Dela smiled at me, a grin broad as she wore for new lovers. But there was only Griffin. It was the banner; it was her fancy moving about her. She smiled at me because I understood her fancy, if Griffin did not—She had her courage back. She had found her footing in this strange place, and there was a look in her eyes that challenge set there.
“I wish there were more to do,” I said.
“There is more,” Lynette said, suddenly from down the table. “Let us go outside. Let us breach them and see what they are before they come at us. We’ve got the exterior lock—”
“No,” Dela said.
“I’ve been up in the observation deck,” she said. “I’ve seen—if you look very hard through the stuff you can see—”
“Stay out of there,” Griffin said. “It’s not healthy.”
“Neither,” Modred muttered, “is sitting here.”
It was insubordinate. I think my heart stopped. There was dead silence.
“What’s your idea?” Griffin asked.
“Lynn’s got one idea,” Modred said. “I have another. First. If you’d listen to me, sir—my lady Dela. We take the assumption that it’s not hostile. We feed it information. It’s going to stop to analyze what we give it.”
“We feed it information and then what?”
“We try the constants. We establish a dialogue.”
“And in the end we give away the last secrets we have from it. What we breathe, who we are, whether we have things of value to it—I don’t see that at this point. I don’t see it at all.”
Modred remained very quiet. “Yes, sir,” he agreed at last, with that tiniest edge of irony that Modred could put in his flattest voice.
“Modred,” Dela said, tight and sharp.
His face never varied. “My lady,” he said precisely. And then: “I was working on something I’d like to finish. By your leave.
My heart was racing. I would never have dared. But Modred had no nerves. I hoped he had not. He simply got up from his chair. “Gawain,” he said, summoning his partner.
“I need Gawain,” Griffin said in a level tone, and Gawain stayed. There was apprehension in Gawain’s face ... on all our faces, I think, but Modred’s, who simply walked out.
“He’s very good,” Dela said.
Oh, he was. That was so. That’s why they made him that way, nerveless.
“I’d like,” Griffin said, “monitoring set up below. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“No, sir,” Percy said quietly. “Not hard at all.”
We dispersed from the table; we cleaned the dishes; we found things that wanted doing, my lady and I; and Vivien. There was the cleaning up of other kinds; there was Vivien’s station—
Oh, mostly, mostly after yesterday, after working so hard we ached ... it was waiting now; and we had so little to do that we found things.
We were scared if we stopped working. And Vivien was in one of her silences, and my lady was being brave; and Lance went down to the gym with Griffin as if there had been nothing uncommon in this dreadful day, the both of them to batter themselves beyond thinking about our Beast.
Might Lynn, I wondered, envying that exhaustion—care for a wrestling round? But no. I had not the nerve to ask. It was not Lynn’s style; or mine; and the crew really did find things to do.
Lynn went out in the bubble ... sat there, hour upon hour, as close to the chaos-stuff as we could get inside the ship. She did things with the lenses there. I took her her lunch up there, trying to keep my back to the view.
“You can see,” Lynette advised me softly, “you can see if you want to see.”
I knew what she meant. I wasn’t about to look.
“I could make it across,” she said. Her thin freckled face and close-clipped skull looked strange in the green light from the screens; but out there was red, red, and red. “I could see.”
“I know you could,” I whispered, hoping only to get out of here without looking at the sights Lynn chose for company. “I’m sure you could. But I know the lady doesn’t want to lose you.”
“What am I?” Lynn asked. “One of the pilots. And what good is that—here?”
“I think a great deal of good.” I rolled up my eyes, staring at the overhead a moment, because something was snaking along out there and I didn’t want to see. “O Lynn, what is that out there?”
“A trick of the eyes. A shifting.”
“Lynn,” I said, because I felt very queasy indeed. “Lynette?”
“Elaine?” Of a sudden something was wrong. Lynn rose half out of her chair, pushed me aside; and then—
Take-hold, take-hold, the alarm was sounding: and Modred’s voice: “Brace, we’re going—”
I yelled for very terror. “Let me out of here,” I remembered screaming, and flinging myself for the hole that led to the bridge. But: “No!” Lynn yelled, and grabbed me in her arms, hugged me to her and I hugged her and the chair and anything else solid my fingers could reach, because we were losing ourselves—
—back again, a blackness; a crawling redness. I held to something that writhed and mewed like the winter winds round Dali peaks, and hissed like breathing, and grew and shrank—
“—another jump,” I heard a distant voice like brazen bells.
“Modred?” another called.
“Griffin?” That was my lady, like crystal breaking.
My eyes might be open. I was not sure. Such terrible things could live in one’s skull, eyeless and unaided in this place. “We’ve jumped again,” the thing holding me said, the voice like wind.
“Are we free?” I cried. “Are we free?” That was the greatest hope that came to me. But then I got my eyes cleared again and I saw the familiar red chaos crawling with black spiders of spots. And the veins, all purple and green, and the thing to which we were fixed. That was unchanged.
“We’re not free.” It was Percivale’s voice, thin and clear. “It jumped again; but we’re not free.”
There was a moment of silence all over the ship, while we understood the terms of our captivity. Like all the ships before us.
“O God,” Dela’s voice moaned. “O dear God.”
“We’re all right.” Griffin’s voice, on the edge of fright. “We’re all right; we’re still intact.”
“Situation stable,” Modred’s cold clear tones rang through the ship. “Nothing changed.”
Nothing changed. O Modred. Nothing changed. I clutched the cushion/Lynn’s arm so tight my fingers were paralyzed.
“You might have been out there,” I said. It was what we had been talking of, a moment/a year ago. “You could have been outside in that.”
Lynn said nothing. I felt a tremor, realized the grip she had on me. “We’re stable,” Lynn echoed. “It must happen many times.”
“The hammering’s stopped,” I whispered. It was so. The silence was awesome. I could hear my heart beating, hear the movement of the blood in my veins. We were so fragile here.
“That’s so,” Lynn said. She let me go and pushed me back, leaned forward to reach the console. “Modred, I get nothing different on visual.”
I managed to get my feet under me while those two exchanged observations. I stared at familiar things and they were normal. And almost I wished for that horrid dislocation back again, that chaos ordinary minds would feel. We were no longer ordinary. We had learned how to live here. For a moment we had been out of this place, and that was the horror we felt; that drop into normal space again. And comfort was breaking surface again in Hell.
“We’re traveling,” I said. Lynn looked at me, bewildered a moment. “We’re traveling,” I said again. “This place moves, goes on moving; we must have reached a star and left again.”
“Yes,” Lynn said with one of her abstracted frowns. “That’s very probable.—Do you copy that, Modred? I think it’s likely.”
“Yes,” Modred agreed. “Considerable speed and age. I think that’s very much what we’re dealing with. We’re a sizable instability. And we grow. I wonder
what we might have acquired this time.”
“Don’t.” Dela’s voice shivered through the com.
“We’re old hands,” came Griffin’s. A feeble laugh. “We know the rules. Don’t we?”
“O dear God,” Dela murmured.
Silence then, a long space.
And about us in the bubble, the chaos-stuff swirled and crawled and blotched the same as before.
“Is everyone all right?” Percivale asked then. “Do we hear everyone?”
I heard other voices, my comrades. Lance was there with Griffin; and Gawain. “Elaine’s with me,” Lynn said. “Vivien?”
Silence.
“She’s blanked,” I said. “I’m going.”
“Vivien,” I heard over com, again and again. I felt my way, hand-over-handed my way from the bubble to the ladder and to the bridge ... across it, through the U where Modred and Percivale were at work. “I’m after Vivien,” I said.
“Gawain’s on the same track,” Percivale said, half rising. “She was at her station when it hit—”
I ran, staggered, breaking rules ... but Viv was weakest of us, the most frightened. I had to wait on the lift because Gawain had gotten there first; I rode it up to the uppermost corridors, floors/ceilings with dual orientation, dual switches, that crazy place where the Maid’s geometries were most alien, where Vivien worked in her solitary makeshift lab. I made the inner doors, and there was Lancelot and there was Gawain before me. They knelt over Viv, who lay on the floor in a tuck, her eyes open, her hair immaculate, her suit impeccable; her hands were clenched before her mouth and her eyes just stared as if they saw something indescribable.
They were afraid to touch her. I was. It was not like blanking, this. It was like the wombs. It was—not; because what Viv saw, she went on seeing, endlessly, like a tape frozen-framed.
“Viv,” Lance said, looked at me as if I should have some hope neither of them did. I sank down. I touched her, and all her muscles were hard.
“It’s your fault,” Gawain said, a strained voice. “It’s your fault. That tape of yours—that tape—”
It was Lance he meant. Gawain’s face was the color of Viv’s. His eyes flickered, jerked, searched for something as if he could not get enough air.
“It was my tape,” I said. “Mine. And Viv that stole it. Wasn’t it? But it’s nonsense. It’s not important. It’s—”
“Viv is lost,” Gawain said.
“Lance. Lance, pick her up. I’ll find a blanket.”
He took Viv’s wrist, but there was no relaxing her arms. He lifted her by that limb, got his arms under her, his other arm beneath her knees, and gathered her to him. I scrambled up. “Just get her out of here,” Gawain said. “Let’s just get her out.”
“How is she?” That was Percivale, on com. “Is she all right?”
“She’s blanked out,” I said, looking up at the pickup, above all the eerie tubes and lines and vats and tanks and glare of lights. “We’ve got her. We’re coming down.”
And then the hammering started again.
Not where it had been. But close.
Up here. Above.
“Oh no,” I said, above the chaos of com throughout the ship. “Oh no.”
It was more than here. It was at our side. It was at our bow. We were attacked at all points of the ship.
“Something might have come loose,” Lance murmured, standing, holding Viv’s rigid body in his arms.
“No,” Gawain said, calmly enough. “No. I don’t think so. Get her to quarters, Lance. Let’s get out of here and seal the door.”
XII
... Why, Gawain, when he came
With Modred hither in the summertime
Ask’d me to tilt with him, the proven knight.
Modred for want of worthier was the judge.
Then I so shook him in the saddle, he said
“Thou has half prevail’d against me,” said so—he—
Tho’ Modred biting his thin lips was mute,
For he is always sullen: what care I?
So we came down to main level and got out to take the downside lift—Gawain and I, and Lance carrying Vivien’s rigid weight. Not a flicker from Viv. I stroked her hair and talked to her the while, and Gawain talked to her, but there was nothing.
Only when we had come out into the corridor, lady Dela was there to meet us, on her feet and about as if we had not been hurled who-knew-where. “Bring her to my rooms,” Dela said. “I won’t have her wake alone down there.”
So we brought her to Dela’s own apartments, to lay her down on one of the couches in the sitting room; but:
“The bed,” Dela insisted, to our shock. “That’s easiest for her.”
Surely, I thought, when Lance had let Vivien down there amid the satin sheets, surely if there was a place Vivien would come out of her blank, this was it—in such utmost luxury, in such renewed favor. I knelt down there at the bedside and patted Viv’s face and chafed her stiff hands. “Vivien,” I said, “Viv, it’s Elaine. You’re in my lady’s quarters and my lady’s asking after you. You’re in her own bed and it’s safe, you understand me?”
I doubted that anything reached her. Her eyes kept staring, and that was not good. They would be damaged. I closed them, as if she were dead. In a moment more they opened again.
“Vivien,” I said, “you’re in Dela’s bedroom.”
A blink. I got that much out of her, which was much, considering—but nothing more. Outside, from many points of the ship now, I could hear the hammering.
And Vivien had chosen her refuge from it.
I got up from my knees and looked back toward the door into the sitting room, where a door had opened. Griffin had come in; I heard his voice; and Gawain had gone out there. Lance waited for me, and I went with him to join the others—my lady, and Griffin.
“She won’t respond,” I said very quietly when my lady looked to me for a report, “but her reflexes are back.—It takes time, sometimes.”
“I don’t understand you,” Dela said in distress. Us, she meant, compared to born-men. “Why do you do that?”
“We aren’t supposed to—” I started to say, and the words locked up in my throat the way things would that weren’t supposed to be talked about.—We aren’t supposed to do things for ourselves, I wanted to say; and blanking’s all that’s left. She had wanted to do something, Vivien had, but she was made, not born, so she had no way out. Alone. Viv was always alone, even with us.
“Don’t any of the rest of you do that,” Dela said. “You hear me? Don’t you do that.”
“No, lady,” Lance said with such absolute assurance it seemed to touch both our born-men, while all about us the hammering continued.
On all sides of us now. So all the preparations we had made, every defense Griffin had planned—all of that was hopeless now.
“Call the others to the dining hall,” Griffin said. “I want to talk to them.”
“Yes, sir,” Gawain said, and went.
So Griffin thought that there was reassurance to give us. O born-man, I thought, we aren’t like Vivien. We’ll go on working now we know the rules, because we know we have work to do for you. You don’t have to reach so far to find us hope.
But seeing Vivien cave in as she had done, Griffin believed he had to come up with something for the rest of us. He looked so distressed himself that it touched me to the heart. It was Dela that went to him and held his hand. And Lance just stood there.
“Ah!”
Vivien’s voice. A terrible sound, a shriek.
I spun about and flew into the bedroom. There was Vivien wide awake and sitting up as if from some nightmare, the covers clutched to her breast and that same stark horror in her eyes, but waking now.
“It’s all right,” I lied to her fervently, coming through the door. I ran to her and caught her hands which held the sheets and I shook at her. “Viv, come out of it. You’re in Dela’s room, you’re safe. It can’t come here.”
“Can’t it?” He
r teeth chattered. Her hair was mussed, trailing about her face. She gave a wrench to get away from me and I let go. Then she looked beyond me at the others who had come in. I looked around. My lady was there, foremost, and Griffin and Lance. “It’s coming through up there,” Vivien said. “Right into the lifesupport.”
“Maybe we could move the equipment down,” Dela said.
Griffin said nothing. Nor did Lance or I, probably all thinking the same.
“It’s making those things all around us,” Vivien said. “Until it has its tendrils into us and we’re done. Nothing we do is working.”
“We lose the tanks if it gets in there,” Griffin said.
“And then we lose everything,” Dela said. “We have to move the lab.”
“No,” Griffin said. “Come on. Let’s go talk to the others.”
He took Dela with him. I delayed, with Lance, to see to Vivien, who sat amid the bed with her head fallen into her hands. She swept her hair back, then, adjusted pins, beginning to fuss over herself, which was one of her profoundest reflexes. She could be dying, I thought, and still she would do that. For a moment I felt deeply sorry for Viv.
“Shut up,” she said then, when I had said nothing. “Let me alone.” She had a way of rewarding sympathy.
“Vivien,” Lance said, “get up and come with us.”
That was asking for it, giving Viv orders.
“Or we leave you here,” I added.
Alone. Vivien got out of bed then, fussed with her suit and brushed at imaginary dirt. Lance held out his hand for her arm, but she pointedly ignored that and walked out ahead of us.
“We’re due in the dining hall,” I said, being kind, because Viv would have no idea where we were supposed to go and would have had to wait on us otherwise, outside, a damage to her dignity. So she went on ahead of us without a thank you, click, click, click of the trim heels and sway of the elegant posterior and still fussing about her hairpins.
O Viv, I thought with deepest pity, because Lance gave me his strong hand and we walked together; but Viv walked all alone. She was made that way. There was none of us as solitary as Vivien.
Alternate Realities Page 14