Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Do you want water?”

  He thought about it; he did, but undrugged he was too fastidious.

  “It disturbs you,” Sbi said.

  “All right,” he said, and Sbi touched his chin to steady him, leaned forward and spat just a little fluid into his mouth. Herrin shuddered at it, and swallowed that and his nausea.

  “I simply store it,” Sbi said, and hawked and swallowed.

  “An appalling function.”

  “Our nature,” said Sbi.

  Herrin stared at Sbi bleakly. “Your reality. I’d not choose it.”

  Sbi made a sound which might be anything. “Mad,” it said. “Look, at the sunrise. Can you or I make it last?”

  “Material reality. Man counts where I’m concerned, and we can’t agree.”

  “You’ve made things so complicated out of things so simple. There is the sun.”

  In a single flowing movement Sbi rose and walked to the hillside, stood there with hands slightly outward and face turned to the sky ... sat down then, and ignored him entirely, seeming rapt in thoughts.

  “Sbi,” Herrin said finally, and Sbi looked over a shoulder at him. “What do you intend?”

  “When can you walk, Master Law? I’ve spent too much to carry you.”

  “I can walk until I have to stop,” he said. “A while.”

  “Don’t harm yourself.”

  “What am I to you?”

  “Something precious.”

  “Why?”

  Sbi stood up again. “Will you walk now?”

  He considered the pain of it, and nerved himself, took the cloak in his hand and used his legs more than the ribs getting up. He used his splinted hands to put the cloak to his shoulders, and Sbi helped him. The act depressed him. He bowed his head and clumsily pulled the hood up, no different finally from other invisibles; safe—no one but Sbi would see him—even in the city no one would see him. He supposed that was where they might go.

  But they walked slowly, and something of directional sense, the sun being at his back, argued that they were bound only into more hills.

  I shall be further lost, he thought. He did not wholly mind, because while in one sense he was dead, he was still able to see and to feel, and the mind which sometimes frightened him with its persistence of life began to yield to its besetting fault, which was at once his talent and his curse.

  “You don’t care,” he prodded at Sbi on short breaths, “to go back to the plain. Where are you leading?”

  “Where I wish.”

  He accepted that. It was an answer.

  “See the hills,” said Sbi. “Smell the wind. I do. Do not you?”

  “Yes,” he said. What the ahnit asked frightened him. “How much else?”

  “Tell me when you know.”

  It took the pose of Master. His face heated, and for a little time he thought, on the knife edge of his limited breaths and the weakness of his legs in matching strides with the ahnit. “I will tell you,” he said, “when I know.”

  He walked, with the sun beating down on him, with the gold of the grasses and the sometime gold of flowers, and it occurred to him both that it was beautiful; and that humans did not come here—ever.

  He looked to the horizon, where the hills went on and on, and it occurred to him that Freedom was full of places where humans had never been.

  He thought of the port, where Kierkegaard played its dangerous games with Outsiders, and Waden sought to embrace the world; there were things Waden himself did not see, choosing his own reality, in Kierkegaard, and outward.

  I could make it visible, he thought, and at once remembered: I could have. Once.

  He stopped on the next hillside, out of breath, stood there a moment. “I’m not through,” he said, when Sbi offered to help him sit down.

  “Rest,” said Sbi. “Time is nothing.”

  He started walking again, hurting and stubborn, and Sbi walked with him, until he was limping and his ribs were afire. “Stop,” Sbi said, this time with force, and he did so, got down, which jarred his ribs and brought tears to his eyes. He stretched out on his back, resting with his hands where they were comfortable, on his chest, and Sbi leaned over him and stroked his brow, a strange sensation and comfortingly gentle.

  “Why are you blind to us?” it whispered to him.

  It had asked before. “Do you play at Master?”

  “Why are you blind to us?”

  “Because—” he said finally, after thinking, and this time with all earnestness, “because if we shed our ways on each other ... what becomes of us and you, Sbi? How do we choose realities?”

  “I don’t,” said Sbi softly.

  He rolled his eyes despairingly skyward and shut them because of the sun. “You don’t care,” he said. “Your whole existence is of only minor concern to you.”

  “There was a time humans saw their way to come here to Freedom; there was a time you were so wise you could do that; and there was a time you saw us, before my years. But you took your river and built your cities and stopped seeing us; you stopped seeing each other. Why are you blind to each other, Herrin Law?”

  He shook his head slowly, not liking where that question led.

  “Why did they cripple you?”

  “Because I saw.” He lost his breath and tried to get it back, with a stinging in his eyes. He felt cold all the way to the marrow. “We’re wrong, aren’t we, Sbi?”

  “What do you think, Master Law?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and blinked at the sun, which could not drive the cold away. “I don’t know. Where are we going, Sbi? Where are you taking me?”

  “Where you’ll see more than you have.”

  He shivered, nodded finally, accepting the threat. Sbi slid a thin arm under his shoulders and supported him as if the cold were in the air, resting with arms about him and sleeves giving him still more warmth.

  And finally he found his breath easier again and knew he had strength for more traveling. “When you’re ready,” he said quietly to Sbi, “I am.”

  Sbi’s three-fingered hand feathered his cheek. “Are you so anxious?”

  “I won’t like it, will I?”

  “I might carry you a distance.”

  “No,” he said, and began to struggle, with Sbi’s careful help, to sit, and then to stand up. He was lightheaded. It took Sbi’s assistance to steady him.

  Perhaps, he thought, there was much of Waden in Sbi, to persuade, to create belief—to prove, at the last, and cruelly, that he was twice taken in. Perhaps Sbi also had a Talent, and perhaps Sbi was coldblooded in his waiting, since he had learned to reason with a human Master. Waden Jenks had disturbed a long stability between man and ahnit; and he had had no small part in it.

  Perhaps there was a place that Sbi would turn as Waden had.

  He pursued it, to know. It was all the courage he had left.

  And late, after hours of sometime walking and walking again, when the sun had gotten to the west and turned shades of gold, they crossed the final hill.

  He had been ready to stop. His side hurt, and tears blurred. “I’ll carry you a little distance,” Sbi had offered, but he hated the thought of helplessness and kept walking, wondering deep in his muddled thoughts why of a sudden Sbi was so anxious to keep going.

  Then he passed one hill and looked on the base of another mostly cut away; on a gold, pale figure which stood in a niche beneath the hill. There had been no prior hint that such existed, no prelude nor preface for it, in paths of worn places or adjacent structure. “Is that it?” Herrin asked. “Is that where we’re going?”

  “Come,” said Sbi.

  Herrin started downslope, and his knees threatened to give with him and throw him into a fall he could not afford; he hesitated, and Sbi took his arm and steadied him, descended with him, sideways steps down the slick, dusty grass until they were in the trough of the hills, until he could look close at hand at the figure sculpted there, in the recess of living stone.

  It was
ahnit. It was not one figure but an embrace of figures, a flowing line, a spiral ... he moved still closer and saw ahnit faces simplified to a line which be would never have guessed, ideal of line and curve in a harmony his human eye would never have discovered, for it did not, as he would have done, try to find human traits, but made them ... grandly other, grandly what they were. They shed tranquility, and tenderness, and, in that embrace, that spiral of figures, the taller extended a robed arm, part of the spiral, but beckoning the eye into that curve, in the flow of drapery and the touch of opposing hands. It was old; on one side the wind had blurred the details, but the feeling remained.

  Herrin reached to touch it, remembered the bandages in the motion itself, and with regret, not feeling the stone, stroked it like a lover’s skin. He looked up at alien form, at something so beautiful, and not his, and loss swelled up in his throat and his eyes. “Oh, Sbi,” he said, “Did you have to show me this?”

  There was silence; he looked back. Sbi had joined hands on breast and bowed, but straightened then and looked at him, head tilted. “You made such a thing too,” said Sbi. “For all the years the city was plain and people walked without meeting ... but you found something else.”

  “I created something else.”

  “No,” said Sbi. “Don’t you know yet what you did? It was always there. It was always real. Your skill found it.”

  It offended him. He was acutely conscious of the presence above him, the alien pedestal on which he rested his hand. “So where does it exist to be found?”

  Sbi folded upright hands to brow, indicating something inward, a graceful gesture.

  “Then I created it,” said Herrin. “It wasn’t there before.”

  “No,” said Sbi. “You only shaped the stone. You made nothing that was not before. There is one maker; but an artist only finds.”

  “A god, you mean. You’re talking about an external event. A prime cause. You believe in that.”

  Sbi made a humming sound. “You believe in Herrin Law. Is that more reasonable?”

  Herrin shook his head confusedly, suspecting the ahnit mocked him. And the work above him oppressed him with its power. He looked up at it, shook his head hopelessly. “Who made this?” he asked.

  “Long ago,” said Sbi. “Long dead. The name is lost. Few come here now, so close to your kind; the place goes untended and the grass grows. If humans came here, they couldn’t see it; not minds, not eyes. But you see us.”

  “We share a reality,” Herrin said. “That’s what you saw ... that this ... is in common. What I made, and this.”

  “What you found in the stone,” said Sbi. “What you found in Waden Jenks.”

  “I was mistaken about Waden Jenks,” he said bitterly.

  “Perhaps not,” said Sbi.

  Pain welled up in him the more strongly. He shook his head a second time and walked back from the statue, the entwined figures which beckoned his eyes into the heart of them. He made a helpless gesture, shook his head a third time, seeing things in the statue he had not seen before, the delicate work of the hands which touched, the faces which looked one almost into the other, suggesting a motion caught in intent, not completion.

  “It’s triangular,” he said. “There should be a third. It’s missing.”

  “No,” said Sbi. “It’s here.”

  His skin contracted. “Myself. The one who sees.”

  “Whoever sees,” Sbi said. “You stand in the heart of them. You’ve become their child.”

  “Child.” He looked at the faces, the embracing gesture, and the contraction became a shiver. They were alien. And not. “It’s good,” he said. And in despair: “I might have attained to this. Sbi, I would have. But it’s better than mine. Old as it is ... whatever it is ... better. Before the wind got to it. ...”

  “It was a strong thought,” said Sbi, “and it will take very long to fade away entirely.”

  “You just leave it here to be destroyed. Alone. For no one to see.”

  “Humans have this land now. Only a few of us remain to watch. You walk past such things and don’t see them; you don’t see them.”

  “What do you see? Sbi, when you look at this, do you see things I don’t?”

  “Perhaps,” said Sbi. “Perhaps not. We’re alone in our discoveries. It’s only such things as this that bind you and me together, by making us see what we thought we alone had found.”

  He went back, aware of the trap set up for the eye, and was drawn in all the same, into gentleness like Sbi’s. He flexed at his hand and had no movement, reached out again to touch the stone, the shaping of a dead and three-fingered hand. He passed his fingers over the stone and felt very little of it but pain.

  “Better than I,” he said.

  “At seeing us. But looking on it has reached something in you. It finds, Herrin Law.”

  He looked aside, his knees aching and unsteady, went back to the hillside and dropped down. He absorbed the pain dully, holding his breath, settled, holding his side with his arm, looking away from the statue which dominated the place. His eyes shed moisture, passionlessly; he hurt and he was tired and empty until he looked back at the statue which still beckoned.

  Sbi had come; Sbi sat down by him. He thought of thirst and hunger when Sbi was there, needs which had begun to be obsessive with him, because he was unbearably empty, and the tremors had come back.

  I shall die, he thought with a certain fatigued remoteness; and remoteness failed him. He wept, wiped his eyes with a bandaged hand, simply sat there, and Sbi edged close and patted his knee. He flinched. “I can’t take from you anymore,” he said. “Sbi, it ... upsets me. I can’t do it. And I’m not sure I can walk anymore. Are we done? Is this the place? If you leave me here I’m going to die.”

  Sbi said nothing. In time Sbi got up and walked away and Herrin watched him go, saying nothing, only despairing. There was only the statue then, aged, anomalous in the sea of hills and grass, giving no indication it had ever borne relationship to anything understandable. It offered love. It was only stone. He had sent Sbi away and Sbi had simply gone. The sun sank and the wind grew cold, and he listened to it in the grass and watched the change of light on the stone.

  And then, at dark, a stronger whispering, and Sbi was back.

  Herrin sat still, the wind cold on the tears on his face, and still did not hope, because whatever Sbi intended, Sbi’s care of him was not sufficient to keep him alive, a simple mistake, a lack of comprehension.

  Sbi came, squatted down, knees shoulder high as usual, held forth a small dead animal. “I have killed,” said Sbi in a voice quivering and faint. “Herrin Law, I have killed a thing. Can you eat this?”

  He considered the small furry animal, and looked from that to the distress in Sbi’s eyes, sensing that the ahnit had done something on his behalf it would not, otherwise, have done. It looked, if ahnit could shed tears, as if it would. “Sbi, if we can get a fire, I’ll try.”

  “I can make one,” Sbi said, and set the little body down, stroked it as if in apology.

  “It’s not,” Herrin asked in apprehension, “something of value to you.”

  “It was alive,” said Sbi, ripping up grasses and digging a bare spot. “I don’t wish to talk about it.”

  Sbi worked, furiously, hands shaking in an agitation Herrin had never seen in the ahnit ... went off again for a prolonged time and came back again with sticks. Herrin watched in bewilderment as Sbi coaxed warmth, smoke, and then fire out of twirling wood, and then, comprehending, bestirred himself to push grass over for Sbi to add. Fire crackled in the night, a tiny tongue of brightness in the cleared circle.

  “In this place,” Sbi mourned, and rose. “Eat. Please, when you are done, bury it, I don’t want to watch.”

  Sbi fled. Herrin touched the small creature it had left, edged the limp, furry body close to the flames and suffered qualms himself, not knowing what to do with it but to push it into the fire and char it into edibility.

  Oh, Sbi, he thought, trying no
t to inhale the stench or to think about what he was doing. Sbi had probably found a place remote from the smell and the memory. He swallowed the tautness in his throat and looked past the smoke to the statue under the moon, that mimed love. Sbi.

  XXV

  Waden Jenks: The University becomes your problem. We take the Outsiders in, and you instruct them. You’ll have your ambition, Keye. The University; and through it the Outsiders who come here.

  Master Lynn: The shaping of ten thousand years and more ... of all time. Quite enough for me. Unlike Herrin, I don’t meddle with the present. I don’t make his mistake.

  Waden Jenks: I regret him.

  Master Lynn: Need him? I think not.

  Waden Jenks: No. I regret him. That’s different.

  Master Lynn: (Silence.)

  Herrin buried the remains, such as his crippled hands could not handle, and the skin and bones. He had a small store of meat, which he had stripped with his teeth—his fingers could not do it—and which he dried over the coals and hoped to keep. He felt sick in one sense, but better with something in his belly. The tremors had stopped. He dug with his booted heel and dumped the pitiful scraps into the pit, then smoothed the earth with the edge of his hand, soiling the bandage, which already was soiled, with grease. “Sbi,” he called, and after a time, “Sbi!”

  Sbi returned, pausing before the statue in an attitude of—offering, Herrin thought, watching the gesture. Tribute, perhaps, to a forgotten artist; or to a god who believed ahnit into reality.

  Eventually Sbi came to him and sank down again.

  “I’m all right,” Herrin said. “Maybe I can walk now.”

  Sbi moved close to him and put a rangy arm about him. “No. Rest.”

  “For what, Sbi? Where do we go? To your own kind? Or is this where we stay?”

  Sbi said nothing for a moment. “No. You tell me where you want to go.”

  “Sbi, why are you doing this?”

  “Tell me where you want to go.”

  “Back to the city? Is that what you want me to say?”

  “Tell me where you want to go.”

  He rested against Sbi and thought a while. “The river, higher up the river. There’s a town called Camus. There’s a valley, up in the hills; a farm. I’d like to go there, Sbi.”