“Lady Dela, we already took a chance with it.”
“Listen to your captains,” Griffin said, taking Dela’s shoulders and refusing this time to be shaken off. “Listen. Will you listen to what she’s trying to tell you?”
“We didn’t move at all,” Lynn said, with soft, implacable precision. “Our own grapples went back on right where they had been, to the millimeter. We gave it repulse straight on and angled and we didn’t shake it even that much. That’s a solid hold they’ve got on us.”
“Well, why did you let them get it on us?” Dela’s voice went brittle. “Why did you play games with it and let this happen?”
“Last night at dinner,” Modred said in his ordinary, flat voice, “we should have investigated. But it was probably too late.”
Only Modred was that nerveless, to turn something back at Dela. She cursed him, and all of us, and Griffin, and told him to let her go. He didn’t and Modred never flinched.
“They’ve told you the truth,” Griffin said, making her look at him: there was no one but Lance could fight back against a strength like Griffin had; but he let her go when she struck at his arms, and stood there when she hit him hard in the chest in her temper. And we stood there—I, and Lance—even Lance, watching this man put hands on Dela, because somehow he had gotten round to Lynn’s side, and Modred’s and the ship’s, and we were standing with him, not understanding how it was happening to us.
Maybe Dela realized it too. She made a throwaway gesture, turned aside, not looking at anyone. “Go on,” she said. “Go on. Do what you like. You have all the answers.”
She stayed that way, facing no one, her hands locked in front of her. Griffin stared at her as if she had set him at a loss, like all of us were. Then he looked over at us. “Get her out,” he said quietly. “All of you who don’t have to be here, out. Crew too: offshift crew, go back to sleep. This may go on into the next watch. We have to put up with it.”
I didn’t know what to do for the moment. I wasn’t supposed to take his orders about my lady Dela, but then, Dela was fit to say something if she wanted to say something. I hesitated. Lance did, not included in that order, things being as they were. “Come,” I said then, and went and hugged Dela against me. “Come on.”
Dela put her arms about me, seeming suddenly small and uncertain, and I put mine about her and led her back through the corridor to her own rooms. Then she walked on her own, in her own safe sitting-room, but I held her hand, because she seemed to want that, and led her back into her own bedroom and did off her shoes and her robe and tucked her into that big soft blue bed. She was still shivering ... my brave, my strong-minded lady. Just last evening she had put courage into us, had talked to us and made us sit down and almost made us believe it would all turn out. She had made herself believe it too, I think; and it was all unraveling.
Vivien had followed us ... not Lance. He had not felt permitted, or he would have. “Get her a drink,” I told Viv—when she could hardly round on me and tell me to do it myself; she gave me a black hysterical look and went over to the sideboard. I sat with my lady and kept my arm about her behind the pillow. The banging at the hull began again, and Dela’s hands were clenched whitely on the bedclothes.
“It can’t get in,” I offered, not believing it myself any longer. “Or it would have done it already. It’s just wishing, that’s all.”
Vivien brought the wine. Dela took it in both hands and drank, and seemed to feel better after half a glass. Vivien sat down on the other side of the wide mattress and I stayed where I was, just being near Dela. For a long time Dela drank in small sips, and stared with detached interest at some place before her, while the hammering kept up.
“Go on,” my lady said finally, to Vivien. “Go on.” But she didn’t look at me when she said it, and when Vivien got up and left, I stayed. “Get me another drink,” she asked quite calmly. “I can’t stand that noise.”
I did so, and took one for myself, because alone, we were not on formalities.
And I sat there beside her while she was on her second glass, my hand locked in hers. Psych-set: Dela was hurting, above and beyond the fear; I could sense that. A frown creased her brow. Her blonde hair fell about her lace-gowned shoulders and she leaned there among the lacy pillows drinking the wine and looking oddly young.
“Why doesn’t he come back?” she asked of me, as if I should know what born-men thought. “We’re stuck here. Why can’t he accept that?”
“Maybe he thinks he could beat it.”
She shook her head, a cascade of pale blonde among the pillows. “No. He doesn’t.” She freed her hand of mine and changed hands with the wineglass, patted Griffin’s accustomed place in the huge bed. “He’s so good to me. He tried so hard to be brave, and I know he’s scared, because he’s young—that’s not rejuv: that’s his real age. He doesn’t know much. Oh, he’s traveled a bit, but not like this.” A soft, desperate laugh, as if she had realized her own bad joke. A reknitting of the brows. “He’s scared. And he doesn’t have to be nice, but he is, and I do love him, Elaine. He’s the first one of all of them who ever didn’t have to be nice to me, and he is, and I hate that it has to be him in this mess with us.”
I looked desperately at my lap, at my fingers laced there, not liking this business of being dragged into born-man confidence. But we’re like the walls. Born-men can talk to us and know our opinion’s nothing, so it’s rather like talking to themselves. Sold on, we’re erased; and here—here where we were, there was no selling, and no gossiping elsewhere, that was certain.
“He’s good,” Dela said. “You understand that? He’s just a good man.”
I remembered that he had hit me, but maybe he hadn’t seen me right, and he had been scared then. Hitting made no difference to me. Others had hit me. I held no grudges; that wasn’t in my psych-set either.
“I’m seventy,” Dela said, still talking to me and the walls at once. “And do you know why he’s with me? Because we started out as allies to do a little bending of government rules ... because the government ... but it doesn’t matter. Nothing back there matters. His family; my estates—it doesn’t matter at all. There’s just that thingout there, and I wish he’d leave it alone, let it take its time.—Does dying frighten you, Elaine? Do you ever think about things like that?”
I nodded, though I didn’t know if I thought of it the way she meant. She changed hands again and reached and stroked my hair. “Griffin and I ... you know there are people who don’t think you ought to exist at all—that the whole system that made you is wrong. But you value your life, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Griffin and I talked about it. Once. When it mattered. It doesn’t now. I meant what I said. We share everything, Griffin and I and all of you, all the food, everything, as long as there’s anything. That’s the way it is.”
“Thank you,” I said. What could I say? She had frightened me badly and healed it all at once, and I put my arms about her, really grateful—but I knew better than to think they wouldn’t think on it again sometime that things really did run short. I knew my lady Dela, that she had high purposes, and she meant to be good, but as with her lovers and her hopes, sometimes she and her high purposes had fallings-out.
The hammering, dim a moment, suddenly crashed out louder and louder. Dela rolled her eyes at the wooden beams overhead and looked as if she could not bear it. She slammed the empty glass down on the bedside table and scrambled out of bed in a flurry of gowns and blonde hair, on her way back to the intercom in the sitting-room.
“Griffin,” I heard her say over the hammering on the hull. I took up her wineglass and refilled it, trembling somewhat, expecting temper when Griffin was Griffin and refused.
“Dela,” he answered after a time.
“Griffin, stop it up there and let it alone and come back down here.”
“Dela,” I heard, standing stock-still and holding my breath. “Dela, there’s no waiting for this thing. Modred and I have something. There’re tubes, Dela, tubes going to all those ships we can see. We don’t know what or why, but we’re trying to get them a little clearer.”