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“It does no good,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said, and I didn’t. I just held him and hurt for him like my own heart was breaking, because they made me that way, my psych-set was involved, and I couldn’t help him. “It’s a very old story,” I whispered, prattling on because I knew his whole reality was upset and I had to make it make sense to him or he was in trouble. “It’s the lady’s fancy, that tape; and so she named us what she did when she bought us, and maybe there’s a little truth in the names—because she did think about which she gave to whom, after all, and she’sread our psych-sets—But it’s a joke, Lance, it’s our lady’s joke, a play, a thing from very long ago and some world with nothing to do with ours. You understand that? It’s not ours. The Maidis just a dream Dela takes up when she’s bored. You’ve always known that, and it’s always true. How long have you been with her?”
“Twenty years.”
And me with my five, I was going to tell him what truth was. That long he had belonged to her: I had had no idea it could have been so many years, or I had never added it up and thought. Thirty-six. He had been sixteen when he came to her. That long he had been fixed on her, and Dela was all his life ... always Dela, Dela, like some guidance star his whole self was locked onto. Lover after lover she took—but Lance was always waiting when love was done.
Love—not us. Ours was a tape-fixed complex of compulsions and avoidances; pain if we turned away from our duty ... pain, and guilt; and this horrible twisting inside, at any thought of losing what we were fixed to, and created to do.
And there was deep irony in it all, because Elaine—the real Elaine, the one realer than I—had destroyed herself trying to turn Lancelot’s love to herself, when it was fixed on Guinevere: she had to try, because in the story Elaine was fixed on him and he on his lady, and that made sense within my frame of reference. I was not supposed to fix on him, but pain always went straight to my gut and made me try to stop it; and he had the most pain of anyone aboard.
That was what had happened to me when I saw him hurting like this. And because I had done this to him myself, that settled a horrible guilt on me. I lay there thinking desperately that maybe I ought to get up and go to our lady and tell her what I had done, but that was bound to bring down one of her rages, and I didn’t see how it could help Lance either. The last thing he wanted, I was sure, was for Dela to find out how much he knew or that he had failed with me just now.
I had a sense of empathy: it was my training; and I put myself in Lance’s place, who had always to endure these voyages in which the rest of us took pleasure, endure them and wait for Dela to tire of her new lovers and to come back to him, which she always had. But there was no coming back from this voyage; and Griffin was not getting off the ship, ever. Where that led in Lance’s poor mind, I was afraid to follow. I remembered how strong he was, and I knew how desperate he was, and I knew that Griffin was both strong himself and could get desperate as this place fretted at him—and that scared me beyond wanting to think about it. One of us could never raise a hand to a born-man. An avoidance was built into us which would send us hurtling into blank long before the hand left our side.
But Griffin was dangerous. My lady had always fancied dangerous men, because there was very little in this world she could not control or predict, and she liked her games wild and enjoyed a certain feeling of risk.
It had never occurred to me before that Lance himself was dangerous. He had been there too long, too quietly, was too much one of us, bowing his head, taking even blows, accepting the worst that ever my lady’s associates chose to do—
My lady chose dangerous men, and this one had been with her for twenty years, pretty as he was, and while it was always Modred strangers stepped aside for, with his dark and cold face—
Something had snapped in Lance. Maybe it would heal. Maybe like Vivien, who had gone in a single day from managing my lady’s accounts to being in charge of the hydroponics which were going to keep us all alive, he would do some kind of transference and pull himself out of it. He still shivered now and again, and the look on his face stopped being pain and became a lock-jawed stare at the ceiling. He blinked sometimes, so it was not a blank; and the eyes were lively, so he was thinking, in that place inside his skull to which he had gone. But his face that had always been sad was something else now, as if there had been some harsh wind blowing that he was staring into, and I was not even there.
I never was, for him. That part of the story was true.
And finally he decided he would stop thinking about whatever it was, and he got up and got dressed, while I decided I had better take the tape and hide it somewhere until I could get it to Modred, before something worse happened.
“Don’t,” Lance said, holding my hand with the tape in it.
“It’s got to go back. I’ll take it to Modred.”
“He can run a copy. Can’t he?” He took the tape from me. Heput it away, in his locker. I stood watching and reckoning that he was caught in it now like I was. He would listen to it again, and it would become his as it was mine. I shared it now, like it or not.
“I wish you’d asked before coming in on me,” I said.
He turned and lifted his hand to my face, touched my cheek. It was a strange gesture, for him. I could see him doing it to Dela. Then he hugged me against him like the old friend I was to him. “Don’t tell her I couldn’t,” he asked of me.
“Of course I won’t,” I said. “Bed with me and sleep a while. It’ll be different. You’re tired, that’s all.”
But it wasn’t different, and then I was really frightened for him; and I knew that he was scared. There began to be an even worse look on his face, that was not merely sadness, but torment, and worse still for the likes of us—anger.
He was gone the next morning, after breakfast. The whole ship was about such routine as existed in such circumstances, the crew trying to get their own equipment into order, checking out things that they knew how to do, and there had been no emergencies. Dela took to her bed again, and Griffin stayed mostly about the sitting room, what time he was not poking into things about the control room, the monitor station, and the observation dome, bedeviling the crew with worry over what he might do—grim and scowling all the while, with Dela taking pills for her nerves. A second day in this place, all too much as novel as the first, any time anyone wanted to look at the horror on the screens, and watch the acid light eating through our neighbors, or to look out on that vast dead wheel which held us all to its mass. Dela called for that tape, and my heart stopped; but the original, at least, was back where it belonged: Lance had seen to that, so we were safe. And soon my lady slept the deepsleep, lost in the dream.
Vivien was up and about her new business, keeping Percivale busy finding this and that for her out of storage. She had appropriated a large space topside, a private queendom into which she had brought loads of stored tanks and pipe and electronics over which Percivale sweated. So all of us were accounted for.
Except Lance, to Vivien’s extreme pique.
There was no one else who had reason to think anything might be amiss. He might even be off about the lady’s instructions. And Modred or others of the crew might know where he was, since he must have been on the bridge getting that duplicate tape run sometime around breakfast ... but I was afraid to ask questions and make much of his absence.
I searched ... quietly, between duties I had to do, between fetching Vivien this and that. And I found him finally, in almost the last place I thought to look before starting on the topside holds ... in the gym that lay bow-ward of the galley, all by himself, drenched in sweat despite the cold in there.