at him, but Percy was not to be stopped in this. “My lady—” he said.

  My lady had the strangest look on her face—thinking, looking at all of us—and we all stopped moving, almost stopped breathing for Percy’s sake. She would hurt him, I thought; I was sure. But she only looked perplexed. “Who put that into your head?” she asked.

  No one said, least of all Percy, whose face was very pale. No one said anything for a very long time.

  “Do you know, lady?” Percy asked.

  “Dear God, what’s happened to you?”

  “I—” Percy said. But it got no further than that.

  “He took a tape,” Vivien said. “He’s never been the same since.”

  “It was me,” I said, because she left me nothing more to say. “It was the tape—The tape.” I knew she understood me then, and her eyes had turned to me. “It was never Percy’s fault. He only borrowed it from me, not knowing he should never have it. We—all ... had it. It was an accident, lady Dela. But my fault.”

  Her eyes were still fixed on me, in such stark dismay—and then she looked from me to Lance, and Gawain and Lynette and Vivien and Griffin and last to Percivale, as if she were seeing us for the first time, as if suddenly she knew us. The dream settled about us then, wrapped her and Griffin too.

  “Percivale,” she said, with a strange gentleness, “I’ve no doubt of you.”

  I would have given much for such a look from my lady. I know that Lance would have. And perhaps even Vivien. We were forgiven, I thought. And it was if a great weight left us all at once, and we were free.

  Vivien, whose spite had spilled it all—looked taken aback, as if she had run out of venom, as if she found a kind of dismay in what she was made to be. Maybe she grew a little then. At least she had nothing more to say.

  And then a new sound, a groaning of machinery, that clanked and rattled and of a sudden a horrid rending of metal.

  “O my God,” Dela breathed.

  “Steady. All of you.”

  “They’ve got the lock,” Lynn surmised. And a moment more and we knew that, because there was a rumbling and clanking closer and closer to the makeshift bulkhead behind which we sat. I clenched my handful of spears, ready when Griffin should say the word.

  “Helmets,” he said, reaching for his.

  I dropped the spears and picked up my lady’s, to help her, small skill that I had. But Percy took it from my hands, quick and sure, and helped her, as Lynn helped me. The helmet frightened me—cutting me off from the world, like that white place of my nightmares. But the air flowed and it was cooler than the air outside, and Lynn took my hand and pressed it on a control at my chest so that I could hear her voice.

  “... your com,” she said. “Keep it on.”

  I heard other voices, Lance’s and Griffin’s as they got their helmets on and got to their feet. Griffin helped Dela stand and Percy got me on my feet so that I could lean on my spears and stay there. Everything was very distant: the helmet which had seemed for a moment to cut off all the familiar world from me now seemed instead to contain it, the cooling air, the voices of my comrades. It was insulation from the horrid sounds of them advancing against our last fortification, so that we went surrounded in peace.

  “Get back,” Griffin said; and Dela reached out her hand for his and leaned against him only the moment—two white-suited ungainly figures, one very tall and the other more suit and lifepack than woman. “Take care of her,” Griffin wished us, all calm in the stillness that went about us.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “We will.” We meaning Viv and I. And Dela came with us, a slow retreat down the corridor, so as not to tire ourselves, the three of us armed with spears. Dela kept delaying to turn and look back again, but I didn’t look, not until we had reached the place where we should stand, and then I maneuvered my thickly booted feet about and saw Lance and Griffin and the crew who had determined where they would stand, not far behind the bulkhead. Their backs were to us. They had their swords and a few weighted pipes that Gawain and Lynn had brought down, and a spear or two. They stood two and three, Lance and Griffin to the fore and the crew behind. And I felt vibration through my boots, and heard their voices discussing it through the suit com, because they had felt it too.

  “It won’t be long,” Griffin said
. “We go forward if we can. We push them out the lock and get it sealed.”

  “They may have prevented that,” Gawain said, “if they jammed something into the track.”

  “We do what we can,” Griffin said.

  Myself, I thought how those creatures had gotten up against us, and wrenched the second door apart with the sound of metal rending, a lock that was meant to withstand fearful stress. Modred’s had been a small betrayal; it lost us little. They could easily have torn us open—when they wished, when they were absolutely ready.

  “Feel it?” Dela asked.

  “Yes,” I said, knowing she meant the shuddering through the floor.

  “They can’t stop them,” Viv said.

  “Then it’s our job,” I said, “isn’t it?”

  The whole floor quivered, and we felt the sound, as suddenly there was a squeal of tearing metal that got even through the insulating helmets. Light glared round the edges of the bulkhead where it met the overhead, and widened, irregularly, all with this wrenching protest of bending metal, until all at once the bulkhead gave way on other sides, and drew back, showing a glare of white light beyond. The bulkhead was being dragged back and back with a terrible rumbling, a jolting and uncertainty until it dropped and fell flat with a jarring boom. A head on a long neck loomed in its place. For a moment I thought it alive; and so I think did Griffin and the rest, who stood there in what was now an open access—but it was machinery silhouetted against the glare of floods, our longnecked dragon nothing but a thing like a piston pulling backward, contracting into itself, so that now we saw the ruined lock, and the flare of lights in smoke or fog beyond that.

  “Machinery,” I heard Lance say.

  But what came then was not—a sinuous plunge of bodies through the haze of light and fog, like a cresting wave of serpent-shadows hurling themselves forward into the space the machinery had left.

  My comrades shouted, a din in my ears: “Come on!” That was Griffin: he took what ground there was to gain, he and Lance—and Gawain and Lynn and Percy behind them, two and then three more human shadows heading into the wreckage and the fog, tangling themselves with the coming flood.