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Me, with my little understanding—I watched him work, the fevered concentration, the sometime flagging of his strength, and the cold, cold patience of his face; and I heard his voice, always quiet, cutting through Percy’s dismay at something or Gawain’s and Ly
But Modred understood now he was not trusted, and he was threatened somehow by that. One little emotion had to be gnawing at him, who could feel nothing else. He had been jolted through a host of sensations in that tape, things his nerves had never felt before. It must have been like a dip in boiling water, leaving no clear impression what the water had been like because the heat was everything.
And what he wanted now, what drove him so, I had no least idea.
The work continued. As with our general terror, information wore us out and left us without reaction—one could only look at so many lines and dots and listen to so much talk that made no particular sense. I found my head nodding, and leaned on Lance, who was more comfortable than the wall; Lance leaned back then and his head bowed over against mine—I went plummeting down a long dark, just too tired to make sense of anything, and the voice of our Beast and the hammering at the hull sang me to sleep.
I came out of it aware of an ache in my neck and of a set of voices in hushed debate.
“No,” one said, and: “It’s been quiet all this time,” the other—Ly
“Lady Dela,” Modred said.
I waked thoroughly, sat up as Lance did, as all of us who had been drowsing came awake. Modred looked like death—no sleep, no food or drink but what I had brought him: it showed.
“Lady Dela, it’s answered. The transmissions—there’s an urgency—” He turned and started touching controls, bringing up a sequence of images, that was all dots and squiggles and lines and circles. “We’ve rationalized its number system, gotten its chemistry—it’s methane. There are all kinds of systems on the wheel—” He brought up another diagram, that was all a jumble of lines, and he pointed to it as my lady and Griffin got to their feet. “There, see—”
“I don’t make any sense of it,” Dela said.
“There.” Modred’s hand described a circle: I could see it among the lines when I looked for it, among the other shapes that radiated out from it. And then it made sense—the wheel and the ships appended to it, and the network of tubes that wove them all so that the whole looked like a crown seen from above, with rays and braidings going out in all directions. Modred’s thin finger lighted on a single point of this. “This is the Maid. Here. Oxygen.” His finger underlined a series of dots, and swept to another, impossibly complicated series of dots inside the wheel. “That’s methane out there. But here—” His finger swept the torus. “See, there’s oxygen, just beyond that partition out there; and a line going that way, from our bow, to that partition. We docked in the wrong segment, and they’ve corrected that. The torus—has seven divisions. Water, here: they must melt ice. And process other things. Here’s a different mix of oxygen; methane/ammonia and sulphur ...”
“You profess to read this thing’s language?”
“A dot code, lady.” Modred never looked back, went on showing us his construction—its construction, whosoever it might be. “It’s compartmented, various pressures, I’d guess, various temperatures for all its inhabitants. But these—” His hand went to the network of veins. “Methane. All methane. And we may be dealing with a time difference ... in thought. The creature talking to us sends the images very slowly. But put them together and they animate. Percy—”
Percy ran it back again to earlier images, and we watched, watched the torus naked of ships; and then ships arriving. We watched the network actually grow, watched the lines start from one ship and penetrate the torus, then penetrate the neighboring ship-figure. The dots in it—I had not noticed, but suddenly there were a lot of them.
“Do you see?” Modred asked. “The atmosphere in that ship went to methane. It changed.”
But now the lines were going in both directions. New masses popped up, more ships arriving; or asteroids and whole planetoids swept in, docked like ships, because some of the shapes were tiny and some were unaccountably lumpy. Some acquired lines crossing the torus to other sections. I watched, and I felt cold, so that when Lance put his arm about me, I was grateful. Maybe he was cold too. I reached out for Vivien, while the thing went on building, took her cold hand, but she simply stood there with her eyes fixed on the screen and no response at all to my touching her.
So the lines advanced, like blind worms, nodding about and leeching onto a ship-form or a bit of rock; and generally the ships went to that complicated pattern that meant methane. So Modred had said. He watched it grow and grow until the network was mostly about the torus. Until Modred pointed to a ship that suddenly appeared amid the net.
“Ourselves,” he said, and the course of it was all but finished except for the waving of the tubes that attached themselves—so, so sinister those thin lines, and the line that appeared leading in another section, and the arrival of another bit of debris far across the wheel ... something our last jump had swept in, I reckoned.
And Modred looked back at us then. “It’s shown us our way out,” he said. “We’ve got to open our forward hatch and go to it.”
“O dear God,” Dela said with a shake of the head.
“No,” Lynette said. “I don’t think that’s a thing to do that quickly.”
“You persist,” Modred said, “against the evidence.”
“Which can be read other ways,” Griffin said. “No.”
“Lady Dela,” Modred said. Patiently, stone-faced as ever, but his voice was hoarse. “It’s a question of profitability. Some of those ships on the ring didn’t change. At some points that intrusion failed. And others directly next to them changed. So some do drive it off. There’s the tubes, and separately—the wheel itself. It’s made an access out to the point where we touch the wheel. We’re very close to an oxygen section. Very close to where we should have docked. It can let us through where we have to go.”
“Has it occurred to anyone,” Vivien asked out of turn, “that however complicated—however attractive and rational and difficult the logical jump it’s put us through to reach it—that the thing might lie?”
A chill went through me. We looked at one another and for a moment no one had anything to say.
“It’s a born-man,” Percy said in his soft voice. “Or creature. And so it might lie.”
I felt myself paralyzed. And Modred stood there for a moment with a confusion in his eyes, because he was never set up to understand such things—lies, and structures of untruth.
Then he turned and walked toward the main board, just a natural kind of movement, but suddenly everyone seemed to think of it and the crew grabbed for him as Lance and Griffin moved all in the same moment
Modred lunged, too near to be stopped: his hand hit a control and there was a sound of hydraulics forward before Lance reached past Gawain and Percy and Ly