Alternate Realities Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PORT ETERNITY

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  VOYAGER IN NIGHT

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  PORT ETERNITY

  “A thoughtful work by an intelligent writer.”

  —The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review

  VOYAGER IN NIGHT

  “Well-written, intelligent space adventure ... an intriguing

  psychological novel ... thoughtful and original

  characterizations of both humans and aliens,

  excellent world building.”

  —The Chicago Sun-Times

  “Fascinating ... testifies to Cherryh’s boldness and

  flexibility as a novelist.” —Locus

  WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE

  “This is a thoughtful, engrossing novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Proof that you can be prolific and good ... a gem.”

  —The Los Angeles Times

  DAW TITLES BY C.J. CHERRYH

  THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE

  The Company Wars

  DOWNBELOW STATION

  The Chanur Novels

  THE PRIDE OF CHANUR

  CHANUR’S VENTURE

  THE KIF STRIKE BACK

  CHANUR’S HOMECOMING

  CHANUR’S LEGACY

  Merovingen Nights

  ANGEL WITH THE SWORD

  The Hanan Rebellion

  BROTHERS OF EARTH

  HUNTER OF WORLDS

  The Era of Rapprochement

  SERPENT’S REACH

  FORTY THOUSAND IN GEHENNA

  MERCHANTER’S LUCK

  The Mri Wars

  THE FADED SUN TRILOGY OMNIBUS

  The Age of Exploration

  CUCKOO’S EGG

  VOYAGER IN NIGHT

  PORT ETERNITY

  THE MORGAINE CYCLE

  THE MORGAINE SAGA

  EXILE’S GATE

  EALDWOOD

  THE DREAMING TREE

  THE FOREIGNER UNIVERSE

  FOREIGNER

  INVADER

  INHERITOR

  PRECURSOR

  DEFENDER1

  EXPLORER1

  PORT ETERNITY

  Copyright © 1982 by C.J. Cherryh

  VOYAGER IN NIGHT

  Copyright © 1984 by C.J. Cherryh

  WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE

  Copyright © 1981 by C.J. Cherryh

  ALTERNATE REALITIES

  Copyright © 2000 by C.J. Cherryh

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1171.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any

  resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  First Paperback Printing, December 2000

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA.

  HECHO EN USA

  S.A.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49561-2

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  A fast forward from the author. ...

  These books are special ... and thanks to Betsy Wollheim for carrying on the tradition of a kind of science fiction publishing that’s not a spinoff, not a copy of a TV show—in fact, not “just like” much else you’ll meet. In her decision to put these books out in a modern format she’s guaranteed they’re findable. Trust me: colored lights and sfx aren’t the “real stuff ” of science fiction, that branch of writing we fondly called “the literature of ideas” long before NASA flew. No, the “real stuff ” is extrapolation—that twelve-letter word for taking a concept and running with it as far and as fast as a lively mind can follow, be it into whimsy or down a scary slip on thin ice. Extrapolative tales require a rarer kind of reader, a mind that enjoys hopping from ice floe to ice floe to get to ... well, you just can’t predict, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

  It’s very certain you don’t get rich writing or publishing what Betsy Wollheim and I call the “magic cookie books,” but there’s the special reward of putting these hard-to-place books out where the right readers can find them.

  PORT ETERNITY

  I was lucky in my first publisher and lucky in the era in which I wrote my earliest books; Donald Wollheim of DAW Books, owning his own publishing house, gave me free rein to experiment, and to write the outrageous, and to exercise a set of muscles a writer ideally needs. Ever seen a butterfly come out of the chrysalis? The wings are small and shriveled. But the wings begin to beat, and to expand, and they stretch out and show their patterns as life flows into them. The relationship of a writer to someone who gives them the chance to do that imagination-stretch is precious.

  My original title for this was Involutions, because it spirals in upon itself. Reality starts down a whirlpool ride into dream and into fiction, and the fictional world becomes more real than surrounding space, at least for a time ...

  Or isn’t it, after all, that all fiction is the backyard of the house we live in, our release from the four-walled constraint of daily chores we do just to eat and have a place to sleep? And while we’re there ... it’s real.

  Stories are what we all work to have. Oh, how destitute are those who don’t have access to stories at all, or who don’t realize that stories are the prize in the box, and that daily life without them is so much less!

  Stories aren’t escape. They’re the living of an active mind. Making money and acquiring things can scratch a few itches, too, but give me a man who loves the companionship of human beings and animals, who appreciates good stories and good food at his fireside, and who’ll bestir himself considerably to get them around him.

  Well, Don and I discussed the book, but Don said it was science fiction, not a philosophy text, and I needed a better title. So he came up with Port Eternity, and so it is.

  And where did this particular idea come from? Well, I’ve loved the Arthurian legends since I played at castles and knights, and I think they’ll have immediacy so long as the English culture survives in any of its farflung children.

  That’s the other thing stories teach us: that we extend farther than our own lifespan, and that there’s unsuspected greatness in the least of us.

  When we believe that for a starting fact, everything we do, we do in a different light.

  I

  ... Fairy Queens have built the city, son;

  ... And as thou sayest it is enchanted, son,

  For there is nothing in it as it seems

 
; Saving the King; tho’ some there be that hold

  The King a shadow, and the city real. ...

  She was a beautiful ship, the Maid of Astolat, beautiful in the way ships can be when cost means nothing, and money certainly meant nothing except the comfort and the pleasure of my lady Dela Kirn. I had seen the Maid from the outside, but her crew had not, at least not since the day they boarded her. She was beautiful outside and in, sleek, with raking lines to her vanes which meant nothing at all in space, but pleased the eye and let everyone know that this was no merchanter, no; and inside, inside she was luxury and comfort, which I appreciated too, more than I appreciated the engineering. Where lady Dela went, I went, along with the other servants lady Dela had for her personal comfort; but the Maid was the best of the places Dela Kirn lived, and I was happiest when she gave the order that packed up the household for the winter season and took us up to station, for whatever destination pleased her.

  Usually this move coincided with some new lover, and some of these were good and some were not—more disagreeable than pleasant, truth be told; but we managed, usually, to enjoy ourselves by avoiding them at their worst. Often enough the Maid had no really binding course, more duration than destination. She just set out and toured this station and another, and because Dela loved to travel, and grew bored with this and that climate, we were a great deal on the move. Dela Kirn, be it understood, was one of the Founders of Brahman, not that she herself had founded a world, but her predecessors had, so Dela Kirn inherited money and power and in short, whatever she had ever fancied to have or do.

  My name is Elaine, which amused my lady Dela, who gave the name to me. I have a number on my right hand, very tiny and tasteful, in blue; and the same number on my shoulder, 68767-876-998, which I am, if anyone asked, and not Elaine. Elaine was Dela Kirn’s amusement. I was made 68767-876-998. Born isn’t the right word, being what I am, which is a distinction I don’t fully understand, only that my beginning was in a way different than birth, and that I was planned. I’ve never had any other name than Elaine, I think, because before Dela I have no clear memory where I was, except that it was nowhere—one of the farms. On the farms they lock you up and you spend a lot of time doing repeat work and a lot of time exercising and a lot of time under deepteach or just blanked, and none of it is pleasant to think back on. When I have nightmares they tend to be of that, of being locked up alone, with just my own mind for company.

  They worked over my genes in planning me, me, 68767-876-998, so that I’m beautiful and intelligent, which isn’t vanity to say, because I had nothing at all to do with it. And probably there are hundreds of me, because I was a successful combination, and a lot aren’t. I cost my lady a lot of money, like the Maid, but then, she wouldn’t have wanted me if I hadn’t.

  And Lancelot and Vivien were beautiful too, which they were made to be ... Dela gave them their names from the same source she got mine, having this fancy for an old poem-tape. I knew. I had heard it. The story made me sad, especially since that Elaine, the lily maid, died very young. I knew of course that I would too, which happens to our type ... they take us when we get a little beyond forty and put us down, unless we have learned by then to be very clever or unless we have somehow become very important, which few of us do.—But they made us on tape, feeding knowledge into our heads by that means, while they grew our bodies, so I suppose they have the right to do that, like throwing out tape when it gets worn—or when we wear out, beyond use.

  Lance—for him I felt sorriest of all when I first heard the tape, because of what he was and because of the story too, that it came out just as badly for him. It was a terrible story, and a grand one at the same time. I heard it over and over again, whenever I had the chance, loving it, because in a way it was me, a me I would never be, except in my dreams. Only I never wanted to give it to Lance to hear, or even to Viv, because their part in it was crueler than mine; and somehow I was afraid it might come true, even if we have no love the way born-men do.

  Dying—that, of course, we do, all of us. But what it was to love ... I only dreamed.

  I was still young, having served my lady Dela just five years. Vivien was older; and so was Lance, who was trained for other things than keeping the household in order, I may add, and very handsome, more than any of Dela’s other lovers that she had for other reasons. Dela was good to Lance when she was between lovers, and as far as we could love, I think Lance loved her very much. He had to. That was what his taped psych-set made him good for, and mostly it was what he thought about, besides being beautiful. He was older than any of us, being thirty-six—and forty frightened him.

  I was, precisely, twenty-one, after five years’ service; because really my mind was better than the training they put into it—and I was sold out at sixteen, finished two years younger than most leave the farms. I read; I wrote; I sang; I knew how to dress and how to do my lady’s hair and how to make love and do simplest math, all of which recommended me, I suppose. But mostly I was innocent, which pleased my lady Dela. She liked the look of me, she would say, holding my face in her two hands and smiling. I have chestnut hair and greenish eyes, and I blush quickly, which would make her laugh; besides that I have, she would say, a face like in the old romance, my eyes being very large for my face and my skin decidedly pale. I have a romantical sad look—not that I am sad a great deal of the time, but I have the look. So I was Elaine, the lily maid, like the ship. Elaine loved Lancelot and died for love, Elaine my namesake in the poem, but love was very far from me.

  Actually, if I had something to make me melancholy, it was that I had that name which meant dying young, and I had been out of the farms so short a time that death, however romantical, hardly appealed to me. I had never thought much about death before that tape—but I did think of it afterward.

  Vivien—Vivien now: she was different, all sharpness and wit, and that was her function, not being beautiful, although she was, in a dark and elegant fashion. The Vivien of the story was a cold and intelligent woman; and so was ours, who managed the accounts and all the things that Dela found too tedious, the really complicated things. Age had no terror for Vivien—she was sure to go on past forty: without her, my lady Dela would hardly have known what to do about her taxes.

  Mostly Viv kept to herself. She was of course older, but she looked down not just on me, but on Lance—which she had a right to do, being the most likely of us all to be given rejuv and to live as long as Dela herself. Viv did sleep with us in the servants’ quarters, and she talked to us without spite, but she was not like us. I bored her; and Lance did, entirely, because Viv had no sex drive at all and made no sense of Lance. Attractive and elegant as she was, she got all her pleasure from her account-keeping and from organizing things and telling us what to do, which is as good a way to get pleasure as any other, I suppose, if it works, which it seemed to do for Vivien.

  Then there was the crew, who were like us all, made for what they did. Their pleasures were mostly of Vivien’s sort—taking care of the ship and seeing that everything aboard was in order. Only sometimes they did have sex when the Maid was in dock, at least three of them, because there was nothing else for them to do. They lived all their lives waiting on Dela’s whim to travel.

  The men were Percivale, Gawain, and Modred. Modred was a joke of kinds, because he was one of the really cold ones who mostly cared for his computers and his machines; and there was Lynette, who was the other pilot besides Gawain. None of them could make anyone pregnant and Lynette couldn’t get pregnant, so it was all safe enough, whatever they did; but they had that kind of psych-set that made them go off sex the moment they were set on duty. The moment the ship activated, the ship became mistress to all of them: they served the Maid in a kind of perpetual chastity in flight, except a few times when my lady had guests aboard and lent them out.

  That was the way we lived.

  On this particular voyage there was just one guest, and my lady Dela was busy with him from the time we all came aboard. He was her fa
vorite kind of lover, very rich and better still—young. He had not yet gone into rejuv; was golden and blond and very serious. His name was Griffin, and it might have been one of Dela’s own conceits, but it really was his name. It meant a kind of beast which was neither one thing nor the other, and that was very much like Griffin. He read a great deal and had a hand in everything; he spent a lot of his off time enjoying tape dramas, to my great delight ... for with that store of them which had come aboard the Maid because of him, I was going to have a great many of them to spend time with, as I had had constantly during the time he had been at the country estates at Brahmani Dali. Born-man dramas were a kind of deepteach I dearly loved, stories where you could just stretch out and let your mind go, and be those people. (But several of his tapes I had not liked at all, and they gave me nightmares: This was also Griffin. They were about hurting people, and about wars, and I hated that, but there never was a way to tell what kind of stories they were when I was sneaking them out of library, no way at all to tell what I was going to get until I took the drug and turned the machine on, and then, of course, it was too late to back out.) All of this was Griffin, who came from neighboring Sita, and who visited for business and stayed for pleasure. He surprised us at first by staying longer than a week, and then a month, and four, and lastly by getting invited to the Maid. He was, truth be known, half Dela’s real age, although she never looked the difference ... she was seventy, and looked thirty, because Dela hated the thought of getting old, and started her rejuv at that age, for vanity’s sake, and also I think because she had no desire for children, which holds most born-men off it another decade. At thirty-odd Griffin had not yet needed it, although he was getting to that stage when he might soon think of it. He attended on Dela. He slept with no one else; his vices were secret and invisible—austere by comparison to some of Dela’s companions. By the stories Griffin liked, I suspected he was one of those who didn’t mind being hurt, and my lady was certainly capable of obliging him.