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I had no intention that he should wait; if he could get to the lift and get down there the faster, so much the better, but he held the lift for me and shouted at me to hurry, so I came, with the shuffling haste I could manage, and I got myself and my unwieldly load into the lift and leaned against the wall as he hit the button with his gloved knuckles. It dropped us down that two deck distance and the door opened on a hideous din of thumps and bangs, but remoter than I had feared.
My lady was there, and Griffin. They stood hand in hand in front of the welded barrier, their weapons set aside, and they looked glad to see us as we came.
“Elaine,” Griffin said right off, “your job is to protect your lady, you understand. You stay beside her whatever happens.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And Lance,” he said, “I need you.”
“Yes, sir,” Lance said without quibble, because it meant being up front beyond a doubt, with all our hopes in defense of all of us.
“They’re not through the airlock yet,” Dela said. “They’re working at it.”
“When our atmospheres mix,” Griffin said, “we’re in danger of blowing everything. At least they know. I imagine they’ll use some kind of a pressure gate and do the cut in an oxygen mix. If they’ve got suits, and I’m betting they do.”
“We could set up a defense on next level,” Lance said.
“Same danger there; they convert this level to their own atmosphere, then we’ve got it all over again. Our whole lifesupport bled out into all that methane would diffuse too much for any danger; but if they let all that methane in here—it could blow the ship apart. A quick way out. There’s that. We could always touch it off ourselves.”
“Griffin,” Dela said.
“If we had to.”
I felt cold, that was all, cold all the way inside, despite that carrying the suit made me sweat.
The lift worked. Vivien came, alone, walking with difficulty, and she had gotten herself one of the spears, carrying that in one hand, and her helmet under the other arm. She joined us.
And the lift went up and came down again with Gawain and Ly
“We wait,” Griffin said.
So we got down on our knees, that being the only way to sit down in the suits, and I only hoped we should have a great deal of warning, when the attack came, because even the strongest of us were clumsy, down on one knee and then the other, and then sitting more or less sideways. I was all but panting, and I felt sweat run under the suit, but my legs felt the relief, and finding a way to rest the corner of the lifesupport unit against the deck gave me delirious relief from the weight.
Bang. Thump.
Be careful, Beast, I thought at it, imagining all its minions and ourselves blown to atoms, to drift and swirl out there amongst the chaos-stuff. In one part of my mind—I think it was listening to the wrong kind of tapes—I was glad of a chance like that, that we might do some terrible damage to our attackers and maybe put a hole in the side of the wheel that they would remember ... all, all those scaly bodies going hurtling out amongst our fragments.
But in the saner part of my mind I did not want to die.
And oh, if they should get their hands on us. ... Hands. If they had hands at all. If they thought anything close to what we thought.
If, if, and if. Bang. Thump. Griffin and my lady told stories—recollected a day at Brahmani Dali, and smiled at each other. “I love you,” Griffin said then to Dela, a sober, afterthinking kind of voice, meaning it. I knew. I focused beyond them at Lance, and his face looked only troubled as all our faces did. It was no news to him, not now.
So we sat, and shifted our weight because the waiting grew long.
“They could take days about it,” Dela said.
“I doubt it,” Griffin said.
“They’ll suit up,” Gawain said. “They’ll have that weight to carry, just like us.”
“I wish they’d get on about it.” That plaintive voice from Vivien. Her eyes were very large in the dim light of the corridor, where the makeshift bulkhead had cut off some of the lighting. “What can they be doing out there?”
“Likely assuring their own safety.”
“They can’t come at us with firearms,” Ly
“That’s so,” Dela breathed.
“Not at close range,” Griffin said. He laughed. “Maybe they’re hunting up weapons like ours.”
That would be a wonder, I thought. I was encouraged by the thought—until I reckoned that the odds were still likely theirs and not ours. And then the realization settled on me darker and heavier than before, for that little breath of hope, that we really had no hope at all, and that we only did this for—
When I thought of it, I couldn’t answer why we tried. For our born-men, that was very simple ... and not so simple, if there was no hope. It was not in our tapes—to fight. But here was even Vivien, clutching a spear across her knees, when I knewher tapes were hardly set that way. They made us out of born-man material, and perhaps, the thought occurred to me, that somewhere at base they and we were not so different—that born-men would do things because it leapt into their minds to do them, like instincts inherent in the flesh.
Or the tapes we had stolen had muddled us beyond recall.
The sound stopped again, close to us, though it kept on above. “They’ve arranged something, maybe,” Dela said. “God help us.”
“Easy,” Griffin said. And: “When it comes—understand, Dela, you and Elaine and Vivien take your position back just ahead of the crosspassage. If anything gets past us you take care of it.”
“Right,” Dela said.
If.It seemed to me a very likely if, recalling that flood of bodies I had seen within our lock.
But the silence went on.
“Lady Dela,” Percy said then, very softly.
Dela looked toward him.
“Lady Dela, you being a born-man—do you talk to God?”
My heart turned over in me. Viv’s head came up, and Lance’s and Gawain’s and Ly
“God?” Dela asked.
“Could you explain,” Percivale went on doggedly, stammering on so dreadful an impertinence, “could you say—whether if we die we have souls? Or if God can find them here.”
“Percy,” Viv said sharply. “Somebody—Percy—”
Shut him up, she meant—right for once; and I put out my hand and tugged at his arm, and Lance pulled at him, but Percy was not to be stopped in this. “My lady—” he said.
My lady had the strangest look on her face—thinking, looking at all of us—and we all stopped moving, almost stopped breathing for Percy’s sake. She would hurt him, I thought; I was sure. But she only looked perplexed. “Who put that into your head?” she asked.
No one said, least of all Percy, whose face was very pale. No one said anything for a very long time.
“Do you know, lady?” Percy asked.
“Dear God, what’s happened to you?”
“I—” Percy said. But it got no further than that.
“He took a tape,” Vivien said. “He’s never been the same since.”
“It was me,” I said, because she left me nothing more to say. “It was the tape—The tape.” I knew she understood me then, and her eyes had turned to me. “It was never Percy’s fault. He only borrowed it from me, not knowing he should never have it. We—all ... had it. It was an accident, lady Dela. But my fault.”
Her eyes were still fixed on me, in such stark dismay—and then she looked from me to Lance, and Gawain and Lynette and Vivien and Griffin and last to Percivale, as if she were seeing us for the first time, as if suddenly she knew us. The dream settled about us then, wrapped her and Griffin too.
“Percivale,” she said, with a strange gentleness, “I’ve no doubt of you.”
I would have given much for such a look from my lady. I know that Lance would have. And perhaps even Vivien. We were forgiven, I thought. And it was if a great weight left us all at once, and we were free.