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

“I’m making the best I know.”

“We’re here,” Jillan said.

“Position in the ship,” said Jillan/Marandu, “is simultaneous. You only control a small priority. Kepta’s, mine—is virtually universal in the circuitry. Size—is illusory; distance is; all these things—are what you choose to manifest. What I choose—in your shape.”

“You mean we’re bloody programs?” Rafe Two cried, and with a wild, despairing look: “Rafe?”

“You’re real,” Rafe said. “You go on living, changing. You always knew that. Is a separate body so important?”

“Oh, damn,” Rafe Two breathed, and shook his head. “Dammit, twin.”

“Rafe,” Paul said fretfully, stepping through the counter. “ Hedoesn’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 isKepta, 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 ru

“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 youcome 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 movedus—”—meaning Worm; for they werewhere 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: “ Killit, 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.

You will know what to do when you see it, or if you don’t, you were bound to fail....

“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: itdid 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—”

Worm.

“Worm—how do you do it? How do you pass through us? Show us, Worm!”

“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—

—view of skies like ru