Lance came up to the crew quarters finally, where I sat playing solitaire. He was undamaged on the outside, and I tried to act as if I had no idea anything was wrong, as if I had never been in that doorway or seen what I had seen. But I reckoned that he wanted to have his privacy now, so downcast his look was, and I could hardly walk out without seeming to avoid him, so I curled up on the couch and pretended to be tired of my game, to sleep awhile.
But I watched him through my lashes, as he rummaged in his locker, and found a tape, and set up the machine. He took the drug, and lay down in deepsleep, lost in that; and all the while I had begun to know what tape it was, and what he was doing, and what was into him. The understanding sent cold through me.
He should not be alone. I was sure of that. The lady had deserted him and his having the tape in the first place was my fault. I took the drug and set up the connections, and lay down beside him in his dream—lay down with my fingers laced in his limp ones and began to slip toward it.
The story ran to its end and stopped, letting us out of its grip; and whether he felt me there or not, he just lay there with tears streaming from his closed eyes. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and took the sensors off him and me and put my arms about him.
But he mistook what I wanted and pushed me away, stared at the ceiling and blanked awhile.
It was that bad.
And when he came out of it he said nothing, but got up, went to the bath and washed his face and left. Me, who was so long his friend, he left without a word. I heard the lift go down again; and it was the galley or the gym down there, so I had no difficulty finding him.
It was the gym. From the door I watched him ... doing pushups until I thought his arms must break, as if it could drive the weakness out of him.
Now, Beast, I thought toward the voice that had terrorized our night. Now, if ever you have something to say. But it stayed mute. Lance struggled against his own self; and I wished with all my heart that someone would discover some duty for him, some use that would get him busy.
He saw me there, turning suddenly. I knew he did by his scowl when he got to his feet, and I turned and fled down the corridor, to the lift, to the upper level, as far from the gym as I could excepting Viv’s domain.
And came Percivale, down the corridor from the bridge, looking as dispirited as I felt.
“Percy,” I said, catching at his arm. “Percy, I want you to do something for me.”
“What?” he asked, blinking at my intense assault; and I explained I wanted him to go down to the gym and fight with Lance. “It’s good for you,” I said, “because we don’t know what’s out there trying to get in, do we? and you might have to fight, to protect the ship and the lady. I think it’s a good idea to be ready. Griffin’s been working out with Lance. I’m sure it would be good for all of you.”
Percy thought about that, ran a hand over his red hair. “I’ll talk to Gawain and Modred,” he said. “But Lance is much stronger than we are.”
“But you should try,” I said, “at least try. Lance did, with Griffin, with a born-man, after all; and can’t you, with him?”
Percivale went down there first, and later that afternoon the three of them were looking the worse for wear and there was a little brighter look in Lance’s eyes when I saw him at dinner. I smiled smugly across the table in the great hall, next Griffin and my lady, with all the table set as it had been the evening before, and all of us again in our party best.
“I think it’s given up,” my lady said, quite cheerful, lifting her glass.
It was true. There had been silence all day. Modred was glum. His carefully constructed tapes had failed. Gawain said so ... and my lady laughed, a brave, lonely sound.
Griffin smiled a faint, small quirk of the lips, more courtesy than belief. And drank his wine. Before dinner was done something did ring against the hull, a vague kind of thump; and the crew started from their places, and Griffin did.
“No!”my lady snapped, stopping the crew on the instant, and Griffin, half out of his chair, hesitated. “We can’t be running at every shift and settling,” Dela said. “Sit down! The lot of you sit down. It’s nothing.”
My heart felt it would break my ribs. But no further sound came to us, and the crew settled back into their places and Griffin sat back down.
“We would have felt a settling,” Griffin said.
“Enough of it. Enough.”
There was silence for a moment, no movement, all down the table; but my lady set to work on her dessert, and Griffin did, and so did we all. My lady talked, and Griffin laughed, and soon we all talked again, even Lance, idle dinner chatter. I took it for a sign of health in Lance, that I might have done some good, and I felt my own spirits higher for it. Dela and master Griffin finished their meal, we took the dishes down, and Lance remained tolerably cheerful when we were in the galley together. He was smiling, if not overly talkative.
But it didn’t help that night. Lance was sore and full of bruises, and he wanted to be let alone. He didn’t object to my moving my bed over or getting in with him, but he turned his back on me, and I patted his shoulder. Finally he turned an anguished look on me in the light there was left in the room, with the others lying in their beds. He started to say something. He didn’t need to. I just lay still and took his hand in mine, and he put his arm about me and stroked my hair, with that old sadness in his eyes, stripped of anger. I could hear noises from farther over toward the wall, where Lynn slept. Either Gawain or Percy had come somewhat off the duty fix, and presumably so had Lynette.
Misery, I thought. And Lance just lay there in the dark looking at me.
“It happens to born-men too,” I said. I knew that, and maybe he didn’t. He had been more sheltered, in his way. “They’re more complicated than we are, and they get this a lot, this trouble; but they get over it.”
He shivered, and I knew he was caught somewhere in his own psych-sets, where I couldn’t truly help him, and he wasn’t about to discuss it. There was no reasonfor Lance, I thought. The lady and Griffin, and when it turned out that this voyage wasn’t ending, ever, then that was it for Lancelot, done, over. He cared for nothing else in all existence but my lady; and when he was shut away from her, that was when he—
—heard the story in the tape, and learned what the meaning of my lady’s fancy was, and what he was named for, and he began to dream of being that dream of hers. That thought came to me while we lay there in the dark. And there was a great hollowness in me, knowing that. Lance had found himself a kind of purpose, but I had nothing like his, that touched his central psych-sets. Being just Elaine, a minor player in the tape, I was meant to do nothing but keep Lance entertained when my lady was otherwise occupied, and to do my lady’s hair and to look decorative, and nothing more, nothing more.
Our purposes are always small. We’re small people, pale copies, filled with tapes and erasable. But something had begun to burn in Lance that had more complicated reasons; and I was afraid—not for myself, not really for myself, I kept reasoning in my heart, although that was part of my general terror. We should live as long as we liked. The lady had promised us, ignoring that thing out there, ignoring the uncertainties which had settled on us ... like growing old. Like our minds growing more and more complicated just by living, until we grew confused beyond remedy. We were promised life. The thing out there in the dark, the chaos waiting whenever we might grow confused enough to let our senses slip back into the old way of seeing—this living with death so close to us, was that different than our lives ever were? And didn’t born-men themselves live that way, when they deliberately took chances?
It was just that our death talked to us through the hull, had called us on com, had tapped the hull this evening just to let us know that he was still there. Death, not an erasing; not the white room where they take you at the end.
We’re already dying, my lady had insisted once; and my mind kept wandering back to that. I looked into Lance’s troubled eyes and sniffed, thinking that at least we were going to die like born-men, and have ourselves a fight with our Death, like in the fables.