Alternate Realities (18 page)

“Modred,” I mourned. “O Modred.”

“It should never have happened,” Lance said. “It was my fault, not yours.”

“How do we prepare against a thief?” I asked, meaning Viv. But Viv had finished her dressing and swept past us without a look.

“My fault,” Lance repeated doggedly.

“They’ll sort it out,” I insisted, turning round to look at him. “You did. I have.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said, “of either of us.”

“You know better than that.”

“I don’t.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Aren’t we—whatever tapes they put in?”

I had no answer for that. It was too much like what I feared.

“Elaine,” he said sadly. Touched my face as he would have touched Dela’s. “Elaine.”

And he walked away too.

My fault
, I echoed in myself. When they all had gone away, I knew who was to blame, who had been selfish enough to bring that tape where it never should have been.

“What’s wrong?” Dela asked at the breakfast table, and sent my heart plunging. We sat, all of us silent: had sat that way. “Is something wrong no one’s saying?”

“We’re tired,” Griffin said, and patted her hand atop the table. “All of us.” He laughed desperately. “What else
could
be wrong?”

It got a laugh from Dela. And a silence then, because some of us had humor enough to have laughed with her if we had had the heart.

O my lady, I wanted to say, flinging the truth out, we’ve heard what we never should; I stole what I never ought; we know what we
are ...
and that was the terror of it, that we were and were not, locked together in this place apart from what was real.

“Elaine?” she asked, and touched my face, lifted my chin so that I had to look her in the eyes. “Elaine, don’t be frightened.”

“No,” I said. It did her good perhaps, to comfort
us
. The lion banner looked down on us where we sat at breakfast at the long table among all the deadly things we had gathered. I heard the trumpets blowing when my lady looked at us like that. But louder was the hammering that had never ceased.

Dela smiled at me, a grin broad as she wore for new lovers. But there was only Griffin. It was the banner; it was her fancy moving about her. She smiled at me because I understood her fancy, if Griffin did not—She had her courage back. She had found her footing in this strange place, and there was a look in her eyes that challenge set there.

“I wish there were more to do,” I said.

“There
is
more,” Lynette said, suddenly from down the table. “Let us go outside. Let us breach
them
and see what they are before they come at us. We’ve got the exterior lock—”

“No,” Dela said.

“I’ve been up in the observation deck,” she said. “I’ve seen—if you look very hard through the stuff you can
see
—”

“Stay out of there,” Griffin said. “It’s not healthy.”

“Neither,” Modred muttered, “is sitting here.”

It was insubordinate. I think my heart stopped. There was dead silence.

“What’s your idea?” Griffin asked.

“Lynn’s got one idea,” Modred said. “I have another. First. If you’d listen to me, sir—my lady Dela. We take the assumption that it’s not hostile. We feed it information. It’s going to stop to analyze what we give it.”

“We feed it information and then what?”

“We try the constants. We establish a dialogue.”

“And in the end we give away the last secrets we have from it. What we breathe, who we are, whether we have things of value to it—I don’t see that at this point. I don’t see it at all.”

Modred remained very quiet. “Yes, sir,” he agreed at last, with that tiniest edge of irony that Modred could put in his flattest voice.

“Modred,” Dela said, tight and sharp.

His face never varied. “My lady,” he said precisely. And then: “I was working on something I’d like to finish. By your leave.

My heart was racing. I would never have dared. But Modred
had
no nerves. I hoped he had not. He simply got up from his chair. “Gawain,” he said, summoning his partner.

“I need Gawain,” Griffin said in a level tone, and Gawain stayed. There was apprehension in Gawain’s face ... on all our faces, I think, but Modred’s, who simply walked out.

“He’s very good,” Dela said.

Oh, he was. That was so. That’s why they made him that way, nerveless.

“I’d like,” Griffin said, “monitoring set up below. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“No, sir,” Percy said quietly. “Not hard at all.”

We dispersed from the table; we cleaned the dishes; we found things that wanted doing, my lady and I; and Vivien. There was the cleaning up of other kinds; there was Vivien’s station—

Oh, mostly, mostly after yesterday, after working so hard we ached ... it was waiting now; and we had so little to do that we found things.

We were scared if we stopped working. And Vivien was in one of her silences, and my lady was being brave; and Lance went down to the gym with Griffin as if there had been nothing uncommon in this dreadful day, the both of them to batter themselves beyond thinking about our Beast.

Might Lynn, I wondered, envying that exhaustion—care for a wrestling round? But no. I had not the nerve to ask. It was not Lynn’s style; or mine; and the crew really did find things to do.

Lynn went out in the bubble ... sat there, hour upon hour, as close to the chaos-stuff as we could get inside the ship. She did things with the lenses there. I took her her lunch up there, trying to keep my back to the view.

“You can see,” Lynette advised me softly, “you can see if you want to see.”

I knew what she meant. I wasn’t about to look.

“I could make it across,” she said. Her thin freckled face and close-clipped skull looked strange in the green light from the screens; but out there was red, red, and red. “I could see.”

“I know you could,” I whispered, hoping only to get out of here without looking at the sights Lynn chose for company. “I’m sure you could. But I know the lady doesn’t want to lose you.”

“What am I?” Lynn asked. “One of the pilots. And what good is that—here?”

“I think a great deal of good.” I rolled up my eyes, staring at the overhead a moment, because something was snaking along out there and I didn’t want to see. “O Lynn, what is that out there?”

“A trick of the eyes. A shifting.”

“Lynn,” I said, because I felt very queasy indeed. “Lynette?”

“Elaine?”
Of a sudden something was wrong. Lynn rose half out of her chair, pushed me aside; and then—

Take-hold, take-hold
, the alarm was sounding: and Modred’s voice: “
Brace
, we’re going—”

I yelled for very terror. “Let me out of here,” I remembered screaming, and flinging myself for the hole that led to the bridge. But:
“No!”
Lynn yelled, and grabbed me in her arms, hugged me to her and I hugged her and the chair and anything else solid my fingers could reach, because we were losing ourselves—

—back again, a blackness; a crawling redness. I held to something that writhed and mewed like the winter winds round Dali peaks, and hissed like breathing, and grew and shrank—

“—another jump,” I heard a distant voice like brazen bells.

“Modred?” another called.

“Griffin?” That was my lady, like crystal breaking.

My eyes might be open. I was not sure. Such terrible things could live in one’s skull, eyeless and unaided in this place. “We’ve jumped again,” the thing holding me said, the voice like wind.

“Are we free?” I cried. “Are we free?” That was the greatest hope that came to me. But then I got my eyes cleared again and I saw the familiar red chaos crawling with black spiders of spots. And the veins, all purple and green, and the thing to which we were fixed. That was unchanged.

“We’re not free.” It was Percivale’s voice, thin and clear. “It jumped again; but we’re not free.”

There was a moment of silence all over the ship, while we understood the terms of our captivity. Like all the ships before us.

“O God,” Dela’s voice moaned. “O dear God.”

“We’re all right.” Griffin’s voice, on the edge of fright. “We’re all right; we’re still intact.”

“Situation stable,” Modred’s cold clear tones rang through the ship. “Nothing changed.”

Nothing changed.
O Modred. Nothing changed. I clutched the cushion/Lynn’s arm so tight my fingers were paralyzed.

“You might have been out there,” I said. It was what we had been talking of, a moment/a year ago. “You could have been outside in that.”

Lynn said nothing. I felt a tremor, realized the grip she had on me. “We’re stable,” Lynn echoed. “It must happen many times.”

“The hammering’s stopped,” I whispered. It was so. The silence was awesome. I could hear my heart beating, hear the movement of the blood in my veins. We were so fragile here.

“That’s so,” Lynn said. She let me go and pushed me back, leaned forward to reach the console. “Modred, I get nothing different on visual.”

I managed to get my feet under me while those two exchanged observations. I stared at familiar things and they were normal. And almost I wished for that horrid dislocation back again, that chaos ordinary minds would feel. We were no longer ordinary. We had learned how to live here. For a moment we had been
out
of this place, and that was the horror we felt; that drop into normal space again. And comfort was breaking surface again in Hell.

“We’re traveling,”
I said. Lynn looked at me, bewildered a moment. “We’re traveling,” I said again. “This place
moves
, goes on moving; we must have reached a star and left again.”

“Yes,” Lynn said with one of her abstracted frowns. “That’s very probable.—Do you copy that, Modred? I think it’s likely.”

“Yes,” Modred agreed. “Considerable speed and age. I think that’s very much what we’re dealing with. We’re a sizable instability. And we grow. I wonder what we might have acquired this time.”

“Don’t.”
Dela’s voice shivered through the com.

“We’re old hands,” came Griffin’s. A feeble laugh. “We know the rules. Don’t we?”

“O dear God,” Dela murmured.

Silence then, a long space.

And about us in the bubble, the chaos-stuff swirled and crawled and blotched the same as before.

“Is everyone all right?” Percivale asked then. “Do we hear everyone?”

I heard other voices, my comrades. Lance was there with Griffin; and Gawain. “Elaine’s with me,” Lynn said. “Vivien?”

Silence.

“She’s blanked,” I said. “I’m going.”

“Vivien,” I heard over com, again and again. I felt my way, hand-over-handed my way from the bubble to the ladder and to the bridge ... across it, through the U where Modred and Percivale were at work. “I’m after Vivien,” I said.

“Gawain’s on the same track,” Percivale said, half rising. “She was at her station when it hit—”

I ran, staggered, breaking rules ... but Viv was weakest of us, the most frightened. I had to wait on the lift because Gawain had gotten there first; I rode it up to the uppermost corridors, floors/ceilings with dual orientation, dual switches, that crazy place where the
Maid
’s geometries were most alien, where Vivien worked in her solitary makeshift lab. I made the inner doors, and there was Lancelot and there was Gawain before me. They knelt over Viv, who lay on the floor in a tuck, her eyes open, her hair immaculate, her suit impeccable; her hands were clenched before her mouth and her eyes just stared as if they saw something indescribable.

They were afraid to touch her. I was. It was not like blanking, this. It was like the wombs. It was—not; because what Viv saw, she went on seeing, endlessly, like a tape frozen-framed.

“Viv,” Lance said, looked at me as if I should have some hope neither of them did. I sank down. I touched her, and all her muscles were hard.

“It’s your fault,” Gawain said, a strained voice. “It’s your fault. That tape of yours—that tape—”

It was Lance he meant. Gawain’s face was the color of Viv’s. His eyes flickered, jerked, searched for something as if he could not get enough air.

“It was my tape,” I said. “Mine. And Viv that stole it. Wasn’t it? But it’s nonsense. It’s not important. It’s—”

“Viv is
lost
,” Gawain said.

“Lance. Lance, pick her up. I’ll find a blanket.”

He took Viv’s wrist, but there was no relaxing her arms. He lifted her by that limb, got his arms under her, his other arm beneath her knees, and gathered her to him. I scrambled up. “Just get her out of here,” Gawain said. “Let’s just get her
out.
”

“How is she?”
That was Percivale, on com. “Is she all right?”

“She’s blanked out,” I said, looking up at the pickup, above all the eerie tubes and lines and vats and tanks and glare of lights. “We’ve got her. We’re coming down.”

And then the hammering started again.

Not where it had been. But close.

Up here. Above.

“Oh no,” I said, above the chaos of com throughout the ship. “Oh no.”

It was more than here. It was at our side. It was at our bow. We were attacked at all points of the ship.

“Something might have come loose,” Lance murmured, standing, holding Viv’s rigid body in his arms.

“No,” Gawain said, calmly enough. “No. I don’t think so. Get her to quarters, Lance. Let’s get out of here and seal the door.”