Alternate Realities (46 page)

“Rafe,” Paul said fretfully, stepping through the counter. “
He
doesn’t know. Paul doesn’t know ... what he’s up against out there. They don’t know what they are. Marandu—whatever you call yourself—Send me to him. Now. While there’s time.”

There was doubt in Jillan/Marandu. It showed in the eyes, in the nervous clench of hands to the breast. Indecision.

“
Where’s Kepta?”
Rafe asked, in sudden, horrid certainty. “Marandu, has Kepta—place?”

The head jerked in a faint—perhaps—negation.,

“What
is
Kepta, Marandu?”

“I,” it said, flinching back, almost fading out. It looked afraid. “I’m one version.”

“One?”

“One,” it said.

It had grown from globe to legged shape to figure, still coasting along the formless horizon in the dark.

But the legs were many; the reverse-silhouette warned of deformity.

“Steady,” Paul told his companions, told himself, for now he truly knew why he had come, that it was his monster; and that in one sense and perhaps both shapes he was to die here, again, and soon. He searched for Rafe’s hand, Jillan’s, hugged them close; and Worm lurched along beside him.

The light receded then.

“It’s running away,” Jillan said. “How can it get distance on us, when we can’t catch it?”

“Now,” said Worm in its multiplicity of voices. “
Fight.
Fight now.”

“How?” Paul asked it. He had nerved himself, and now in default, the old weakness came back, the old insecurity, deadly as swallowed glass, and worked within his gut. He should not have taken the lead. He was not up to this. It outmaneuvered him—that easily.

Then he cast a look at Worm, one wild surmise. “Worm—how? How do
you
come and go?”

It knotted upon its coils like a wounded snake, convulsed, phased with them in one aching shock that hit the nerves and fled.

“O
God
,” Rafe moaned, catching his balance where it had thrown him, as it had thrown them all. Jillan gasped and staggered on her feet, and Paul—Paul refused to think of ground or up or down, but absorbed the shock and shuddered.

Homeworld
, he thought out of some source like old memories; remembered—a world like orange ice, with skies that melted and ran; with lightnings like faint glow constant in the clouds; and drifters, drifters with no color at all except the backflare of the clouds—
That you?
he whispered to Worm.
Was that you?
But whatever Worm had tried to say was gone.

The nodding head touched him, and now, with the whiskered, chitin-armored head thrust up before him, it arched its body and presented to him the upper surface; five jewels shone atop its head, black and glistening, and he thought of eyes.

“Come,” it whispered back, and its bristles quivered. “Passage.”

There was difference in the dark, as if something dire had happened, and yet nothing had changed.

Except suddenly, to their left, a figure loomed distinct.

“O God,” Jillan said. “It’s
moved
us—”—meaning Worm; for they
were
where the enemy was.

Paul stood still, and Rafe did beside him, facing this nightmare, this many-limbed amalgam of themselves, a thing of legs and arms and faces. It turned slowly, presenting Paul-face to them, and it smiled with a gorgon look.

“The thing got you here,” Paul One said. “I wonder if it can get you out. What do you think?”

And Rafe-face answered: “
Kill
it, Rafe, kill it, stop it, stop him—”

“Let me hold you,” said Paul One, offering its arms; and Worm gibbered:
“No—”

“What do we do?” Rafe asked, Rafe Three, tight and low, backing up until they made one line with Jillan. “Paul, did it tell you what to do?”

“Worm,” Paul said, his gut liquid with fear. “Worm, get us out of here!”

They were elsewhere, at a little greater distance. They hugged one another in shock, trembling. Paul held Jillan; Rafe held them both; and Worm made a circle about them, looping and making small hisses of defiance or consternation.

Lost,
Paul thought.
We’re lost, we’re helpless against that thing.

And then he remembered Jillan, and took her gold-glowing face between his hands, making her look up at him. “It hasn’t got you,” he said. “It hasn’t got
you
, Jillan. That monster’s one short. We’re one stronger. You’re my difference.”

“I can’t do it, Paul.
Can’t.”

You must meet it on its own terms,
Kepta had said.

“There’s one way,” he said to her, “one way we can meet it all at once, the way it is, on its terms.” Jillan looked so much afraid, for once in her life afraid. He wanted to cry for her; wanted to hit out at whatever threatened them, and instead he touched Jillan’s face, reminding himself they both were dead and hopeless and illusion only. Rafe had more than he: a living self. And less, far less. “Want you to trust me,” he said, “Jillan; want you to do with me—with me—what it’s done to Rafe. Just slip inside; we’re not that substantial:
it
did it. So can we.”

There was already contact. She pressed herself against him then, harder and harder. “I can’t, she said then. “I
can’t
. You’re solid to me.”

He tried too, from his side. “Rafe,” he said, extending his left arm, and Rafe came against them, held them tight with all his strength, but there was no merging.

“Won’t work,” Jillan said, “
won’t.
”—And he felt all too much the fool, trying the possible-impossible, the thing that Paul did, that Kepta did as a matter of course. Worm looped about them all, circled, wailing its distress. “Help,” It cried. “Help, help—”

“Make,” Worm said.

“What—make? Make what?”

It whipped through their substance with one narrowing of its legged coils. Rafe screamed, becoming part of it, and Jillan—

The pain reached him. His vision divided, became circular, different from his own, and he owned many legs—

Fargone swinging in ceaseless revolution;
Lindy
’s dingy boards; the oncoming toad-shaped craft and, the merchanter
John Liles
—

—self-abandonment—

We’re here
, Rafe said, calmer and calmer now.

We’re—wherever we’ve gotten to. Take it easy, Paul; easy—

The pain had stopped. Worm eased from their body. Their hearing picked up multiple sound from somewhere, like wind rushing; there was—if they opened their eyes—too much sight, though the universe was black; and the knowledge ripped one way and the other like tides, memories viewed from one side and the other, shredded, revised.

Some one of the multiple brain chose movement: Rafe, Paul thought; Paul tried to cooperate. There was progress of a kind.

Awkward trifaced thing maneuvering into Paul’s way.
There was humor in that self-image, even in extremity: that was Rafe-mind, steady and self-amused.

I love you
, Paul thought to their amalgamated self over and over again, without reservation, without stint; and got it back, Rafe-flavored. He wanted Jillan too; felt her fear, her reserve against all their wants: it was all too absolute.

Me
, she insisted,
me, myself, I, I, I
—even while she moved her limbs in unison with them. There was pain in that.

“We need you,” Paul whispered, desperate. He
knew
, of a sudden, knew what privacy in Jillan this union threatened. She shielded them from her own weapons, from rage, from resentment, every violence.

“You’re our defense, Jillan; Rafe’s our solid core; me—I go for
him
when I can get at him. But I need what you’ve got—all of it, hear—no secrets, Jillan-love.”

“No one needs all,” Jillan flung back at them both. “But that was always what you asked.”

It stung, it burned. It took them wrathfully inside itself and taught them privacy.

No one,
thought Jillan-mind, with a ferocity that numbed,
no one can ask myself of me.

Our shield,
Paul whispered to Rafe, in the belly of this amalgam they had become.
Give way. Give up for now. Let Jillan have her way.

There was outrage left: memories of Fargone docks, of Welfare and Security.

You asked it.
That was Rafe, in self-defense.

There was terror
(Jillan now)
in the dark, hiding there, dodging a drunken spacer who had a yen for a fourteen-year-old, a kid without ship name to defend her—she eluded him, hurled invective at him; shook, afterward, for long, stomach-wracking minutes.

Grandmother had a number
(Paul-mind, in self-defense)
which all lab-born had.

“None of her damn business,” Jillan-mind insisted of that seven-year-old, with a great and cleansing wrath; and Rafe was only sorry, gentler, in his way. “Stupid kid,” he said. There was no doubt in them of humanity; the memory grew clean, purged; “She loved you,” Rafe-mind said, confusing his own half-forgotten spacer mother with the daughter of lab-born gran.
He
knew; Jillan knew; there was no doubt at all in them, why a woman would work all her life and hardly see her son—to leave him station-share, the sum of all she had, her legacy. Merchanters knew, who had bought a ship with the sum of their own years.

They progressed; limbs began to work.

Rafe’s suffering in this—
a stray thought from Paul, shame, before the man who was so godlike perfect, feeling his horror at the shambling thing they had become.

Shut up
, Jillan said, severe and lacking vanity, as she had killed it in herself years ago (too great a hazard, on the docks, to look better than one had to, to attract anything but, maybe, work. One had to look like business; and be business; and mean business; and she did.)

Use what you’ve got.
(Rafe-mind, whose vanity was extreme, and touching, in its sensitivity).

You can’t get pregnant,
Jillan hurled at him, ultimate rationality; and caught his longing, his lifelong wish for some woman, for family—

Vanity serves some purposes,
Rafe-mind thought, recalling it was his smoothness, his glib facility with words that got them what they had: he had bent and bent, so Jillan never had to—
A room in a sleepover, an old woman gave it to me—I took even that. Even that, for you—

She felt the wound, shocked. Her anger diversified, became a vast warm thing that lapped them like a sea.

Mine,
she thought of them, and saw Paul-shape ahead of them. Wailing went about them. Worm nudged their flanks, little jolts of pain too dim to matter.

“Paul,”
Worm said, slithering about them, round and round; and the creature before them lingered, murkish in its light. Limbs came and went in it. The face changed constantly.

You’re a copy,” Rafe said to Marandu/Jillan’s faded image.M

“Yes,” Marandu said. The hands, drawn up to the breast, returned to human pose; Marandu/Jillan grew brighter and more definite, with that unblinking godlike stare.

“Computer-generated,” Jillan said in self-despite.

“Or we are the computer,” Marandu said, turning those too-wise eyes her way. That stare, once mad, acquired a fearsome sanity. “We’re its soft-structure. Its enablement. We’re alive individually and collectively. We’ve been running, and growing, for a hundred thousand years. That’s shiptime. Much longer—in your referent. That we’re partitioned as we are was accident. It’s also kept us sane. It provides us motive. In a hundred thousand years, motive’s a very important thing.”

“And the enemy,” said Paul. “The enemy: what is it?”

“It’s Kepta, of course,” Marandu said. “It’s Kepta Three.”

“Be careful,” <> said to <>’s counterpart: had come very close now, to the center where <> had invested <>self. “You know what <> can do.”

At this hesitated. “Fool,” said. “Make another <> and watch it turn on <>.

did.”