Alternate Realities Read Free

played her game for a while—they seemed to enjoy it.
    It struck me increasingly strange, me, who had nothing of property, and was instead owned and made, that for Dela Kirn who could buy thousands of my kind and even have us made to order ... the greatest joy in her life was to pretend. All my existence was pretense, the pretense of the tapes which fed into my skull what my makers and my owner wanted me to know and believe; and until I was sold to Dela and until I saw Dela’s secret fancies, I thought that the difference between us and born-men was that born-men lead real lives, and see what really is, and that this was the power born-men have over the likes of us. But all Dela wanted with all her power was to unmake what was, and to shape what the story tapes told her until she lived and moved in it. So then I was no longer sure what was true and what was false, or what was best in living, to be me, or to be Dela Kirn.
    Until the end, of course, when they would put me down because I had no more usefulness, while Dela went on and on living on rejuv, which our kind almost never got. Seventy. I could not, from twenty-one, imagine seventy. She had already lived nearly twice as long as I ever could, and she had seen more and done more, living all of it, and not having the first fifteen years on tape.
    Maybe, I thought, in seventy years she had worn out what there was to know; and that might be why she turned to her fables.
    Or she was mad.
    If one has most of the wealth of a world at one’s disposal, if one has built whole cities and filled them with people and gotten bored with them, one can be mad, I suppose, and not be put down for it ... especially if one owns the hospitals and the labs. And while far away there was a government which sent warnings to Dela Kirn, she laughed them off as she did most unpleasant things and said that they would have to come and do something about it, but that they were busy doing other things, and that they needed Brahman’s good will. About such things I hardly know, but it did seem to work that way. No one came from the government but one angry man, and a little time in Dela’s country house at Brahmani Dali under our care, and some promises of philanthropy, sent him back happier than he had come.
    This much I understood of it, that Dela had bought her way out of that problem as she had bought off other people who stood in her way; and if ever Dela could not buy her way through a difficulty, then she threatened and frightened people with her money and what it could do. If Dela felt anything about such contests, I think it was pleasure, after it was all over—pleasure at the first, and then a consuming melancholy, as if winning had not been enough for her.
    But the Maid was her true pleasure, and her real life, and she only brought her favorite lovers to it.
    So she brought Griffin ... all gaiety, all happiness as we hurried about the Maid ’s rich corridors settling everyone in our parting from Brahmani Station—but there was a foreboding about it all which my lady understood and perhaps Griffin did not; it was months that she would love a man before she thought it enough to bring him to the Maid , and after that, it was all downhill, and she had no more to give him. The dream would end for him, because no one could live in Dela’s story forever.
    Only we, Elaine and Lancelot and Vivien; and Percy and Wayne and Modred ... we were always there when it ended; and Lance would be hurt as he always was; and I would comfort him—but he never loved me ... he was fixed on Dela.
    So we set off on holiday, to play out the old game and to revel while we could, and to make Dela happy a time, which was why we existed at all.

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.”
    G riffin, 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