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“We’ll have an account, if you please,” Dela said, “Modred.”
“Lady, I think you’ll have had access by now to the tape I used. I’m sure Percy can understand it.”
“I don’t care to go through it all. I want to know why you did such a thing.”
Dela had not learned what had happened to us—my heart leapt and sank again in guilty relief—no one had told her about the stolen tape. I should, and had not the courage. And then I thought what that would do for Modred, how Dela would never trust him if she knew what he had heard. Or Lance. Or look at any of us the same.
And Modred as likely might tell her—having no nerves; and no knowledge of born-men.
“I explained,” Modred said, “that there was a chance of contacting it.”
“He—” I said aloud, my heart beating against my ribs, “Modred told me, lady Dela, that he had it figured—that if his plan failed, then—then there was Ly
“How many of you consulted on this?” Dela asked sharply. “Gawain? Elaine?”
“I never—” I said. “I—”
But all of a sudden I was having trouble concentrating, because something had stopped, the noise forward stilled, and that diminished a great deal the noise that had been constant with us for days.
“I—” I tried to continue, thinking I ought, trying to gather a denial, to explain, but Griffin held up his hand for quiet.
“It’s stopped out there,” Griffin said.
“It’s—” Dela said.
And then that Sound was back again, our Beast talking to us over com. It had heard.None of us moved for the moment, and then Modred got out of his seat, and Griffin did, and the rest of us, as Modred headed out of the room.
We knew where he was going.
“Modred!” my lady cried.
But that did no good either.
XIV
... but she saw,
Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights,
The Dragon of the great Pendragonship
Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.
And even then he turn’d; and more and more
The moony vapor rolling round the King,
Who seemed the phantom of a Giant in it,
Enwound him fold by fold and made him gray
And grayer, till himself became as mist
Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.
Our Beast snarled at us, whispered to us, a low ticking that rose and assaulted our ears as we came—shaking us with the power of its voice. Vivien had come: she clung to the doorway with a kind of demented fixation on the sound. She had become entranced with her destruction, but that noise got to the bones and put shivers into the flesh, and Viv was right now close to sanity, in sheer fright. The crew headed for their places, but Lance laid hands on Modred to stop him.
“Let him go,” Griffin said, and Lance looked at Dela, and did what he was told. I stood by shivering, physically shivering in the horrid sound. But we were better than we had been, and braver: my lady stood there with her fingers clenched on the back of Modred’s chair and wanted answers from him—at once, now, immediately.
“We’re getting screen transmission,” Percy said, and it came up, a nonsense of dots and static breakup.
“That’s an answer,” Modred said calmly. He half turned, looking at my lady at his back, but receiving no instruction, he turned back again.
“What’s it saying?” Griffin asked.
Modred ignored the question, busy with a flood of beeps that came through, and Griffin allowed it, because Modred was doing something, and Percy was, and then Ly
“Equipment’s not compatible,” Modred said finally, the only word he gave us in all that time. “Stand by: we’re getting it worked through comp.”
“So it can hear us,” Dela murmured. She moved back, shaking her head, and Griffin put his arm about her shoulders.
Lance and I and Viv, we just stood there, not understanding anything—until of a sudden lines began to come across one of the screens and it began to build itself downward into a picture. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see—whatever it was. “We can clean that up,” Gawain said. The crew began to work, and Percy sweated over the computer in greatest concentration, while Modred intervened with small gestures, an indication of this and that, quiet words. And then Modred reached for another control. Ly
“My lady.” Modred half turned in his seat. “We have to transmit and give it something back to keep its interest. This is going to take us time.”
“Give it—what?” Griffin asked.
“The same thing as before,” Modred said. “Repeating it. Giving it the notion we’re still working.”
“All right,” Dela said quietly, and Lynette took her hand away, so whatever Modred wanted to send went out.
It went on a long while, this consultation, this meddling with the computer, and sometimes the lines on the screen grew clearer, and sometimes more confused. My knees ached, and my back and shoulders, so that finally I went over to that bench near the door where Vivien had sat down. After a moment more Lance came and took the place by me, silent company, image of other terrible nights trying to cope with this place.
But my heart was tired of beating overtime, and my limbs were all out of shivers. Terror had acquired a kind of mundanity, had become an atmosphere, a medium in which we just went on functioning, and did what we were supposed to do until somehow our Death would get to us. I reckoned that tired as I was it might not even hurt much. Maybe Vivien reckoned that way, sitting by me with her hands clasped in her lap—not blanked at all, but following this; and maybe Lance felt the same—who had Dela and Griffin in front of him, their arms about each other. Only the crew went on driving themselves because they had something left to do.
Our born-men—they had no least idea, I reckoned, what made sense to do, but they stood there, while the voice of our Beast rumbled away over the distant sound of hammering. At last Dela turned away as if she would leave—having had enough, I thought: this might wear on for hours. Almost I got to my feet, thinking she might need me—but no, she went only as far as the bench on the other side of the door, drawing Griffin with her, and they sat down there to wait it all out while the crew kept on at their work.
The image came clear finally, and it made no sense, being only dots. “Get the other one up,” Modred said, and they started it all over again.
So the crew kept at their work, still getting something, and whatever-it-was kept up its noise. And my lady, who once would have gone to her rooms and shut out the sound—stayed, not even nodding into sleep, but watching every move Modred made.
Not trusting him. Modred had said it. It was very clear why all of us were here, why this one night the lady stayed to witness, and therefore all the rest of us stayed. Modred had to know that.
There had been a time, when the Maidhad made tame voyages ferrying lovers from star to star, that my lady had liked Modred in contrast at her banquets, with his dark dour ways. He was the shadow in her fancy, the skeleton at the feast, the memento mori—a dangerous-looking sort whose impudence amused her, whose outrages she forgave. But that was before things had passed out of control, and we all had to rely on him. O my lady was afraid of him now, for all the wrong reasons—a grim face, an insolence which had taken matters into his own hands. And a name that had stopped being a joke. He was Modred: she had always had a place for him in her fancy. And so she stopped trusting him.