Alternate Realities (8 page)

A wandering instability, a knot in time and space, a ripple in the between that came wandering through our safe solar system and sucked us up. And with who knew what other ships? I almost opened my mouth on that sudden thought—that perhaps we should try to see if we had company in this disaster, if others had been sucked through too; material things seemed to work here, and maybe the com would. And then I thought of some big passenger carrier, short of food and water in relation to its number of passengers, and what that might mean for
us
, if they did make contact.

No. Old—Percy had said it. Perhaps—the thought went shivering through my flesh while I stared at the screens—others had faced similar moments, had lived out their lives until they decayed, the light eating through them. From what we had seen of the mass, from the insane way in which the ships were fused, one upon the other, they must all be very old, if age meant anything at all here, and that was not the quick eating away of matter by the chaos-stuff.

“Go,” my lady said suddenly, waving her hands at us. “See what’s damaged. Start putting things in order. See to it. Are you going to stand like you’ve lost your wits?”

I looked desperately at Lance and Vivien, turned and went, a last backward look at the screens, and then I hurried out to check the halls and the compartments. My lady now talked as if she had given up her premise that we were dead, and I took some comfort in that while I walked the corridors back to her compartment—only mild damage there. The wine bottle had been mostly empty, the dew had been so generally distributed in null-
G
that there remained no visible trace of it except on the table-tops and the steel doors. The rest had soaked into the carpet and covered the woodwork, beyond helping. And the glasses were unbreakable, lying where returning
G
had dropped them. I wiped surfaces, straightened the bed, gathered up fallen towels in the bath. At least there had been no furniture out of its braces. Not so bad. I walked outside, confronted suddenly with the chill corridors, the light
G
that made my stomach queasy. It came back to me again what my lady had said about eternity being compassed in dying, about the brain spilling all it contained in random firings—but then, if that were so, then we should not be sharing the dream, unless all that I had touched, the ship, the lady, Lance, everyone—was illusion, and I had never seen or touched at all.

Perhaps I had built it all out of the chaos-stuff as I had built my hand when I willed to see it. Perhaps I had just gone too far in my building, and what the lady said about dying was my own brain talking to itself, trying to convince me by logic that the dream had to end and that I should be decently dead.

And I would not listen, but went on dreaming.

No
, I thought, and shuddered, because there had just crept a touch of red into the shadows in the hall, the old way of looking at things coming back again, and if I could not stop it my eyes would begin to see the chaos-stuff through the walls.

They had experimented, so my lady’s pilfered tapes had told me, with living human senses; and the brain could be re-educated. Eyes could learn to see rightside up or upside down. Somewhere in the waves of energy that impinged the nerves, the brain constructed its own fantasies of matter and blue skies and green grass and solidity, screening out the irrational and random.

A reality existed within us too, tides of particles that were themselves nodes in chaos, all strung together to make this reality of ours. And in this place the structure of matter gaped wide and I could see it ... miniature tides like the tides of the moving galaxies in one rhythm with them, and us spread like a material veil between, midway of one reality and the other.

No, I thought again, and leaned against the veil/wall in my chosen viewpoint of what was, was, was ... don’t look down. One was advised not to look at such things and never to know that all of us were dreaming, dreaming even when we were sure we were alive, because what the brain always did was dream, and what difference whether it built its dreams from the energy affecting it from outside or whether it traced its own independent fancies, making its own patterns on the veil. Don’t lean too hard. Don’t look.

I slid down onto the corridor floor and heaved up my insides, which was my body’s way of telling me it had had enough nonsense. It wanted the old dream back, insisted to have it. I lay there dry-heaving until I dismissed my ideas of dreams and eternities, because I hurt inside and wanted to die, and if I could have waked and died at once I would have gladly done it.

So a pair of slippered feet came up to me; and my lady Dela, all tearful, cursed me for useless and kicked me besides, in my sore stomach. That helped, actually, because when my lady had gone on in and shut the door, I was angry, which was better than hurting. And before I had gotten up on my own, Percy came after me, saying she had sent him. Gentle Percy cleaned the hall up and cleaned me up and carried me to the crew quarters. There, when he had gone back to his duties, I took care of myself and changed and felt better, if somewhat hollow at the gut.

So much for fighting it. I moved meekly about the reality of the
Maid
, loving her poor battered self as I did my own body, and doing all I could to get her into order again. So did we all, I think with the same reason, that if the
Maid
had been precious to us before, she was ten thousand times so now.

I
t seemed a long time that we worked. The clocks said one thing and our bodies told us something else, and they were never in agreement, so that some hours flew past as if we had been day-dreaming and others dragged on and on while we ached and got thirsty and hungry. I kept thinking of the way the walls had come and gone at first, and that hours were doing the same thing, or our bodies were. Whatever happened to matter, Lynn said, would happen to us; and if there were phases in this place, I reckoned, where things just went slower, then we and the clocks ought to agree, but it didn’t work out that way. It was one of the small horrors that worked at our nerves and urged us that just blanking out might be better. Likewise Modred and Percy said comp went out on them: it dumped program at times, and at others behaved itself. The crew stayed on the bridge or back at the monitor station—worried, I gathered, about the power plant that kept us going—but it did go, the fans kept turning and the air kept recycling and, Gawain said when I brought them another meal, there was no real need for them to stay by controls, because what was automatic was working tolerably well and what was not automatic was not doing well at all and they couldn’t fix anything, just live with it and be patient when comp dumped.

Gawain was tired. His eyes were terrible. So were Modred’s, like black pits. They had been in their day cycle and had been through more than a day now. They ended by deciding perhaps they should stay up in controls after all, all of them—in case the alarms didn’t function dependably. “Until we see,” Modred said. So I brought up mats and pillows and blankets for the four of them and they bedded down up there.

Vivien—Viv was asleep too, busy deepstudying, locked into that tape that would make her useful again, after which time she would likely have a thousand orders to give us all. Lance was somewhere repairing damages and cleaning up, where unsecured items had smashed into walls, or unbraced chairs made wreckage of themselves. Not technical things, but such things as we could do.

Griffin called me, wanting two suppers in my lady’s quarters, so I went to the galley and fixed all he asked for ... he and my lady, who consoled each other, who had been consoling each other all afternoon of that quick/slow day. Well enough. It put no demands on us, tired as we were. I carried the trays up in a carrier and walked in with them, very quietly, into the sitting room.

I walked farther, cautiously, and I could see the big blue bed and them tangled in the middle of it, golden blond Griffin and my pale blonde lady, pink to his gold, and white, and her braids all undone in a net about them. They made love. I waited, waited longer, finally put the carrier on the mobile table and quietly as I could I eased it through the door, just to leave it where they could have it when they wanted. They never noticed my being there, or they ignored it, lost in each other, and very quietly I left and closed all the doors behind me, downcast with my own aches and pains and where we were and what hopelessness we had of doing something about it.

Sleep, I thought. I was due my rest, finally; and overdue.

And I was right outside the library.

I came in very quietly. Viv was on the couch, limp in deepsleep. She chose to do her deepstudy in the library, maybe not to bother those of us who wanted to talk in the crew quarters, but such extreme consideration was not Viv’s style. It was more, I figured, out of fear of being supplanted; she wanted no rivals who could do what she could do, and she didn’t want that tape in our hands.

The lights were low. I could have slapped her face and not roused her, but all the same I kept very quiet picking out the tape
I
wanted. I slipped it into my jacket and went out again, trusting Modred would cover for me when he must. Ah! I wanted the deepsleep.

I walked down the corridor to the main hall, and the lift and so down to the crew quarters with my treasure. I undressed and bathed and in my robe set up the unit on the couch, attached the sensor leads, took the drug—thinking with melancholy that we would run out, someday—not of the tapes but of the drug that made them more intense; that when my lady thought of that ... we would lose our supply, and she would not be long in thinking of it. It was only fair, perhaps, because we could sink into the tapes and the dreams so much more easily than born-men. I felt a guilt that had nothing to do with my tape-pilfering: I stole my lady’s dreams. It was selfish, and bothered my psych-sets; but I rationalized it, that she had
not
forbidden it, and sank back with my tape, in it, part of it.

It was my dream, my own, my world better than the real: my lady Dela’s world; and mine. We were made, we who served, never born; we were perfect, and needed no dreams to make us more than we were created by the labs to be. We were not intended to love ... but it was seeing born-men’s sharing love that made me lonely, and made me think of my tape—

I thought of Lancelot. Probably I cried; and we don’t do that generally, not like born-men, because where they would cry, we go blank. Only in the taped dreams, then we might, because there’s no blanking out on them. While the tape was running, I loved, and had a soul, and believed in the born-men’s God; and when it would stop I was all hollow and frightened for a moment: that was the price, I knew, of pilfering tapes not meant for us. But then my other tapes, those deep in my mind, would take over and bring me back to sense.

I waked for real. Arms held me. I thought it was part of the tape at first, because sensations in them were that real, called out of the mind; but the sound had stopped, and I was still lapped in someone’s arms, and comforted. I would have gone on into normal sleep except for that; I was conscious enough now to fight out of it, pull the piece from my ear and the other attachments from my temples and my body, sweeps of a half-numb hand. My eyes cleared enough that I saw who slept with me, that it was Lance. Like a thief he had slipped into my dream, to share the tape while it was running ... the tape that he was never supposed to have. His face was sadder than it had ever been. His eyes were closed, tears running from under his lashes. More than mine, the tape was his, and his part was sadder than mine by far. I loved and lost
him
, young and only half knowing love at all; but he, older, having more, lost everything.

And that was always true for him.

I hurt, and maybe it was more than my psych-set that grieved me. I was still in the haze of the tape’s realities. I swept the tiny sensors away from his brow and his heart, and wiped the tears away for him. I kissed him, not for sex, as my tapes are, but because it was what the real Elaine would have done, a kind of tenderness like touching, like lying close at night, that kind of comfort.

He waked then and embraced me purposefully, and I shifted over, getting rid of other sensor connections, because I was willing. I reckoned it was the best thing for him, to occupy his mind and body both after going through that dream.

But he couldn’t. It was the first time he ever outright couldn’t, and it shook him. He blanked, then, which froze my heart—because blanking out from something beyond your limits is one thing; but blanking on your training, on your whole reason for being at all—He stayed that way a moment, and then he came out of it and rolled over and lay there with his eyes open and a terrible sorrow on his face. He shivered now and then, and I put my arms about him and pulled the sheets up about us.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally without ever looking at me. I might have been anyone.

“We’re all awfully tired,” I said. And in my heart: O Lance, you should never have heard it, and I should never have used it here—because he had one thing that he did and that was it, and maybe he had just seen something else, yearning after that other Lancelot as I did after that other Elaine, who was absolute in love, and who was so much that I was not made to be. What was Lance’s other self that
he
was not? Much, that no lab-born was ever made to be.