Alternate Realities (49 page)

“No choice is permanent. Except your first one. Will you go to Paradise?”

“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. It included all there was. “Can I talk to them?”

“You said it to me, didn’t you—they’re not toys.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “Don’t do this to me.”

“I only asked for choice.”

“What if I ask you to wipe them out here? Off this ship. Out of this. Would you do that?”

“No,” Kepta said. “Their templates would exist. I’d use them. Eventually.”

“Honesty.”

“Would it be—what they would choose?”

He sat and shivered until it seemed Kepta must lose patience and go away; but Kepta stayed, waiting, waiting.

“I want to be with them,” Rafe said at last, so softly his voice broke. “Make me one of them.”

“You don’t understand,” Kepta said. “Even yet.”

“But I do,” Rafe said. He swung his feet up and lay down on the machinery, blinked at the lights, the metal glare of knives. “I won’t go. I won’t leave them. Wake us up together, Kepta.”

For a long moment Kepta stood. The cold seeped in.

“Yes,” Kepta said. “I know.”

Vega shone.

“No human’s ever been here,” Rafe said, confronting that white, white glare, that dire A-class star that no human would find hospitable. He felt its wind, heard its voice spitting energy to the dark. Ship had invented sensors for them, human-range.

“
Look
at that,” said Jillan; and passengers hovered near, delighted in the four human-shapes, in new senses, in mindsets both blithe and fierce.

“Let ((())) try!” said Worm, who looked through human eyes, and shrieked and fled.

“““crept out of hiding, as many had, who had been long reclusive. The timid of the ship had appeared out of its deepest recesses, now that was gone.

“Look your fill,” said <>. “There’s time.”

Paul just stared, arm in arm with Jillan-shape. Rafe and Rafe Two stood on either side. They kept their shapes, unlike some. They kept to their own senses exclusively, quite stubborn on that point.

“We’re human,” Rafe insisted. “Thank you, no help, Kepta. We don’t make part of any whole.”

Perhaps, Rafe thought, for he could still see human space, perhaps Kepta had betrayed him after all. Perhaps he had waked back there too, in a capsule near a much smaller star.

He hoped that he had not. He dreaded its loneliness.

“It was crazy,” Rafe Two had said when they had waked together in the dark. “Rafe, you didn’t have to.”

“Come on,” he had said then, in that dark place where they waked. “Sure I had to. I’d miss you. Wouldn’t I? Maybe I do, somewhere. At Paradise.”

Shapes crept close to them, hovered near.

Worm snuggled close, ineffably content.

It was a small, very old ship that
Hammon
found adrift.

“Something ... 24,” the vid tech deciphered the pitted lettering. “The rest is gone.”

“God,” someone said, from elsewhere on the bridge. “That small a ship—How’d she get out here?”

“Drifted,”
Hammon
’s captain said. “Out of some system.”

And later, with the actinic glare of suit-lights lighting up the wrecked insides, hanging panels, bare conduits, tumbled and crumpled steel:

“It’s a mess in here,” the EVA-spec said. “They were hulled, half a hundred times. Dust chewed her all to bits.”

“Crew?” asked
Hammon
’s com.

The spec worked carefully past jagged edges, turned spotlights and cameras on frozen bodies.

“Three of them,” the vid tech said. “Poor souls.”

“She’s old,” the spec reported. “Real old. Out this far—at the rate of drift—”

The spec shivered, adding up those years.

I don’t know how many readers have come to me after reading
Wave Without a Shore
asking where I went to university ... readers absolutely convinced I’d had their particular professors, in their particular disciplines. Suffice it to say ... the story indeed comes out of the year I spent teaching at the collegiate level.

Understand, I’d never had a writing course. The local college wanted me to teach one. I certainly can say my approach was a bit looser than the one in the story: I walked in, asked the students what they hoped to learn from me, since I simply wrote for a living, and had no concept what went on in a writing class. I had no idea at all what I was supposed to do with the enrolled students except turn some of them out able to sell and the rest at least still able to enjoy their hobby. “First, do no harm ...” ought to apply to teachers as well as doctors.

This isn’t necessarily the case with the principals in
Wave
.

What was my collegiate experience? Well, I’m a Latin major—most useful course of study I could think of—still true.

I had, among other snippets of course work, a session with the philosophers ... Aristotle’s my favorite, if you want to know. But we also studied the modern philosophers to see what it had all come to—and I did conclude that, while philosophy is the most dangerous art and the Queen of the Sciences, a little grounding in real world science and human behavior is indispensable. Certain modern chaps have taken old Aristotle too far into the woods of abstract reasoning.

Let me explain my own philosophy: it’s Stoic, old, Roman, and stubborn. Our eyes, ears, nose and fingers are composed of sensors taking in signals from the visible and audible spectrum, and signals from chemical and temperature changes in our environment, all of which reach our nervous system, go to the brain, and meet a set of stored experiences that say, yes, it’s daylight and it’s not raining—and that touches a set of educational experiences that say the weather satellite predicted this very set of events. The one we’re born with: the other, we can improve.

Second step: the “I” who receives all those stimuli forms an opinion and expresses the notion to another “I” whose independent sensors have registered much the same. “Fine day,” I say. “A bit hot,” you say. Each of us observes our environment our own way.

But being a Stoic, I can say, “I imagine I’m content with the temperature.” And I am.

Being a Stoic, I can say, “I imagine I’m discontent with the daylight,” and I can paint so vivid a night in my mind I can see the stars come out. This is very useful for a writer—but one should never use it in heavy traffic, or in front of strangers.

Being a Stoic, I can receive impulses that warn me, “That candle flame is going to burn my fingers if I touch it,” but I can say, through experience, “Only if I’m too slow.” And I can put it out with my fingers.

Being a Stoic, I can say, “I control my own perceptions. I am completely in charge of my own happiness. If I am unhappy, it is my own fault. So I can be happy if I can change the situation or change my own opinion.” Both require energy. Both are a bit of work—but usually worth it.

As to whether it is worth it—that’s my choice. So everything is my choice.

Others are also free to choose. I’m not in control of them.

There are, besides that, forces larger than I am. If I fall off a boat a thousand miles from shore I can’t think I’m not drowning, though I suppose a positive thought would make the situation more pleasant. What I am responsible for, when outgunned, is my state of mind, and being able to say, “Well, this is an interesting phenomenon. I wonder how deep it is ...” is a way of life for a writer who enjoys her craft.

But there are people who carry the art of positive thinking to an extreme.

To them ... this book is dedicated.

—Protagoras

 

F
reedom was one of those places honest ships avoided, a pleasant world of a pleasant star, but lacking a station at which ships could dock, and by reason of its location on the limb’s sparse edge, inconvenient for ships on fixed schedules.

A few outsiders came here, pirates who were afforded a shuttle landing, and who therefore restrained themselves from their habitual destructions, preferring to charge exorbitant prices selling what on Freedom were rare goods. There were occasional free merchants with similar larceny in mind, but there was also a strong likelihood of
meeting
one of Freedom’s piratical clients in the neighborhood, and that prospect discouraged most merchants of any category. Freedom was moreover a poor world, in outsider reckoning. It had grain and preserved meats and vegetables. That attracted the pirates, who had no world at their disposal and needed such things; it did not attract much trade of other sorts.

There were inevitably the military ships, who came pursuing the pirates on one of the occasional campaigns for order, whenever the pirates had gotten too daring and touched off a hunt, or when the powers which ran the Alliance decided it was time to hold a military exercise.

Freedom had no ships of its own, not since the original, which had once been intended as an orbiting station, but which had finally, through disuse and failure of its maintenance, broken up in a spectacular display over the Sunrise Sea. Freedom had assets, sunny skies over large land masses, abundant population both indigenous and human—a condition completely contrary to Science Bureau regulations, since they mingled without safeguards. There was in fact no place on all of Freedom where both human and ahnit could not in theory mingle unchecked and without expectation of violence, a condition superior to that of some worlds under Science Bureau management and control. Freedom possessed broad, moderately saline oceans, reasonable weather with rainfall in convenient places, an oxygen/nitrogen/carbon-dioxide atmosphere with replenishment by vegetation, a vegetation which incidentally furnished inhabitants a minimum of ordinary difficulties with natural poisons and allergens. Tides, under the benign influence of the large single moon, bathed white sand beaches and thundered majestically against basalt, jungled cliffs, sufficient to have inspired poetry in the deadest souls. Humanity thrived on Freedom, multiplying at a rate sufficient to give the main zone of settlement, on the curved, many-peninsulaed continent named Sartre, a very respectable shuttleport city, Kierkegaard, with industry and manufacture sufficient to supply the needs of the farmers who ploughed Sartre’s fertile plains. Freedom was almost totally agricultural, virgin abundance well-suited to man (or ahnit), and its lack of trade was no handicap to the economy.

But even the pirates refused to go outside Kierkegaard’s port area, and the occasional military personnel who paid official visits to the Residency and the First Citizen, went and returned as swiftly as possible, staying to modern Port Street, which tall firebush hedges screened from the rest of the town.

Curiously, Freedom was not a notorious world, not, like Gehenna II and some of the limb’s other plague spots, a breeding ground of legends. Those who had visited Freedom had no wish to talk about it, indeed, tried to ignore it as thoroughly as ships avoided it in their courses.

It was not that it was a place where humanity failed, or where men lost their souls to the strangeness of aliens.

Freedom was a mutual failure.

H
errin Law thrived on Freedom, young, well favored by nature, chance, and the powers which governed the world. “He’s gifted,” the instructional supervisor had visited the Law household to say one night: Herrin recalled the night with perfect clarity through the years, the amazing visit of a man all the way from the township of Camus, to their bare-boards farmhouse in Law’s Valley, where he and his father and mother and sister had been gathered in their town best clothes to see this caller, who had come all the way out from the township to report the result of his first tests. “He’ll be University material,” the man—citizen Harfeld—had told his parents. His parents had cried a little after the visit, as if it were some kind of disaster; but during it, citizen Harfeld had patted him on the shoulder and congratulated him on a talent so rare that Camus could not possibly nurture it properly.... “He’ll have the taped courses, to be sure,” Harfeld had said, “up to appropriate level; there’ll be a government stipend, all the best for such a special student. An educator searches a lifetime for such talents—rarely finds them.” So Herrin had swelled up with a seven-year-old’s vulnerable pride in himself and understood that he was something different from anyone else in the house, so he was already able to look at his parents’ reaction from a certain distance of that specialness. His older sister looked on him differently, too, and seemed to shrink after that special night, casting furtive looks at him, jealousy and perhaps a little self doubt, which increased over the years, and cast her in a new role of second sibling despite their sequence of birth. She developed a whole new bearing after that night; and so did he.

He loved his family, from his slight distance. He was capable of being wounded when his parents petted his sister Perrin in a different way than they did him. He clung to the consciousness that he would be leaving and that in a way he had already left them; and Perrin because she was a walking wound, and she was the one who would stay with them into their old age. Perrin was duty. She tormented herself with her inferiority; she lost all confidence, and bestowed superiority on others who had her about them. Perrin was uncertainty and self-doubt; Perrin clung; and Herrin, after that night of the visitor, was simply separate, understanding the position his precocity enabled him to enjoy as virtual outsider. That this was the price of superiority, that the same height from which he looked down on others and analyzed their feelings, also obliged him to live removed from the run of humanity. He grew up extraordinarily handsome and more graceful than his agemates; grew up with a sensible reserve which made it possible for him to associate with agemates less mature and less self-assured than he. He was confident of his merit and basked in slightly lonely love, loved in return from that height at which he lived; and tolerated jealousy with the understanding that those less favored had to have
some
defenses. He was kind because no cruelty had ever shaken him from that plateau on which he lived, since that momentous visit. Love poured up to him, and he rained it down again.