Alternate Realities (27 page)

There might be such again. We know.

But the time passes, and we gather others, who come whenever Griffin calls.

And we ... we come, at such time: Modred from his berth on the
Maid
, where he spends endless time in talking with all sorts of living things and devising new ideas; and Vivien keeps him company, making meticulous records and accounts.

Percivale has a place up in the heights of the curve. We see him least of all; but very old and wise creatures visit him to talk philosophy, and when he comes to visit us his voice is quiet and makes one very warm.

And Gawain and Lynette—they travel about the land, even into the strange passages that lead elsewhere, so of all of us they have seen most and come with the strangest tales to tell.

And Lance—

“I love them both,” he said once and long ago. And so he left the hall where Dela and Griffin lived, first of all to leave.

And that was the worst pain of any I had ever had.

“Where’s Lance?” my lady asked that next day; and I was afraid for him. I ran.

But Griffin found me, all the same, there back of the house, where I thought that I was hidden.

“Where’s Lance?” he said.

“He went away,” I said, just that. But Griffin had always had a way of looking through me.

“Why?”

“For love,” I said, which was a word so strange for me to be saying I was terrified. But it was so. It was nothing else but that.

“He shouldn’t be alone,” Griffin said. “Elaine—can you find him?”

“Yes,” I said.

And he: “Go where you have to go.”

So it was not so much trouble to track one of us, when every creature everywhere knew us. And I found Lance sitting on the shore of that huge lake which lies central to our world ... itself a strange place and full of thinking creatures.

“Elaine,” he said.

“They sent me,” I said to him. And he made a place for me beside him.

So we live, Lance and I, in a tower on that shore, a long time in the building, but of time we have no end.

And from one window we look out on that vast lake; and from the other we look toward our Camelot.

Whether we dream, still falling forever, or whether the dream has shaped itself about us, we love ... at least we dream we do.

And whenever the call goes out, echoing clear and brazen through the air, we take up our arms again and go.

This book was one of those odd experiments aside from my works of wider appeal. Don and I discussed the outcome of the story—often. We absolutely disagreed on what happened. I find that a wonderful, whimsical kind of situation. Both of us certainly read the same book—well, he edited it and I wrote it—but both of us saw a different story at the end and both of us believed in what we saw.

Think of this as the kind of science fiction some writer might create who lived (or will live) at some time in the next half millennium, after we’ve gone to the stars. And will we still write science fiction then? I see no reason we won’t—Homer wrote science fiction, didn’t he? So did Dante. And Jules Verne. So do we. Why shouldn’t our descendants?

My job as a science fiction writer is only half about technology, the what-if and the what-next? Homer wrote about traveling beyond the rim of known seas, and meeting strange people. Dante used his science fiction writing for a political medium. Verne explored the future. And I’ve done a bit of each. But throughout all the meeting and the voyaging and the politicking and the imagining—I do the other thing those others did: I hold up a mirror to ourselves.

What would you do if you could live your life over—and over—and over?

What would you be if there were no end in sight?

Ever?

T
rishanamarandu-kepta
was, < >’s name, of shape subject to change and configurations of consciousness likewise mutable. But
Trishanamarandu-kepta
within-the-shell kept alert against the threat of subversive alterations, for some of the guests aboard were unreliable in disposition and in sanity.

Concerning < >’s own mental stability, < > was reasonably certain. <> had a longer perspective than most and consequently held a different view of events. The chronometers which might, after so many incidents and so frequent transits into jumpspace, be subject to creeping inaccuracies, reported that the voyage had lasted more than 100,000 subjective ship-years thus far. This agreed with < >’s memory. Aberrations in both records were possible, but <> thought otherwise.

<> never slept. Some of the minds aboard might have seized control, given that opportunity, so <> managed <>’s body constantly, sometimes at a high level of mental activity, sometimes at marginal awareness, but <> never quite slept. Closest analogue to dreamstate, <> felt a slight giddiness during jumpspace transits. That was to be expected in a mind, even after long and frequent experience of such passages. < > leapt interstellar distances with something like sensual pleasure in the experience, whether the feeling came from the unsettling of < >’s mind or < >’s physical substance. Fear, after all, was a potent sensation; and all sensations were precious after so long a span of life.

<> traveled, that was what <> did.

<> set <>’s sights on whatever star was next and pursued it.

Another voyage began. Little
Lindy
moved up in the immense skeletal clutch of a Fargone loader into the cargo sling of the can-hauler
Rightwise
, while
Rightwise
’s lateral and terminal clamps moved slowly to fix
Lindy
in next to a canister of foodstuffs. She actually massed less than most of the constant-temp canisters
Rightwise
had slung under her belly, less than the chemicals and the manufacturing components destined for station use.

She was in fact nothing but a shell with engines, an unlovely, jerry-rigged construction; and the Lukowskis, the Viking-based merchanter family which owned
Rightwise
, having only moderate larceny in their hearts and a genuine spacers’ sympathy for
Lindy
’s young owners, settled for the bonus Endeavor Station offered for the delivery of such ships and crews in lieu of
Lindy
’s freight, and took labor for the passage of the Murray-Gaineses themselves.
Rightwise
had muscle to spare, and
Lindy
’s bonus would clear two percent above the mass charge: the owners were desperate.

So
Rightwise
checked
Lindy
’s mass by Fargone records, double checked the dented, unshielded tanks that they were indeed empty for the haul, grappled her on and took her through jump to Endeavor—unlikely reprieve for that bit of scrap and spit which should long since have been sent to recycling.

The Murrays and Paul Gaines arrived at Endeavor with the same hopes as the rest of the out-of-luck spacers incoming. Endeavor was a starstation in the process of building, sited in the current direction of Union expansion, in a rich (if unexportable) aggregation of ores. But trade would come, extending outward to new routes. Combines and companies would grow here. And the desperate and the ambitious flocked in. There were insystem haulers, freighted in on jumpships, among them a pair of moduled giant oreships, hauled in by half a dozen longhaulers in pieces, reassembled at Endeavor, of too great mass to have come in any other way. They were combine ships out of Viking, those two leviathans, and they collected the bulk of the advertised bonus for ships coming to Endeavor. There was a tanker from Cyteen; a freighter from Fargone, major ships—while most of the independent cold-haulers that labored the short station-belt run were far smaller, patched antiquities that gave Endeavor System the eerie ambiance of a hundred-year backstep in time. They were owned by their crews, those ancient craft, some family ships, most the association of non-kin who had gambled all their funds together on war surplus and ingenuity.

And smallest and least came ships like the Murray-Gaineses’
Lindy
, an aged pusher-ship once designed for nothing more complex than boosting or slowing down a construction span or sweeping debris from Fargone Station’s peripheries, half a hundred years ago. They had blistered her small hull with longterm lifesupport. A human form jutted out of her portside like a decoration: an EVA-pod made of an old suit. Storage compartments bulged outward at odd angles almost as fanciful as the pod. Tanks were likewise jury-rigged on the ventral surface, and a skein of hazardously exposed conduits led to the war-salvage main engine and the chancy directionals.

No established station would have allowed
Lindy
registry even before the alterations. She had been scheduled for junk at Fargone, and so had many of her parts, taken individually. But at Endeavor
Lindy
was no worse than others of her size. She was rigged for light prospecting in those several rings of ore-laden rock which belted Endeavor System, feeding the refiner-oreships, which would send their recovered materials in girder-form and bulk to Station, where belt ores and ice became structure, decks, machine parts and solar cells, fuel and oxygen.
Lindy
would haul only between belt and oreship, taking the richest small bits in her sling, tagging any larger finds for abler ships on a one-tenth split. She even had an advantage in her size: she could go gnat-like into stretches of the belt no larger ship would risk and, supplied by those larger ships, attach limpets to boost a worthwhile prize within reach:
that
kind of risk was negotiable.

And if she broke down in Endeavor’s belt and killed her crew, well, that was the chance the Murray-Gaineses took, like all the rest who gambled on a future at Endeavor, on the hope of piling up credits in the station’s bank faster than they needed to consume them, credits and stock which would increase in worth as the station grew, which was how marginal operators like the Murray Gaineses hoped to get a lease on a safer ship and link into some forming Endeavor combine.

There was Endeavor Station: that was the first step.
Rightwise
let go the clamps; the Murray-Gaineses sweated through the unpowered docking and the checkout, enjoyed one modest round of drinks at the cheapest of Endeavor Station’s four cheap bars, and opened their station account in Endeavor’s cubbyhole of a docking office, red-eyed and exhausted and anxious to pay off
Rightwise
and get
Lindy
clear and away before they accumulated any additional dock charge.

So they applied for their papers and local number, paid their freight and registered their ship forthwith with hardly more formality than a clerical stamp, because
Lindy
was so ridiculously small there was no question of illicit weaponry or criminal record. She became
STARSTATION ENDEAVOR INSYSTEM SHIP 243 Lindy
, attached to SSEIS 1, the oreship/smelter
Ajax
. She had a home.

And the Murrays and Paul Gaines, free and clear of debt, went off arm in arm to
Lindy
’s obscure berth just under the maindawn limit which would have logged them a second day’s dock charge. They boarded and settled into that cramped interior, ran their checks of the charging that the station had done in their absence, and put her out under her own power without further ado, headed for Endeavor’s belt.

For a little while they had an aftward single G, in the acceleration which boosted them to their passage velocity; but after that small push they went inertial and null, in which condition they would live and work three to six months at a stretch.

They had bought three bottles of Downer wine for their stores. Those were for their first tour’s completion. They expected success. They were high on the anticipation of it. Rafe Murray, his sister Jillan, merchanter brats; Paul Gaines, of Fargone’s deep-miners, unlikely friendship, war-flotsam that they were. But there was no doubt in them, no division, when playmates had grown up and married: and Rafe was well content. “It’s tight quarters,” Jillan had said to her brother when they talked about Endeavor and their partnership. “It’s a long time out there, Rafe; it’s going to be real long; and real lonely.”

Paul Gaines had said much the same, in the way Paul could, because he and Rafe were close as brothers. “So, well,” Rafe had answered, “I’ll turn my back.”

They called Rafe, half-joking, half-not, their Old Man, at twenty-two. That meant captain, on a larger ship. And they
were
his. Jillan planned on children in a merchanter-woman’s way. They were life, and she could get them, with any man; but, un-merchanter-like, she married Paul, for good, for permanent, not to lose him, and snared him in their dream. Their children would be Murrays; would grow up to the Name that the War had robbed of a ship and almost killed out entire ... and he dreamed with desperate fervor, did Rafe Murray, of holding Murray offspring in his arms, of a ship filled with youngsters—being himself a merchanter-man and incapable of pregnancy, which was how, after all, children got on ships: merchanter-women made them, and merchanter-women got his and took them to other ships which did not need them half so desperately.