Текст книги "Alternate Realities (Port Eternity; Wave without a Shore; Voyager in Night)"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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II

Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, “Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

Griffin, as I say, was one of the strange ones my lady Dela picked up from time to time, not easy to fix which of his several natures was the real one, no. I had found him frightening from the start, truth be told. He didn’t laugh often, but much when he did, and he could be mortally stubborn and provoke Dela to rages which came down on all of us and darkened the house at Brahmani Dali for days. He interfered with Dela’s business and talked to Vivien about the books, which ordinarily Dela would never allow—but Griffin did, and had his way about it, amid storms in the country house which would have disposed of less appealing lovers. He wound himself in tighter and tighter with my lady’s business, and that disturbed us all.

He was an athletic sort, who looked rather more like one of us than he did like a born-man; but then, they play games even with born-man genes when women are rich, and Griffin certainly came from wealthy beginnings. Like Lance, Griffin seemed to fill whatever room he was in. He was very tall and slim in the hips and wide in the shoulders ... and he had an interesting, strong-boned face—not so fine as Lance, who was dark-haired and handsome and had meltingly dark eyes, but Griffin was bronzed and blond like one of the knights in the storybook tape. That answered, physically, why Dela had been attracted at the outset.

But Griffin was not, like most of her previous lovers, empty-headed; and he had not gotten pretty by spending all his time taking care of that beautiful body. He was just that way, which left the rest of his time to be doing something else—and in Griffin’s case, that something else was meddling with Dela’s business or lying lost in the tapes. He was one of the few men I ever did know who looked merely asleep under the tapes, and not lackwitted: Griffin did not know how to be ungraceful, I think it was muscle. He just did not collapse when he slept the deepsleep. And when he was awake, he was imposing. He tended to stare through the likes of me, or at very most remembered and thanked me for doing some small extra service for him—a courtesy far greater than I had gotten from most of my lady’s associations, and at the same time, far less, because he could still look through me while he was thanking me. He never bedded with me, and he was the first of Dela’s lovers who had never done that. He stayed to Dela. That fact upset me at first, but he bedded with none of the estate servants male or female either, so I understood it was not my failing: he simply wanted Dela, uniquely and uninterrupted by others—quite, quite different from the usual. I saw them together, matched, blond and blonde, storybook knight and storybook lady, a man full of ideas, a man my lady let into more than the bedchamber. He was change; and he frightened us in strange and subtle ways.

What, we wondered, when she should tire of him?

We had set out from station that morning, and Dela was taking a nap, because we had been up too many hours getting up from the world and getting settled in, and we had gone through a time change. We were, of course, under acceleration and moving a little cautiously when we walked, but nothing uncomfortable: the Maidrarely hurried. Griffin was still up and about, typical of the man, to be meddling with charts and tapes and comp in his cabin; and he wanted a little of my lady’s imported brandy. I brought it to his cabin, which was next to Dela’s own, and since he had not dismissed me I stood there while he sipped the brandy and fussed with his papers.

This time? I wondered. It would spoil all my reckonings of him if he asked me to bed with him now. I stood thinking about it, watching his broad back, no little distressed, thinking of all those tapes he listened to, about murdering and pain. He was altogether imposing under those circumstances. Dela was abed, drugged down; perhaps he felt he needed someone. A lot of people get nervous before jump. I waited. I blanked, finally, went null as my knees locked up, and I was in some pain; blinked alert as he stood up and looked down at me.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said. “Go. Go on. That’s all.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, wondering now if it would have pleased him had I been forward with him: some expected that. I looked back from the doorway. But Griffin had snugged down on the bed on his belly, head on his arms, and looked genuinely content enough: the brandy seemed to have had its effect. So he was happy; Dela would be. That was all I wanted. I went back and took the empty glass, set it on the tray, and left.

It might not be, I was thinking then, so bad a voyage, Griffin simply remaining Griffin: some men changed aboard, becoming bizarre in their fancies and their demands, but he did not. I diverted myself through the library, a simple jog from the corridor that joined his and Dela’s cabin and the outer hall, into the library/deepsleep lab, with its double couch. A touch of a button, the unsealing of a clear-faced cabinet, neat tucking of a tape cassette into my coveralls pocket and off and out the other door, into the same hall and out into the main corridor. Dela never minded, but then, Dela had whims: I kept my borrowings neat and quiet.

The galley then, on lowermost level, and up again to our own quarters, midway in the ship, very nice, very comfortable, after the fashion of things aboard the Maid. Deep, fine beds, the finest sheets, fine as Dela’s own—she never scanted us. Beautiful thick carpet, all the colors rust and brown and cream, a fine curved couch wrapped all the way around the corner, one level behind the other, with multiple deepstudy outlets, and the screens above, on the ceiling. Lance was there, not deepstudying, just sitting on the couch, arms on his knees, looking downhearted and tragic as he usually did at such settings-forth. I had had some thought of using my tapes; I gave it up, and sat down by Lance and took his hand in my lap and simply went into blank again. For us too, it had been too many time changes, and it would be better for Lance when he was rested.

Vivien came in from attending whatever business had occupied her with the station and the undocking, accounts and charges all squared, presumably. Not the least drooping, not a sleekly chignoned hair mussed, but Viv was on our schedule: she had a brittleness to her movements, all the same. And came Percy and Lynette, of the crew, who were on ship’s time and who looked like business as they usually did when we saw them. Percy was a youngish man with red hair and a delightful beard, all very close and delicately trimmed, his great vanity. And Lynn, Lynn was a flat and ethereal sort with an aquiline nose and freckles that had never seen much of any sun, brown hair trimmed as close as Percy’s.

“What sort have we got this trip?” Percy asked, reclining on the nearest bed, his booted ankles crossed. He propped himself up sidelong on his elbow. This was our haven, this room. We could say what we liked with no one listening, so it was safe for him to ask. Lynette had settled sidelong the other way, leaning against him, not flirting, but because we all like touching when we relax, which is the way we are, sexed or not. Percy and Lynn, being crew, and busy all this while, had not yet met Griffin.

I shrugged. That was the kind of impression I had to give about Griffin, that I didn’t have a clear impression, even after all this time. We had gotten used to him down at Brahmani Dali, as much as one could get used to Griffin—which meant we accepted that he would be up to something constantly, and alternately upsetting my lady and pleasing her.

“I don’t like him,” Lance said suddenly. Four months of silence, and: “I don’t like him.” He had never said that before, not even with some of my lady’s absolute worst, who had abused him and any others of us accessible. “I wish she would get rid of him.”

That frankness upset me. It was one thing to think it, but it was another to say it out like that, even here.

“This one,” said Vivien, “this one is different than the others. I think she might marrythis one.”

“No,” I exclaimed, and put my hand over my mouth, guilty as Lance.

“Why else does she have me going over her accounts and letting him into them, and why does she have spies going over his?She said once she might marry him. I don’t think it was a joke. I think she’s really thinking about it. It has to do with that government business last year. This Griffin’s family has influence. And the worlds, Brahman and Sita—position for a natural alliance. The government has other concerns at the moment, can’t afford prolonged trouble in this direction. And besides—she seems to enjoy him.”

Viv looked satisfied. Herposition wasn’t threatened. No one said anything for a while. This move seemed then to have monetary reasons behind it, which we understood: everything my lady did seriously tended to have such reasons in it, so this frightened me more and more. “He’s not so bad,” I said, not that I really believed it, but Lance was beside me and his hand was sweating in mine. “And she’ll get cooler toward him someday. If he stays—it’ll still happen that way, won’t it? And he’s never done anything to any of us, not like that Robert she took up with.”

There was a general muttering, a reflexive jerk of Lance’s hand. Robert had been the worst.

“Maybe she’ll get some favor out of him or his family,” Lynette said, “and then it’ll be like the others.”

“But she talked about marrying,” Vivien persisted, unstoppable. “And she’s never considered that. Ever. Griffin’s intelligent, she says. Someone who could run things in years to come. She’s never talked like that about the others. He’s young.”

More silence and heavier, even from Percy and Lynette, who were generally not bothered with estate finances and problems of that sort. After all, if another owner came into the picture, if Griffin began to involve himself permanently and changed Dela’s way of operating—then the Maidmight not go on making such trips as she did now. So the crew faced uncertainties too.

The Maidmight—the thought came washing over me—might even be sold, and so might we all, being part of a fancy Dela might tire of if she changed her life and stopped taking lovers. Being sold was ... I could not imagine it. I had heard dread whispers that it meant being taken back into the labs for retraining, and that meant they took your mind apart. It was effectively like dying. I didn’t say that aloud. We had enough troubles, all of us. And Lance ... he was old for retraining. Lance could be put down.

I was never inclined to sudden panics, but I had one. I sat there and blanked, and when I came out of it, Lance was tugging at my hand to shake me out of it.

“Elaine?” he said.

I clenched his hand in mine and said nothing.

“We’re going to make jump sooner than usual,” Lynn said. “She’s told us to keep up acceleration all the way. It has to do with him, maybe. Ask Wayne and Modred about particulars: but it’s Delhi.”

The regional capital. The kind of place her ladyship had stayed out of, with her wealth which she had no desire thus far to flaunt near the government.

“Griffin has property on Delhi,” Vivien said.

“What kind?” I asked, heart pounding, because I had heard of establishments on Delhi where a lot of our kind came from. Percivale was one of Delhi’s breeding, so he said; and I knew that Modred was.

“Farms,” Vivien said tautly. “And training centers. Labs. They’ve been talking about taking an interest in that. In shifting assets—Griffin’s wealth and our lady’s can pull hard weight in Delhi Council if they start playing games with banks. Those kind of maneuvers ... Griffin can do. All he has to do is free up some currency. His farms there—”

Then they all seemed to think of selling and being sold, and Percy blanked, and Lynn too, for a moment, like two statues reclining there.

“I think we should get some sleep,” Vivien said, with a stretch of her back. She had spent all shehad to say, and in our matters, that was as far as Vivien’s interest went. She got up and left. Sleep seemed a good idea, because there was certainly nothing pleasant to think of awake. We moved to our beds, all of which were close together, and began to get undressed. Only Lance still sat there, and I felt sorry for him. They psych-set me so that I can’t stand to see someone suffering. Born-men feel; we react; so the difference runs. And Lance was reacting to everything, and especially to this most frightening of the lady’s affairs. I think maybe he would rather have had Robert aboard again. Any of them. It had already been hard on him, this involvement with Griffin, lasting now for four months and promising to go on long—but marryhim ... and all this maneuvering, this trip to Delhi which seemed to make it all more and more like the truth.... All this had surely struck poor Lance to the gut. He wasn’t blanked, and it would have been healthier if he were. He just sat there like he was bleeding inside.

“Come on,” I said, walking back over to tug at his hand. “I want you”—which was a lie. I was tired, but it was his psych-set, and it gave him something to react to that would take his mind off Dela and off his own future at least for the moment. He undressed and we got between the sheets. He made love to me ... he wasgood. What handsome blond Griffin was like I had no idea, but if it were me, or if I were lady Dela, I would have preferred Lance, who was very beautiful and who did sex very well and with endless invention, which was what he was made for.

Only his eyes were sadder than ever and he was not, this time, as good as he could be. His body reacted to his psych set; and that was that, tired or not, up to reasonable limits. But there were times when Lance was thereand times when he was not, and this time he was not. Worry, like everything else, every other disturbance in his patterns, he channelled into his psych-set outlet the way he was healthily supposed to, so he was not breaking down and he didn’t panic, but it was as close to panic as I had ever seen him.

I held him close for a long time afterward and tried to keep his mind on me—which it had never been, all the while—because I likedhim, in a different way than I liked anyone else. I would have called it love, but love—was for the likes of the lady Dela, who could fall into and out of grand and glorious passions, sighing and suffering and flying into rages. We just blank when we’re upset. The least anguish of an emotional sort turns us off like a light going out unless we’re directly ordered to stay around, or unless we’re occupied about some duty. We have better sense than to cause ourselves such pains, and we have better manners than to tease one another too seriously—which, besides, would be interfering with Dela’s property, and rather like vandalism, which we could not do either.

Pilferage now ... borrowing ... that we could do. I got up and got the tape I had pilfered out of the library and set the hookups over by the couch for Lance and me, figuring that he needed an escape just now. He wanted only to lie there staring at the ceiling, but I took him by the hand and pulled at him until he stirred out of bed and came; and then he put the sensors on himself and took the drug gladly enough when I gave it to him. I got a blanket and my own rigging fixed, drugged out and settled in, hoping for something good.

It was a story tape: I had thought so from where I pilfered it; but it was one of those, one of Griffin’s, that could almost kill you with fright. I knew when I was still sliding into it what it was going to be, and I tried to open my mouth to yell out to Percy or someone to help, get it off us, pull us out of it, but I must have been too far gone. No one came.

Only the story got better. Lance and I were in it together, and while it was more bloody than I liked, I found myself enjoying it after all. That was it: once you give your mind to one of these things, especially if you’re down, that means the drugs have got your threshold flat and you’re locked into the tape, so that you’ll agree to whatever happens. I lived it. Lance did, to whatever degree he could, according to his own pre-programming. Probably he was what I was, which was a hero, and very strong and extraordinarily brave and angry. Griffin had a passion for such stories, of angry men. For a little while I could handle anything at all: I was a born-man; and I fought a great deal and sometimes made love to a very beautiful blonde lady who reminded me of Dela. Lance would have loved that. And I’ll bet the men he fought were all Griffin; but for me they were Robert, that I killed a dozen times and enjoyed it more thoroughly than I liked to think about when I finally woke out of it.

But when I did wake up I knew for sure it was not the kind of tape that we were ever supposed to have, not at all, because it was violent, and bloody, and all my psych-sets were disturbed. Lance was that way about it too, and avoided my eyes and seemed to be thinking about something. So I figured I had better get this one back into that library before it was missed.

We candeceive, at least I could, and Lance could, and probably all of us. Vivien and Lynette and Modred were too cold to play games ... or to talk much with born-men, a silence which was deception of another kind, when they had reason to use it. At least that trio wouldn’t get up and sneak about some project for their own personal pleasure.

But Modred, now....

Modred was the one I went to when I wanted a tape back in the library undetected, a ride up in the lift toward the bow, up to the bridge where duties were still going on. No one suspected Modred of nonsense like tape-pilfering; and he wouldtake my orders, because the operational crew maintained the library and were always pulling references to this and that through the computer. If I wanted a tape for my own use for a while, it was nothing for him to spin a tape through and record it, and then do things with the records of its use. It was even less for him to play with the records and drop a tape into the chute for the automated sorting to whisk back to its slot in the rack back in library. He could do that and never miss a beat in what else he was doing, and I think he really preferred the more complicated larcenies: they were problems, and this was not.

Modred and Gawain. Wayne, we called the one, for short: he had long brown hair, and was very handsome—but he was all business whenever I would see him, given to working himself very hard. He was the mainday pilot, as Lynn ran things on alterday shift, and Percy was alterday comp. Gawain had a work compulsion, which tended to make Gawain lose weight when we were on long trips, but he really enjoyed what he did, and smiled a lot when he was working. Me, with my psych-set to worry about other’s pain, I always carried him his dinners when he forgot them and when I happened to be awake on the same schedule; and I did the same for Modred, who shared his shift and also worked too much and got too thin, but who never showed exuberance about it. Modred was the only one but me whose name we never shortened to something sensible, because when we did it came out Dread, and that was just too much like him to be clever. Modred had a beard as black as Percy’s was red, one of those jawline-following thin ones, but very heavy despite how close he cut it, and while Gawain let his hair go down to his shoulders for vanity’s sake, Modred had his cut very short—Lynn and Percy played barber, among other skills—and he cut it square across his brow, which made his dark eyes very sinister. That was why my lady Dela named him Modred, and I think why she bought him, because she was fascinated by dangerous-looking men. Even born-men moved out of Modred’s way, and that was a useful thing with some of the guests Dela had had. Not that Modred would hurtanyone, being like us, psych-set against it, but he looked like he would, and people reacted to that. Actually, he seemed to enjoy doing me small favors I asked, and getting small attentions from me and from Lynn when she was in the mood. Mostly that grim face—handsome, because my lady would not have had him about otherwise—seemed to me to conceal a very blank sort, who did his duty, who thought and calculated constantly, and who liked, like the rest of us, to sleep close at night, with someone close enough to let him feel companied. Vivien avoided sleeping next to him, somewhat scared of him, truth be told—and I always preferred Lance. So mostly Modred, really sexless, slept with his crewmates, who were also sexless during the voyages, and they kept each other company. Likely those four were neither concerned nor jealous about the freedom Lance and Viv and I had to come and go with my lady, to be in attendance on her, to share her luxuries, and in my case, to share her lovers—because they four were psych-fixed to the Maid, and when Modred or the others handled her controls, I think it was really like touching the body of a lover. It was a sort of grim joke, the stainless steel Maidand her crew doomed to love her with a chaste and forever devotion.

I preferred Lance.

But I flirted with Modred because it was pleasant. I always suspected he liked my touching him ... at least that killer’s face of his acquired a certain placidity like a pet being stroked by a familiar hand. He was not immune to sensation; it was just sex that was missing in him.

“Thank you,” I whispered in his ear, leaning close, when he settled back into his place at the console, from disposing of the tape for me. I was not supposed to be on the bridge, any more than Modred was supposed to be doing things to the library records, but supposedwas often a very lax word in my lady Dela’s world: Dela cared nothing about laws or limitations in anyone. As long as the Maidserved well as what she was, an abode of utmost luxury, and an extravagantly expensive toy, then what her living toys did in their off hours was of no concern. We could have held orgies on the bridge and abstracted the whole library to the crew quarters had we liked, and if my lady was in one of her relaxed moods, she would notice nothing.

There were, of course, other moods. Remembering those, we always kept the record purified.

“They’ll be wanting you,” Modred said in his flat way, staring at his screens to find out where things stood at the moment. Gawain was at the main console. I had my hands on Modred’s shoulders and leaned to deposit a kiss on the side of his neck, which, he took about like the touch of my hands, as something relaxingly pleasant. “I think my lady is awake.”

He could do that, never missing the thread of the conversation when I teased him, which was the difference between him and Gawain or Percy, who at least grew bothered.

“I’ll see to it,” I said, and patted his shoulder. Actually Modred fascinated me because he couldn’tbe moved, and it was my function to move people. I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was a new chance to try.

I had once tried more direct approaches, in the crew quarters. I think Modred wanted, with some dim curiosity, to do what others did, but it was only curiosity. “Let him alone,” Lynn had said when she saw it, with a frown that meant business.

So you play the same game with him, I had thought then, but likewise Lynette was not one to cross lightly; and when it occurred to me that I might hurt someone my psych-set intervened and cooled me down at once. I confined myself after that to small games that Modred himself found pleasant.

“We’re going to make jump in another hour,” Gawain said from his post.

I wrinkled my nose. That meant getting my lady and the rest of us prepped with the drugs to endure jump. That was what she wanted, then. Jump always scared me, even drugged. It was the part of voyages that I hated.

And then: “ Modred—” Gawain said in a plaintive voice I had never heard him use. It frightened me. Modred’s reaction did, because he flung off my hand and reached for another board in a hurry, and alarms were going off, shrieking.

“Out!” he shouted, and Modred never shouted. I scrambled toward the exit, staggering as the whole ship heeled, and then vocal alarms were going, the take-hold, which means wherever you are, whatever is closest, regardless. I never made the door. I grabbed the nearest emergency securing and got the belt round me, while already the Maidwas swinging in a roll so that we came under Glike coming off a world.

“We’re losing it,” Gawain shouted into com. “We’re losing it—Modred—”

“I don’t know what it is,” Modred yelled back. “Instruments ... instruments are going crazy. ...”

I looked up from my position crouched against the bulkhead, looked at the screens, and there was nothing but black on them. We were in the safe area of our own home star and with traffic around us. There was no way anything ought to be going wrong, but Gwas pulling us and making the lights all over the boards blink red, red, red.

Then it was as if whatever was holding us had just stopped existing, no jolt, but like sliding on oil, like a horrible falling where there isno falling.

And jump. Falling, falling, falling forever as we hurtled into subspace. I screamed and maybe even Modred did—I heard Gawain’s voice for sure, and it became space and color. There was no ship, but naked chaos all around me, that stayed and stayed and stayed.