Alternate Realities (31 page)

Sweat chilled his face. What had been a limp became a stagger. He tended more and more toward the right-hand wall as the left-hand one strayed off into black, as the whole corridor opened into the likeness of a vast cavern, one with low knobbed points to the ceiling like a cavern of warts, whose farther reaches were wrapped in deepening shadow.

A sudden bright light speared from the ceiling in front of him. He flung an arm across his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked the light and the darkness, irrational as cursing: there had been no answers and he expected none.

“I don’t know,” a voice came back to him, and
he
was standing there, a naked man at one heartbeat strange and then—like recognizing a mirror where one had expected none—altogether familiar. He was staring at himself, at what might have been a mirror in its expression of shock and fear—he knew that look, was startled when it lifted a hand he had not lifted and opposed itself to him.

“Damn you,” he cried to the invisible, the manipulater.
“Damn you,
use your own shape!”

“I am,” the doppelganger said. Tears glistened in his/its eyes. “O God, don’t—don’t look like that. Help me. I don’t know where I am.”

“Liar,” he told himself.

“Rafe.” The voice drifted from the lips, his own, uncertain and lost and vague. “Please. Listen to me. You’re awake. I’m you. I think I am. I don’t know. Please—” The doppelganger walked, sat down above a node, not quite phasing with it. It tucked its bare knees up, locked its arms about them, looked up at him with eyes full of shadow, as if the image were breaking down. “Please sit and talk with me.”

He watched his own face shape words. The lips trembled, quirks in the chin that he knew and felt in his own gut, as if it were himself fighting tears, fighting for his dignity. It hurt to watch. He was trembling as if the tears were his, and they began to be. “Where’s Jillan? Where’s Paul? Can you tell me that?”

“Sit down. Please, sit down.”

He found a place and sat, hugged his knees up until he realized he had taken the mirror pose, clothed version and naked one. His gut heaved, and he swallowed hard. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Rafe. You have to call me something. I’m you. Or something like. I can see you—there. I guess you can see me. Do I look like you?”

“Where’s Jillan and Paul? The people with me—where are they?”

“They’re—” The doppelganger pointed off toward the dark outside the light. “They’re somewhere about. Not speaking to me. Please—let me try to explain this. I don’t know where their bodies are. I found you. Me. Lying there. I thought—you know, the way you can see yourself—they say you can see yourself when you die. You float up near the ceiling and look down and see yourself lying there, and you can hear, and you don’t want to go back—But I wanted to. I tried. Jillan and Paul—they’re like me. They’re with me. I think they are.”

“You’re talking nonsense.” He hugged himself, trying not to shiver, but the thought kept circling him that it was not an alien in front of him. He wanted it to be. He wanted it to change into something else, anything else. “Evaporate, why don’t you?”

“Please.” The doppelganger seemed to shiver. Tears ran down its face. “I think I might. I don’t know. Maybe I’m you, a part of you, and we got separated somehow.”

“Maybe I’m dreaming this.”

“Or I am. But I don’t think so. There’s this dark place. I come and go out of it and I don’t know how. You walk and you cover so much ground you can get lost. Maybe you can lose yourself and not get back. I’m afraid that’s what’s happened to Jillan and Paul. I think they’re off looking—looking for their own selves. Like you. They’re not taking this well. I’m scared. Please don’t look like that.”

“God, what do you expect me to look like?”

“I know. I know. I feel it like we were still connected when you look like that.”

“You read my mind. Is that it? You’re the alien. You just pick up on what I think, what I’d think—”

“Don’t.” The doppelganger shook its head, wiped a fist across its mouth in an expression which was his own. “Don’t do that. I know I’m not. I know. I wouldn’t choose to feel like this if I had a choice. I don’t remember being anything else. I was born at Fargone; Jillan’s my sister; our kin all died—”

“Cut it!”

“It’s all I know. It’s all I know, and—Rafe—I remember the jump, remember this place we were in—”

He remembered too, the terror, the waving arms, the pain, the ungodly pain....

“I woke up in the dark,” the doppelganger said. “And they were with me, Jillan was, and Paul. And somehow I found you. You were lying on the floor. I tried to get to you. I thought—I thought we were dying then. That I had to get back.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you.” Rafe put his head down, ran his hand through his hair, looked up again in the earnest hope the apparition would have gone. It had not. It stared at him, a mirror image of despair.

“I’m afraid,” it said. “O God, I’m scared.”

“I don’t know.”

He drew a deep breath and got to his feet, came closer and saw the image lose its coherency at close range. “I can see through you.”

“Can you?”

“You’re an image. That’s all you are.” He kept walking till the image lost all its coherency and he moved into it. He saw it projected around his outstretched hand. “Fake!”

“But I’m here,” the voice persisted, forlorn, with an edge of panic. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Back off. Please back off.”

He swept his arm about as if that could scatter it, like vapor. “You’re
nothing
, hear?”

There was no answer. The image reconstituted itself a little way away, naked and frightened looking. Tears still glistened on its face.

“I think,” it said, “I think—somehow they made me. I don’t know how. While you were asleep. O God, hold onto me. Please hold onto me.”

“How?” The terror in the voice was real. It hurt him, so that at once he wanted to deal it hurt and heal it. “I can’t touch you. You’re not
here
, do you hear me? Wherever you are, it’s not here.”

“I think—think they made me out of you. Up to—I don’t know how long ago—we have the same memories, because I was you.” The doppelganger folded his hands over his nakedness, wistful, lost-looking, in a dreadful calm. “I’m really scared. But I guess I haven’t got title to be. All I am—I guess—is you.”

“Look—” he said to himself, hurting for himself, feeling half mad. “Look, where are you? Can you tell that?”

“Here. Just here. There’s that other place. But it’s only dark. I don’t want to go back there.”

“I think—I think they’ve made some kind of android.”

“I might be.”

“The Jillan and Paul with you—they’re like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Bring them here.”

“I don’t know how to look.”

“Liar.” He flung his arm at the doppelganger, somewhere between hate and pity. “Go try.”

“It’s dark out there.”

He wanted to laugh, to curse, to weep. He did none of them, feeling a shaking in his knees, a mounting terror. He had never liked dark confined spaces. Crawlways, like Fargone mines. “Go on,” he said. “Come back when you know something.”

And that too was mad.

“Will you—” his double asked, in a faint thin voice, “will you find something to call me—so I have a name?”

“Name yourself.”

“
You
name me,” the other said, and sent chills up his spine.

“Rafe,” Rafe said. He could not commit that ultimate robbery. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

The shoulders straightened, the head came up, touching a chord in him, as if he had discovered courage in himself he had never seen. “That’s what I am,” the doppelganger said. “Brother.”

And it walked away.

What it had said chilled him, that it had said a thing he had not dreamed to say.

He sat down where he was, locked his arms over his head, thinking that he might have witnesses.

He looked up when he had got his breath back.

“If you’ve built that thing,” he said to the walls, able to think of it as
thing
when he was not staring at it face to face, “you’ve got some way to interpret it. Haven’t you? You understand? Why are you doing this?”’

There was no answer. He sat there until the strength had returned to his legs and then he began carefully to retrace his way back to the small horror that was his, the place stocked with food that he could use.

Habitat,
he thought.
As if I were an animal.
He nursed hope, all the same, that if he had come through it, if the pain was done, then their captors were only being careful. It did not guarantee that they were benign. There were darknesses in his mind that refused to come into the light, the memory of the ship that had done what no ship ought to do; of pain—but they might have been ignorant, or in a hurry to save them.

So he built up his hope. The lights came on ahead of him, at an easy pace. He went, looking over his shoulder from time to time, and quickly forward, fearing ambushes.

He remembered the bogey’s size, like the starstation itself. Hurling that into jump took more power than any engine had a right to use; and for the rest, for technology that could tear a mind apart and reconstitute it inside an android—that was the stuff of suppositions and what-ifs, spacers’ yarns and books. No one did such things.

No one jumped a station-sized mass. By the laws he knew, nothing could, that did not conform to the conditions of a black hole. And it did it from virtual standstill.

He did not run when he had home in sight; he restrained himself, but his knees were shaking.

He sat down when he had gotten there, in the chair before the disjointed console, in the insane debris of
Lindy
’s corpse, and bowed his head onto his arms, because it ached.

Ached as if something were rent away from him.

He wiped his eyes and idly flipped a switch, jumped when a screen flared to life and gave him star-view.

He tried the controls, and there was nothing.

Com,
he thought, and spun the chair about flipping switches, opening a channel, hoping it went somewhere. “Hello,” he said to it, to whatever was listening. “Hello—hello.”

“Damn.”
he yelled back at it, reaction; and trembled after he had cut it off.

He went on, shaking, trying not to think at all, putting himself through insane routine of instrument checkout, as if he were still on
Lindy
’s bridge and not managing her pieces in this madness.

Com was connected to something—what, he had no wish to know. Vid gave him starfield, but he had no referent. The computer still worked, at least in areas the board had not lost. The lights still worked; one of the fans did, insanely; their tapes were still there, but the music would break his heart.

He slumped over finally and hid the sight of it from his eyes, suspecting worse ahead. It played games with him. He already knew that they were cruel.

T
here was the dark, forever the void, and Rafe moved in it, calling sometimes—“Jillan, Paul—” but no one answered.

He should have been cold, he thought; but he had no more sense of the air about him than he had of the floor underfoot.

He turned in different directions, in which he found himself making slower and slower progress, as if he walked against a wind and then found himself facing (he thought) entirely a different direction than before.

“Aaaiiiiiiiiii!”
something howled at him, went rushing past with a glow and a wail like nothing he had ever heard, and he scrambled back, braced for an attack.

It went away, just sped off insanely howling into the dark, and he sank down and crouched there in his nakedness, protecting himself in the only way he had, which was simply to hug his knees close and sit and tremble, totally blind except for the view of his own limbs.

“Jillan,” he whispered to the void, terrified of making any noise, any sound that would bring the howler back. His own gold-glowing flesh seemed all too conspicuous, beacon to any predator.

Android.
He reminded himself what he was, that he could not be harmed; but his memories insisted he was Rafe Murray. It was all he knew how to be. And he knew now that they were not alone in this dark place.

At last he got himself to his feet and moved again, no longer sure in what direction he had been going, no longer sure but what the darkness concealed traps ahead, or that he was not being stalked behind.

“Jillan,” he called aloud. “Paul.”

Had that been one of the aliens—that passing, mindless wail, or some other victim fleeing God-knew-what ahead?

They were androids. That was what they were, what he had been when he had met his living body—met Rafe. Something had projected him into that green-noded corridor.

But then, he reasoned, Rafe ought to have been a projection sent in turn to him, and he had not been. Viewpoint troubled him, how he had seen through hologrammatic eyes. How that Rafe had thrust his hand into the heart of him and cursed him—
Evaporate, why don’t you?

Why not?
a small voice said.
If I’m an android they can make me what they like. Can’t they?

Fake,
that other Rafe had said, screaming at him his outrage at self-robbery.

That Rafe Murray had the scars, the bruises, the pain that proved his title to flesh and life.

“Jillan,” he screamed with all his force. “Paul! Answer me!
Answer me
...” with the terror that he would never find them, that they had been taken away to some final disposition, and that it would take him soon, questions all unanswered.