Alternate Realities (15 page)

Viv could scare them. She could scare anyone. She had my lady’s ear ... at least she had had it when she did the accounts; and she had that reputation. But so did I have Dela’s ear. And I would say things if Vivien did. I had that much courage. Dela’s temper could
make
the crew make mistakes. She could order them to do things that might endanger all of us. She could order Lynn out on the hull. Or other dangerous things.

“We’re supposed to be resting,” I said. “It’s against orders to be disturbing the crew.”

“Oh. Orders,” Viv said. “Orders ... from someone who skulks about stealing. I know who gets tapes they’re not supposed to have. Born-man tapes. I suppose you think that gives you license to tell us all how it is.”

“They might do you good.
Imagination
, Viv. Not everything comes in sums.”

That capped it. I saw the look she gave me. O misery, I thought. We don’t hate like born-men, perhaps, but we know about protecting ourselves. And perhaps she couldn’t harm me: her psych-set would stop that. But she would undermine me at the first chance. I was never good at that kind of politics. But Viv was.

It didn’t help my sleep. I was licensed to have that tape, I thought; I was justified. My lady
knew
, at least in general, that I pilfered the library. It was all tacit. But if Vivien made an issue, got that cut off—

I had something else to be scared of, though I persuaded myself it was all empty. Bluff and bluster. Viv could not go at that angle; knew already it would never work.

But she would suggest me for every miserable duty my lady thought of. She would do that, beyond a doubt.

The hammering started up again, tap, tap, tap, and that hardly helped my peace of mind either. We quarreled over blame, and
it
meanwhile just worked away. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling, shut them with a deliberate effort.

Everyone settled down then, even Vivien, but I reckoned there was not much sleeping done, but perhaps by Modred, who lacked nerves as he lacked sex.

I drowsed a little finally, on and off between the hammerings. And eventually Lance came back—quietly, respecting our supposed sleep, not brightening the lights. He went to his locker, undressed, went to the bath, and when he had come back in his robe he lay down on his bed next to me and stared at the ceiling.

I turned over to face him. He turned his head and looked at me. The pain was gone. It could not then have gone so badly; and that hurt, in some vague way, atop everything else.

I got up and came around and sat on the side of his bed. He gave me his hand and squeezed my fingers, seeming more at peace with himself than he had been. “I was not,” he said, “what I was, but I was all right. I was all right, Elaine.”

Someone else stirred; his eyes went to that. I bent down and kissed him on the brow, and his eyes came back to me. His hand pressed mine again, innocent of his difficulties.

“Griffin knows,” I warned him. I don’t know why it slipped out then, then of all times, when it could have waited, but my mind was full of Griffin and dangers and all our troubles, and it just spilled. He looked up at me with his eyes suddenly full of shock. And hurt. I shivered, that I had done such a thing, hurt someone for the second time, and this time in the haste of the hour.

“They quarreled,” I said, walking deeper into it. “Lance, we’re supposed to help him ... you understand ... with the ship. Lady Dela says so. That we’re to help. She’s afraid, and there’s something going on—” The hammering stopped again. This time the silence oppressed me, and a cold breeze from the vents poured over my skin. I put my hands on Lance’s sides, and he put his on my shoulders, for comfort. There was dread in his face now, like a contagion. “Bridges,” I said. “Whatever-it-is means to use a Bridge to get to us. All the other ships ... have tubes going in and out of them. They’ve seen it ... the crew ... when they fined down the pictures on the bridge. That’s what that hammering is out there.”

He absorbed that a moment, saying nothing.

“Lady Dela’s not to know yet,” I said. “Griffin doesn’t want to frighten her.”

Lance nodded slightly. “I understand that.” He lay there thinking and staring through me, and what his thoughts were I tried to guess—I reckoned they moved somewhere between what was working at us out there and what small happiness I had destroyed for him.

“What are we going to do about it?” he asked finally.

“We’re supposed to be back up on the bridge at 1000. All of us. I think Griffin’s got something in mind. I hope so.”

“It’s after 0800, isn’t it?”

I turned around and looked at the clock. It was 0836. “I think I should have gotten everybody breakfast. There’s still time.”

“I don’t want it. Others might.”

“Lance, you should. Please, you should.”

He stayed quiet a moment, then got up on his elbow. “You go start it, I’ll come and help.”

I got up and started throwing on my clothes again. There was time, indeed there was time; and it was on my shoulders, to see that everyone was fed. Everyone would think of it soon, and maybe our spirits wanted that, even if our stomachs were not so willing.

It took all kinds of strength to face that thing out there, and in my mind, schedules were part of it, insisting that our world went on.

But I kept thinking all the while I rode the lift down to the galley and especially before Lance came to help me, that it was very lonely down there. The hammering was stopped now; and I was in the outermost shell of the
Maid
, so that the void was out there, just one level under my feet while I was making plates of toast and cups of coffee. I felt like I had when I had first to walk the invisible floor and teach my eyes to see—that maybe our Beast didn’t see things at all the way our senses did, and maybe it just looked through us whenever it wanted, part and parcel of the chaos-stuff.

Lance came, patted me on the shoulder and picked up the ready trays to take them where they had to go. “I’ll take those topside,” I said purposefully, meaning Dela, meaning Griffin; and I took them away from him.

He said nothing to that. Possibly he was grateful. Possibly his mind was somewhere else entirely now, on the ship, and not on Dela; but I doubted that: his psych-set didn’t make that likely.

Dela was abed, where I looked to find her. She stirred when I touched her bare shoulder, and poked her head up through a curtain of blonde hair, pushing it back to discover breakfast. “Oh,” she said, not sounding displeased. She turned over and plumped the pillows up to take it in bed. ‘Is everything all right then? It’s quiet.”’

“I think it’s given up for a while,” I lied, straight-faced and cheerfully. “I’m taking breakfasts round. May I go?”

“Go.” She waved a dismissing hand, and I went.

Griffin I found asleep too—all bent over his desk in his quarters, the comp unit still going, the papers strewn under him on the surface. “Sir,” I said, tray in hand, not touching him: I was wary of Griffin. “Sir.”

He lifted his head then, and saw me; and his eyes looked his want of sleep. I set the tray down for him and uncovered it, uncapped the coffee and gave that into his hands.

“It’s stopped,” he said.

I nodded. “Yes, sir, off and on. It’s been quiet about half an hour so far. It’s 0935, sir.”

He turned with a frown and dug into the marmalade. I took that for a dismissal on this occasion and started away.

“Have you slept, Elaine?”

I stopped. “Much as I could, sir.”

“The others?”

“Much as they could, sir.” My heart started pounding for fear he would ask about Lance or discuss my lady, and I didn’t want that. “They’ll be eating now. They’ll be on the bridge soon.”

He nodded and ate his breakfast

So we came topside at the appointed time, to the bridge. The crew took their posts; Lance and Viv and I stood. The quiet about the hull continued, the longest lapse in hours. And that quiet might mean anything ... that whatever-it-was had finished out there, that the Bridge was built and we had very little time ... or that it really had given up. But none of us believed the latter.

1005. Griffin delayed, and we waited patiently, no one saying anything about the delay, because a born-man could do what he liked when he had set the schedule. Viv found herself a place on the cushion by the door, alone, because I wasn’t about to sit by her; and Lance stood by me.

“Nothing more has come in,” Modred said after checking the records from the night. “Everything’s as it was.”

Transmissions, he meant. All around us the screens showed the old images, the unrefined images, just the glare and the light, the slow creep of measled red and black shading off to purples and greens.

There were footsteps in the corridor outside. Griffin arrived, and Dela was with him, in her lacy nightclothes, her hair twisted up and pinned the way she would do when I wasn’t convenient to do it in its braids.

She looked us all up and down, and looked round the bridge, and Viv and the crew rose from their places and stood respectfully—as if she had just come aboard, as if she had just come here for the first time. As if—I don’t know why. Neither, perhaps, did the others, only it was a respect, a kind of tenderness.

She looked around a moment at things I knew she couldn’t read, at instruments she didn’t know, at screens that showed only bad news, but not the worst. And she kept her hands clasped in front of her, fingers locked, and looked again at all of us. All of us. And Lance: her eyes lingered on him; and then on Gawain. “Griffin has talked to me,” she said after a moment. “And he wants to fight this thing, whatever it is. And he wants you to help him. You have to. I see that ... that if it tries to get in, someday it’s going to. And that means fighting it. Do you think you can?”

We nodded, all of us. We had no real compunction about it, at least I didn’t, small damage that I could do anything because it threatened our lady; and it wasn’t its feelings we were asked to hurt.

“You do that,” Dela said, and walked away.

And out the door, past Viv. Very small and sad, and frightened.

I wanted to run after her; I looked at Griffin instead, because we had our orders, and on Griffin’s face too there was such an expression of pain for our lady—I looked at Lance, and it was the same. And Gawain and Percy and Lynn. Only Vivien scowled; and Modred had no expression at all.

Griffin made a move of his hand, walked to the counter where he could face all of us at once. “Here it is,” Griffin said. “They
are
going to get in. Maybe they’ll come in suits and blow our lifesupport entirely, and rearrange it all, because they need something else. They could be some other ship who’s trying to survive here and doesn’t mind killing us. But I don’t think so. The tunnels are general; they’re everywhere. And that points to the wheel itself. The station. Whatever it is we’re attached to. I’ve talked to Dela about it. There’s no gun aboard; but we’re going to have to set up some kind of a defense. If they blow one compartment, we can seal it off, so we’ll just redraw the line of defense. But they’re going at it so slowly ... I think it’s more deliberate than that. They’ve done it—to all the ships. And maybe time isn’t important to it. To them. Whatever.” He looked from one to the other of us. “What we can’t have is someone panicking and blanking out at the wrong time. If you don’t think you
can
fight, tell me now. Even if you’re not sure.”

No one spoke.

“Can you, then?” he asked.

“We’re high order,” Gawain said, “and we don’t tend to panic, sir. We haven’t yet.”

“You haven’t had to kill anything. You haven’t come under attack.”

That posed things to think about.

“We can,” Lynette said.

Griffin nodded. “You find weapons,” he said. “Cutting torches and anything that could do damage. Knives. If any of those decorations in the dining hall have sound metal in them—those. Whatever we’ve got that can keep something a little farther away from us.”

So we went, scouring the ship.

I
t was one of those
long
days. We scoured about the ship in paranoid fancy, cataloguing this and that item that might be sufficiently deadly.

Of course, the galley. That place proved full of horrors.

And the machine shop, I reckoned: the crew spent a long time down there making lists.

And of course the weapons in the dining hall and Dela’s rooms. They were real. And it was time to take them down.

That was Viv and I. I stood on the chairs and unscrewed brackets and braces while Viv criticized the operation and received the spears and the swords below. And my lady sat abed, so that I earnestly tried to muffle any rattle of metal against the woodwork, moving very slowly when I would turn and hand a piece to Viv, who was likewise quiet setting it down.

I thought about the banners, whether we should have them; the great red and blue and gold lion; the bright yellow one with green moons; the blue one with the white tree; and all the others. And I thought of the stories, and it seemed important, if we had the one we should have the other—at least the lion, that was so gaudy brave.

“That’s not part of it,” Vivien said when I attacked the braces.

“Oh, but it is,” I said. I knew. And Viv stood there scowling. I handed it toward her.

“It’s
stupid
. It doesn’t do anything.”

“Just take it.”

“I’m not under your orders.”

“Quiet.”

“
Who’s
quiet? Put that back and get down off the chair.”