Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “I know Camus,” Sbi said.

  “There,” said Herrin.

  “You came from this place.”

  “You know a great deal about me.”

  “Remember how long I’ve observed.”

  “I came from that valley. Yes. I want to go back there.”

  “All right,” Sbi said.

  No argument, no discussion. “You want something,” Herrin surmised. “Is this it?”

  “Go where you wish. I’ll help you.”

  “Why?”

  Sbi said nothing. But he had not expected answers from Sbi.

  XXVI

  Waden Jenks: I informed you on Camden McWilliams; if you’re not having success, don’t look to others.

  Col. Olsen: The information was accurate beyond doubt?

  Waden Jenks: Colonel, what you doubt is at your discretion.

  Col. Olsen: Reasoning with you people is impossible.

  Waden Jenks: You asked for information; I gave you precise past patterns. You see the whole situation. You complain to me about your lack of success. Hardly reasonable.

  The pain grew less. There was a morning, a dewy, otherwise unpleasant morning when clothing was sodden, when the bandages were somewhat looser, and Sbi so carefully began to adjust the splinting, substituting slim green wands.

  “They bend,” Herrin said, and clamped his lips against the pain as he tried to flex his right hand. “Sbi, they move.”

  “Yes,” said Sbi, although the movement was more a tremor than voluntary. Sbi avowed to have seen it, and kept to his wrapping. “Try, whenever you think of it, try to bend the hands.”

  “Not much hope, is there?” Herrin asked. “There’ll not be anything close to full use of them.”

  “Bend them when you can.”

  He nodded, sat patiently while Sbi worked on his bands. Winced sometimes, because the pain was very much still there when some jar set it off again. Sbi chewed a bit of grass ... incongruous to watch it disappear upward from stem to bearded head and vanish; Sbi did not much eat the stems, but chewed on them from time to time. Herrin had a bit of meat tucked away, but would not eat it in front of Sbi, and a handful of fire-parched grain which at least gave him no stomachache as the raw grain did.

  “Here,” said Sbi, leaning forward, touched him mouth to mouth and transferred a quick burst of sugary fluid, moisture without which he could not survive. Sbi had developed a deftness about the process which he greatly appreciated, so matter-of-factly performed it failed to bother him as it might.

  “It doesn’t hurt much,” Herrin said, trying the newly bandaged hands. “That’s good, Sbi. That’s good.”

  “I hoped so,” Sbi said. Sbi plucked another heavy-headed bit of grass and stuck it in his mouth. “Come, are you ready?”

  With that they broke their camp, no more than picking themselves up off the ground. They did not use fire often. Sbi had no particular use for it ... it crumbles, Sbi objected of parched grain; and: There’s always something, to the question what ahnit ate when there was no grain ripe. Not animals, Herrin reckoned, never that; he tried this and that as they walked ... and more than once Sbi stopped him before he picked some plant. “Deadly,” Sbi would say, or: “You won’t like that; very bitter.”

  “Don’t you ever eat in the city?” Herrin wondered once.

  “I fancy beer,” said Sbi, “and cake.”

  Herrin thought of both and suffered. Of a sudden he thought of porridge, and cold mornings and warm beds; of sights and scents and sounds which came back together and had to do with home.

  And that afternoon they came to the Camus valley, overlooking the town he remembered.

  “It’s there,” he exclaimed; “it’s there, Sbi.”

  And he started down the hill, tired as he was, remembering where a road was which led to home.

  XXVII

  John Ree: They say he’s in the city. One of the invisibles.

  Andrew Phelps: (looking about) We shouldn’t talk about this.

  John Ree: I’ll tell you: we’ve hunted. Apprentice Phelps, I’ve hunted.

  Andrew Phelps: Among them?

  John Ree: Wherever he might be. Wherever.

  The house was there, as he recalled, bare boards one with the color of the earth, a corrugated plastic roof ... they did not even get the building slabs they had down in Camus. The windows were lighted in the evening. There was no better time to come home.

  Herrin stopped on the hillside, in the midst of a step, and looked back at Sbi, who had stopped on the hillcrest. Ungainly, alien, robes flapping in the slight breeze; Sbi just stood, whether sad or otherwise Herrin could not tell. And then he thought of the midnight cloth he himself wore, the cloak, the bandages, which he had taken on him like a brand, which no one put off once on.

  He shed the cloak and took it back, held it in his hands toward Sbi, there in the wind, on the hill. “Good-bye,” he said, which curiously had more of pain in it than leaving that brown board farmhouse had had for him long ago, because there was so much of Sbi he had missed and never seen and there was so much Sbi had done that made no sense and now never might. He thought Sbi looked sad, but with Sbi’s face that was no certainty. “Good-bye,” he said a second time, and left the cloak in Sbi’s hands and walked back down the hill.

  Faster and faster.

  He was tattered and worn, his Student’s Black dusty and seam-split at the arm; his face was unshaven and his hair hung in dusty threads; the bandages remained on his hands—he could not have borne the pain without them—but the color was obscured by grease and dirt. Home ... and cleanliness, and food, and most of all, to be what he had been. He almost ran as he approached the lighted windows and the door. “Hello!” he called, to make them listen, “Hello!” He reached the wooden door and hit it with his elbow, and listened in agonized excitement as chairs moved inside, as familiar furniture scraped on a familiar wooden floor and steps crossed to the door.

  “Who’s there?” It was his father’s voice.

  “It’s Herrin,” he cried. “Father, it’s Herrin, home.”

  The door opened, a rattling of the latch, swung inward. His father was in the doorway, his mother beyond, both grayed and older than he remembered; he crossed the threshold, opened his arms although they had never had the habit of touching him, and if they embraced him it would hurt him—he would bear the pain of his ribs to ease that ache inside.

  “What happened?” his father asked, looking frightened. “Where did you come from?”

  “I’d like a drink. Something to eat.”

  They looked at him in evident disturbance. He stood still, letting them sort it out slowly, trying to remember as he had always remembered, that they thought differently and less deeply than he. After a moment his mother drew back a chair at the table in front of the door and joined his father who was busy in the small kitchen at the left of the table, virtually one room with the bedroom on the right.

  It was small; it was poor; there was so little here that had changed over the years, except there was a new rug on the floor, and it was far newer and brighter than anything else in the room. Dishes rattled comfortingly. Even the feel of the chair was right, the table under his elbows what he remembered it felt like. There was the place on the other side of the door where his bed had stood. A plow leaned there now, probably waiting sharpening. Perrin’s bed was still there, beyond theirs. It smelled right, the whole house, as it had always smelled; there was something about the spices they cooked with, that no one in the Residency kitchens and no one in University had the knack of. Food had always tasted better here.

  His parents brought him a sandwich and a cup of tea, steaming hot, set it down in front of him. He took half the sandwich up in dust-crusted, bandaged hands and bit into it with a bliss that ran through his body, choked that bite down and handled the tea the same, a delicate sip of purest steaming liquid out of old, familiar dishes; for a moment he felt Sbi’s lips and shuddered, and felt the old china again.

  He ate,
tears welling up from his eyes, because it was chill outside and warm inside, and the inside of him was coming to match it, filled with food and comfort. He could not eat all of it, could not possibly. And that seemed bliss beyond compare, to know that he need not be hungry, or thirsty.

  Only then, his belly full to hurting, he began to notice the silence and their eyes, which waited for him, as they had waited in years long before, knowing that reasoning with him was not easy or often possible, on their level. The world had changed; they had not. He looked back at them, frightened by that old silence.

  “What happened?” his father asked a second time. They were still waiting for that precise question. “Where did you come from?”

  “Kierkegaard. I walked.”

  Silence. They stared at his face, not his hands, fixedly at his face, without expression on their own beyond a residual fear.

  “I’ve come home,” he said.

  They said nothing to that.

  “Why did you walk?” his mother asked.

  “I’ve quit the University. Mother, there are Outsiders there. The First Citizen is bringing them in. I can’t stay there. I don’t want to stay there the way things are getting to be.”

  Fear. He still picked that up in the expressions. And something else, a deeper reserve.

  “I need a bath,” he said.

  Without a word his mother nodded toward the back of the house where the bathroom was, where an old pump produced water with slow patience.

  “I’m going to stay,” he said.

  “Heard you’re a great artist, a University Master,” his father said.

  “Was,” he said. “I quit.”

  There were nods, nothing of warmth, nothing of comfort in his presence.

  “I’ve stopped all that. I don’t belong to the University. I have nothing to do with it any longer. I want to stay here, to farm.”

  Nothing. Their faces were like a wall, shutting him out.

  “Perrin’s moved out,” he asked, “has she?”

  Silence.

  “Is she here, then?”

  “Perrin’s dead,” his mother said. It hit him in the stomach. Fantasies collapsed, a structure of new beginnings he had imagined with Perrin, an intent to do otherwise than he had done, a half-formed longing to enjoy a closeness he had thrown away without ever knowing it.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “She couldn’t be you. She killed herself the year you left. Everyone talked about you. Everyone was proud of you. Even when you were gone she had no place for herself. Except here. And that wasn’t good enough.”

  He sat motionless.

  “She left a note,” his father said. “She said she had never had anything important. It was all for you, for University.”

  His eyes stung. He stared across the room at the wall while his parents quietly, together, rose from the table and took the dishes back to the kitchen. The tears slipped and slid down his face. He was not sure why, because he did not particularly feel them, more than that stinging and a leaden spot in his stomach which might as likely be the sandwich on an abused digestion, far more food than he should have eaten all at once.

  “You’re important,” his mother said, drying her hands by the counter. “We heard all the way in Camus about that big statue, about how you’re the most important man in the University. You can’t want to live in Camus.”

  “I’m not that, anymore.” He held up his bandaged hands. “I had an accident. It’s all right to say something about it. I can’t work anymore, not like that. I’ve come home to do a different kind of work.”

  There was dead silence. His parents stood there and stared bleakly at him. After a moment his father shrugged and walked over to the fireside where evening coals were left. “You’ll make something important here in Camus ... better you should go down to the town and work there. There’s nothing up here for you.”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Mind like yours ... I suppose you’ve come out here to start a whole new branch of the University. A whole new way. But that’s nothing to us.”

  “Perrin was ours,” his mother said. “Perrin was ours. We understood Perrin and she understood us. She wanted so much she didn’t have. It wasn’t fair. Perrin was ours. Nothing was fair with her. She hated Camus after you’d gone. Talked about Kierkegaard. Wanted to come to University. Couldn’t. She wasn’t talented like you. That was the way of everything, wasn’t it? You’re going to start to work in Camus now. What are you going to build there?”

  “They’re wrong,” he said. He stammered on the words. “Everything, everything is wrong. They broke my hands, you hear me? I’ve walked to this house from Kierkegaard. They’ve brought in Outsiders from off the planet and they’re doing things that are going to change everything and no one sees it. Do you know, these Outsiders pilfer, too? Right off the tables in the market, they walk away and people pretend they don’t see because that’s what they’re supposed to do, and they play the game, but it’s a hole to nowhere ... those goods don’t turn up in market again, they don’t come back to Kierkegaard, not even to this world. It goes out from here. We’ve opened the door on something that isn’t small enough for us. We think we know what’s real and we don’t. It’s all a structure that’s operable only if we all believe it.”

  They moved, his mother drying her hands which were already dry, and his father walking back to the kitchen counter as if he had business there.

  “They’re wrong,” Herrin said again. “I’ve been through the system and I’ve taught in the system and I know the structure of the whole thing and it’s wrong.”

  “Long wet autumn,” his father said to his mother. “I think we’ve got to expect a cold winter.”

  “Father,” Herrin said. “Mother?”

  “Leaves have gone dark,” his mother said. She looked through to the wall, still wiping her hands on the towel. “I think it’s time to pull some of those tubers, take a look at them.”

  “Might.”

  “Can’t afford a ground freeze. Could come any morning.” She seemed to shrink, a slight shiver.

  “Mother?”

  There was no answer. They started putting away the dishes. Herrin sat, hands on the table, with the sandwich lying undigestible in his belly. He sat and watched in silence as they began stirring about the evening routine, the complaints about the quality of the wood for keeping the fire at night; the reminder about the kitchen fire and the old argument about the temperature in the room, something played for him, and in his absence. He watched, hungry for the sights and the sounds, nonparticipant. He rose finally when they were about to go to bed and searched out a towel and filled it with food, got a bottle for water and filled it from the kitchen tub; while they settled into bed he entered the bath, pawed through things until he found a razor, and soap, and he searched the closet for clean clothes, but his father was smaller than he and there was nothing of his own left. Just Perrin’s things, still hanging there. He closed the door and snatched up the things he had pilfered, hastened past his parents’ bed in the main room and out through the door.

  He left it open, ran, stumbling and blind with tears. “Sbi,” he called out, but he had said good-bye to the ahnit, had turned Sbi away. “Sbi,” he wept, and ran up the hill clutching the bundles in his arms.

  A shadow met him just the other side, Sbi’s tall shape, Sbi’s scent, Sbi’s enfolding arms, which took him in, gently comforting. He wept, long; Sbi sat down with him on the grassy hillside and simply held him.

  “They stopped seeing me,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Sbi. “I feared so.”

  He drew another breath, wiped nose and eyes with the back of his bandaged hand, blinked in the grit it left. “I pilfered things I could use.”

  “Good,” said Sbi.

  “I want to leave this place,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Sbi, and rose, keeping an arm about him to help him. Something warm settled about his shoulders, the cloak Sbi had
kept waiting for him. “Where shall we go now?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Sbi picked up the bundles of toweling, and laid an arm again about his shoulders. “Come. Out of the wind at least.”

  He came, settled where Sbi wished, a place still not out of Law’s Valley, nor far enough from the house for his liking; but rocks sheltered it from the wind and he could sit down next Sbi and curl up with knees and elbows inside the midnight cloak.

  There was dew the next morning too, but at least they were not hungry as well as cold and wet. Herrin breakfasted on parched grain and a bit of cheese ... he offered a bit of bread to Sbi, but Sbi would not take it, for whatever reason. And he drank from the jar, the merest sip, which Sbi watched silently.

  They packed up then. The house would have been visible, he thought, if he climbed the hill; he could have looked down on his father and mother’s house by daylight ... had he just walked up the rise. He would not. Sbi wove grass braids with great dexterity and bound up the bundles he had to carry. “Here,” said Sbi. “We might go to Camus and pilfer a basket, but until we do. ...”

  “Not Camus,” Herrin said. He leaned against the rock and hitched the grass rope to his shoulder, a weight on his hand for the instant, which hurt despite the splints.

  “Where?” Sbi asked again.

  He shook his head. “I don’t care.” He looked up, looked at Sbi’s face, recalling that last night he had deserted Sbi. Sbi had waited. Dismissed, had simply sat down outside the house and waited last night. His own predictability disturbed him. All that he did assumed the nature of a pattern of Sbi’s choosing. Sbi’s reality.

  “What do you want?” he asked of Sbi again. “You stay with me ... why?”

  No answer. He looked at the morning-lit face, the black, wet eyes, and found the morning bitter cold.

  “Do what you like this time,” he told Sbi. “Go to your own kind; I’ll come with you, if that’s what you ultimately want.”