Free Alternate Realities by C. J. Cherryh Page A

lady’s dreams. It was selfish, and bothered my psych-sets; but I rationalized it, that she had not forbidden it, and sank back with my tape, in it, part of it.
    Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber up a tower to the east
Guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot. ...
    It was my dream, my own, my world better than the real: my lady Dela’s world; and mine. We were made, we who served, never born; we were perfect, and needed no dreams to make us more than we were created by the labs to be. We were not intended to love ... but it was seeing born-men’s sharing love that made me lonely, and made me think of my tape—
    I know not if I know what true love is,
But, if I know, then, if I love not him,
I know there is none other I can love....
    I thought of Lancelot. Probably I cried; and we don’t do that generally, not like born-men, because where they would cry, we go blank. Only in the taped dreams, then we might, because there’s no blanking out on them. While the tape was running, I loved, and had a soul, and believed in the born-men’s God; and when it would stop I was all hollow and frightened for a moment: that was the price, I knew, of pilfering tapes not meant for us. But then my other tapes, those deep in my mind, would take over and bring me back to sense.
    Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain
At love, life, all things, on the window ledge,
Close underneath his eyes, and right across
Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge
Whereon the lily maid of Astolat
Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night.
    I waked for real. Arms held me. I thought it was part of the tape at first, because sensations in them were that real, called out of the mind; but the sound had stopped, and I was still lapped in someone’s arms, and comforted. I would have gone on into normal sleep except for that; I was conscious enough now to fight out of it, pull the piece from my ear and the other attachments from my temples and my body, sweeps of a half-numb hand. My eyes cleared enough that I saw who slept with me, that it was Lance. Like a thief he had slipped into my dream, to share the tape while it was running ... the tape that he was never supposed to have. His face was sadder than it had ever been. His eyes were closed, tears running from under his lashes. More than mine, the tape was his, and his part was sadder than mine by far. I loved and lost him , young and only half knowing love at all; but he, older, having more, lost everything.
    And that was always true for him.
    I hurt, and maybe it was more than my psych-set that grieved me. I was still in the haze of the tape’s realities. I swept the tiny sensors away from his brow and his heart, and wiped the tears away for him. I kissed him, not for sex, as my tapes are, but because it was what the real Elaine would have done, a kind of tenderness like touching, like lying close at night, that kind of comfort.
    He waked then and embraced me purposefully, and I shifted over, getting rid of other sensor connections, because I was willing. I reckoned it was the best thing for him, to occupy his mind and body both after going through that dream.
    But he couldn’t. It was the first time he ever outright couldn’t, and it shook him. He blanked, then, which froze my heart—because blanking out from something beyond your limits is one thing; but blanking on your training, on your whole reason for being at all—He stayed that way a moment, and then he came out of it and rolled over and lay there with his eyes open and a terrible sorrow on his face. He shivered now and then, and I put my arms about him and pulled the sheets up about us.
    “I’m sorry,” he said finally without ever looking at me. I might have been anyone.
    “We’re all awfully tired,” I said. And in my heart: O Lance, you should never have heard it, and I should never have used it here—because he had one thing that he did and that was it, and maybe he had