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

“No,” he protested—everything.

“Not make them again?”

He wiped his eyes, hung there, his arms about the metal limb. It was cold. There was, for him, sensation; heat and cold; touch, taste; all the range of senses. “For what?” he asked. “What do you make them for in the first place?”

“Should I not?”

“You talk—” He caught his breath, caught his balance, straightened and walked over to sit on the smooth plastic bed amid the humps, the nodes, in the shining forest of the limbs, where it wanted him. “You talk about Paradise. Leaving me there. Forget that. I’m not leaving them to you, to make into what you want. Take me with them. Hear?”

“They’d object,” Kepta said. “I know them very well.”

“Damn you.” He shuddered, lifted up his arm, flesh and bone. “You want to strip me down to what they are? Do that. At least I could touch them then.”

“But you can. You already have. You’re not thinking straight. Don’t you know one Rafe-template’s you? In every respect—he’s you. You’ve already had your wish. He can touch them; be touched; touch me; do all the things you’d do. Dead, alive—that makes no difference. The only decisions are selfish ones.”

He wiped his eyes a second time, bleak and blank and knowing insanest truth.

“Think about it,” Kepta said. “There are choices.”

“What am I leaving them to? Where are you taking them?”

“Vega, maybe; you mentioned that. Altair. They interest me. Places that have names—are so rare in the universe.”

He looked at the doppelganger. His pulse picked up with hate. “Truth, Kepta. Once, the truth.”

Motives—”’

“—won’t make sense. Makethem make sense. I want to know.”

“Say that I travel,” Kepta said. “And they will.”

“For what?”

“Don’t we all,” asked Kepta, “travel? Who asks why?”

“I do.”

“That is worth asking, isn’t it? We are kindred souls, Rafe Murray.”

“Don’t play games with me!”

“I know. There’s pain. I never promised you there wouldn’t be. I never promised them. Do you want them back? Now?”

He was paralyzed, yes and no and loneliness swollen tight within his throat. He shook his head, found nothing clear.

“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.

“ Lookat 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 Hammonfound 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.

WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE

I don’t know how many readers have come to me after reading Wave Without a Shoreasking 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.