Alternate Realities (32 page)

He feared truths, that whoever had made him could throw some switch and bring him somewhere else, back where they had made him, back to that place with the machinery and the blood; perhaps would unmake him then. He feared death—that it was still possible for him.

“Aaaaaaaaaaauuuuu!”
Another thing passed him, roaring like some machine out of control, and he stopped, stood trembling until it had faded into the distance.

“Stop playing games with me,” he said quietly, trusting of a sudden that something heard him better than it would hear that other, living Rafe.
“Do you hear me? I’m not impressed.”

Could it speak any human tongue? Had it learned, was it learning now?

“Damn you,” he said conversationally, shrugged and kept walking, pretending indifference inside and out. But the cold that was not truly in the air had lodged beneath the heart.
God,
he appealed to the invisible—he was Catholic, at least the Murrays had always been; but God—God was for something that had the attributes of life.

Rafe One had God; he had Them. It. Whatever had made him. It might flip a switch, speak a word, reach into him and turn him inside out for a joke. That was power enough.

“Jillan!” he yelled, angry—He could still feel rage, proving—proving what? he wondered. The contradictions multiplied into howling panic.
“Jillan!”

“Rafe?”

He turned, no more anywhere than before, in the all-encompassing dark. He saw a light coming to him, that wafted as if a wind blew it. It was Paul, and Jillan came running in his wake.

“Rafe,” Jillan cried, and met him and hugged him, warm, naked flesh that reminded him flesh existed here—
synthetic?
he remembered. Paul hugged him too; and his mind went hurtling back to that howling thing in the dark, remembering that here it would be palpable and true, He shivered in their arms.

“There are
things
in here,” Jillan said.

“I know, I know. I heard them,” he said, holding her, being held, until the shivers went away.

“Don’t go off from us again,” Paul said. “Dammit, Rafe, we could get lost in here.”

He broke into laughter, sobbed instead. He touched Jillan’s earnest, offended face and saw her fear. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Dark, “Jillan said. “Just dark. No way out.”

“I met someone,” he said to them, and let the words sink in, watching their faces as the sense of it got through. “I
met
someone.”

“Who?” Jillan asked, carefully, ever so carefully, as if she feared his mind had gone.

“Myself. The body that we saw. There in the corridor. He wants to talk to you.”

“You mean you went back,” said Paul.

“I talked to him.”

“Him?”

“Myself. He’s alive, you understand that? I met him—face to face. Jillan—” he said, for she began to turn to Paul. “Jillan—we’re not—not the real ones. They’ve made us. The memories, our bodies—We’re not real.”

There was devastated silence.

“If we could get back,” said Paul.

“It’s not a question of getting back,” Rafe said, catching at Paul’s arm.
“Paul, we’re constructs.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

Rafe laughed, a sickly, sorrowful mirth. “Yes,” he said. “Out of his. The way you came out of Paul’s; and Jillan’s out of her. Constructs, hear? Androids. Robots. Our senses—aren’t reliable. We got only what the ones who made us want. God knows where we really are.”

“Stop, it!” Jillan cried, shaking at his arms. “Rafe, stop it, you hear me?”

He seized her and hugged her close, felt her trembling—Could an android grieve? But it was Jillan’s grief, Jillan’s terror. His sister’s. Paul’s. It was unbearable, this pain; and like the other it did not look to stop.

“Rafe,” Paul said, and pulling him away into his arms, pressed his head against his shoulder and tried to soothe him as if he had gone stark mad. There was the smell of their flesh, cool and human in this sterility; the touch of their hands; the texture of their hair—Real, his senses told him. Someone was playing with their minds; that was the answer.
That’s why Rafe’s solid to me and I’m not that way to him.

“Please,” he said, pushing away from them. “Come with me. Let me take you to him. Talk with him.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Jillan’s eyes had all space and void in their depths. “Rafe, pull yourself together. Don’t go off like this. They’re tricks. They’re all just tricks. They’re working on our minds, that’s what’s happening. That’s why none of this makes sense.”

“Get out of it, how, Jillan? We came through jump.
Lindy
’s in pieces, back there in that hall.”

“It’s illusion. They want us to think it is. They’re lying, you understand?”

“Jump wasn’t a lie.”

“We’ve got to do something to get out of here.”

“Jillan—” He wanted to believe her. He wanted it with all his mind. But he suspected a dreadful thing, staring into her eyes. He suspected a whole spectrum of dreadful truths, and did not know how to tell her. “Jillan,” he said as gently as he could. “Jillan, he wants to talk to you and Paul, he wants it very much.”

“There is no
he
!” Paul shouted.

“Then come with me and prove it.”

“There’s no proving it. There’s no proving anything about an illusion, except you put your hand into it and it isn’t there.”

“He did that to me. Put his hand through me. I wasn’t there.”

“You’re talking crazy,” Paul said.

“All you have to do is come with me. Talk to him.”

“It’s one of them. That’s what it is.”

“Maybe it is,” Rafe said. He felt cold, as if a wind had blown over his soul. “But prove it to me. I’ll do anything you want if you can prove it to me. Come and make me believe it. I want to believe you’re right.”

“Rafe,” Jillan said.

“Come with me,” he said, and when they seemed disposed to refuse: “Where else can we find anything out for sure?”

“All right,” Jillan said, though Paul muttered otherwise. “All right. I’m coming. Come on, Paul.”

She took his hand. Paul came up on his other side. He turned back the way he had come, as near he could remember, walking with two-meter strides, not knowing even if he could find that place again. But the moment he started to move it began to be about him again, the light, the noded, green-gossamer corridor,
Lindy
’s wreckage like flotsam on a reef.

And the other Rafe, the living one, sat on the floor against the wall. That Rafe looked up in startlement and scrambled stiffly to his feet, wincing with the pain.

“Rafe,” Rafe said, for it had been a long and lonely time, how long he did not know, only he had had time to meddle uselessly with the console, to shave and wash, and sleep. And now the doppelganger was back, in the shadows where his image showed best, naked as before.

And on either side of him arrived Jillan and Paul, naked, pitiful in their fear.

At least their images—whose eyes rested on him in horror, and warned him by that of their fragility. He could not hurt them. His own doppelganger—that was himself, but Jillan and Paul drove a wedge into his heart. “He found you,” he said to them, patient of cruel illusion, of anything that gave him their likenesses, even if it mocked him in the gift.

“What
are
you?” Jillan said, driving the dagger deeper. There was panic in her voice.

“Don’t be afraid,” Rafe said. But Paul went out—
out
, like the extinguishing of a light, and Jillan backed away, shaking her head at his offered hand.

“No,” she said. “No.” And fled, raced ghostlike through the wall.

His own doppelganger still stood there, naked, hands empty at his sides, with anguish in his eyes.

“I tried,” the doppelganger said with a motion of his hand. “I tried. Rafe—they’ll come back. Sooner or later they’ll have to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

Rafe sank down where he stood, where a node made a sitting-place against the wall. He ached in every bone and muscle, and looked up at the doppelganger in unadulterated misery.

“Rafe,” the doppelganger said. “I think they’re dead. You understand me? They haven’t found anything of themselves. I’m not sure there’s anything left to find.”

Rafe shut his eyes, willing it all away; but the doppelganger had come closer when he opened them. It knelt in front of him, waiting, his own face projecting grief and sympathy back at him.

“You understand?” the doppelganger said. “They’re copies. That’s all I found. They’re like me.”

He wanted to scream at it to go away, to be silent, but a strange self-courtesy held him still to listen, to sit calmly with his hands on his knees and stare into his own face, knowing the doppelganger’s pain, knowing it to the height and depth, what it cost and how it hurt.
Jillan dead. And Paul.
He had known it in his heart for hours, that this place, this graveyard caricature of
Lindy
had all the important pieces in it. The console. The EVAPOD. Himself. All the working salvage that was left. “Do they know?” he asked, half insane himself.

“I can’t tell.” The image remained kneeling there. “On the one hand they could be right; they thought—they thought this was illusion. Maybe it is. But it was too strong a one for them.”

“It’s not illusion.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“God, this is mad!”

“I know. I know it is. But I think you’re right. We split—I remember all this pain. I remember—these arms waving about. It hurt, I never remember any pain like that—”

“Cut it out.!”

“I think—that was where they died.”

“Shut up!”

That Rafe tucked up his knees, rested his forehead on his arms—grief incarnate, mirror of his own, mirror until it hurt to look at himself, knowing what he felt, seeing it mimed in front of him. Rafe Two lifted his head at last, stared at him with ineffable bleakness, and he began to shiver himself in long slow tremors.

“Cry,” the soft voice came to him. “I did, awhile, for what it’s worth. I cried a lot. But it can’t change what is. Don’t you think I want to believe you’re not real? That we’re all of us all right? I wish I could believe that. You wish you could get rid of me. But you can’t. And we aren’t.”

“Damn you!” He leaped up, ran to the console, seized on the first thing he could find and flung it at the doppelganger. It was one of his music tapes, which passed through the image and hit the wall, falling harmless as the curse; and the doppelganger just sat there, breathing, doing everything it should not. Its breath came hard, one long heave of its naked shoulders, its head bowed as if it fought for self-control. It mastered itself, better than he; or having fewer options. It was resignation that looked back at him with his own face, out of bruised and weary eyes, and he could not bear that defeat. He sank down at the console and gasped for air that seemed too thin, with thoughts that seemed too rarified to hold without suffocating. Things swirled about him:
Dead, dead, dead
—

He did not cry. Sitting there, he shivered until his muscles ached and cramped, until lack of air brought him to bow his head on the console.

“He’s real,” he heard his own voice say; and Jillan’s then: “No,” so that he opened his eyes and found them standing there, all of them, his dead, his living self—

“O God,” he said, “God, Jillan, Paul—don’t go, don’t go this time.” He levered himself up, unsteady on his feet, offered them his hand, even knowing they could not touch it. “Stay here. Don’t run.”

His doppelganger walked to him, stood close by him, ghostly thin, standing where he stood in parodied embrace. There was no sensation from it, only a confusion of image, as if it had superimposed itself deliberately.

“Don’t go,” it echoed him. “Don’t you see—we’re the illusion. Projected here. We’re androids. That’s all we are. Made out of him, his mind, Jillan’s, Paul’s. We’re the shadows. He’s the real one.”

They stood there, the two of them, staring at him. “It doesn’t make sense,” Jillan said in a small voice. “Rafe—we can’t be dead. Can we?”

Rafe himself sank down to his knees on the gossamer-covered carpet, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear it of all the accumulated lunacy.

“I think,” said the other Rafe, standing over him, about him, a moving pale shimmer—”I think it’s very likely, if we can’t find the bodies. I think you are.”

“Then what are we?” Paul yelled.

“Androids,” said Rafe Two. “Something like that, at least. They made us. And the originals are gone.” He walked over near the console, touched the edges of the seats with insubstantial fingers. “We never rigged
Lindy
for much stress.”

“Something that they made,” Jillan said. “is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes,” Rafe said, himself, looking up at her from where he knelt. She was still in every particular his sister, that look, that quiet steady sense. It shattered him. “Yes. Something that they made.”

She stared in his direction a moment, then shrugged and laughed, taking a step away. “I don’t
feel
dead.” A second step, so that she began to fade out at the wall. “I’m going out of focus, aren’t I?” Soberly, with horror beneath the surface. “It’s a pretty good copy. Aren’t I?”

“Stop it!” Paul said.

“Jillan’s right,” Rafe Two said, by the EVApod. “It was the seats, understand? We never rigged for more than two or three G at most. We got a lot more than that. It flung us off. Remember? Autopilot went crazy. My fault, maybe. But I couldn’t stop us. Nothing could, our tanks depleted—Couldn’t if we’d had
Lindy
at max.
Lindy
couldn’t cope with it.”

“We’re not dead,” Paul said.

“Whatever we are,” Rafe Two said, folding his insubstantial arms, “I guess we don’t have that problem. Not anymore we don’t.”