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Misery, I thought. And Lance just lay there in the dark looking at me.
“It happens to born-men too,” I said. I knew that, and maybe he didn’t. He had been more sheltered, in his way. “They’re more complicated than we are, and they get this a lot, this trouble; but they get over it.”
He shivered, and I knew he was caught somewhere in his own psych-sets, where I couldn’t truly help him, and he wasn’t about to discuss it. There was no reasonfor Lance, I thought. The lady and Griffin, and when it turned out that this voyage wasn’t ending, ever, then that was it for Lancelot, done, over. He cared for nothing else in all existence but my lady; and when he was shut away from her, that was when he—
—heard the story in the tape, and learned what the meaning of my lady’s fancy was, and what he was named for, and he began to dream of being that dream of hers. That thought came to me while we lay there in the dark. And there was a great hollowness in me, knowing that. Lance had found himself a kind of purpose, but I had nothing like his, that touched his central psych-sets. Being just Elaine, a minor player in the tape, I was meant to do nothing but keep Lance entertained when my lady was otherwise occupied, and to do my lady’s hair and to look decorative, and nothing more, nothing more.
Our purposes are always small. We’re small people, pale copies, filled with tapes and erasable. But something had begun to burn in Lance that had more complicated reasons; and I was afraid—not for myself, not really for myself, I kept reasoning in my heart, although that was part of my general terror. We should live as long as we liked. The lady had promised us, ignoring that thing out there, ignoring the uncertainties which had settled on us ... like growing old. Like our minds growing more and more complicated just by living, until we grew confused beyond remedy. We were promised life. The thing out there in the dark, the chaos waiting whenever we might grow confused enough to let our senses slip back into the old way of seeing—this living with death so close to us, was that different than our lives ever were? And didn’t born-men themselves live that way, when they deliberately took chances?
It was just that our death talked to us through the hull, had called us on com, had tapped the hull this evening just to let us know that he was still there. Death, not an erasing; not the white room where they take you at the end.
We’re already dying, my lady had insisted once; and my mind kept wandering back to that. I looked into Lance’s troubled eyes and sniffed, thinking that at least we were going to die like born-men, and have ourselves a fight with our Death, like in the fables.
Thermopylae. Roland at the pass. When it got to us we would blow the horns and meet it head on. But that was in the fables.
I began to think of other parts of the story, Lancelot’s part, how he had to be brave and be the strongest of all.
And of what the rest of us must be.
Lance slept for a while, and I snuggled up under his chin and slept too, happy for a while, although I couldn’t have said why ... something as inexplicable as psych-set, except that it was a nice place to be, and I found it strange that even in his sleep he held onto me, not the closeness we take for warmth, and far from sex too ... just that it was nice, and it was something—
—like in the tape, I thought. I wondered who I was to him. I reckoned I knew. And being only Elaine, I took what small things I could get. Even that gave me courage. I slept.
Then the hammering started again on the hull.
I tensed, waking. Lance sat up, and we held onto each other, while all about us the others were waking too. It wasn’t the patterned hammering we had heard before. It came randomly and loud.
Gawain piled out of bed and the rest of us were hardly slower, excepting Vivien, who sat there clutching her sheet to her chest in the semidark and looking when the lights came on as if it was all going to be too much for her.
But she moved, grabbed for her clothes and started dressing. Modred was out the door first, and Percy after him; and Gawain and Lynette right behind them. Lance and I stopped at least to throw our clothes on and then ran for it, leaving Viv to follow as she could.
We ran, the last bit from the lift, breathless, down the corridor to the bridge. The crew had found their places. My lady and Griffin were there, both in their robes, and my lady at least looked grateful that we two had shown up. I went and gave her my hand, and Lance stood near me—not that presumptuous, not with one of my lady’s lovers holding the other.
“They say it’s the same place as before,” Dela informed us as Vivien showed up and delayed by the door. “But it doesn’t sound like a signal.”
It sounded like someone working on the other side of the hull, to me. Tap. Bang. And long pauses.
The crew was talking frantically among themselves—Modred and Percy answering questions from Ly
Only my lady Dela stood there shivering, and went over to a bench and sat down. I sat down and put my arms about her, and Lance hovered helplessly by while I tried to keep her warm in her nightgown. She was crying. I had never seen Dela cry like this. She was scared and trembling and it was contagious.
“Give us vid,” Griffin was saying. “Let’s see if we can’t figure out what happened to the rest of the ships around us. See if they’re breached in some way.”
Vid came on, all measled red and glare, shading off to greens and purples where some object was. “Forward floods,” Modred said “Wayne.”
“Just let it alone,” Dela snapped. “Let it be. If we start turning the lights on and looking round out there we’ll encourage it.”
Modred stopped. So did Gawain.
“Do it,” Griffin said. And when they did nothing: “Dela, what are we going to do, wait for it?”
“That’s all we can do, isn’t it?”’
“It’s not all I choose to do. We’re going to fight that thing if it has to be.”
“For what good?”
“Because I’m not sitting here waiting for it.”
“And you encourage it and it gets to us—”
“We still have a chance when we know it’s coming.—Put the floods on,” he said to Gawain.
Gawain looked at Dela. “We think the sound is coming from inside the wheel ... not one of the smaller ships: from where we contact the torus.”
Dela just shivered where she sat, between us; and Viv hovered near the door, frozen.
“Dela,” Griffin said, “go on back to bed. Give the order and go back to bed. Nothing’s going to happen. We look and get some clear images of where it’s coming from, that’s all.”
Dela gave the order, a wave of her hand. The floods went on and played over blacknesses that were other ships. We sat staring into that black and red chaos, at ships bleeding light through their wounds. Dela turned her face into my shoulder and I locked my arms about her as tightly as I could, stared helplessly into that place that I remembered of a sudden, that chaos senses had to forget the moment it stopped. I turned my face away from it, looked up at Lance’s face which was as chaos-lost as I felt; and Viv, Vivien holding on to the door. It was hard to look back again, and harder not to. Griffin was still giving orders—had the cameras sweep this way and that, and there was that ship next to us, the delicate one like spiderweb; and a strange one on our other side, that we had slid up against when we were grappling on; we couldn’t see all of it. And mostly the view dissolved in that red bleeding light. But when the cameras centered on our own bow, we could almost see detail, like it was lost in a wash of light across the lens, something that was like machinery. A cold feeling was ru