Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  <> squatted there, just watching, running through the feelings Rafe-mind had about himself and his living original. Then:

  “Wake up,” Rafe heard. “Wake up, Rafe.”

  He opened his eyes, knowing the voice, braced himself back on his hands in a scramble for the wall, for it was close, until he had gotten his thoughts together.

  “Which one are you?”

  His own face smiled back at him, answering that question. Rafe Two would have been puzzled at the least.

  “Stay back,” Rafe said.

  “You know I can’t touch you.”

  He let go his breath, still pressed as close against the wall as he could get. “Like hell. You promised me the others back. Where are they?”

  “Plotting together. They want to take the ship.”

  “Good for them.”

  The alien grinned, squatted there with his elbows on naked knees, went sober once again. “It’s not too likely a threat.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Ship’s important to you, isn’t it? I think about this star where I found you; this mind doesn’t care. I think of others. But when I think of ship, it reacts. Like love. Like need. It feels strong as sex-drive. Stronger, maybe. But Lindy’s finished, I’m afraid. It was, you’ll pardon me, not much of a ship to start with.”

  “Shut up.”

  “On the other hand,” the doppelganger said, “—I love that idea, you know? The other hand. I understand a number of things: you’d want to be dropped as far away from Endeavor as you could get. They’d ask questions there at Endeavor, years of questions. There and at Cyteen. I could drop you, oh, say, Paradise. There’d be questions there, too; but maybe less anxiety. Less chance of your being—confined. Wouldn’t you say?”

  He sat and listened to this prattle, roused out of sleep to listen, tucked up against the wall. He ignored most of it, let it drift through his mind and out again, refusing to let it stick. “Stop playing this game. I don’t care where you drop me.”

  “I want to prepare a canister for you. This takes a little time. I won’t stay long at all at Paradise, not to make a stir.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name?”

  “You’ve got a name of your own the way I presume you’ve got a shape. What is it?”

  It seemed to think a moment. “Kepta, if you like.”

  “Kepta. What are you really up to?”

  “Right now,” the doppelganger. said, “I’m merely clearing decks. I’ll take another impression before I turn you out; this will put me up to date with all you’ve gotten here. I’ve put that off; it is stressful. But that’s the only thing I want of you.”

  “The others. What will happen to them?”

  “I won’t turn them off, if that’s what you mean. That’s the last thing I’d do.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “They’re mine,” Kepta said.

  “What do you mean, yours? You mean you’re taking them somewhere?”

  “They can hardly leave the ship with you—can they? No, there’s nothing really to worry about at all. I could put some of this business off; but on the other hand—I’d like to get you to the lab, just to make sure, well, of having that copy. It’s my only condition.” The image got to its feet, held out a hand. “Come on, get up. I’d like you to walk there.”

  “Meaning there are other choices?”

  “There are other ways.”

  Rafe thought that over, staring up into his own face, hating the mock-regretful look on it. He put his hands on the gossamer-carpeted floor and shoved himself up, straightened and glared at the image eye to eye, but it refused the confrontation, walked off a way and held out its hand, beckoning.

  “Come on.”

  “Why should I believe this, when you haven’t come through with the other promise? I want to see the others, hear?”

  “Afterward. I promise. Come on, now, Rafe. Let’s not be difficult.”

  “Let’s,” he echoed sourly. “What is my choice?”

  “I really don’t want to do that.”

  “What?”

  “I could send something in here to bring you. I’d have it carry you and spare you the long walk; but walking makes it your choice, that’s why I want you to do it. I really think that’s valuable.”

  “You know, I never noticed it; I don’t like the way I talk.”

  “Humor?”

  Rafe said nothing, but started walking; looked back again, at home, at Lindy’s jumbled fragments, then fell in beside Kepta’s light-dim shape. “I need anything?”

  “No. Not really.”

  He walked farther; the image walked, with smooth efficiency: sequencing projectors, he had decided once. Projected from what? Fibers in the rug? “This going to hurt much?” he asked finally.

  “Yes,” Kepta said.

  They walked along, down the snaking corridor of gossamer-green humps and hillocks. The lights were all on, showing him the way.

  “Haven’t felt any push on this ship,” he said. “We’re inertial, aren’t we?”

  “Some ways off Endeavor, plus one plus thirty plus ten, one-tenth C. Make you feel better, knowing where you are?”

  He nodded, relationships and directions flashing into shape. He felt familiar stars about him again. Home space. He drew a shuddering, long breath, pretended nonchalance. “Big nothing out here.”

  “It’s a vacant spot. Where we’re not disturbed.”

  VI

  They walked side by side, he and Kepta, into that vast empty node where many halls converged—silent: his footfalls on the padded floor made no great sound. Rafe heard only the whisper of his clothing, his own deepened breaths. Kepta made no sound at all, except to talk to him from time to time down the winding hall:

  “Tired?” Kepta asked.

  “Does that matter? You pushed me along this way once, with the lights. What were you after, then?”

  “Reactions,” Kepta said.

  He strode on a few more limping steps. “Like now?”

  A few steps more. “No,” Kepta said. “Now I know exactly what you’ll do.”

  He looked at Kepta, but Kepta did not, seemingly, look his way.

  “You’re limited.” Rafe asked him, the question flashing to his mind, “to one vantage point? To that shape? Those eyes?”

  “No,” Kepta said again.

  “Physically—where are you?”

  Silence.

  “Makes you nervous? You scared, are you, to answer that?”

  Silence still.

  They came into the dark, warted heart of the huge meeting of corridors. Light came from home-corridor at their backs, a soft glow that lit the whole floor ahead in a dim gray succession of ripples and hummocks, stalagmites and lumpish stalactites afflicted with gossamer-shrouded warts and protuberances. There were no echoes. No sound. The carpet drank it up. “Can’t afford lights here?” Rafe jibed at Kepta, trying to learn, by whatever questions Kepta would answer. “You don’t like light, that it? Or don’t you need it?”

  Lights flared, illuminating a vast chamber, a craziness of lumps and hummocks and tunnels on a mammoth scale; lights died and left him in dark again, as suddenly.

  Kepta was gone.

  “Kepta?” He faced wildly about, flash-blinded, helpless, stumbling on the uneven floor. “Kepta?”

  “First passage on your left,” a voice said, close by him. The gold-glowing image resumed. “Just checking. I’m a little narrow-focused in this shape; a great deal of me is doing other things, and now and again I like to take a little look behind the eyes, so to say. That’s right, this way. Not far now.”

  His heart pounded. He rubbed at his eyes trying to get his vision back, stumbling on the uneven floor, staying with Kepta in a winding course around the prominences. They skirted around a jutting protuberance of the wall and passed one black corridor opening. The next acquired dim light, showing gray and green no different than otherwhere.

  “This way,” Kepta said
.

  He matched Kepta’s drifting pace. The way narrowed into a twisting gut, went from gossamer-green to bald glistening plastic in a green that deepened to livid unpleasantness.

  Narrower still, and brighter-lit. “O God,” Rafe said, and balked. Metal gleamed. Clusters of projections like insect limbs lined the chamber which unfurled from beyond the turning—some arms folded, some thrust out in partial extension, things to grip and bite, extensors armed with knives.

  “Come on,” Kepta said. “Come ahead. That’s right. No sense running now.”

  “It’s still there,” Rafe Two said. They had tried the unseen barrier now and again, when one and the other of them grew restless in their dark confinement. He went back and sat down while Jillan and Paul had their own go at it, Paul with violence, which did no good, but it satisfied some need, and Rafe averted his face and rested his chin on his arm, knee tucked up, staring into the dark beyond the invisible wall.

  Now and again there were sounds. The thing that wailed had become familiar, still dreadful when it came, but it seemed by now that it would have done something, attacked if it could or if it had the desire.

  “Shut up,” he told it when it came.

  Paul and Jillan sat down again, Paul last; who cast himself down and hung his hands between his knees, to look up, again with a bleak, sullen stare.

  He was being patient, was Paul, amnesiac, wiped of everything recent, even the remembrance that he was dead. They had had to tell him that all over again, and Paul had sat and listened, and objected. Perhaps he thought they were crazy; perhaps he believed it. Whatever Paul believed, he was quiet about it all.

  Because Jillan was calm, Rafe thought; because he and Jillan accepted it and explained matters gently as they could. He detected the cracks in Paul’s facade, the little signs of tension, the occasional sharp answer, the increasingly worried look on Paul’s face when they failed to retaliate for his gibes. They were shielding him; Paul realized it. Jillan protected him—being merchanter-born, tough in spacer-ways, with a spacer’s tolerance of distances, infinities, time and thinking inside-out. She was the stronger here. So was he.

  Jillan and me, Rafe thought, and Paul, on the other side, cut off from her. From me. He’s trying so hard to keep himself together in Jillan’s sight, up to her measure of a man—We joke; we seem to take it light; it’s like salt in all his wounds.

  He got up, paced, for Paul’s sake, to be human. Pushed at the wall.

  “Give it up,” Paul said.

  He sat down again, slumped, elbows on knees.

  So maybe it helped, giving Paul a way to seem calm and in control.

  “Got any ideas?” he asked Paul then.

  Paul was silent a long time. “Just thinking,” Paul said, “that we don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t get tired—wonder how long it takes a mind to unravel, sitting still. Wonder if it’s listening. Or if it’s just gone off and forgotten us, this alien you met. Wonder if we’re all crazy. Or you are. And we sit here glowing in the dark.”

  Rafe laughed. It was conscious effort. He remembered—a thing that turned him cold; a meeting Jillan had not known; that Paul assuredly had not; and for a moment he was the one pretending cheerfulness. It had hurt; it would happen again, he thought, for no reason, for nothing that made sense.

  “Sooner or later,” he began dutifully to answer Paul; but something caught his eye, a light far out in the dark.

  “Something’s out there,” Jillan said, scrambling to her feet as he did. “Something’s coming—”

  It moved in that rapid way things could here. Paul got to his feet and Jillan held to him, steadying him by that contact.

  It whipped up to the barrier, a human runner.

  Paul.

  Doppelganger’s doppelganger. It stared, stark and wide-mouthed, glowing like themselves, and with one strangled cry of grief, it spun and ran away, diminished as rapidly as it had come.

  “What was that?” asked Paul, remarkably calm, considering the horror in his eyes.

  Rafe turned and looked at him, far from calm himself—considered this second Paul-shape that had materialized inside the barrier with him and Jillan.

  Jillan too, he remembered—the arms that had gripped him with more than human strength—

  He set his back to the phantom wall, facing both of them, their united, guarded stare.

  The pain—O God, the pain!

  Rafe screamed while he had breath, while he had the strength. But it was too deep and too long, too thorough, pinned him between breaths and held him dying there until air began the long slow leak back into his lungs. Then the cycle ran round again.

  And over again.

  “There,” said Kepta’s vast slow voice after all eternity. “There. That’s over now.” And there was dark a time.

  “Try to move,” it said.

  Rafe moved; he would have done anything it told him, not to have the pain. He kept moving and thrust aching arms under him, took the strain of muscle-stretch across his aching ribs, his belly, trying constantly to find some position that did not hurt and discovering fresh agonies at every shift.

  “Easy,” Kepta said out of that vast haze of his senses, awareness of light, machines that hummed and moved, having him as a mote in their cold heart. A metal arm moved at his face, thrust a tube into his mouth with persistent accuracy, shot a dose of tepid water down his throat. Other arms moved spiderlike about him and closed about his arms, click-click. He was past all but the vaguest fear. He let his limbs be moved because gentle as it was he had resisted once and found no limit to its strength. Click-click. It faced him about and held him upright as he sat on the table.

  “Over, then?” His voice was a ragged croak, his throat raw from screaming. “Over?”

  “All done,” Kepta said, taking shape in front of him. “Rest a bit.”

  He was willing; the spider arms stayed still, like a cradle behind him. He leaned his head back, his feet dangling off the edge of the machinery. For a moment he blurred out again, head resting against the arms, heart still laboring, while the tears leaked from his eyes and the sweat slicked his skin.

  “Where is it?” he asked then, meaning the thing that he had birthed. He had some proprietary curiosity; it had cost him so much pain.

  “Here,” Kepta said, “here in the machine.”

  “You mean you’ll give it a body.”

  “No,” Kepta said, and rested a ghostly hand on a large hummock that rose with several others to form the table, the base of several of the arms. “It has one. In here. Do you want to know how it works? Your template of a moment ago exists now. It will never know more than you knew when it was made. Always when I call it up it will be at the same moment.”

  Rafe shook his head and shut his eyes, feeling everything slide into chaos, not wanting this.

  “So I can always recover that point,” Kepta said, “at need. A point of knowledge—and ignorance.”

  Eyes slitted, till Kepta was a golden blur. “You still going to let me go?”

  “Oh, yes.” Kepta moved among the machinery, through one lowered metal arm. “You asked about bodies. This one—” Kepta laid a hand on his own insubstantial chest. “You assume there’s some substance to it, somewhere. There’s not. It’s a pattern. You want Jillan? I can call up that template. Or Paul. Or one of several of you.”

  Paul One ran, raced into the dark, sobbing at what he had seen: himself; himself possessing Jillan and Rafe and he-himself, watching helplessly from outside—

  At last he found Rafe again, his own Rafe, beaconlike in the nowhereland, that shape that was Rafe and not, something blurred and larger, far larger.

  “I know what you found,” Rafe said. “I knew you would.” And Rafe himself blurred further, into outlines vast and dark. “I knew it would hurt. Paul—”

  “Was it me?” he asked. “Was that my real body?”

  “No,” it said. “Only another duplicate.”

  There was no more system of reference, nothing huma
n left. It took him in its changing arms, took him to its heart, whispered to him in a voice still human though the rest of it was not.

  “You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you, nothing will ever hurt you while I have you. You can’t trust what you see, that’s the first thing you have to learn. You want to be safe. But I can make you strong. You won’t be afraid of anything. You want to know how this ship works? I’ll tell you. Anything you want to know. That version you just saw? Nothing. Nothing. Another copy off your template. I have to tell you how that works, that next. The templates.”

  “I recorded you,” Kepta said, waving a hand past the mounded protrusions beneath all the array of shining spider arms, “not just the outward form, but at every level, in every function and structure—everything. The template’s as like you as if you’d been spun out in bits, down to the state and spin of your particles: that’s how exact it is ... all uncertainties made definite, particulate memory, frozen in the finest definition matter can achieve. We just—play it out again. Call it up in memory and let it integrate. The visible manifestation, the body—a very simple thing: just light, quite apart from the more complex patterns. An image conceived off the template and maintained by quite inelegant means: the computer knows its shape, that’s all, and revises it moment by moment by the direction of the program; but that program that animates it—that’s quite another thing.”

  “It reacts,” Rafe said. “It thinks—”

  “That’s the elegance. It does.”

  “You’ve turned them to machines.”

  “No. Contained them in one. They react; they think; they think they move. They’re programs, if you like, smart programs that can learn and change, that get input they interpret in the same way they always did, or they think they do, that eyes work and mouths make speech, and muscles move. The body—is merely light, for passing convenience. It changes in response to signals the programs give. It can’t input. But on other levels, in the purest sense, the programs can input from each other, can imagine, tend to perceive what they expect—like smells and textures. Illusions, if you like. But they aren’t. The programs aren’t. They grow, and change, get experience, change their minds. They stay up and running until someone shuts them down.”