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Gawain was tired. His eyes were terrible. So were Modred’s, like black pits. They had been in their day cycle and had been through more than a day now. They ended by deciding perhaps they should stay up in controls after all, all of them—in case the alarms didn’t function dependably. “Until we see,” Modred said. So I brought up mats and pillows and blankets for the four of them and they bedded down up there.
Vivien—Viv was asleep too, busy deepstudying, locked into that tape that would make her useful again, after which time she would likely have a thousand orders to give us all. Lance was somewhere repairing damages and cleaning up, where unsecured items had smashed into walls, or unbraced chairs made wreckage of themselves. Not technical things, but such things as we could do.
Griffin called me, wanting two suppers in my lady’s quarters, so I went to the galley and fixed all he asked for ... he and my lady, who consoled each other, who had been consoling each other all afternoon of that quick/slow day. Well enough. It put no demands on us, tired as we were. I carried the trays up in a carrier and walked in with them, very quietly, into the sitting room.
I walked farther, cautiously, and I could see the big blue bed and them tangled in the middle of it, golden blond Griffin and my pale blonde lady, pink to his gold, and white, and her braids all undone in a net about them. They made love. I waited, waited longer, finally put the carrier on the mobile table and quietly as I could I eased it through the door, just to leave it where they could have it when they wanted. They never noticed my being there, or they ignored it, lost in each other, and very quietly I left and closed all the doors behind me, downcast with my own aches and pains and where we were and what hopelessness we had of doing something about it.
Sleep, I thought. I was due my rest, finally; and overdue.
And I was right outside the library.
I came in very quietly. Viv was on the couch, limp in deepsleep. She chose to do her deepstudy in the library, maybe not to bother those of us who wanted to talk in the crew quarters, but such extreme consideration was not Viv’s style. It was more, I figured, out of fear of being supplanted; she wanted no rivals who could do what she could do, and she didn’t want that tape in our hands.
The lights were low. I could have slapped her face and not roused her, but all the same I kept very quiet picking out the tape Iwanted. I slipped it into my jacket and went out again, trusting Modred would cover for me when he must. Ah! I wanted the deepsleep.
I walked down the corridor to the main hall, and the lift and so down to the crew quarters with my treasure. I undressed and bathed and in my robe set up the unit on the couch, attached the sensor leads, took the drug—thinking with melancholy that we would run out, someday—not of the tapes but of the drug that made them more intense; that when my lady thought of that ... we would lose our supply, and she would not be long in thinking of it. It was only fair, perhaps, because we could sink into the tapes and the dreams so much more easily than born-men. I felt a guilt that had nothing to do with my tape-pilfering: I stole my lady’s dreams. It was selfish, and bothered my psych-sets; but I rationalized it, that she had notforbidden 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 ru
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 ru
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 co
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 just seen something else, yearning after that other Lancelot as I did after that other Elaine, who was absolute in love, and who was so much that I was not made to be. What was Lance’s other self that hewas not? Much, that no lab-born was ever made to be.
I wiped the last trace of tears from off his face and he did not blink. I leaned close and kissed him again.