Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Shut up, Jillan said, severe and lacking vanity, as she had killed it in herself years ago (too great a hazard, on the docks, to look better than one had to, to attract anything but, maybe, work. One had to look like business; and be business; and mean business; and she did.)

  Use what you’ve got. (Rafe-mind, whose vanity was extreme, and touching, in its sensitivity).

  You can’t get pregnant, Jillan hurled at him, ultimate rationality; and caught his longing, his lifelong wish for some woman, for family—

  Vanity serves some purposes, Rafe-mind thought, recalling it was his smoothness, his glib facility with words that got them what they had: he had bent and bent, so Jillan never had to—A room in a sleepover, an old woman gave it to me—I took even that. Even that, for you—

  She felt the wound, shocked. Her anger diversified, became a vast warm thing that lapped them like a sea.

  Mine, she thought of them, and saw Paul-shape ahead of them. Wailing went about them. Worm nudged their flanks, little jolts of pain too dim to matter.

  “Paul,” Worm said, slithering about them, round and round; and the creature before them lingered, murkish in its light. Limbs came and went in it. The face changed constantly.

  X

  You’re a copy,” Rafe said to Marandu/Jillan’s faded image.M

  “Yes,” Marandu said. The hands, drawn up to the breast, returned to human pose; Marandu/Jillan grew brighter and more definite, with that unblinking godlike stare.

  “Computer-generated,” Jillan said in self-despite.

  “Or we are the computer,” Marandu said, turning those too-wise eyes her way. That stare, once mad, acquired a fearsome sanity. “We’re its soft-structure. Its enablement. We’re alive individually and collectively. We’ve been running, and growing, for a hundred thousand years. That’s shiptime. Much longer—in your referent. That we’re partitioned as we are was accident. It’s also kept us sane. It provides us motive. In a hundred thousand years, motive’s a very important thing.”

  “And the enemy,” said Paul. “The enemy: what is it?”

  “It’s Kepta, of course,” Marandu said. “It’s Kepta Three.”

  “Be careful,” <> said to <>’s counterpart: had come very close now, to the center where <> had invested <>self. “You know what <> can do.”

  At this hesitated. “Fool,” said. “Make another <> and watch it turn on <>. did.”

  “It was <>y nature then,” <> said. “Perhaps <>’ve grown.”

  “Only older,” returned, gaining more of <>’s territory. extended a filament of self all about the center, advanced Paul-mind and = = = = in their attack. The passengers huddled far and afraid, in what recesses they could, excepting ((())), who had forgotten who had killed ((())), long ago; excepting entities like [], who ranged themselves with . “<>’ve grown older and less integrated, <>. Give up the center.”

  “ are long outmoded,” <> said in profoundest disgust. “<> learn; <> change. Come ahead and discover what <> have become.”

  shivered then, in the least small doubt circled and moved back.

  “Attack,” [] raged, the destroyer of []’s own world. “Take it!”

  But delayed, delayed to think it through in Paul-mind. had fallen once before into that trap, <>’s mutability.

  Therefore, used Paul—to learn what <> might have gained from <>’s latest acquisitions; to be certain this time that ’s strength was equal to the contest. <> collected things of late. <> modified <>self in disturbing ways, and was not what <> had been.

  circled farther back, with more and more agitation, sent out more and more of ’s allies to scour the perimeters.

  “ want the strangers,” said. “ want everything in them.”

  Hunger was very like that felt; and self-doubt; and hate, that too. even felt these things in human terms, experimentally.

  “This time,” <> said, “<> fed a warped copy.” And suddenly doubted whether ’s theft had indeed been ’s own idea or half so clever as had thought.

  turned back.

  “Where are going?” [] howled, ravening at ’s back. “Coward!”

  <> was far from confident. <> huddled in the control center, realizing a serious mistake. <> had, in a taunting lie, revealed too much of ’s vulnerability; and went to solve that problem.

  had realized the key to ’s previous defeats.

  “Call it a very long time ago,” Marandu said, “a very long time ago ... this ship set out from home. Trade, you might call it; but it’s always a mistake to try to translate these things. Call us a probe. Or a sacrifice.” The hands drew up again, knotted like prayer beneath the chin; the body drew up in midair and drew toward the floor, legs folding, fetal-like. “Go. Go ... go. The—. ... There is no word in this brain for that. But that was why. Life, you might say. To sample—everything. Exchange. Trade. Commerce ... of a kind.”

  “Why?” Jillan insisted to it; “hush,” Rafe said, afraid of losing that tenuous truth, of breaking whatever held it to them.

  “No translation,” Marandu said. “There’s never translation of motives; only of acts.”

  “What happened?” asked Rafe.

  A long pause. “An incident. A copy of me existed as precaution. When I died, when the crew did, when the ship was without orders, it activated me.”

  “Me?”

  “I was Kepta then. Division came later.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I kept going. I kept going. Kept transmitting, as long as seemed profitable.” Marandu’s female mouth jerked. The hands drew up. “Passage of time—negates all motives. Survival is still intact. So is curiosity.” Jillan-shape flickered, brightened again and the eyes were set far, far distant. “Difficulty—” Marandu said in a voice that moved the lips but scarcely. Sweat glistened on its lip, on its brow beneath the ragged fringe of hair; the legs settled crosswise; hands came down on knees; the shape hovered in midair, naked, dim and glistening with perspiration.

  “Marandu,” Paul said.

  “Difficulty,” the voice hissed again.

  “Where?” asked Jillan.

  “Your duplicates.”

  “Send me to them,” Rafe Two said. “Let me help them!”

  The eyes which had rolled up came down again and centered. “Kepta is threatened,” Marandu said. The sweat rolled in illusory beads. “The enemy has gained a vital point.”

  “Paul—” Paul said.

  “Not yet,” Marandu said. The hands were clenched. “Not yet.”

  Rafe clenched his own hands, stared at it in helplessness. “What’s it doing? What’s Kepta up to?”

  “Holding what’s essential.”

  “What’s essential?” he flung back at it, but it answered nothing, only sat there, pale and drawn. “Marandu, what’s essential?”

  “Controls,” Rafe Two said.

  “The computer.” Rafe turned, empty-handed, pushed himself off from the control panel and ran, ran in desperation down the hall.

  “Rafe!” he heard—his doppelganger’s voice.

  “Rafe.” Jillan’s or Jillan/Marandu’s; and a shape leapt into being beside him, a running ghost—Paul, racing along by him in a confused blur of light. Jillan was there, or Marandu; and his doppelganger, half-merged with him.

  “Where are you going?” Jillan cried.

  “Controls,” Rafe gasped, springing perilously from lump to hump of the uneven floor. “That’s where it has to be, what it has to have—I’ve been there. I know—”

  The knives, he was thinking as he ran, remembering that he was flesh, remembering the arms and blades in that center of the ship. O God, the knives—

  Station dock; manifests—Lindy got on toward her loading with Rightwise and a Fargone agent wanted to make a fuss, small, dim man with a notepad, a checklist, suspicions.

  “Where’s your form B-6878?” he asked.

  Rafe searched
, desperately, through the sheaf of authorizations.

  The clock ticked away, meaning money, each second that loader was engaged. Money and life. All their years had bought—

  “Careful,” Paul Two said, “careful—” for they had come very near that misshapen thing. Worm hovered round them, and Paul-shape shambled, sidling round them in a green-gold glow that spread along the horizon.

  “—is there,” Worm whistle-moaned at their backs. “Danger-danger-danger!”

  “Look!” Rafe cried; and their conjoined, rotating sight discovered a new glow at the opposite side, a thing like Worm, but more horrible, whose white-glowing segments were interspersed with lumps and legged things. Some of them had mouths and others, eyes.

  “Eater,” Worm gibbered. “Can-Can-Cannibal.”

  “Come ahead,” Paul-voice taunted them from the other side, a god-voice, Paul’s deeper tones underlain with Rafe’s.

  “Fight,” howled Worm, hovering behind them. “Coward,” it sobbed to itself, over and over again, in half its voices.

  Paul One flickered nearer and nearer, growing incrementally in their sight. He opened his/their arms. “Rafe,” it said. “Jillan.”

  “Run,” Rafe-voice screamed within it. “Run—!”

  “Come on. ” Paul-mind challenged that shambling thing. He stood firm. Jillan braced herself. “You’ve caught me; now take me in.”

  “Look out!” Worm cried; and it was Rafe-mind turned them quick enough: the Cannibal-horror rushed past them in flank attack as the amalgam struck from the other side.

  “—an accident,” the Welfare man said, “—in the belt. ...”

  “Shut up!” Jillan cried, had cried that day, before he could say the words. Eight years old—she knew, knew what Welfare came to say—

  But: “Brother,” Rafe Three said, meaning his battered other self, that thing that hung in rags from the monster’s side. “O brother—” with the stinging salt of tears.

  And Paul: “Listen to me—” he told his twisted self, with sorrow that gathered up Jillan-mind and Rafe and all. “Oh, no. You’ve got it wrong, my friend.”

  Ugliness flowed back. His own darkness, like a wave: his desire to hurt—

  —Rafe wept and begged. He savored that, felt a thrill of sex—

  “That’s me!” Paul said, accepting it, treading on his pride, stripping off all the coverings, revealing all the darks. “Don’t be shocked, Jillan; I did warn you, I told you the best I knew—don’t leave me, Rafe. Don’t. O God, don’t—break—”

  Paul One writhed, sought Jillan-mind with its hate; sought Rafe. Kill, it raged. Have you—all—all—all—

  It was too much; too strong, too mad. “No!” Rafe pulled them back, dodged aside, for the Cannibal loomed up: “Back!” Worm shrieked, and plunged between, tangled its black body, with that pale one.

  “Worm!” Rafe cried, and Paul dodged again as Worm came flooding back from the Cannibal’s assault. Worm’s substance was in ribbons. It was missing legs in great patches all down its length; it limped and moaned. But the Cannibal ran, wounded too, ran until it met a thing which took shape out of the dark, a Devourer far larger than itself.

  “Paul,” that thing said, in a voice far too small and human for its size. Cannibal merged with it; it looped closer to gather Paul One’s misshapenness against its glowing side.

  “There,” it said, contentedly; “there.” And lifted up its face to them.

  “Rafe—” Paul said. A shudder went through his/their flesh; he felt Jillan’s horror: Rafe Three’s own dismay.

  It was vast. It kept lifting up and up, serpentlike, and the eyes of Rafe-face stared down at them. Beauty—it had that too, Rafe’s gone to cold implacability. “I’ve won,” it said; and Paul-Rafe wailed as it sank unwilling into the serpent’s glowing side. “There’s nothing more to fear.”

  “No!” Worm wailed. “No, no, no, no—”

  “Hush,” the whisper thundered. “Worm—worm, they call you. Do you know, Worm, what that is? For shame, Paul, to give him a name like that.”

  “Kepta?” Paul asked. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” it said. “Of course I am. Come here.”

  They reached the great hall, the noded dark. Things gibbered as they ran, voices howled through the overhead, chittered, roared like winds where no winds existed. Rafe kept running, stumbling, fell flat and scrambled up without pause, holding his aching side.

  His ghosts stayed with him. Perhaps Marandu was one: he could not tell. There was no light but their bodies, no guidance but their hands that reached impotently to help his weakness. “Where?” Rafe Two asked him, “where now, Rafe?”

  “Hallway,” he gasped, “third to the left of ours—”

  “This way,” Rafe Two said, at home in dark, or not truly needing eyes. Rafe gathered himself, sucked a pain-edged breath and ran, staggering with exhaustion.

  A Jillan-image materialized in the dark ahead, blazing gold. “Stop!” she/it said. An arm uplifted in a gesture human as the image and as false.

  Rafe Two slowed; Rafe ran, experienced nothing but a flare of light and image, stumbled his way on blind in the dark of the passage, reeling from wall to wall. A glow passed him, gave him fitful light, became Jillan before it faded out.

  He sprawled, hard, in the shimmer of insubstantial arms that tried to save him; he clawed his way up, sobbing, and kept going. His ghosts were with him again, Jillan, all; they went about him, a glowing curtain, a cloud. He fell again, a third, a fourth time on the hummocks of the floor. He tasted blood, was blind, phosphenes dancing in his eyes.

  “Look out!” Jillan cried and waved him off, her body out in front of him. He reached out his hands, facing darkness beyond her.

  White, sudden light blazed from the ceiling nodes. It lit the room of knives, arms that moved, snicked in unison toward him all attentive, in the lumpish barren plastic of the center he had sought.

  “Kepta!” he shouted, backing, for things that gripped and things that cut were still in drifting motion toward him, traveling in extension he had not guessed. “Kepta! Stop!”

  They kept coming. More unfolded out of recesses of the wall.

  “Kepta!”

  Jillan-shape materialized there among the knives, flung up arms, opened its mouth and yelled something a human throat did not well stand.

  Knives stopped then, frozen in mid-extension, a forest of metal, perilous limbs in which Jillan-shape stood immaterial.

  Rafe stood shivering, perceived a dance of light as his own ghosts hovered round him as close as they could get, demolishing themselves on his solidity and reforming.

  “Tell Kepta I want to talk with him,” Rafe said.

  “Kepta won’t,” Marandu said. His female hands tucked up again like paws. “Go back.”

  “Because I’m substance? Because I’m alive, with hands to touch this place?”

  “Substance,” said Marandu among the knives, “is dealt with here.”

  “Rafe,” Paul pleaded with him. “Rafe—stay alive. Get out of here.”

  “It’s threatened,” Rafe said. He was shivering. They could not feel as much, but the shivers ran through his limbs. O God. It’s going to hurt—“I’m standing here, Kepta—hear me? I’m not moving. I’m not going to move.”

  “Kepta advises you,” Marandu said—and Marandu’s eyes were far-focused, vague and full of dark—“advises you—”

  The thing loomed up, serpentlike, seductive in its implacability, the serenity of Rafe-face become unassailable and vast.

  “Lie,” Worm cried, and writhed and looped its wounded coils aside. “Lie, lie—”

  “Are you lying?” (Paul).

  “Examine me,” it said, this thing with Kepta’s name. It extruded a shape from its side, the agglomeration of Paul One. Paul One wailed, writhed as Worm had done. A glowing coil materialized and took it in again. “Come close. See me as I am.”

  “Go to hell,” said Jillan Murray-Gaines, through the amalgam of their lips. “Or are yo
u already in residence?”

  “Humor,” it said. “Hell. Yes.” It laughed, gentle as a breath. “I appreciate the reference. So would the passengers. I’m Kepta. There are dozens of us. We create one another—in endless cycles.” It slid closer, and it seemed dangerous to move at all now; but Rafe-mind did, veteran of the docks. They slipped backward together.

  “Do you understand?” it asked again. (Another gliding move. Rafe-mind moved them back, but not far enough. It gained.) “Dangerous,” it said, “to move without looking. Where’s Cannibal? Where’s Worm? Are you sure?”

  “Don’t look,” Paul whispered, shivering in their heart. “Don’t be tricked.”

  “You’ve been ill-advised,” Rafe-voice urged, smooth, so very smooth. “Even death—can be remedied. Your copies are exact, down to the very spin of your particles. Your cellular information. Would you be reconstituted? I can do that much.”

  Paul caught the breath he did not have, felt limbs that were not real—instincts yearned after life and breath, after humanity—

  “No,” Rafe said. Just—no, unreasoning, suspicious. He was twelve again, dockside; the hand held out the coin, too large a coin for simple charity.... No—from Jillan-mind, brittle-hard, plotting how to run. Nothing’s free; not from this thing—”

  “Look out!” cried Paul.

  The serpent-shape was quicker. Its vast body slammed down in front of them, turning about them, surrounding them with its coils.

  “You just lost your chance,” it said.

  “Lost,” Marandu whispered, fading. “They’ve failed.”

  “Let me go to them!” Paul cried. “Let me try!”

  “Against a Kepta-form?” Marandu drew itself away, retreating in its dimness. And then it stopped, turned, gazing at them with Jillan’s calm face. “Bravery. Yes. I know.”

  It shimmered out.

  “Paul!” Rafe cried.,

  Then all his ghosts were gone.

  Marandu with them. And the lights went out.

  Disaster. <> had felt it, not unanticipated. <> felt <^>’s fear. It shivered through that portion of <^>self that remained partitioned outside Jillan-shape. There was irony in this: Jillan-mind was darkly stubborn, and <^>