“What good is it to see it? Modred, Modred, let it all be, shut it down and let it be.”
“Let them alone!” Griffin snapped back. “They’re doing a job up here. Do you want me to come down there and explain it all or do you trust me? I thought we had this out. I thought we had an agreement, Dela.”
There was long silence, and I clenched my hands together, because there was no one born who talked to Dela Kirn that way, no one.
“All right,” Dela said in an unhappy voice. There was a sudden silence, then another tap, very soft, that ran from the hull through my nerves. “All right. Modred, help him. All of you, work with Griffin.”
She came back into the bedroom then, and for a moment instead of the youth the rejuv preserved, I saw age, in the slump of her shoulders and the gesture that reached for the doorway as if she had trouble seeing it. I started to go and help her; and then I froze, because I felt wrong in seeing such a thing. She was wounded and sometimes in her wounds she was dangerous. She might hit me. I resigned myself to that when she let go the door and came near, her hand stretched out for me. I took it and set her down on the bedside.
No violence. She began to crawl beneath the covers and I tucked her in and sat down again on the bed, because she had not yet dismissed me. She lifted a hand and patted my check, with a mournful look in her blue eyes.
“You’ll do what Griffin says too,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “if you ask me to.”
“I do.” She stroked the side of my cheek with her finger as if she were touching statuary. “You’re special, you know that. Special, and beautiful, and maybe I shouldn’t tangle up your minds the way I have, but you’re people, aren’t you? You understand loyalty. Or is it all programming?”
“I don’t know how to answer,” I said, and I was afraid, because it was a terrible kind of question, having my lady delve into my programming and my logic. There were buttons she could push, oh, not physical ones, but real all the same, keys she had that could turn me frozen or, I suspected, hurt me beyond all telling—the key instructions to all my psych-sets. “I could never know if I felt what you feel. But I know I want to take care of you. And I’m very glad it’s you and not someone else, lady Dela.”
“You think so?”
“I’ve met others and their owners, and I know how good you really are to us. And if it doesn’t offend you, thank you for being good to us all our lives.”
Her lips trembled. Outside the hull the hammering still continued, like someone fixing pipes, and she pulled me to her, my face between her hands, and kissed me on the brow.
It touched me in a strange way, like pulling strings that were connected to something deep and connected to everything else. Psych-sets. It’s a very pleasurable thing to fulfill a Duty, one of the really implanted ones. And this made me feel I had.
I sat back and she just stared at me a time and kept her hand on mine, as if my being there mattered to her.
“Griffin is a good man,” she insisted when I had never argued; and there was that frightened look in her eyes.
I reckoned then for once Dela was up against something she just didn’t want to think about, just as she tried to believe us all dead when it began to go wrong. This wasn’t like the Dela who ran the house on Brahman, who built cities. Then she was all business and hard-minded and no one could say no to her; but now she had no inclination to go running up to the bridge to take command. She might have fought. She abdicated. Griffin showed himself more competent with the ship ... at least knowing how to talk to the crew. We hadn’t defended her. I think that hurt her deeply.
Watch yourself, said I to Griffin, absent. Watch yourself, born-man, when you begin to take the Maidaway from my lady.—But she had already lost it; and maybe it was that which had so broken Dela’s spirit, that the Maidwhich had been so beautiful and so free, which had been Dela Kirn herself in some strange metaphysical connection ... was held here and smashed and broken, and now threatened with further erosions. I perceived pain, and held to Dela’s hand, minded to go on pouring her drinks and to stay here until she could sleep, whatever the infernal hammering meant out there.
I mean, Dela had never cared for the running of the ship, just that it did run, and she had bought Gawain and the others and they were good, the very best: that was her pride. Her money bought the best and it worked and she gave the orders and the ship ran ... all magical. She had not the least idea how it all worked, far less idea than I did, who lived with the crew. And now Griffin, who claimed to do a little piloting himself insystem ... just walked in and took them over; and Dela couldn’t fight any longer. We were pinned here ... I think that was the most horrible thing to her, that whatever we did, however we fought, there was never any hope, and while that was true, she had no spirit left at all.
“Call Lance,” she said.
My heart stopped. I opened my mouth to babble some excuse on his behalf: he can’t, he can’t, I thought; but there was no excuse that would hide the truth, and perhaps—perhaps with her—I nodded, rose and went out to the com, pushed 21, the crew quarters. “Lance,” I said. “Lance.”
“Yes?” the answer came.
“My lady wants you in her quarters.”
A silence. “Yes,” he said plainly. It was all that had to be said. And very quietly I slipped away out the door, because all that I could do was done.
O Griffin, I thought, you never walk out on my lady; you didn’t know that. But you will. And more than that, you’re doing things your own way, and she’ll never bear with that, not where it touches the Maid. Not in that.
But for Lance—for him I was mortally afraid.
I didn’t want to go down the lift. I might meet Lance there, coming up, and that was not a meeting I wanted. The knell still rang against the hull, insane hammering that grew loud and soft by turns. I avoided the lift, kept to the main corridor, that took me back to the vicinity of the bridge, where I was not supposed to be, by Griffin’s order.
Viv was there, just standing, where she could see in the open door, her hands locked together in an attitude of worry. I startled her, being there, and she scowled and looked back to the bridge.
“What are they up to?” I asked.
“What would you know?” she said. That was Viv. Her old self, worried as she was.
I edged up into the doorway. The main screen was off, but they had a clear image on some. I stood there and stared at our neighbors.
Tubes.Tubes, Griffin had said, and there were, everywhere. At every point a wreck contacted the wheel, the station, whatever it was that had snared us ... tubes like some kind of obscene parasites that sucked the life from them. Tubes between the ships, as if the growth had pierced them and kept going. The wounds I had thought to have seen, holes in the ships themselves through which the light bled ... some of those were not: some of those holes had been the arch of those tubes, against the chaos-stuff that was measled black in the still picture. They were huge, those structures, big enough for access, and irregular in their shapes, like many-branched snakes, like veins and arteries growing out of this thing we had snuggled up to and growing us to its body.
It didn’t take much guesswork now to know what was proceeding out there with all those noises. Or why we were stuck fast. There’s a thing I’d seen on vid, an access box, and they use it when there’s some emergency ... Hobson’s Bridge, I had heard it named. It’s a tube and two very powerful pressure gates; and they use it in shipboard disasters when ships have to be boarded and suits aren’t sufficient to get people off. You rig it at one side and ride it across; you lock on with the magnetic grapple and you make the seal. You cut through. You’re in.
Sometimes I wished I listened to fewer tapes.
Griffin had looked around. He caught me in the doorway, fixed me with that mad blue-eyed stare of his. “Elaine. Did Dela send you?”