Alternate Realities Read online

  “Come on,” I said, walking back over to tug at his hand. “I want you”—which was a lie. I was tired, but it was his psych-set, and it gave him something to react to that would take his mind off Dela and off his own future at least for the moment. He undressed and we got between the sheets. He made love to me ... he was good. What handsome blond Griffin was like I had no idea, but if it were me, or if I were lady Dela, I would have preferred Lance, who was very beautiful and who did sex very well and with endless invention, which was what he was made for.

  Only his eyes were sadder than ever and he was not, this time, as good as he could be. His body reacted to his psych set; and that was that, tired or not, up to reasonable limits. But there were times when Lance was there and times when he was not, and this time he was not. Worry, like everything else, every other disturbance in his patterns, he channelled into his psych-set outlet the way he was healthily supposed to, so he was not breaking down and he didn’t panic, but it was as close to panic as I had ever seen him.

  I held him close for a long time afterward and tried to keep his mind on me—which it had never been, all the while—because I liked him, in a different way than I liked anyone else. I would have called it love, but love—was for the likes of the lady Dela, who could fall into and out of grand and glorious passions, sighing and suffering and flying into rages. We just blank when we’re upset. The least anguish of an emotional sort turns us off like a light going out unless we’re directly ordered to stay around, or unless we’re occupied about some duty. We have better sense than to cause ourselves such pains, and we have better manners than to tease one another too seriously—which, besides, would be interfering with Dela’s property, and rather like vandalism, which we could not do either.

  Pilferage now ... borrowing ... that we could do. I got up and got the tape I had pilfered out of the library and set the hookups over by the couch for Lance and me, figuring that he needed an escape just now. He wanted only to lie there staring at the ceiling, but I took him by the hand and pulled at him until he stirred out of bed and came; and then he put the sensors on himself and took the drug gladly enough when I gave it to him. I got a blanket and my own rigging fixed, drugged out and settled in, hoping for something good.

  It was a story tape: I had thought so from where I pilfered it; but it was one of those, one of Griffin’s, that could almost kill you with fright. I knew when I was still sliding into it what it was going to be, and I tried to open my mouth to yell out to Percy or someone to help, get it off us, pull us out of it, but I must have been too far gone. No one came.

  Only the story got better. Lance and I were in it together, and while it was more bloody than I liked, I found myself enjoying it after all. That was it: once you give your mind to one of these things, especially if you’re down, that means the drugs have got your threshold flat and you’re locked into the tape, so that you’ll agree to whatever happens. I lived it. Lance did, to whatever degree he could, according to his own pre-programming. Probably he was what I was, which was a hero, and very strong and extraordinarily brave and angry. Griffin had a passion for such stories, of angry men. For a little while I could handle anything at all: I was a born-man; and I fought a great deal and sometimes made love to a very beautiful blonde lady who reminded me of Dela. Lance would have loved that. And I’ll bet the men he fought were all Griffin; but for me they were Robert, that I killed a dozen times and enjoyed it more thoroughly than I liked to think about when I finally woke out of it.

  But when I did wake up I knew for sure it was not the kind of tape that we were ever supposed to have, not at all, because it was violent, and bloody, and all my psych-sets were disturbed. Lance was that way about it too, and avoided my eyes and seemed to be thinking about something. So I figured I had better get this one back into that library before it was missed.

  We can deceive, at least I could, and Lance could, and probably all of us. Vivien and Lynette and Modred were too cold to play games ... or to talk much with born-men, a silence which was deception of another kind, when they had reason to use it. At least that trio wouldn’t get up and sneak about some project for their own personal pleasure.

  But Modred, now....

  Modred was the one I went to when I wanted a tape back in the library undetected, a ride up in the lift toward the bow, up to the bridge where duties were still going on. No one suspected Modred of nonsense like tape-pilfering; and he would take my orders, because the operational crew maintained the library and were always pulling references to this and that through the computer. If I wanted a tape for my own use for a while, it was nothing for him to spin a tape through and record it, and then do things with the records of its use. It was even less for him to play with the records and drop a tape into the chute for the automated sorting to whisk back to its slot in the rack back in library. He could do that and never miss a beat in what else he was doing, and I think he really preferred the more complicated larcenies: they were problems, and this was not.

  Modred and Gawain. Wayne, we called the one, for short: he had long brown hair, and was very handsome—but he was all business whenever I would see him, given to working himself very hard. He was the mainday pilot, as Lynn ran things on alterday shift, and Percy was alterday comp. Gawain had a work compulsion, which tended to make Gawain lose weight when we were on long trips, but he really enjoyed what he did, and smiled a lot when he was working. Me, with my psych-set to worry about other’s pain, I always carried him his dinners when he forgot them and when I happened to be awake on the same schedule; and I did the same for Modred, who shared his shift and also worked too much and got too thin, but who never showed exuberance about it. Modred was the only one but me whose name we never shortened to something sensible, because when we did it came out Dread, and that was just too much like him to be clever. Modred had a beard as black as Percy’s was red, one of those jawline-following thin ones, but very heavy despite how close he cut it, and while Gawain let his hair go down to his shoulders for vanity’s sake, Modred had his cut very short—Lynn and Percy played barber, among other skills—and he cut it square across his brow, which made his dark eyes very sinister. That was why my lady Dela named him Modred, and I think why she bought him, because she was fascinated by dangerous-looking men. Even born-men moved out of Modred’s way, and that was a useful thing with some of the guests Dela had had. Not that Modred would hurt anyone, being like us, psych-set against it, but he looked like he would, and people reacted to that. Actually, he seemed to enjoy doing me small favors I asked, and getting small attentions from me and from Lynn when she was in the mood. Mostly that grim face—handsome, because my lady would not have had him about otherwise—seemed to me to conceal a very blank sort, who did his duty, who thought and calculated constantly, and who liked, like the rest of us, to sleep close at night, with someone close enough to let him feel companied. Vivien avoided sleeping next to him, somewhat scared of him, truth be told—and I always preferred Lance. So mostly Modred, really sexless, slept with his crewmates, who were also sexless during the voyages, and they kept each other company. Likely those four were neither concerned nor jealous about the freedom Lance and Viv and I had to come and go with my lady, to be in attendance on her, to share her luxuries, and in my case, to share her lovers—because they four were psych-fixed to the Maid, and when Modred or the others handled her controls, I think it was really like touching the body of a lover. It was a sort of grim joke, the stainless steel Maid and her crew doomed to love her with a chaste and forever devotion.

  I preferred Lance.

  But I flirted with Modred because it was pleasant. I always suspected he liked my touching him ... at least that killer’s face of his acquired a certain placidity like a pet being stroked by a familiar hand. He was not immune to sensation; it was just sex that was missing in him.

  “Thank you,” I whispered in his ear, leaning close, when he settled back into his place at the console, from disposing of the tape for me. I was not supposed to be on
the bridge, any more than Modred was supposed to be doing things to the library records, but supposed was often a very lax word in my lady Dela’s world: Dela cared nothing about laws or limitations in anyone. As long as the Maid served well as what she was, an abode of utmost luxury, and an extravagantly expensive toy, then what her living toys did in their off hours was of no concern. We could have held orgies on the bridge and abstracted the whole library to the crew quarters had we liked, and if my lady was in one of her relaxed moods, she would notice nothing.

  There were, of course, other moods. Remembering those, we always kept the record purified.

  “They’ll be wanting you,” Modred said in his flat way, staring at his screens to find out where things stood at the moment. Gawain was at the main console. I had my hands on Modred’s shoulders and leaned to deposit a kiss on the side of his neck, which, he took about like the touch of my hands, as something relaxingly pleasant. “I think my lady is awake.”

  He could do that, never missing the thread of the conversation when I teased him, which was the difference between him and Gawain or Percy, who at least grew bothered.

  “I’ll see to it,” I said, and patted his shoulder. Actually Modred fascinated me because he couldn’t be moved, and it was my function to move people. I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was a new chance to try.

  I had once tried more direct approaches, in the crew quarters. I think Modred wanted, with some dim curiosity, to do what others did, but it was only curiosity. “Let him alone,” Lynn had said when she saw it, with a frown that meant business.

  So you play the same game with him, I had thought then, but likewise Lynette was not one to cross lightly; and when it occurred to me that I might hurt someone my psych-set intervened and cooled me down at once. I confined myself after that to small games that Modred himself found pleasant.

  “We’re going to make jump in another hour,” Gawain said from his post.

  I wrinkled my nose. That meant getting my lady and the rest of us prepped with the drugs to endure jump. That was what she wanted, then. Jump always scared me, even drugged. It was the part of voyages that I hated.

  And then: “Modred—” Gawain said in a plaintive voice I had never heard him use. It frightened me. Modred’s reaction did, because he flung off my hand and reached for another board in a hurry, and alarms were going off, shrieking.

  “Out!” he shouted, and Modred never shouted. I scrambled toward the exit, staggering as the whole ship heeled, and then vocal alarms were going, the take-hold, which means wherever you are, whatever is closest, regardless. I never made the door. I grabbed the nearest emergency securing and got the belt round me, while already the Maid was swinging in a roll so that we came under G like coming off a world.

  “We’re losing it,” Gawain shouted into com. “We’re losing it—Modred—”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Modred yelled back. “Instruments ... instruments are going crazy. ...”

  I looked up from my position crouched against the bulkhead, looked at the screens, and there was nothing but black on them. We were in the safe area of our own home star and with traffic around us. There was no way anything ought to be going wrong, but G was pulling us and making the lights all over the boards blink red, red, red.

  Then it was as if whatever was holding us had just stopped existing, no jolt, but like sliding on oil, like a horrible falling where there is no falling.

  And jump. Falling, falling, falling forever as we hurtled into subspace. I screamed and maybe even Modred did—I heard Gawain’s voice for sure, and it became space and color. There was no ship, but naked chaos all around me, that stayed and stayed and stayed.

  III

  ... and from them rose

  A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,

  And, as it were one voice, an agony

  Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills

  All night in a waste land, where no one comes,

  Or hath come, since the making of the world.

  I don’t like to think of that time, and it was a long, long while before it dawned on me that I could move, and draw myself back from the void where I was. Things were all distorted. It seemed I could see through the hull, and through myself. Sometimes the chaos was red and sometimes the red became black and red spots crawled here and there like spiders. I cried, and there were other sounds that might be other voices, or the Maid herself still screaming.

  Then like in the time before I left that white place where I was made, I had to have something to look at, to control the images, to sort truth from illusion, and I concentrated simply on getting my hand in front of my face. Knowing what it ought to look like, I could begin to make it out, bones and veins and muscles and skin. Not red. Not black. My own true color. I concentrated on it until it took the shape and texture it ought to have, and then I was able to see shadows of other things too, like the deck, and the rest of my own body lying there.

  “Gawain,” I cried, and by concentrating on shapes I could see the controls, and Gawain, who looked dead hanging in the straps; and Modred, who lay on the floor ... his restraint had given way, as mine must have, and it should have broken my ribs, but it had not ... there was, at least, no pain. Modred was trying to move too, like something inky writhing there on the deck, but I knew who it was, and I crawled across the floor which was neither warm nor cold nor rough nor smooth ... I made it and got his hand, and hoped for help, because Modred was frightened by nothing, and if there was any of us who had a cold enough mind up here to be able to see what to do, I had most hope of Modred.

  “Hung in the between,” he said. “I think we’re hung up in the between.”

  His voice did strange things in my head, echoed round and round as if my brains had been some vast room. For a moment I didn’t want to look down, because there was a Down and we were still falling into it. Gawain had to get us out of this; that was all I could think of, and somehow Modred was pulling himself to his feet and heading in Gawain’s direction. I scrambled up to follow him, and stood swaying with one foot on one side of a chasm and the other foot on the other side, stars between, the whole flowing like a river in born-men’s Hell, all fire and glowing with the stars like brighter coals. Don’t move, my brain kept telling my body, and I didn’t for a moment. I stood there and shut my eyes.

  But there is an advantage in being what we are, which is that wherever we are, that’s what is, and we don’t have such problems as some do, trying to relate it to anywhere else. I was upright. I set one foot out and insisted to feel what was under it, and after that I knew that I could walk. I moved after Modred, though the room kept shrinking and expanding insanely, and sometimes Gawain was very far away and sometimes just out of reach, but two-dimensional, so that he seemed pressed between two pieces of glass, and his beautiful hair hanging down at an unconscious angle seemed afire like the river of stars, streaming and flowing like light.

  “Gawain!” Modred shouted, all distorted.

  “Gawain!” I shouted too.

  Gawain finally began to move, slow reaching of an arm which was at the moment two-dimensional and stretched all out of proportion. He tried to sit upright, and reached for the boards or what looked like an analogue of them in this distortion of senses, a puddle of lights which flowed and ran in swirling streams of fire.

  He’s there, I insisted to my rebel senses, and he began to be solid, within reach, as I knew he had to be. I grasped Modred’s arm and reached for Gawain’s, and Gawain twisted around and held onto both of us, painfully tight. “What you want to see, you can see,” I said. “Don’t imagine, Gawain. Don’t imagine.”

  He was there, all right. I could feel him heaving for breath, and I was breathing in the same hoarse gulps, and so was that third part of us, Modred.

  “We’ve been malfunctioned into jump,” Modred said, carefully, softly between gasps for breath. Voices distorted in my ears, and maybe in his too. “I think we’re hung up somewhere in subspace and there’s no knowing w
hat happened back there. We could have dragged mass with us into this place. We could have dragged at the sun itself. I don’t know. The instruments aren’t making sense.”

  “Lady Dela,” I said, thinking about her caught in this disaster, Dela, who was the reason for all of us existing at all.

  “No drugs,” Gawain murmured. “We’re in this with no drugs.”

  That frightened me. We drug down to cope with the between of jump, that nowhere between here and there. But we were doing it without, if that was where we were ... and like walking a tightrope across that abyss, the only hope was not to look down and not to lose our balance to it. One necessity at a time. “I’m going for lady Dela,” I said.

  “You’ll get lost,” Gawain protested, because the floors were still going in and out on us, taming reds and blacks and showing stars in the middle. “Don’t. If we ripped something loose back there, if those corridors aren’t sound. ...”

  “Use com.” That was Modred, clearer headed than either of us. Modred passed me like a great black spider, and reached into the pool of lights, perhaps able to see them better because he knew what ought to be there. “Lady Dela,” he said. “Lady Dela, this is Modred on the bridge. Do you hear me?”