Alternate Realities (14 page)

Watch yourself, said I to Griffin, absent. Watch yourself, born-man, when you begin to take the
Maid
away from my lady.—But she had already lost it; and maybe it was that which had so broken Dela’s spirit, that the
Maid
which had been so beautiful and so free, which had been Dela Kirn herself in some strange metaphysical connection ... was held here and smashed and broken, and now threatened with further erosions. I perceived pain, and held to Dela’s hand, minded to go on pouring her drinks and to stay here until she could sleep, whatever the infernal hammering meant out there.

I mean, Dela had never cared for the running of the ship, just that it did run, and she had bought Gawain and the others and they were good, the very best: that was her pride. Her money bought the best and it worked and she gave the orders and the ship ran ... all magical. She had not the least idea how it all worked, far less idea than I did, who lived with the crew. And now Griffin, who claimed to do a little piloting himself insystem ... just walked in and took them over; and Dela couldn’t fight any longer. We were pinned here ... I think that was the most horrible thing to her, that whatever we did, however we fought, there was never any hope, and while that was true, she had no spirit left at all.

“Call Lance,” she said.

My heart stopped. I opened my mouth to babble some excuse on his behalf: he can’t, he can’t, I thought; but there was no excuse that would hide the truth, and perhaps—perhaps with her—I nodded, rose and went out to the com, pushed 21, the crew quarters. “Lance,” I said. “Lance.”

“Yes?” the answer came.

“My lady wants you in her quarters.”

A silence. “Yes,” he said plainly. It was all that had to be said. And very quietly I slipped away out the door, because all that I could do was done.

O Griffin, I thought, you never walk out on my lady; you didn’t know that. But you will. And more than that, you’re doing things your own way, and she’ll never bear with that, not where it touches the
Maid
. Not in that.

But for Lance—for him I was mortally afraid.

I didn’t want to go down the lift. I might meet Lance there, coming up, and that was not a meeting I wanted. The knell still rang against the hull, insane hammering that grew loud and soft by turns. I avoided the lift, kept to the main corridor, that took me back to the vicinity of the bridge, where I was not supposed to be, by Griffin’s order.

Viv was there, just standing, where she could see in the open door, her hands locked together in an attitude of worry. I startled her, being there, and she scowled and looked back to the bridge.

“What are they up to?” I asked.

“What would you know?” she said. That was Viv. Her old self, worried as she was.

I edged up into the doorway. The main screen was off, but they had a clear image on some. I stood there and stared at our neighbors.

Tubes.
Tubes, Griffin had said, and there were, everywhere. At every point a wreck contacted the wheel, the station, whatever it was that had snared us ... tubes like some kind of obscene parasites that sucked the life from them. Tubes between the ships, as if the growth had pierced them and kept going. The wounds I had thought to have seen, holes in the ships themselves through which the light bled ... some of those were not: some of those holes had been the arch of those tubes, against the chaos-stuff that was measled black in the still picture. They were huge, those structures, big enough for access, and irregular in their shapes, like many-branched snakes, like veins and arteries growing out of this thing we had snuggled up to and growing us to its body.

It didn’t take much guesswork now to know what was proceeding out there with all those noises. Or why we were stuck fast. There’s a thing I’d seen on vid, an access box, and they use it when there’s some emergency ... Hobson’s Bridge, I had heard it named. It’s a tube and two very powerful pressure gates; and they use it in shipboard disasters when ships have to be boarded and suits aren’t sufficient to get people off. You rig it at one side and ride it across; you lock on with the magnetic grapple and you make the seal. You cut through. You’re in.

Sometimes I wished I listened to fewer tapes.

Griffin had looked around. He caught me in the doorway, fixed me with that mad blue-eyed stare of his. “Elaine. Did Dela send you?”

“She dismissed me, sir.”

He nodded, in a way that more or less accepted my presence there. I took a tentative step inside. Noticed by a born-man, one doesn’t vanish when his back is turned. Griffin walked the length of the U at controls, stopped by Modred and looked back again at me. “You understand what we’ve got here?”

I swallowed against the tightness in my throat and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“How’s Dela taking this?”

She had told me to take Griffin’s orders, even if she really didn’t want me to; and I stood confused, not knowing what I owed where; but I’m high-order, and I don’t blank in choices. “I think she’s scared, sir; and I don’t think she wants to think about it for a while.”

That at least was the truth; and it kept Lance out of it. I didn’t want Griffin dashing back there to comfort Dela, not now, no.

Griffin ran a hand through his pretty golden hair, and he leaned standing against the chair absent Percy used, looking mortally tired. I felt sorry for him then, and I was not in the habit of feeling sorry for Griffin. He was trying. He had sent Lynn and Percy to rest; and Lance and Viv ... even if no one was able to. He tried to solve this thing. So did the crew ... fighting for the
Maid
, even if Dela saw no hope in it.

“You know what a Bridge is?” he asked. “Ship to ship?”

I nodded.

“And Dela—what does she say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But she would understand if she saw that.”

He looked still very tired. Looked around at all of us, Gawain and Modred, and back to me. “You’re good,” he said. “You’re very good.”

I made a kind of bow of the head, pleased to be told that, even by a stranger. We knew our worth; but it was still good to hear.

“What they’re doing,” Griffin said, and all at once I was conscious that the hammering had stilled for a while, “is linking into all those ships. That means that something’s been alive and doing that a long, long time.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, contemplating the age of those ships that had come here before us. I looked round the control center, a nervous gesture, missing the sound. “It doesn’t take long to set up a Bridge, does it?”

“No,” Griffin said. “But I daresay they’re jury-rigging. They. It. We have to do something to stop it. You understand that. When you talk to Dela—” He spoke very, very softly, in conspiracy. “When you talk to her, believe that. Protest it in her ear. For her sake. It’s your duty, isn’t it?—Where’s Lance?”

I must have flinched. “Below, sir.” We can lie, in duty. He looked at me—he could not have suspected when he asked that question; me, with my face—he had to suspect something behind that flinching, had to think, and know why one of us would lie, and for whom.

“When you see him,” he said, ever so quietly, only that tired look on his face, “tell him I’ll see the whole staff up here at 1000 this morning. I want to talk to all of you at once. And keep it quiet. I don’t want to frighten Dela. You understand that.”

I nodded. He walked away himself, his hands locked behind him, and stopped and looked at the screens. I stood there, while Modred and Gawain consulted and did things with the comp that showed up in the image on the screens.

It looked uglier and uglier, defined, where before the bleeding smears of light had masked all detail. It took on colors, greens and blues. Finally Griffin walked over to the side and looked at Gawain and Modred. “You’ve got that inventory search run.”

“Yes,” Modred said, and reached and picked up a handful of printout. Griffin took it. The hammering started again, and even Modred reacted to it, a human glance at the walls about us. Griffin swore, shook his head.

“Go get some rest,” he told them. “I’m doing the same.”

He started away then, and I moved out of the doorway, to show respect when a born-man wanted past. My heart was beating very fast: com, I was thinking, I could get to com before Griffin could get to Dela’s rooms; I could think of something casual to say—something; but Griffin delayed, fixed me with a strangely sad look. “I’m going back to
my
quarters,” Griffin said.

I felt my face go hot. I stood there, he walked out, and I didn’t make the call. I walked down the corridor after him, headed my own way, for the lift that would take me down to the crew quarters.

Vivien trailed after me, maybe the others too; but I watched Griffin’s broad back, his shoulders bowed as if he were very tired, his head down, and for a moment he looked so like Lance in one of his sorrows that I found myself hurting for him.

I knew pain when I saw it. Remember ... it’s my function.

I wished I might go to him, might balance things, set it all right by magic. I walked faster, to overtake him; but my nerve failed me, with the thought that I had no instruction from Dela, and I could not side against her. Not twice. I stopped, close by the lift, and Viv pushed the button, opening the door.

Tap, the sound came against the hull. Tap-bang.

W
e fled into the crew quarters, Gawain and Modred, Vivien and I ... quietly as we could, but Lynn and Percy lifted their heads from their pillows all the same. We started taking off boots, settling down for a little rest.

“Where’s Lance?” Gawain asked, all innocent.

“Dela called,” I said, from my cot where I had lain down next Lance’s vacant one; and Gawain’s face took on an instant apprehension of things. Viv looked up from taking off her stockings. I closed my eyes and folded my hands on my middle, uncommunicative, trying to shut out the sound from the hull. It was down to a familiar pattern now ... tap-tap-tap. It grew fainter. I thought of the tubes like branching arteries. Maybe they were working somewhere farther up, at some branching. I imagined such a thing growing over the
Maid
, a basketry of veins, wrapping us about. I shuddered and tried to think of something pleasant. About the dinner table with the artificial candles aglow up and down it, dark wood set with lace and crystal and loaded with fine food and wines. I would like a glass right now, I thought. There were times when I would have gone to the gallery and stolen a bottle. I didn’t feel I should. Share and share alike, my lady had said; and the good wine was a thing we would run out of.

Supposing we lasted long enough.

There was silence. I opened my eyes.

“It stopped,” Percy said, very hushed.

“Whatever they’re doing,” Modred said, “they’ll have it done sooner or later. I’m only surprised it’s taken this long.”

“Stop it,” Vivien said, very sharp, sitting upright on her bed, and I rolled over to face them, distressed by Viv’s temper. “If you’d done your jobs,” Viv said, “we wouldn’t be in this mess. And if you did something instead of sit and talk about it we might get out.”

“Someone,” Lynn said, “might go out on the hull with a cutter.”

“In
that
?” Percy asked. That was my thought; my stomach heaved at the idea.

“I could try it,” Lynn said.

“You’re valuable,” Modred said. “The gain would be short term and the risk is out of proportion to the gain.”

Like that: Modred’s voice never varied ... like Viv’s sums and accounts. I had had another way of putting it all dammed up behind my teeth. But the crew wasn’t my business, any more than it was Viv’s.

“What are you going to do?” Viv asked. “What are you doing about this thing? Our lady depends on you to do something.”

“Let them be,” I said, and Viv looked at me, at me, Elaine, who did my lady’s hair and had no authority to talk to Vivien. “If it was your job to run the ship you could tell them what to do, but they’ve done everything right so far or we’d none of us be alive.”

“They left us grappled to this thing. Was
that
right? They
talked
to that thing instead of breaking us loose on the instant. Was that right?”

“Grappling on,” Modred said, unstoppable in locating an inaccuracy, “was correct. We would have damaged the hull had we kept drifting.”

“And talking to it?”

“Let them be,” I said, because that argument had bit them: I saw that it had. “Maybe it was right to do. Wasn’t that our lady’s to decide, and didn’t she?”

“Griffin,”
Viv said. “Griffin decides things. And he wouldn’t be deciding them if the crew’s incompetency hadn’t dropped us into this. We were in the middle of the system. You can’t jump from the middle of the system. And they did it to us, getting us into this.”

“We were pulled in,” Gawain said. “There wasn’t any warning. No evasion possible.”

“For
you
. Maybe if you were competent there’d have been another answer.”

That was Vivien at her old self again: she did it in the house at Brahmani Dali and sent some of the servants into blank. Now she tried it on the crew. I sat up, shivering inside. “Maybe if Viv’s hydroponics don’t work out,
she
can go out on the hull,” I said. It was cruel. Deliberately. It left me shivering worse than ever, all my psych-sets in disarray. But it shut Viv down. Her face went white. “I think,” I said between waves of nausea my psych-sets gave me, “you’ve done all the right things. So it breaks through. It would do it anyway; and so you’ve talked to it: would it be different if we hadn’t? And so it’s got us; would we be better off if we’d slid around over the surface until we made a dozen holes it could get in, and it grappled us anyway?”

They looked at me like so many flowers to the sun. Percy and Gawain and Lynn looked grateful. “No,” Modred said neatly, “the situation would be much the same.”