Alternate Realities (37 page)

Lights flared, illuminating a vast chamber, a craziness of lumps and hummocks and tunnels on a mammoth scale; lights died and left him in dark again, as suddenly.

Kepta was gone.

“Kepta?” He faced wildly about, flash-blinded, helpless, stumbling on the uneven floor.
“Kepta?”

“First passage on your left,” a voice said, close by him. The gold-glowing image resumed. “Just checking. I’m a little narrow-focused in this shape; a great deal of me is doing other things, and now and again I like to take a little look behind the eyes, so to say. That’s right, this way. Not far now.”

His heart pounded. He rubbed at his eyes trying to get his vision back, stumbling on the uneven floor, staying with Kepta in a winding course around the prominences. They skirted around a jutting protuberance of the wall and passed one black corridor opening. The next acquired dim light, showing gray and green no different than otherwhere.

“This way,” Kepta said.

He matched Kepta’s drifting pace. The way narrowed into a twisting gut, went from gossamer-green to bald glistening plastic in a green that deepened to livid unpleasantness.

Narrower still, and brighter-lit. “O God,” Rafe said, and balked. Metal gleamed. Clusters of projections like insect limbs lined the chamber which unfurled from beyond the turning—some arms folded, some thrust out in partial extension, things to grip and bite, extensors armed with knives.

“Come on,” Kepta said. “Come ahead. That’s right. No sense running now.”

“It’s still there,” Rafe Two said. They had tried the unseen barrier now and again, when one and the other of them grew restless in their dark confinement. He went back and sat down while Jillan and Paul had their own go at it, Paul with violence, which did no good, but it satisfied some need, and Rafe averted his face and rested his chin on his arm, knee tucked up, staring into the dark beyond the invisible wall.

Now and again there were sounds. The thing that wailed had become familiar, still dreadful when it came, but it seemed by now that it would have done something, attacked if it could or if it had the desire.

“Shut up,” he told it when it came.

Paul and Jillan sat down again, Paul last; who cast himself down and hung his hands between his knees, to look up, again with a bleak, sullen stare.

He was being patient, was Paul, amnesiac, wiped of everything recent, even the remembrance that he was dead. They had had to tell him that all over again, and Paul had sat and listened, and objected. Perhaps he thought they were crazy; perhaps he believed it. Whatever Paul believed, he was quiet about it all.

Because Jillan was calm, Rafe thought; because he and Jillan accepted it and explained matters gently as they could. He detected the cracks in Paul’s facade, the little signs of tension, the occasional sharp answer, the increasingly worried look on Paul’s face when they failed to retaliate for his gibes. They were shielding him; Paul realized it. Jillan protected him—being merchanter-born, tough in spacer-ways, with a spacer’s tolerance of distances, infinities, time and thinking inside-out. She was the stronger here. So was he.

Jillan and me,
Rafe thought,
and Paul, on the other side, cut off from her. From me. He’s trying so hard to keep himself together in Jillan’s sight, up to her measure of a man—We joke; we seem to take it light; it’s like salt in all his wounds.

He got up, paced, for Paul’s sake, to be human. Pushed at the wall.

“Give it up,” Paul said.

He sat down again, slumped, elbows on knees.

So maybe it helped, giving Paul a way to seem calm and in control.

“Got any ideas?” he asked Paul then.

Paul was silent a long time. “Just thinking,” Paul said, “that we don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t get tired—wonder how long it takes a mind to unravel, sitting still. Wonder if it’s listening. Or if it’s just gone off and forgotten us, this alien you met. Wonder if we’re all crazy. Or you are. And we sit here glowing in the dark.”

Rafe laughed. It was conscious effort. He remembered—a thing that turned him cold; a meeting Jillan had not known; that Paul assuredly had not; and for a moment he was the one pretending cheerfulness. It had hurt; it would happen again, he thought, for no reason, for nothing that made sense.

“Sooner or later,” he began dutifully to answer Paul; but something caught his eye, a light far out in the dark.

“Something’s out there,” Jillan said, scrambling to her feet as he did. “Something’s coming—”

It moved in that rapid way things could here. Paul got to his feet and Jillan held to him, steadying him by that contact.

It whipped up to the barrier, a human runner.

Paul.

Doppelganger’s doppelganger. It stared, stark and wide-mouthed, glowing like themselves, and with one strangled cry of grief, it spun and ran away, diminished as rapidly as it had come.

“What was
that
?” asked Paul, remarkably calm, considering the horror in his eyes.

Rafe turned and looked at him, far from calm himself—considered this second Paul-shape that had materialized inside the barrier with him and Jillan.

Jillan too, he remembered—the arms that had gripped him with more than human strength—

He set his back to the phantom wall, facing both of them, their united, guarded stare.

 

Rafe screamed while he had breath, while he had the strength. But it was too deep and too long, too thorough, pinned him between breaths and held him dying there until air began the long slow leak back into his lungs. Then the cycle ran round again.

And over again.

“There,” said Kepta’s vast slow voice after all eternity. “There. That’s over now.” And there was dark a time.

“Try to move,” it said.

Rafe moved; he would have done anything it told him, not to have the pain. He kept moving and thrust aching arms under him, took the strain of muscle-stretch across his aching ribs, his belly, trying constantly to find some position that did not hurt and discovering fresh agonies at every shift.

“Easy,” Kepta said out of that vast haze of his senses, awareness of light, machines that hummed and moved, having him as a mote in their cold heart. A metal arm moved at his face, thrust a tube into his mouth with persistent accuracy, shot a dose of tepid water down his throat. Other arms moved spiderlike about him and closed about his arms,
click-click.
He was past all but the vaguest fear. He let his limbs be moved because gentle as it was he had resisted once and found no limit to its strength.
Click-click.
It faced him about and held him upright as he sat on the table.

“Over, then?” His voice was a ragged croak, his throat raw from screaming. “Over?”

“All done,” Kepta said, taking shape in front of him. “Rest a bit.”

He was willing; the spider arms stayed still, like a cradle behind him. He leaned his head back, his feet dangling off the edge of the machinery. For a moment he blurred out again, head resting against the arms, heart still laboring, while the tears leaked from his eyes and the sweat slicked his skin.

“Where is it?” he asked then, meaning the thing that he had birthed. He had some proprietary curiosity; it had cost him so much pain.

“Here,” Kepta said, “here in the machine.”

“You mean you’ll give it a body.”

“No,” Kepta said, and rested a ghostly hand on a large hummock that rose with several others to form the table, the base of several of the arms. “It has one. In here. Do you want to know how it works? Your template of a moment ago exists now. It will never know more than you knew when it was made. Always when I call it up it will be at the same moment.”

Rafe shook his head and shut his eyes, feeling everything slide into chaos, not wanting this.

“So I can always recover that point,” Kepta said, “at need. A point of knowledge—and ignorance.”

Eyes slitted, till Kepta was a golden blur. “You still going to let me go?”

“Oh, yes.” Kepta moved among the machinery, through one lowered metal arm. “You asked about bodies. This one—” Kepta laid a hand on his own insubstantial chest. “You assume there’s some substance to it, somewhere. There’s not. It’s a pattern. You want Jillan? I can call up that template. Or Paul. Or one of several of you.”

Paul One ran, raced into the dark, sobbing at what he had seen: himself; himself possessing Jillan and Rafe and he-himself, watching helplessly from outside—

At last he found Rafe again, his own Rafe, beaconlike in the nowhereland, that shape that was Rafe and not, something blurred and larger, far larger.

“I know what you found,” Rafe said. “I knew you would.” And Rafe himself blurred further, into outlines vast and dark. “I knew it would hurt. Paul—”

“Was it me?” he asked. “Was that my real body?”

“No,” it said. “Only another duplicate.”

There was no more system of reference, nothing human left. It took him in its changing arms, took him to its heart, whispered to him in a voice still human though the rest of it was not.

“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you, nothing will ever hurt you while I have you. You can’t trust what you see, that’s the first thing you have to learn. You want to be safe. But I can make you strong. You won’t be afraid of anything. You want to know how this ship works? I’ll tell you. Anything you want to know. That version you just saw? Nothing. Nothing. Another copy off your template. I have to tell you how that works, that next. The templates.”

“I recorded you,” Kepta said, waving a hand past the mounded protrusions beneath all the array of shining spider arms, “not just the outward form, but at every level, in every function and structure—everything. The template’s as like you as if you’d been spun out in bits, down to the state and spin of your particles: that’s how exact it is ... all uncertainties made definite, particulate memory, frozen in the finest definition matter can achieve. We just—play it out again. Call it up in memory and let it integrate. The visible manifestation, the body—a very simple thing: just light, quite apart from the more complex patterns. An image conceived off the template and maintained by quite inelegant means: the computer knows its shape, that’s all, and revises it moment by moment by the direction of the program; but that program that animates it—that’s quite another thing.”

“It reacts,” Rafe said. “It
thinks
—”

“That’s the elegance. It does.”

“You’ve turned them to machines.”

“No. Contained them in one. They react; they think; they think they move. They’re programs, if you like, smart programs that can learn and change, that get input they interpret in the same way they always did, or they think they do, that eyes work and mouths make speech, and muscles move. The body—is merely light, for passing convenience. It changes in response to signals the programs give. It can’t input. But on other levels, in the purest sense, the programs can input from each other, can imagine, tend to perceive what they expect—like smells and textures. Illusions, if you like. But they aren’t. The programs aren’t. They grow, and change, get experience, change their minds. They stay up and running until someone shuts them down.”

Rafe shook his head. The words writhed past, heard, half-heard. He hung there in the spider arms, looked at the machines, the mocking image of himself. “One large memory,” he said past unresponsive lips, “one hell of a large memory, that thing. Wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh yes, quite large.”

“Runs all the time.”

Kepta lifted his head in a curious way, his own mannerism thrown back at him, half-mocking, half-wary.

“I threaten you,” Rafe said, and found it funny, hanging there, naked, in the steel, unyielding hands. “Do I? Suppose I believe that’s how you do it, suppose I believe it all—There’s still the why of it. You want to tell me why? And you still want to tell me you’re putting me out of here?”

“Why’s not relevant. Say that I wanted the template. That’s all. When I call it up and it talks to me, it won’t know a thing of what we’ve said; won’t know what it is. It’ll be the you that walked in here of his own free will. That’s the one I’ll deal with. Why tell you anything? The template won’t remember. You’d have to tell it what you’ve learned. And you’ll be safe away from it.”

“Why?” he asked again. “Why let me go?”

“I said. It’s easy.—You’re worried, aren’t you? You’re worried about your life, theirs—the whole species. That’s why you don’t really think I’ll turn you out. You think of ships. Military. I understand this concept of yours, this collective of self defense. You think I’ve come to learn all I can; that I’m in advance of others who’ll come to harm all your kind. No. I’m unique.”

“Then come in. Come into some human Port and talk like you’re civilized.”

The mirror-image blinked. “You don’t really want that.”

“No,” he said, thinking again, thinking at once of Endeavor, magnified a hundred-fold,
O God, some major port—

“There’ll just be yourself returning,” it said. “The military will check records, put you together with the Endeavor business. You’ll be answering a lot of questions. That’s all right. Tell them anything you like. I’ll be long gone from Paradise.”

“Where? To do what?”

“You’re worrying again.”

“Are you afraid? Afraid of us?”

“
Responsibility.
You have this tendency—to make yourself the center, the focus. Jillan and Paul—you’re responsible for them; if your species died, you’d be more responsible than I who killed them. An interesting concept, responsibility—and within your context, yes, you could become that focus. I could wipe out your kind, based on what you know. And on what you don’t. You couldn’t fight me. Your ships can’t catch me; my weapons are beyond you; there’s just no chance, if I were interested. I’m not. So you’re not the center, are you? That’s a great loss to you ... that your kind will live on without your responsibility. Could it even be—that you’re not responsible for other things? Or that your friends are not in your universe at all?”