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“Who is it?” my lady wailed.
I came and joined myself to the others, and we held and comforted her. “It’s all right,” Lance kept saying. “It’s all right.” And I: “You know our faces. Lookat us and everything will be what you tell it to be. It’s Elaine. Elaine. Tell your eyes what they should see, and make them believe it.”
“Elaine.” Her hands found my face, felt for it, as if to be sure. “Go. Go help Griffin. Where is Griffin?”
“He’s well,” I said. “I heard him giving Wayne orders.”
“Go,” she pleaded, so abjectly I knew she was upsetting herself. I gathered myself up and steadied my own nerves, felt Lance’s hand clinging to mine. I pulled loose of it, reached out my own toward the doorway and found it—better, much better now that I had walked this way once. I forced the room into shape and got to the corridor, felt my way along it past the library doors on the left and toward Griffin’s door at the end. I got it open and a voice bellowed out at me, echoing round and round in my head.
Griffin was sick, blind sick and raving. I found the bed, found him, and stripped sheets to do what I could to comfort him. He lay on the mattress and writhed, and when I tried to make him be still he fetched me a blow that flung me rolling. It was some few moments before I could clear the haze from my eyes again, with the floor going in and out of touch with my hands, but I made it behave itself, felt the carpet, made myself see the texture of it. When I could sit up and rub the starbursts from my eyes, Griffin was sitting up and complaining; and demanding Gawain get us out of this place.
“Can’t, sir,” I said, hanging on the back of a chair. “We’re in the between and we don’t know where we are.”
“Get away from me,” he said. I couldn’t, because my lady had told me to stay, but I pulled myself around to the front of the chair and sat down there with my knees tucked up in my arms, listening to Griffin swear and watching him stumble about the room knocking into furniture.
Eventually he discovered what we had discovered already, that he could control his stomach, and see things, and he finally seemed to get his bearings. He stood there the longest time, holding onto the dressing counter and looking at me with an expression on his face that clearly said he had not known I was there. He straightened back, stood up, felt with spidery moves of his hands toward the wall close by him. Ashamed. That was clear. And that surprised me despite everything else, because it was the first time Griffin had ever looked at me, really seemed to notice whether I existed. He turned away, groped after the bed and threw the remnant of the bedclothes over the side. Then he sat down and leaned his head into his hands, in brittle control of things. I think it took Griffin longest of all of us because he was used to having his own way, and when the whole world stopped being what suited him, it really frightened him. But our lady Dela, who lived in fantasies, she was mobile enough to attack the corridors, and showed up unexpectedly, using Lance for her help, and with Vivien trailing anxiously after.
“Worthless,” lady Dela snapped at me, finding me still perched on a chair and her precious Griffin evidently neglected, sitting on the bed. I started to warn my lady when she swept down on Griffin, but at least he refrained from hitting her. He cursed and shook her hand off ... her precious Griffin, I thought, who had never once asked about Dela.
“Out,” Dela ordered me, so I got up and left her to her ministries and her lover, finding the floor a great deal plainer than it had been and the walls at least solid. I walked out, and she cursed Lance and Viv too, telling them they ought to be about their proper business, so I waited for them outside, and caught Lance’s hand and held onto it for comfort when they came outside the door. What we were supposed to be doing, what our business was now, I had no least idea. Lance looked vastly shaken. Vivien looked worse than that, her eyes like one vast bruise, her hair disheveled, her fingers locked like claws on Lance’s other arm, as if she were afraid he would dissolve at any moment. I reckoned that Vivien, who was so very good at books and figures, really had the least concept of all what had happened to the Maidand to her; she was narrow, was Viv, and so long as her accounts balanced, that was enough. Now they did not.
“I think maybe we should get Viv to bed,” I said, and Lance pried her fingers loose and took her hand. We put our arms about her and guided her between us, all the long confusing way back to the lift; and that was the worst, that little loss of vertical stability after all the rest had been ripped away from us. Viv simply moaned, too dignified to scream, and leaned on us. We got her out again at the bottom and back to the crew quarters. She was better when we had put her into bed, not troubling to undress her. I tucked the sheet up over her and Lance patted her forehead and got her a drink, holding her head with great tenderness despite all his own distress. It seemed strange how Lance and I managed better than Dela and Griffin and even Vivien, who until now had managed our lives and told us what to do. But we didn’t have to cope with the whys and the what-nows, just do little things like walk the halls and keep ourselves on our feet. The ones I least envied in this calamity were the Maid’s crew, who were up in controls trying to figure where we were and even when—with no reference points.
IV
... but Arthur with a hundred spears
Rode far, till o’er the illimitable reed,
And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle,
The wide-wing’d sunset of the misty marsh
Glared on a huge machicolated tower....
Hour by hour, if that was really a word we could use any longer, the world grew clearer, and Vivien confessed she would live. Then came peevish orders from my lady, who complained she was deserted by the whole staff: she wanted Lance—which meant Griffin was better, I reckoned, since she sounded more angry than hysterical.
Lance went off in his pained despair, called up there to be near Griffin, which he hated, and with Dela, which was all he ever wanted. That left us with Vivien in the crew quarters then, in disfavor, I suspected. Vivien had drifted into quiet, exhausted, and we had given her a little sedative we had had ready for jump, belatedly, but it let Viv rest, not quite out, not really tracking on much either. And in a ship the walls of which were none too stable yet in my senses ... the lonely quiet seemed to put me all too far from everyone else. I was also conscious suddenly that my stomach was terribly empty. If time had gone as wrong as we thought it might have, then it might have been a long while that we had not wanted food or water, but now it hit me all of a sudden, so that I found my limbs shaking, as if all the demands of some long deprivation were coming due.
And sure enough about the same time came Lynette’s voice ordering one of us to get food up to the bridge as quickly as we could, claiming they felt faint. I was not sure that my lady Dela and particularly Griffin or Viv wanted to see food yet, but I staggered down to the lift and out on the lowermost level to the galley, and tried to put food for all of us together, out of the shambles our wild careering into jump had made of the place.
Then Vivien showed up in the doorway, a little frayed about the edges, it was true, muzzy with the drug, but moving along without touching the walls. She said nothing. Her face was set and determined with more fortitude than I had reckoned existed in Viv, and she had put most of the strands of her hair back into place so that she looked more herself. She was hungry, that was what: discomfort had gotten her moving again the same way it had sent her to bed, and without a by-your-leave she started into one of the trays. So had I, truth to tell. I had been stealing a bite and a drink while I was making the rest, because I wanted to stay on my feet to do it.